She escaped in 1942 but wasn’t so lucky this time around. In the latest, horrific anti-Semitic murder to defile France, Mireille Knoll, an 85‑year‑old wheelchair-bound Parkinson’s sufferer, was stabbed 11 times and burnt to death in her flat in Paris on Friday. Aged nine, she had escaped from the Rafle du Vel d’Hiv, when French police sent thousands of Jews to their death; yet in the end the world’s oldest hatred finally caught up with her, to France’s eternal shame.

At least the courts promptly confirmed that this was an anti-Semitic murder; when Sarah Halimi, a 65-year-old doctor, was murdered last year, it took months for the French authorities to accept, despite overwhelming evidence, that...