After the Roundup

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 Vélodrome d'Hiver, Joseph and his family were transported by cattle car to the Beaune-la-Rolande internment camp and brutally separated, with children remaining at the camp and adults traveling on to Auschwitz and certain death. The Nazi guards told Joseph and the 4,000 remaining children that they would soon be reunited with their parents, but Joseph and his new friend, Joe Kogan, did not believe them and chose to risk everything in a daring escape attempt. After eluding the guards and crawling through the mud and 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 Vél’ d’Hiv and his escape. Now, for the first time in English, Joseph tells the rest of his dramatic story in After the Roundup.

Joseph Weismann is a survivor of the 1942 Vel' d'Hiv Roundup in Paris. His story inspired the French film, La Rafle. Now 85 years-old, he lives in Paris.

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.