French police in Paris
French police in ParisReuters

On Tuesday, the murder trial into the death of Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll opened in Paris. Knoll, who was 85 when she was killed, was stabbed multiple times in her home which was then set on fire. Her neighbor and another person have been charged with her murder.

“I recall how immediately following the report, I arrived at the home of the Knoll family,” related Meyer Habib, a member of the French National Assembly. “I sat there together with Daniel Knoll and his brother Alain, and for two hours they described their mother to me, through their tears – this wonderful woman, who was full of joy and humor and life, who was miraculously saved from the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup during the Holocaust. Her husband was a survivor of Auschwitz.

“Miri fell victim to Islamic barbarism; she was cruelly murdered by a neighbor she knew, in her own home, solely because she was Jewish,” Habib said. “Today, the two murderers who stabbed her eleven times and then burned her body, will be brought before the court.

“Two wild animals, two barbarians.

“Miri shared a tragic fate with Sarah Halimi who was murdered just a few hundred meters away, also by an Islamic neighbor she knew and was afraid of. Both were slaughtered because they were Jewish – for that reason alone.

“The Knoll family can now see the murderers being brought to justice. To our sorrow, the Halimi family will probably never see Sarah’s murderer sitting in a French court and being sentenced for his crime, and I do not know if they will ever be able to mourn this difficult case.

“That is why I made such a great effort to have a commission of inquiry established, a commission that I will head, with the aim of identifying what went wrong in the Halimi case, and in order to shed light on the entire series of events.

“May the memory of these two holy women be for a blessing forever, and may their murderers pay for their crimes,” he concluded.