PARIS, Aug. 25 -- With solemn commemorations, a ceremonial flag-raising at the Eiffel Tower and columns of 1940s-era tanks and army jeeps, Parisians on Wednesday marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the city from Nazi occupation, the day France regained its military honor and wiped away the shame of occupation and collaboration.
Thousands of women wearing '40s-style dresses and men dressed in military uniforms danced in the streets to jazz and swing music. Earlier in the day, six firefighters, in a reenactment of an event six decades ago, raised the French flag on the balcony of the Eiffel Tower.
A child carrying a French flag kisses a woman riding a vintage jeep and holding an American flag at a parade recalling the liberation of Paris.
(Jerome Delay -- AP)
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During a ceremony at city hall, President Jacques Chirac paid tribute to veterans and Resistance fighters.
"The liberation of Paris is the victory of the Resistance and the people of Paris, together with French and Allied armies," Chirac told cheering and flag-waving crowds.
But more recent events -- specifically, an increasing number of anti-Semitic attacks -- served as a painful reminder for many that France still has not fully come to terms with one of the darker chapters of its wartime history, the persecution and deportation of French Jews to Nazi death camps.
In his address, Chirac called for vigilance in confronting "this hate of the other, still at work, the most somber face of the human soul."
No official ceremonies marked the liberation of the Drancy, a U-shaped former police barracks outside Paris that served as the principal way station for Jews being deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. From 1941 to August 1944, 77,000 Jews were deported through Drancy with the participation of French police and other collaborators with the wartime Vichy government. Most of those Jews perished.
Shimon Samuels, director of international relations for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said the persecution of France's Jewish population "is a dimension that has not been focused on" during the celebrations marking the liberation of Paris. The events Wednesday "would have been a very good opportunity to take Drancy as an icon of the liberation."
Valerie Hoffenberg, the Paris representative for the American Jewish Committee, drew a parallel between what happened to French Jews 60 years ago and the new rise in anti-Semitic incidents, saying, "if we are not protected by laws, we can be in a lot of trouble."
"The last prime minister before the war was Jewish," she said. "We had a lot of Jews in the government. And a couple of years later, we know what happened. Things can change very, very quickly."
Israel's foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, also made the link between past and present during an official visit to Paris. "It can't be that 60 years after the liberation of Paris, Jews will live under threat here, or in any other country of the world," he said.
Shalom spoke at the scene of the latest anti-Semitic attack, the ruins of a Jewish community center in the center of Paris that was set on fire last weekend. On the walls of the building, the arsonists scrawled swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans such as "Death to Jews" and "The world will be more pure when there are no more Jews."
French politicians, from Chirac down, condemned the attack and pledged to find those responsible. But Samuels and others said it was just the latest in a growing number of incidents that appeared to have been planned to coincide with anniversaries. Evidence increasingly seemed to point to neo-Nazis and Hitler sympathizers, they said, rather than disaffected Muslim youths reacting to events in the Middle East.
Between January and July, 160 anti-Semitic incidents have been officially reported, according to the Interior Ministry, more than double the number during the same period in 2003.
