On this day, 1942, Jews in France were ordered to sew a yellow star on the left side of their coats. The introduction of the yellow star was to easily identify Jews and facilitate the deportation of the Jews of France to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Over 75,000 Jews would be deported to Auschwitz alone in three years and another 5,000 Jews were sent to Drancy and Beaune-la-Rolande death camps in France. Of the 80,000 French Jews deported, 96% of them were murdered. The annihilation of the Jews in France began with the reign of the Vichy Regime, a white-nationalist party, led by Marshal Philippe Pétain, which toppled over the Third Republic. The Republic’s three-part motto, “liberté, égalité, fraternité”, was temporarily replaced with Pétain’s “travail, famille, patrie, a hendriatis” (‘work, family, homeland’), which stood against those who threatened the revival of French society (the Jews and the Communists). Similar to Hitler, Pétain was hailed by the French as ‘the Messiah of the West’ who would bring France out of political, moral, and economic turmoil. But this falsehood of moral and societal redemption was a mere guise for the raging antisemitism of the French. Empowered by the nationalists’ demand to give France back to the French, the Vichy Regime set out to establish a series of racist policies towards Jews. In conjunction with Germany, and the hope of allegedly restoring France’s economy and its workforce, Jewish students were barred from being admitted to universities and were prohibited from participating in the army, press, commercial and industrial activities, and the civil service. The policies were enacted gradually so that the civilian population would not realize the extent of the Vichy’s antisemitism. By 1941, the Vichy had adopted their own set of Nuremberg Race Laws, stripping all Jews of their civil rights. French Jews were spared until November 1942 when the Nazis invaded unoccupied territories of France. All Jews were taken to a closed stadium where they would await their deportation eastward for a week. The conditions of the stadium were inhumane, as more than 13,000 crowded together without food, water, or sanitary facilities. Testimony from survivor Asher Cohen describes the conditions of the stadium as an ineffable emotional state. Cohen remembers detainees crying “let us go” and the suicide attempts, while detainees begged for other prisoners to kill them. The Vel’d’Hiv stadium would only be the beginning. Jewish Resistance groups like the Organisation Juive de Combat (OJC) in France formed guerrilla organizations from the mountains of France (the Maquis) to major French cities (Corps Franc). They managed to build an intricate network of secret agents who smuggled money from Switzerland into France to fund a series of underground activities. The OJC was the sole representative of Jewish defiance in France. Unlike the Resistance, it was established exclusively to alleviate the plight of fellow Jews held captive in death camps. The French resistance, like all other gentiles across Europe at the time, was generally not accepting of Jews. They also held a different agenda than Jewish resistance movements; while Jewish partisans focused on an organized response to the persecution of the Jews in France, the French resistance was more set on freeing France from German occupation.