Noémie Halioua is a freelance journalist, after having been a reporter in the Middle East for the i24news channel. In 2018, she published
"
The Sarah Halimi Affair
"
(Éditions du Cerf), a documented investigative book which traces in detail the investigation, the night of the crime and which draws a portrait of Sarah Halimi.
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The one who would become Sarah Halimi was born on November 30, 1951, in Nogent-sur-Marne. Her name is Lucie Attal. His parents left Constantine in the 1950s, after businesses run by Jews were “
stoned
”. Lucie has brown hair and white skin, hazel eyes light up her slender face. She has the stoutness of a twig but an iron will and an extraordinary moral requirement. At the dawn of her life, she is already "
upright as justice
In the words of his father. One Sunday, when her parents brought her to a show, she heard her mother rejuvenate her by two years at the teller to benefit from a reduced rate. Little Lucie throws a tantrum and bursts into tears. She doesn't want people lying about her age. She doesn't want people to lie at all. She is already the one that her relatives will describe during the ceremony in her memory: endowed with a rare moral rectitude, refusing to consent to the slightest lie, even if it is tiny and even when it is accommodating.
Once her baccalaureate was in her pocket, Lucie Attal embarked on demanding medical studies. An ambitious choice for this young woman who grew up in a popular suburb and whose parents sell vegetables in the markets. She works with relentlessness, constancy and pugnacity, just as she will show stubbornness and rigor when she joins the orthodox current. While her parents practice an intimate and cultural Judaism, Lucie Attal chooses, at the age of twenty, to join a very practicing community and to adopt a Hebrew first name: thus Lucie becomes Sarah.
From then on, she respects the sartorial modesty of rigor, wears long skirts and shirts that cover the elbows, visible and identifiable attributes that her neighbor below will not fail to recognize, as he will testify during his first interrogation. A few years later, at the age of 27, Sarah obtained the diploma for which she had fought so hard, but gave up her career to start a family. Sarah Attal meets Y. Halimi, a professional psychologist, practicing like her, and a few months later, they say “
yes
” to each other in the village hall of Nogent-sur-Marne. Sarah Attal becomes Sarah Halimi and will remain so even after her divorce five years later, when she will be granted the famous HLM on rue Vaucouleurs in Paris.
She who had always shied away from the light and avoided conflict, breathes her last in screaming and brutality when a monster appears in her living room in the middle of the night to beat her for over forty minutes, before throwing her body away. by the window.
A few months before her divorce, a private nursery opened in the heart of the Jewish quarter of the Marais. She applied for the post of director of the establishment, obtained it and therefore devoted all her strength to supporting young children and their parents: this would become “
the work of her life
” in the words of her son. Sarah Halimi sacrifices all her time for her three children and those of others. She demonstrates a personal commitment that goes far beyond the scope of her responsibilities, and is involved night and day down to the smallest details. If for those who know her little, it can happen to display a firm face, she splits the armor when it comes to a small being. "
A crying child is a child who has something to say
», She will say to her daughters when they in turn become mothers. “She
was not a manager or a nursery director, she was a mother. A mother who received children from other mothers and who transmitted to them what an ideal mother could transmit to them. She knew how to instill love in children, to give them love,
”testified the former president of the nursery during the ceremony in her memory organized one month after her death. She "
transmitted a flame, a sensitivity, a purity to these children
", he will testify.
His life was, according to the order of things, to end in the image of his existence, in calm, gentleness and love. She who had always shied away from the light and avoided conflict, breathes her last in screaming and brutality when a monster appears in her living room in the middle of the night to beat her for over forty minutes, before throwing her body away. by the window. On the night of April 3 to 4, 2017, Kobili Traoré enters through the door of his balcony left half-open, the massacre in his hand and alternates his blows of insults such as "
bitch
", "
bitch
», All punctuated by suras from the Koran. That night, she wears a white nightgown, of a light fabric, with blue printed patterns, buttoned at the chest. Basic linen has become, by dint of being worn by little girls and grandmothers, the ultimate symbol of fragility.
We are a few days before Passover, the Jewish Easter which celebrates the exit of the Hebrews from Egypt. Usually the occasion to meet up with family and keep the memory of a happy episode in biblical history, one that celebrates freedom and hope after three centuries of slavery. A few hours before nightfall, Sarah Halimi has already made up the shopping list to prepare a feast for her children and grandchildren. His son-in-law will find this list on the dining room table the day after that fatal night.
