Word: seurat
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...They weren't human or inhuman. They were nonhuman." That was how French Journalist Jean-Paul Kauffmann, quoting fellow hostage Michel Seurat, , described the pro-Iranian Islamic Jihad terrorists who held him hostage for three years. The wrenching account of his kidnaping, captivity and release appeared last week in L'Evenement du Jeudi, the French newsmagazine Kauffmann worked for when he and French Researcher Seurat were abducted...
...more than a year, the hostages never saw daylight. Their only diversion was reading the handful of books provided by their jailers; Kauffmann read War and Peace more than 20 times. At one point, he and Seurat listened while their Shi'ite captors spent eight days torturing an Arab suspected of being a spy. When it was over, Kauffmann's jailer joked, "I damaged him a little. He had two broken ribs. We broke both his legs. Finally he talked, and we set him free." Freedom, Kauffmann learned, was a euphemism for death...
...most bizarre episodes, Seurat was allowed a brief visit in August 1985 with his wife and daughters in Beirut, and then returned to the cell loaded down with sociology books. It was the last time he saw his family. A month later, he was deathly ill with hepatitis. A Lebanese Jewish doctor, Elie Hallat, who was also a hostage, pleaded in vain for Seurat's release. As his condition worsened, a Shi'ite commander volunteered a transfusion. "You are becoming a Shi'ite," joked a captor after Seurat was given blood. In fact, the researcher was dying. By then French...
...March 1986, the Islamic Jihad announced that it had "executed" Seurat. It seems likely, however, that he succumbed, at 39, to his disease. But the jailers told the hostages he was alive and recovering in a hospital. Kauffmann later learned from a radio newscast that Hallat, doomed by his captors' rabid anti-Semitism, had been executed. Kauffmann, Carton and Fontaine were continually moved from apartment to apartment. At one point Kauffmann was wrapped in bandages like a mummy, sealed in a metal box and bolted under the chassis of a truck. When he banged on the side, he was told...
...Sondheim -- "I turn it over to my accountants and do what they tell me to" -- and, for a man who acknowledges he sometimes makes more than $1 million a year, he does not seem to believe he has much. After writing Sunday in the Park about Painter Georges Seurat, he went to a show of Seurat drawings, which sell in the low six figures. "I can't tell you how much I wanted one," he recalls, "but, of course, I couldn't afford...