Joseph Weismann

Joseph Weismann, born to a Jewish family in Paris, France, is one of the rare survivors among the children deported from that city following the infamous Vél' d'Hiv Roundup of Jews on July 16-17, 1942, during World War II. The roundup was carried out by the Vichy French authorities under an agreement with the Nazis. Weismann, age 11, and his entire family were taken from their home at 54 rue des Abbesses and held for five days in appalling conditions in the Vélodrome d'Hiver cycling stadium. They were then deported by cattle car to the Beaune-la-Rolande internment/transit camp in Loiret. When the children were separated from their parents, Joseph and a friend, Joseph Kogan, eluded the guards and escaped by crawling under the barbed wire fencing. Weismann spent the rest of the war working on a farm in Loiret. After the liberation, he was taken in by a French Jewish couple. He hoped to be reunited with his parents and sisters Charlotte and Rachel, but they were murdered in Auschwitz. He subsequently moved to Le Mans, where he became a furniture salesman. After being urged by Simone Veil in 1996, Weismann began to testify regularly about his Holocaust experiences at schools and other organizations, and wrote his memoirs, entitled Après la rafle, published in 2010. In 2017, it was translated into English and published in the USA as After the Roundup: Escape and Survival in Hitler's France.