Mireille Knoll

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Mireille Knoll ( December 28, 1932 in Paris - March 23, 2018 there ) was a French survivor of the Holocaust . She was the victim of a murder with a suspected anti-Semitic background. Parallels were drawn with the Sarah Halimi murder case in April 2017, in which, less than a year earlier, another Jewish woman in Paris was the victim of an anti-Semitic murder in her own apartment.

Life

Mireille Knoll's son told the AFP news agency that his mother had narrowly escaped the Rafle du Vélodrome d'Hiver in Paris at the age of ten in July 1942 . At that time, several thousand Jewish women, men and children were arrested, locked up in the Vélodrome d'Hiver and finally deported to concentration and extermination camps in the east. Mireille Knoll and her mother had recently left Paris. According to the Washington Times , the two escaped the raid because of their mother's Brazilian passport. Mother and daughter fled to Portugal . After the liberation of France, they returned to Paris.

Knoll married an Auschwitz survivor. The couple moved to Canada and had two sons. They returned to Paris, where her husband set up a raincoat workshop. This was in Quartier du Sentier . Her husband died in the early 2000s. Since the death of her husband, Mireille Knoll lived with a nurse and her daughter in a social flat in Paris in the 11th arrondissement . She has suffered from Parkinson's disease in recent years and was only able to leave her apartment in a wheelchair and accompanied by her carer.

Mireille Knoll had several grandchildren.

Murder case

On March 23, 2018, a neighbor alerted the fire department because there was a fire in Knoll's apartment. Mireille Knoll was found dead on her bed in her burned-out apartment around 7:00 p.m. she was murdered with eleven stab wounds. It was found that fires had been started in several places in the apartment. The controls on the gas cooker hobs were turned on, but the central gas tap remained closed, possibly preventing a gas explosion.

According to media reports, Mireille Knoll had called on the police several times before she was murdered and reported death threats from a man on her street who had announced that she would be "burned".

Shortly after the murder, the French police caught two suspects, namely the 28-year-old son of a flat neighbor, Yacine M., and a 21-year-old marginalized, Alex C. Both investigations into homicide (homicide volontaire) were initiated; the Paris public prosecutor announced that it was assuming an anti-Semitic motive. Yacine M. had known the victim for many years and visited her often. According to people close to him, he was a loner, alcoholic and mentally unstable. In the past, he had threatened to burn down the building in which his mother lived and to blow up the shop where she worked and from which she was fired. In addition, he had already been admitted to the psychiatric care center of the Paris police prefecture. He recently served a prison sentence of several months for a sex offense, the victim of which was the 12-year-old daughter of Mireille Knoll's housekeeper. He was released from prison in September 2017. He met Alex C., who was known to the police for robbery, in prison.

On the day of the crime, Yacine M. went to Mireille Knoll's apartment that morning, according to the investigating authorities, when she was visiting from one of her daughters-in-law. When one of Knoll's sons visited his mother that afternoon, M. was still there and drank large quantities of port wine. In view of the alarming presence of M. Knoll's son stayed until the arrival of a housekeeper. M. then left the apartment and went to his mother in the same building. Some time later, however, he went back to Knoll and called Alex C. from there. He had met M. in Knoll's apartment and had also been drinking there.

The statements of the two suspects were initially contradicting the actual course of events; in their statements they blamed each other for the crime. A few months after the crime, it was still not clear whether the crime had anti-Semitic motives or not.

classification

Many media have linked the criminal case with increasing Muslim anti-Semitism in previous years in France.

The news magazine Spiegel Online compared the case with the murder of Sarah Halimi, which took place less than a year earlier. In both cases, Jewish women in Paris were victims of brutal violence in their own homes. Both times the perpetrators were young Muslims and had known the victims for years. But while the anti-Semitic motive in the Halimi murder was only discussed after a long time, also in order not to stir up any general suspicion against Muslim suburban youth and for fear of adopting arguments from the right-wing extremist Front National party during the 2017 presidential election campaign , all of the major French people immediately reported in the case of Mireille Knoll Media comprehensive about the background.

The daily newspaper Die Welt put the case in line with the murder of four French Jews in a kosher supermarket by an Islamist immediately after the attack on Charlie Hebdo in 2015.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung called the case the "latest escalation of a long-ignored problem". Jews must be afraid in certain districts in Paris since " Salafists incite neighbors against neighbors".

Reactions

Noa Goldfarb, a granddaughter of Knoll, who now lives in Israel, wrote after the death of her grandmother: "I left Paris 20 years ago because I knew that I had no future there - neither I nor the Jewish people." but do not allow yourself to dream “that I will leave my loved ones in a place where terror and cruelty would lead to such a sad end”.

French President Emmanuel Macron expressed his shock at the “horrific crime” on Twitter and reaffirmed his “absolute determination” to take action against anti-Semitism. Macron went to her funeral too.

On March 28, 2018, the umbrella organization of the Jewish organizations CRIF organized a silent march in Paris.

The politicians Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen were viewed as undesirable by the organizers. The victim's son, however, welcomed everyone to this train. The two named politicians appeared for the memorial march, but were whistled and subsequently left the train.

