Paris
Survivors: Healing the Scars of Bataclan
By
Julia Amalia Heyer and Petra Truckendanner
Three
months ago, a trio of Islamist terrorists stormed the Bataclan
theater in Paris and slaughtered 90 people. Those who survived are
still struggling to come to terms with what happened that night.
A colorful cup
emblazoned with the children's book character Barbapapa stands in the
sink and a bib belonging to his youngest daughter, who is two, hangs
from the window handle. It has three smiling Dalmatians on it.
Arnaud, a
41-year-old graphic artist who asked us not to use his last name, is
sitting at the kitchen table in front of a brightly tiled wall. He
draws a circle on a piece of paper using a black ballpoint pen.
"The pile of
bodies," he says.
In Arnaud's kitchen,
the horror of that night is illustrated with pen marks, cross-hatches
and arrows. They indicate stairs, emergency exits and the stage, with
the security barrier in front of it. The circle marks the spot where
the dead bodies piled up on top of each other. Right in the middle of
the concert hall. He had to pass the spot on two separate occasions
that night.
On another sheet of
paper, he draws the narrow, L-shaped corridor where the terrorists
held him, his wife Marie and 10 other concertgoers hostage. They were
kept there for more than two hours -- a small eternity when you know
you could die at any moment.
Arnaud was the last
one to leave the Bataclan alive on the night of the attack. He was
the last to be freed. It was at 12:23 a.m. on Saturday, Nov. 14 and
he was lying on the floor in that narrow hallway. His right eardrum
was ruptured and metal shrapnel from Foued Mohamed-Aggad's suicide
belt was embedded in his back.
Crying, Arnaud
recalls: "I opened my eyes and I was lying in a lake of blood
and entrails. Damn, I thought, I'm breathing."
Three months later,
he still has myriad questions about what happened that night. Did the
stairs at the end of the hallway save his life? Why didn't Foued
Mohamed-Aggad and Ismaël Omar Mostefaï simply kill their hostages
before the crack commando from the Brigade de recherche et
d'intervention (BRI) arrived and pulled one hostage after the other
behind their bullet-proof Ramses shield? Before the police pushed
their wheeled, 80 kilogram protective shield centimeter by centimeter
into the corridor? Before Mostefaï was shot and Mohamed-Aggad
exploded?
The Collective
Conscience
Arnaud draws a small
circle inside of a rectangle: After it was all over, the head of one
of the terrorists was lying on the staircase landing.
The horror of Nov.
13, 2015 has burned itself into the collective conscience of the
French populace. On that night, the brightly painted Bataclan, one of
the oldest concert houses in Paris, was the target of an attack and
was transformed into a mass grave. Ninety people were killed,
slaughtered by three young men armed with Kalashnikovs and suicide
belts.
An additional 40
people died in other attacks on bars and restaurants in eastern
Paris, where the Bataclan is also located. A total of 130 people lost
their lives in a massacre of the likes not seen in Paris since World
War II. Three months later, Arnaud and all those who experienced, and
survived, that night are still reliving the terror every day.
The country at large
-- along with its political leaders -- is likewise still coming to
terms with what happened. French mourning has ceded to a kind of
apathy with people stoically following the political debates, knowing
full well that neither an extension of the emergency laws nor the
draconian measures that are now to be pushed through will be able to
prevent terror and radicalism. Instead, they are just dividing the
country even further.
At a café on the
Seine, we meet with a member of the BRI who was part of the unit that
stormed the Bataclan. Wearing a forest green quilted jacket, he
declines to be identified. His recollections of that night are like
memories of a war. He describes the concert hall as a mass grave and
speaks of a carpet of death.
"We were
swimming in blood. What can I say? That's my job. But I had never
experienced anything like that before. You can't really prepare for
something like it."
Like Arnaud, he was
there until the very end, standing behind the Ramses shield as they
pushed their way forward in the corridor to kill the terrorists. Only
several days after the attack did he gather the courage to pull his
shoes out of a plastic bag and clean them. They were full of blood.
