France mourns officer, Holocaust survivor
Victims of terrorism, violent anti-Semitism
PARIS — Arnaud Beltrame was a 44-year-old police officer who sacrificed his life in a terrorist attack Friday. Mireille Knoll was an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor brutally killed in her Paris apartment the same day.
Inan unusual spring chill, France on Wednesday commemorated both victims as the latest casualties in a struggle against terrorism and violent anti-Semitism.
The fallen officer received a state funeral and the posthumous distinction of commander of the Légion d’Honneur, one of France’s highest honors.
Later, tens of thousands gathered at the Place de la Nation to honor Ms. Knoll, marching through the streets wearing buttons and carrying signs with her picture.
Col. Beltrame, a lieutenant colonel, volunteered to trade places with a hostage during a shootout at a supermarket in the southwestern French city of Trebes, part of an attack that killed four, including Col. Beltrame.
Officers of the French Republican Guard, riding motorcycles and wearing blue uniforms and white helmets, formed the honor guard escorting the simple dark car carrying the body of Col. Beltrame to the Invalides in Paris for a hero’s memorial.
Under the gilded shadow of Napoleon’s Tomb, French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday heralded the fallen officer as the embodiment of “the spirit of French resistance,” pronouncing his name in the company of towering figures such as Joan of Arc, Charles de Gaulle and Jean Moulin, a beloved French resistance fighter.
Arnaud acted in the service of “the ideals of France,” Mr. Macron said.
“We will prevail with the cohesion of a united nation,” he added.
Mr. Macron and Edouard Philippe, the prime minister, stood bareheaded out of respect for Col. Beltrame, despite a chilly, steady rain, as did crowds of Parisians who lined the route the hearse took through the capital. Although most of the onlookers had not known the 44-year-old gendarme in life, they knew everything about his death.
The theme of national unity was an ambitious choice, given the apparent homegrown nature of these and other recent attacks on French citizens.
But Col. Beltrame’s act prompted an outpouring of support and a sense of community from people of different faiths and backgrounds. A Mass held for him in Trebes on Sunday drew not only Christians but also Jews and Muslims, who saw the attack at the supermarket as an assault on their community and on a place where they all shopped.
Ms. Knoll’s killing focused renewed attention on one of the darkest realities challenging a “united” France.
France is home to Europe’s largest Jewish community, a community that receives considerable attention and protection from the state, especially in comparison with its European neighbors. Hate-speech laws criminalize Holocaust denial, and the government refuses to collect official statistics on race, religion or ethnicity, an effort to avert any repeat of the experience of World War II, when France collaborated with Nazi Germany.