The German author and cabaret artist Oliver Polak dedicated his book Gegen Judenhass , published on October 2, 2018, to the murdered Mireille Knoll.

Legal processing

On July 13, 2020, the investigating magistrates in charge of the case announced their decision on the charges, on which the suspects would have to answer before a jury (Cour d'assises) . Yacine M. and Alex C. were then charged with intentional homicide (Homicide volontaire) . As an aggravating circumstance, the investigating judges saw as given that the act had been committed against a particularly vulnerable person and because of their religion. They classified the act as anti-Semitically motivated. Furthermore, the charge was serious theft and damage to property with danger to human life. Yacine M's mother was also charged with the destruction of evidence. The investigators are convinced that she cleaned the knife with which Mireille Knoll was stabbed after the fact.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b 85-year-old Holocaust survivor murdered. In: Spiegel Online . March 26, 2018, accessed March 27, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Ce que l'on sait du meurtre de l'octogénaire juive Mireille Knoll. In: lemonde.fr . March 27, 2018, accessed October 3, 2018 (French).
  3. ^ Holocaust survivor killed in Paris during an anti-Semitic attack. with a portrait by Mireille Knoll. In: The Washington Times . March 26, 2018, accessed March 27, 2018 .
  4. ^ Outrage following the murder of Holocaust survivors in Paris. In: Deutsche Welle . March 26, 2018, accessed March 27, 2018 .
  5. ^ A b Rudolf Balmer: Murder of a Jew shocked France. In: The daily newspaper . March 26, 2018, accessed March 28, 2018 .
  6. ↑ a b "We must fight the roots of Islamist terror". In: Frankfurter Allgemeine . March 27, 2018, accessed March 28, 2018 .
  7. ^ Jewish grandmother who escaped the Holocaust murdered in her Paris flat. In: The Citizen . March 28, 2018, accessed March 28, 2018 .
  8. ↑ a b c d e Meurtre de Mireille Knoll: les deux suspects s'accusent. In: ladepeche.fr . April 1, 2018, accessed April 1, 2018 (French).
  9. ↑ Paris Shoah survivors murdered. In: Jüdische Allgemeine . March 26, 2018, accessed March 27, 2018 .
  10. ^ A b Georg Blume: Murder of Holocaust survivors in Paris: "Anti-Semitism is a national disease". In: Spiegel Online . March 27, 2018, accessed March 27, 2018 .
  11. ↑ Michaela Wiegel: Antisemitism in France: “We have to fight the roots of Islamist terror”. In: faz.net . March 27, 2018, accessed March 27, 2018 .
  12. ↑ a b Two suspects imprisoned after murdering a Jewess. In: sueddeutsche.de . March 27, 2018, accessed March 27, 2018 .
  13. ^ Société: Meurtre de Mireille Knoll: le mobile antisémite en suspens. In: lexpress.fr . May 26, 2018, accessed November 23, 2018 (French).
  14. ^ Jérémie Pham-Lê: Affaire Mireille Knoll: rififi entre enquêteurs. In: leparisien.fr . June 21, 2018, accessed November 23, 2018 (French).
  15. ↑ In memory of Mireille. In: Jüdische Allgemeine . July 15, 2020, accessed July 15, 2020 .
  16. ↑ The new hatred of Jews - France has to face this problem. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . June 29, 2018, accessed July 15, 2020 .
  17. ↑ Sebastian Gubernator: Holocaust survivors murdered: France's enormous anti-Semitism problem. In: The world. March 27, 2018, accessed March 31, 2018 .
  18. ↑ Comment by Nadia Pantel Paris: It draws your heart together . In: sueddeutsche.de . 2018, ISSN  0174-4917 ( sueddeutsche.de [accessed on March 31, 2018]).
  19. ^ France: Criminal proceedings for the killing of an 85-year-old Jewish woman. In: zeit.de . March 27, 2018, accessed March 28, 2018 .
  20. ↑ Macron at the funeral of a murdered Nazi survivor. In: ORF .at. March 28, 2018, accessed October 3, 2018 .
  21. ↑ Décrétés indésirables par le Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France (Crif), Jean-Luc Mélenchon et Marine Le Pen onté hués et exfiltrés. In: Le Parisien . March 28, 2018, accessed March 28, 2018 (French).
  22. ↑ Cécile Bouanchaud, Olivier Faye: Marche pour Mireille Knoll: un message d'unité gâché par des échauffourées. In: lemonde.fr . March 29, 2018, accessed October 3, 2018 (French).
  23. ↑ Oliver Polak: "Anti-Semitism is like an evergreen". In: fr.de . October 2, 2018, accessed October 2, 2018 .
  24. ↑ Meurtre de Mireille Knoll: les deux suspects jugés pour crime antisémite. In: liberation.fr . July 13, 2020, accessed on July 14, 2020 (French).
  25. ↑ Two men on trial for the murder of Holocaust survivors. In: Spiegel Online . July 13, 2020, accessed on July 14, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Knoll, Mireille
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French Holocaust survivors, victims of anti-Semitic violence
DATE OF BIRTH December 28, 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH 23 March 2018
Place of death Paris