“Monsieur Bernard,” as the students called him, was “a very patient teacher, really respectful.” “And he could be funny too,” said Anna. This high school student had barricaded herself in her classroom on Friday, October 13 when her “teacher shouted that we had to close all the doors,” as the terrorist entered their Gambetta-Carnot high school in the northern town of Arras.
In front of the school, parents recalled who Dominique Bernard was, the 57-year-old French teacher who was killed by the assailant. The father of three daughters, who came from a family of teachers and was married to an English teacher, “took time out for parent-teacher meetings and was a great listener.” “He died because he tried to protect our children,” lamented the mother of a high school student.
https://medforth.biz/breaking-….knife-attack-at-gamb
BREAKING: Knife attack at Gambetta High School in Arras, France: one teacher had his throat cut, another was stabbed to death , several others injured; the perpetrator, who shouted “Allah Akbar”, is a young Chechen already known for his radicalisation, his brother was also arrested – Allah's Willing Executioners
Bernard studied literature in Lille, Northern Franc, and had been teaching there since the 1980s. Bruno Lecat, who shared the university benches with him, remembers him as “a rich human being, very generous and attentive to others. He was a truly beautiful person.” During his studies, he formed a theater company with Nathalie Raoul, who described him to Agence France-Presse as a “respectful, a little secretive, very delicate” man. “His personality was essential to the functioning of the group, with a great deal of discretion and originality”. At the time, he was a “very intelligent student, not at all into fads or trends, a very unique person.”
Bernard was “a lover of literature who knew how to pass on his passion,” and “a hard-working teacher who took his work very much to heart,” said philosophy teacher Damien Dousseau. “He was a very cultured person with many interests. Outside his work here, he regularly gave lectures on literature, as well as cinema and music,” added a distraught colleague and friend. Fabien Dufay, a sports teacher at Gambetta high school, recalled a “very friendly colleague, with whom we used to have a lot of fun in the staff room.”
In 2002, Bernard was one of the founders of the Université Populaire d’Arras (now closed), an open university created in the spirit of the schools founded by French philosopher Michel Onfray. Paule Orsoni, a retired philosophy teacher who worked alongside him on this project, called him a “brilliant man with a very keen eye, a great connoisseur of Julien Gracq and René Char.”