Fewer than 100 returned
The Guardian reported on the march in memory of Mireille Knoll on Wednesday.
Silent marches are taking place in Paris and other large French cities in memory of an 85-year-old woman who survived the Holocaust but was stabbed to death last week, in what is being investigated as an antisemitic attack.
Photograph: Yoan Valat/EPA
After killing Mireille Knoll, her attackers set her local authority flat alight in a poor area of the French capital. Two men, aged 22 and 29 – one of them a neighbour known to the victim since he was a child, have been arrested and placed under formal investigation.
Photograph: Christophe Ena/AP
Other marches were due to be held in the French cities of Lyon, Marseille and Strasbourg.
Knoll fled occupied Paris at the age of nine, narrowly escaping the infamous Vel d’Hiv roundup of Jewish families by French police on behalf of the Nazis. Around 13,000 people, including more than 4,000 children, were herded into the Vel d’Hiv velodrome in Drancy, a northeastern suburb of the French capital, in 1942. They were then deported to Auschwitz – fewer than 100 returned.
After travelling to southern Europe and then Canada, Knoll returned to Paris. Even after her grandchildren moved to Israel, she remained.
Such a cheerful looking woman, despite her ordeals in life.
This reminds me that around Christmas in my community, people are, in general ok if you do not put decorations (lfghts up). And by people I mean Christians. I put lights up and they are grand, and this does confuse if not infuriate the Christians, because all my neighbors know I am an atheist. However, I hear the the stories from my Jewish friends who become even more ostracized during Christmas. Almost like they are the evil ones of planet earth.
I will live the remainder of my days and never understand why Jews are singled out and also why so many people appear obvious to blatant anti-semetism.
That France’s changing demography has prompted an exodus of Jews is undeniable.
The Guardian article portays this anti-semitism as ‘resurgent’ when, in fact, it is rather more ‘imported’.
And this incident is but the tip of the iceberg.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/30/opinion/jews-murder-paris-knoll.html
John @ 3 – well it’s both, isn’t it. France assuredly does have its own history of anti-Semitism. It was much discredited in the wake of the Occupation but that doesn’t mean it simply vanished, any more than it did anywhere else.
Also, John @3, j’accuse Esterhazy. ~150 years ago, the Affaire Dreyfus as denounced by Émile Zola, only decades later.