Robert Badinter certainly deserves to enter the Pantheon, as Michel Lebel suggests in his letter published on February 12! The great humanist lawyer Robert Badinter recently reported, shortly before his death, in a moving testimony of his childhood as a Jewish child hidden by the Righteous, a memory that he never forgot. He recounts, with an emotional voice, the unexpected encounter with a German soldier who had pointed his gun at him (one day in the summer of 1944) and who had ordered him to show his papers, to which he had complied, the terror in my stomach, because obviously his ID card was fake, except for the photo, of course. Badinter remembers that the German soldier looked at his identity papers for a long time. He had trembled with fear. But, instead of arresting him, or even killing him on the spot, the German soldier took a photo out of his pocket and called his companion, another German soldier, to show it to him. He then turned to Badinter to show him, not suspecting him of being a Jewish child: it was the photo of his own son that the German soldier had put before his eyes, with a sort of astonishment. touched, with almost a tear in his eye: “The son of the German soldier looked like me like two drops of water!, explains, his voice trembling with emotion, Robert Badinter, eighty-five years later, and This is how I saved my life! » And so in July 1981, after ten years of fierce combat and after having become the Keeper of the Seals of France, Robert Badinter, for the greater good of France, was going to abolish the death penalty (and the guillotine ) ! He had escaped cruelty, he wanted others to escape civilized savagery. God bless you, Robert Badinter!
To watch on video