Eighty years ago, Jael Botsch-Fitterling’s parents decided something was very wrong in Germany, the nation they called home. Chancellor Adolf Hitler had just named himself fuhrer, and anti-Semitism was becoming national law. Her parents and other relatives packed up and fled.
But today, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo terror attacks in Paris, she’s been thinking about that first decision to leave – thinking about it quite a bit, in fact.
The Charlie Hebdo attacks ended in a bloodbath inside a Jewish market in Paris with four Jewish men slaughtered. And there’d been other attacks: In 2012, a so-called “lone wolf” killed three students and a teacher at a Jewish school in Toulouse, France; last May, an attacker with links to the Islamic State killed four people at the entrance to the Jewish Museum in Brussels.
Botsch-Fitterling finds the pattern deeply distressing....
Clarence Sexton | 8/31/2009
