Read an extract from the powerful and moving You Will Not Have My Hate by Antoine Leiris.
On 13th November 2015, Antoine Leiris’s wife, Hélène, was killed, along with 88 other people at the Bataclan Theatre in Paris, when three men armed with guns and suicide bombs opened fire on the unsuspecting crowd at a rock concert.
Three days later, Antoine wrote an open letter addressed to his wife’s killers, which he published on Facebook. The whole world was in mourning for the victims, but Leiris refused to be cowed or to let his baby son’s life be defined by Hélène’s murder. He refused to let the killers have their way. ‘For as long as he lives, this little boy will insult you with his happiness and freedom,’ he wrote. His post was shared over two hundred thousand times and was reported on all over the world. In his beautiful and moving defiance of the terrorists who had killed his wife, Leiris became an international hero to everyone searching desperately for a way to deal with the horror of the attacks.