A Kalashnikov and a
Backpack
He swipes at his
smartphone to find the details of the attack. By 10 p.m. that night,
some 5,000 calls had been made to the emergency hotline. His unit
reached the Bataclan at 10:15 p.m.
A half hour earlier,
at 9:40 p.m., a black Polo parked in front of the building on
Boulevard Voltaire. At 9:42, a text message from a Samsung mobile
phone was sent to a recipient in Belgium who has not yet been
identified. "We're there. It's starting," the text read.
The mobile phone was found later in a trashcan next to the Bataclan.
Between 9:48 p.m., when the three men armed with Kalashnikovs stormed
the Bataclan, and 10:15 p.m., when the BRI vehicle pulled up in front
of the theater, 89 people lost their lives.
Concertgoer Alex
Jofre saw one of the attackers immediately. A slender man, Jofre was
standing on a pedestal behind a pillar beneath the left side of the
balcony when the attackers stormed the building. On the stage, the
Eagles of Death Metal had been playing for three quarters of an hour.
Jofre had a clear line of sight to the entrance next to the bar and
he saw the Kalashnikov and the backpack -- and he heard the first
shots. In contrast to most of the others in the audience, Jofre knew
at that moment that the pops were not from firecrackers, that it
wasn't part of the act and wasn't a joke.
"It takes a
while of course before you comprehend what's happening. What you are
seeing doesn't correspond to your reality. You're at a concert in
Paris, you bought the tickets months ago. You're listening to music,
dancing a bit, and suddenly a man with a machine gun rushes in and
starts shooting."
The music stopped
abruptly; Jofre and those next to him intuitively threw themselves
onto the floor. Because he didn't know where the emergency exit was,
Alex Jofre would spend the two hours, from 10 p.m. until shortly
before midnight, in a box near the stage. He had to cram himself
inside in the fetal position. The box measured just 1 x 1.5 meters
and was 40 centimeters high. He covered his head and shoulders with a
black cloth he found in the box.
First his legs began
to hurt and then they lost all feeling. He could hear the terrorists
playing with people and making fun of them. "If you stand up
now, you can go," they called. Then shots would immediately
follow.
Don't Look Down
Only after the hall
had been cleared -- except for the dead -- and the hostage situation
on the upper floor was underway did the police find the motionless
man in the box. Keep your eyes on the ceiling, he was told by the
policeman who led him out. Don't look ahead and whatever you do,
don't look down at the floor.
"I am the
victim of an attack." It is a sentence that Alex Jofre repeats
so often that he seems like he is still trying to get used to this
new reality. Jofre, 38, is from Argentina but has lived the last 12
years in Paris. He is a musician himself, but also works in a
Nespresso shop.
"I don't know
how to deal with my fear. Hardly a second goes by in which I don't
think back to that night in the Bataclan. Actually, I'm only calm
when I'm sleeping. I don't have nightmares. But when I look out of my
window, I can feel that somebody is aiming at me from across the
street. That they want to shoot me. I am the victim of an attack."
In contrast to Alex
Jofre, Louise Jardin, 28, didn't notice anything at all at first.
Beer in hand, she was standing directly in front of the stage on the
side where the bassist was playing. When she heard the first shots,
she thought they were firecrackers, part of the performance. Wow, she
thought to herself.
That Friday marked
the fourth time that she had seen Eagles of Death Metal live and the
Bataclan was her favorite venue. But then, the music stopped. When
she turned around, she saw how the people behind her were ducking for
cover or were already lying on the floor. A man standing about an
arm's length from her fell over, staring at her intently the entire
time. She recalls:
"I saw in his
eyes that he was no longer alive. Then came the smell of warm blood,
sweet, pungent. I cowered down in front of the barrier and held my
purse in front of my head. A girl was lying next to me and she
whispered to me, she really wanted to know my name. Louise, I told
her and I remember wondering why she wanted to know my name at a time
like that. Strange things go through your head in such moments. I
completely lost track of time, I could hear my phone vibrating in my
purse. I tried not to look up. There were dead bodies, blood, body
parts everywhere. I don't know any more when I was hit, when they
shot at me. The back of my head and my neck became really warm. And
then it hurt pretty badly. My head throbbed and my ears hissed. It
was like somebody had thrown a handball as hard as they could into
the back of my head. Only, it was bleeding. Now they've got me, I
thought. This is what dying feels like. The girl next to me kept
mumbling the whole time: This can't be, this can't be. And it really
was kind of like being in a movie."
