THE KILLING OF AN 85-YEAR-OLD HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR OUTRAGES FRANCE’S JEWISH COMMUNITY AS LEADERS WARN THE COUNTRY AGAINST THE ONGOING ‘NIGHTMARE’ OF MURDEROUS ANTI-SEMITISM.
PARIS • Two suspects have been given preliminary charges of murder with antiSemitic motives in the stabbing death of an elderly Jewish woman, a French judicial official said Tuesday.
The two men have been jailed, the official said. He was speaking anonymously to discuss the ongoing investigation.
The brutal killing of 85-year-old Mireille Knoll in Paris last week has raised uncomfortable questions about resurgent anti-Semitism in France.
“I thought I was going to die on the spot. I cried all the tears in my body and I thought of her. She didn’t deserve this,” her anguished son, Daniel Knoll, told The Associated Press Tuesday, near the Paris public housing project his mother called home for most of her life.
“How can one do that to anybody? The police revealed she was stabbed 11 times.”
One of the men charged Tuesday was a neighbour that Knoll hosted regularly, to lessen her loneliness.
For Knoll’s family, the killing was a cruel coda to her long life.
At age nine, she fled Paris to escape a notorious Second World War roundup of Paris Jews. French police herded some 13,000 people — including more than 4,000 children — into the Vel d’Hiv stadium in 1942 and shipped them to the Auschwitz death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Fewer than 100 survived.
A family member with Brazilian citizenship helped Knoll and other relatives escape Nazi-occupied territory for southern Europe and then Canada. She returned to France only after the end of the war.
Over the years, her grandchildren and other French Jews moved to Israel, but Knoll stayed in her beloved Paris, living nearly her whole life in the modest apartment on Avenue Philippe Auguste.
“There was nothing to steal. My mother was poor,” her son said. “Her credit card? She would have only been able to withdraw 100 euros. She had no money on her account.”
As Knoll’s family gathered in Paris to attend her funeral on Wednesday, horrified French leaders and activists called for people to take to the streets to protest racism.
French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted that it was a “horrific crime,” and reaffirmed his “absolute determination to fight against anti-Semitism.”