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 the motivation was anti-Semitic and Islamist-inspired. For all of Emmanuel Macron’s fighting talk, the state has lost control, putting the future of Judaism in France in grave doubt.

Among the attacks this year, an eight-year-old boy was beaten and a supermarket burned; Jews account for 0.8 per cent of the population yet are the victims of 38 per cent of racist attacks. In swathes of the country, outward signs of Judaism, such as wearing a kippah or affixing a mezuzah to a front door, have become too dangerous. Parents have been forced to take their children out of state schools.

As it prepares for Passover, France’s Jewish community feels that history is repeating itself, that the time to move on once again is creeping ever nearer. The community is descended from Holocaust escapees in Europe, as well as refugees from Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria, forced to flee in the 1950s and 1960s. Less than a lifetime later, another exodus is in train, an almost unbelievable development in a country that co-invented the Enlightenment, democracy and human rights.