SEEKING LIGHT IN DARK

Antoine Leiris had every reason to focus on the worst of humanity but instead he found there are signs of hope

YOU WILL NOT HAVE MY HATE Author: Antoine Leiris Publisher: Harvill Secker/Penguin Random House RRP: $29.99

FRENCH journalist Antoine Leiris’ wife Helene was killed, along with 88 other people, in the terrorist attack on the Bataclan theatre in Paris in November 2015.

As Leiris explains in this book, which covers the 12 days between the attack and his wife’s funeral, he was at home minding their 17-month-old son while Helene accompanied friends to a concert by the American band Eagles of Death Metal.

The first he knew of the unfolding slaughter was when he began receiving text messages asking if he was OK. Turning on the TV, he watched the drama of the attack and the fallout across the city.

He tried to phone Helene but of course, there was no answer.

Three days later Leiris wrote an open letter on Facebook to his wife’s murderers.

“On Friday night, you stole the life of an exceptional being, the love of my life, the mother of my son, but you will not have my hate,’’ he wrote.

“I don’t know who you are and I don’t want to know. You are dead souls…

“… I will not give you the satisfaction of hating you. That is what you want, but to respond to your hate with anger would be to yield to the same ignorance that made you what you are.’’

It was a message that quickly went around the world and became the inspiration for the title of this book.

There is strength in his book’s message that preaches love, yet this is a heartbreaking memoir.

In a section penned the Monday after the terrorists struck, he writes: “Not many people understand how I can so quickly get over the circumstances in which Helene was killed. People ask me if I’ve forgotten or forgiven. I forgive nothing, I forget nothing. I am not getting over anything, and certainly not so quickly. When everyone else has gone back to his or her life, we will still be living with this.’’

In contemplating how he will explain Helene’s death to their son when he is old enough to ask, Leiris writes: “Death awaited his mother that night; they (the killers) were merely ambassadors.

“With a burst of machine gun fire, they shattered our puzzle. And after we have put it back together, piece by piece, it will no longer be the same.”