Helene Muyal-Leiris was one of 89 killed in the Bataclan attack on Friday night in Paris, and her widowed husband’s message to her killers is being read round the globe. In the Independent:
Mr Leiris, who first met his 35-year-old wife 12 years ago, told the attackers he would “not grant you the gift of my hatred.”
In a post – shared more than 60,000 times by Tuesday morning – Mr Leiris said in French he would raise their son Melvil “happy and free” and that responding to “hatred with anger is falling victim to the same ignorance that has made you what you are.”
Excerpts from Leiris’s post:
“Friday night, you took an exceptional life – the love of my life, the mother of my son – but you will not have my hatred. I don’t know who you are and I don’t want to know, you are dead souls. If this God, for whom you kill blindly, made us in his image, every bullet in the body of my wife would have been one more wound in his heart.
…We are just two, my son and me, but we are stronger than all the armies in the world. I don’t have any more time to devote to you, I have to join Melvil who is waking up from his nap. He is barely 17-months-old. He will eat his meals as usual, and then we are going to play as usual, and for his whole life this little boy will threaten you by being happy and free. Because no, you will not have his hatred either.”
Photo from New York Daily News