The violent death of an 85-year-old Jewish widow, Mireille Knoll, has brought France once again face-to-face with its past.
Firemen discovered her charred body, bearing at least 11 stab wounds, inside her burning apartment when they answered an emergency call to a block of flats in a middle-class neighbourhood of eastern Paris.
It happened hours after the terrorist murder of policeman Arnaud Beltrame, who gave himself up for a hostage and was eulogised for his heroism by President Emmanuel Macron in a state ceremony on Wednesday.
Mr Macron paid tribute to Beltrame and Knoll. He blamed their deaths on “underground Islamism” and vowed to fight this “insidious enemy”.
Knoll escaped a roundup of Jews in 1942, when she was nine, only to die by an act Mr Macron called barbarous. “The murderer of Mireille Knoll … killed an innocent and vulnerable woman because she was a Jew,” he said.
The article by Michael Sheridan appeared in The Australian (subscription required) taken from The Sunday Times.