Westhoffen, France (CNN)Guillaume Debré didn’t know how to break it to his young daughters and has yet to show them a photograph of the swastika. “They are markings on sacred stones, that spell out hate and in this country, we understand what that means and what it can lead to,” he says.
“To my daughters it’s just a peaceful area where their family comes from. It’s difficult for them to understand that their family, that their grave has become a target of hate.”
But in early December, that is exactly what happened in the small village of Westhoffen in the Bas-Rhin region of Alsace, in eastern France. No one knows exactly when swastikas and anti-Semitic graffiti were spray-painted onto 107 tombstones in the village’s ancient Jewish cemetery — the 42nd anti-Semitic attack in the region in just 18 months.
