Overview

On the nights of July 16 and 17, 1942, French police rounded up eleven-year-old Joseph Weismann, his family, and 13,000 other Jews. After being held for five days in appalling conditions in the Velodrome d'Hiver stadium, Joseph and his family were transported by cattle car to the Beaune-la-Rolande internment camp and brutally separated: all the adults and most of the children were transported on to Auschwitz and certain death, but 1,000 children were left behind to wait for a later train. The French guards told the children left behind that they would soon be reunited with their parents, but Joseph and his new friend, Joe Kogan, chose to risk everything in a daring escape attempt. After eluding the guards and crawling under razor-sharp barbed wire, Joseph found freedom. But how would he survive the rest of the war in Nazi-occupied France and build a life for himself? His problems had just begun. Until he was 80, Joseph Weismann kept his story to himself, giving only the slightest hints of it to his wife and three children. Simone Veil, lawyer, politician, President of the European Parliament, and member of the Constitutional Council of France-herself a survivor of Auschwitz-urged him to tell his story. In the original French version of this book and in Roselyne Bosch's 2010 film La Rafle, Joseph shares his compelling and terrifying story of the Roundup of the Vel' d'Hiv and his escape. Now, for the first time in English, Joseph tells the rest of his dramatic story in After the Roundup.

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9780253026804

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In bearing witness, Joseph Weismann has written a book that is indispensable for the enormous task of understanding the Shoah. Les Chroniques de Miawka, reviewing a previous edition or volume</p>

Extraordinary... and timely. Joseph Weismann's compelling account of his escape from an internment camp after the notorious Winter Velodrome roundup of Parisian Jews in July 1942 is both a vivid recreation of childhood (he was 11 years old when he spent a tenacious six hours crawling through a barbed wire fence to make his getaway) and a powerful insight into what it is like to be on the receiving end of the demonization of a race or religion. -Peter Grose, author of A Good Place To Hide As few others manage, Joseph Weismann's memoir captures the tension between the great communal torment and the unique personal repercussions of those who endured the Holocaust. This is a boy's story, except that the boy is in hell, and faces it, and survives it. Weismann's narrative is an achievement to be grateful for. -Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler's List

Author Information

Joseph Weismann is a survivor of the 1942 Vél' d'Hiv Roundup in Paris. His story inspired the French film, La Rafle. Now 85 years old, he lives in Le Mans. Richard Kutner is an independent literary translator. His translations include Fear of Paradise by Vincent Engel and Cast Away on the Letter A by Fred, for which he was awarded a Hemingway Translation Grant.

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