Wednesday January 7th 2015 just after midday. The day after Drie Koningen – Epiphany – and we’d just ceremoniously switched off the Christmas tree lights for another year on our little Christmas tree, that had survived the hot summer on the balcony and hopefully the central heating indoors of the last two weeks.  I was carefully packing away the decorations and placing the fragile Christmas balls one by one back into their box for another year, when my husband Hans, with a shocked and worried face, hurried back into the living room frowning whilst reading out a Twitter message on his phone: Terrorist attack in Paris. 10 journalists killed! Charlie Hebdo!

Later in the afternoon I looked on Facebook for posts from friends and colleagues. Quite quickly I saw that Juliette de Wit had posted a really sweet illustration that looked like a snowball with a hand and red pencil emerging out of the snow, drawing a big red smile. Then I realised that it wasn’t a snowball but a drawing that was almost completely erased but for the words Charlie Hebdo just visible at the top and signed by Tignous at the bottom! The illustration suddenly became very grim!…Juliettes reaction with her illustrator tools to the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo!
I Googled Tignous and read that he was one of the four cartoonists, Tignous, Cabu, Wolinski and Charb, that had been executed earlier by two terrorists during an editorial meeting in the Charlie Hebdo headquarters in Paris! 10 Charlie Hebdo journalists murdered and two brave policemen, one executed outside the premises on the street!
In the evening the dreadful scenes were shown on tv…and they continued in the days to come:

Thursday afternoon a policeman was gunned down on a street in Paris by an unknown terrorist.
Continue reading The Day After… →