article: One of the most extraordinary documents on show is Memo 173-42. It is dated 13 July 1942 and marked "secret". "The occupying authorities," it reads, "have decided upon the arrest and grouping together of a certain number of foreign Jews." Over nine pages, the head of the Paris police details his orders for the enactment of the Holocaust on French soil. Three days later, a few hours before dawn on 16 July, French police operating in groups of two (one in uniform, one in plain clothes and accompanied by a German soldier), arrested more than 13,000 Parisian Jews. "Many, many documents of this period were destroyed at the end of the war," says Olivier Accarie-Pierson, curator of an exhibition that has just opened at the town hall of Paris's third arrondissement, or district. "It's very rare. This is unique." Mysteriously, in this district and in no other, the documents testifying to the daily life of Paris during the occupation escaped destruction. Whether it was an act of civil disobedience or an administrative oversight, nobody knows why the records survived, Mr Accarie-Pierson says. But one day - about 20 years ago - they were discovered in a cupboard. They are a treasure trove for historians. Although this is the first time they have been put on public view, historians have been studying them since they were put into the central Paris police archive, a mine of information about the minutiae of Parisian life stretching back to before the French Revolution. Other documents on display are the lists of names - hundreds and hundreds of them - written in a ledger by meticulous French policemen during the census of Jews ordered by the Germans as soon as they occupied Paris in 1940. That census was updated in 1943 when Jews were forbidden from listening to the radio and ordered to hand in their wireless sets. The names and addresses of those who complied were taken down and used for future round-ups. Poring over the documents in this exhibition, it is difficult not to be shocked by the clipped, official language employed. "And yet we were talking about thousands of people!" says Mr Accarie-Pierson. Men, women and children who would soon perish in Nazi death camps. The Jews were sent to two camps - the Winter cycling track (Velodrome d'hiver or Vel d'hiv) in the west of Paris and an internment camp set up just outside the capital at Drancy. Although no photographic evidence has survived of their interiors, conditions must have been hellish. "Where were the beds?" I ask in front of a post-war photo taken of the inside of the cycling stadium. " Around the edge there?" "There weren't any beds," says Mr Accarie-Pierson. In Paris, the Jews were already being treated like animals. Police chief Rene Bousquet collaborated directly with the Gestapo to facilitate the round-ups and the bureaucratic language sometimes lets through a glimmer of disdain for the Jews from other police chiefs. After a few weeks all the Jews rounded up on 16 July had been deported by train, mostly
summary: The only surviving police archives of the biggest World War II deportation of French Jews are being opened up to public view for the first time.