Tensions cloud tribute to slain Holocaust escapee

PARIS — Family members, friends and France’s president honoured an 85-year-old woman who escaped the Nazis 76 years ago but was stabbed to death last week in her Paris apartment, apparently targeted because she was Jewish.

Mireille Knoll’s death has taken on national importance, reminding France of both historic anti-Semitism and its resurgence in some quarters in recent years.

French President Emmanuel Macron decried the “barbaric” views that fuelled an Islamic extremist’s supermarket hostage-taking last week as well as Knoll’s killing.

In a speech at the 19th-century Invalides monument Wednesday, Macron said Knoll’s attacker “murdered an innocent and vulnerable woman because she was Jewish.”

The killing “profaned our sacred values and our history,” he said.

Later, Macron made a surprise appearance at Knoll’s funeral ceremony in the Jewish section of the cemetery in the Paris suburb of Bagneux, where sombrefaced guests gathered to pay their respects.

Silent marches were being held later Wednesday around the country in her honour, and to denounce racism.

Far-right French leader Marine Le Pen was insisting on attending the Paris march despite criticism from France’s leading Jewish group.

The head of the CRIF Jewish organization said Le Pen’s National Front and members of the far left would not be welcome at the marches because of antiSemitic sentiment among their members.

Le Pen tweeted Wednesday that the CRIF could not stop her from attending.

She has sought to distance herself from the anti-Semitism that has stained her party in the past, instead focusing anger on immigrants and Islamic extremists.

The National Front said it was maintaining its appeal to members to attend Wednesday’s marches because Knoll’s son Daniel said “everyone, without exception” is welcome to join.

Speaking on RMC radio, Daniel Knoll said he wanted to encourage national unity and distanced himself from the CRIF’s political position.

“Whether it is a Jewish mother, a black mother, a Protestant mother, a Muslim mother, they are all our mothers,” he said.

“They have the right to live normally, with love.”

Mireille Knoll was killed Friday in her apartment, which was then set on fire.

Prosecutors filed preliminary charges against two people for murder with anti-Semitic motives, including a neighbour Knoll hosted regularly, according to her son.

Authorities have not released the names of the two men in custody but have said the chief suspect is a 29-year-old with a past conviction who lived in the same building.

Speaking Tuesday to the Associated Press, Daniel Knoll said, “My mother had a thirst for knowledge and meeting new people and talking to them, and that’s what killed her.”

Mireille Knoll was forced to flee Paris with her family at the age of nine to escape a Second World War roundup of Jews.

After the war she returned to Paris and spent most of her life in the eastern Paris apartment where she was killed, according to her son.