The daughter of one of the cartoonists murdered in the Charlie Hebdo attack has shared a poignant photograph of his empty desk.
The image posted on Instagram by Elsa Wolinski, daughter of Georges Wolinski, shows an office where a pen lies at the ready on a sheaf of paper beside a black notebook. The caption says: “Dad is gone, not Wolinski.”
Her 80-year-old father, known by his last name in France, was shot dead on Wednesday in the offices of the satirical magazine with which he had a long association. Four other cartoonists, including the paper’s editor, were also among the 12 people killed.
Elsa Wolinski said on Thursday that the moment she learned that shots had been fired, she feared the worst. Her father, born in Tunisia, always had a pessimistic and melancholy nature, she said. But the most painful thing for her was to imagine him shot dead with a bullet.
He had brought her up in the knowledge that he was in a “risky profession” in which he had to defend his ideas. “I thought that you could stop him in the street, show disagreement, but I never thought you could kill artists,” she told an interviewer on Europe1 radio. Fighting back tears, she said: “I don’t think you can kill ideas.”
She added: “He was a man who was afraid. He was scared of what would happen to society, and of the world he was leaving to his grandchildren.”
Crowds gathered spontaneously outside the Charlie Hebdo offices on Thursday to pay respect to the victims during a midday minute’s silence.
Elsa Wolinski said she had not been informed by police of her father’s death and only learned of it when her husband went to the scene.
