May 17, 2026 (NYTimes.com)
Guest Essay by Jean-Marc Dreyfus France Has a New Picture of the Holocaust
Mr. Dreyfus is a Holocaust historian at the University of Manchester. He is co-author, with Lior Lalieu, of “La rafle du billet vert. 14 mai 1941. Les photos retrouvées.”


ChatGPT:
Yes — the “Green Ticket Raffle” (more accurately called the Green Ticket Roundup or rafle du billet vert) absolutely took place in Paris on May 14, 1941.
The New York Times guest essay you’re referring to involved historian Jean-Marc Dreyfus discussing newly surfaced photographs of that roundup.
The event was one of the first mass arrests of Jews in occupied France during World War II. Thousands of foreign-born Jewish men in the Paris region received summonses printed on green paper (“green tickets”), supposedly for a routine administrative review. When they reported to collection points around Paris, many were arrested by French police collaborating with the Nazi occupation authorities.
The tragedy and deception of the event are part of why it remains historically important:
- the summons appeared bureaucratic and ordinary,
- many victims complied voluntarily,
- and French authorities themselves participated in the arrests.
Many of those detained were later deported and murdered in Nazi camps.