It was an inconspicuous, green piece of paper. Anyone who received the note in Paris in May 1941 was supposed to report to a gymnasium on 14 May, ostensibly to clarify their residence permit.
What followed was no official formality. It was the first major roundup of Jews in German-occupied France: the so-called Rafle du "billet vert", the roundup of the green slip of paper.
On the orders of the SS and Gestapo, the French police arrested around 3,800 Jewish men that day, most of them from Poland and the Czech Republic. They were taken to the Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande camps.
Around 700 managed to escape. The rest, around 3,100 men, were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in July 1942 and murdered there.
The collaborationist Vichy government had already legally authorised the arrest and internment of foreign Jews shortly after the German invasion in June 1940.
