After The Roundup

Joining Joseph Weismann will be Paul and Richard Kutner, and Susan Zuccotti, for a conversation on After The Roundup, the true memoir of eleven-year-old Weismann, who was rounded up in Paris with 13,000 other Jews by the French police in July 1942 and held in appalling conditions in the Vélodrome d’Hiver. From there, Weismann and his family were transported by cattle car to the transit camp of Beaune-la-Rolande. Joseph was soon brutally separated from the rest of his family, who were sent to Auschwitz. The 1,500 children left at Beaune were told that they would be reunited with their parents in two weeks to start a new life. Joseph refused to believe this and decided to make a daring escape, crawling inch by inch under the barbed wire for five hours. How would he survive the rest of the war and reconstruct a life for himself? His problems had only 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.