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Video length: 3 min
“You go to lunch with two colleagues, and you find yourself in a war scene”: forty years later, victims of the attack on rue des Rosiers still traumatized
“You go to lunch with two colleagues, and you find yourself in a war scene”: forty years later, victims of the attack on rue des Rosiers still traumatized
(SENSITIVE AFFAIRS / FRANCE 2)
It was in 1982. The anti-Semitic attack on Rue des Rosiers, one of the deadliest in France, left six people dead and 22 injured. More than forty years later, in this extract from “Sensitive Affairs”, one of the survivors remembers it as if it were yesterday…
In the heart of the Jewish district of Marais, in Paris, a lively shopping street: rue des Rosiers. It brings together a large Ashkenazi community who fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe in the 19th century. An emblematic restaurant brings together regulars, tourists and passing workers: chez Joe Goldenberga true institution that serves specialties inspired by Polish and Russian cuisines. Xavier Yon, a business manager then in his forties, was accustomed to it. In this extract from “Sensitive Affairs”, he recounts the nightmare he experienced on August 9, 1982.
That Monday, the restaurant was packed. Xavier Yon and two of his colleagues have reserved. At 1:15 p.m., they take their place at the back of the room. Almost immediately, a deafening noise erupts. The three colleagues understand “immediately, to the second, that it’s an attack.”
A man posted outside has just thrown a grenade into the establishment. Submachine gun in hand, he enters with an accomplice. The two men empty their magazines on customers and staff. Xavier Yon can only rush under a bench. From his hiding place, he hears, helpless, gunshots which freeze him. The wounded who are dying on the ground are finished: “Every time you hear a gunshot, you know it’s someone getting killed.”
After three long minutes of shooting, the commando fled. Xavier Yon keeps a vision “horrible” of the restaurant after their departure: the image “of a person collapsed, on the ground, in his blood, still alive, dying… It’s a war scene. You go to have a quiet lunch with two of your colleagues for work, and you find yourself in a war scene“…
Excerpt from “Rue des Rosiers: the slow path towards the truth?”, to be seen on September 29 In “Sensitive Affairs”, a co-production between France Télévisions, France TV presse, France Inter, INA and Capa Presse adapted from a France Inter broadcast.
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