Calmly but Quickly
Something exploded
nearby. To distract herself, Louise began counting the vibrations of
her phone in her handbag.
The detonation she
heard was the attacker Samy Amimour. He was hit by a police bullet at
10:07 p.m. and his suicide belt exploded. At the time, he was the
only one of the attackers still downstairs in the concert hall. The
others had likely already made their way up to the balcony.
The hall was emptied
a short time later. A male voice called out: "Stand up and leave
the building, calmly but quickly." Louise remembers that she
almost laughed at his choice of words. How is that supposed to work?
"Calmly but quickly?" In such a situation?
She doesn't want to
be seen as "the victim of an attack." Sitting on a white
leather sofa three months after the violence, the young woman pushes
her horn-rimmed glasses into her blonde hair and says: "I was
there. That's all there is." Now when Louise goes to a concert,
she checks on the Internet first to see where the emergency exits
are.
In the beginning,
Louise says, she thought she had managed bury her emotions and put
events behind her. She went straight back to work. Then Christmas
came and she suddenly found she was afraid of Christmas trees. She
had fears a terrorist might be hiding in the tree and that the
branches could shoot at her. "It's extremely absurd, I know,"
she says. But the fear didn't go away.
"It's the
feeling that I could die at any time. Someone comes, kills me and
that's it." Her 28th birthday in mid-January was the first in
many years when she didn't throw a big party. She has asked her
friends not to talk about that night anymore, and she no longer wants
to read anything about it. Nor does she want to meet any other
survivors. It's too sad, she says.
"I tell myself,
It's great that you survived. Really cool even. And now I also have
to do something great with my life." That stress is a burden she
has to carry, and it's not one she likes.
Psychologists say it
is often difficult for survivors of mass shootings to accept that
there is a before and an after. That the horror of what they have
experienced is so great they will be unable to suppress it. It may be
possible to put it on the back burner for a while, but at some point
it pushes its way back to the front with a vengeance.
'This Way, This
Way!'
Aka Hermann, 39, was
one of the few that night who knew where the Bataclan emergency exits
were located. Hermann had worked there as a security guard for six
years and it was a job he enjoyed. When the concert began, he was
standing behind the barrier in front of the left side of the stage.
He remembers the audience's exuberant mood and how all the visitors
in the front had been enjoying themselves until the attack began.
Cool, firecrackers! he recalls one young man calling out.
When the people in
the back collapsed forward and the crowd in the hall began swaying to
and fro to the horrific rhythm of the Kalashnikov salvos, Hermann
opened the doors to the backstage area and the emergency exit behind
the stage. "This way," he screamed, "this way."
He was almost stampeded by the crowd.
Herman also didn't
think he would need any psychological care -- at least not until he
could no longer manage to walk down the street out of fear that
passing cars might be trying to run him down. One day, during a panic
attack on a commuter train, he began shaking so badly that he had to
get off.
On a Tuesday in
mid-January, he went back to his former workplace on the Boulevard
Voltaire. Candles and flowers lined the sidewalk across from it. It
was the first time he had stepped back inside the Bataclan since the
attacks, and he seemed pleased to have gone. He showed us pictures on
his mobile phone. There are images of the concert hall, the stage,
the bar, with countless white crosses taped all over the place
marking the bullet holes.
Arnaud, the graphic
artist who was the last hostage held by Ismaël Omar Mostefaï and
Foued Mohamed-Aggad, also wants to return to the Bataclan. He wants
to see if, at the end of the L-shaped corridors there actually is a
small protrusion as he remembers it and he wants to know how many
steps there are to the spot where Mohamed-Aggad died and whether
there is an explanation for the fact that the terrorist, who had been
standing next to him seconds earlier, didn't at that moment detonate
his explosive belt, which would have killed both of them.
Bringing Murder to a
Land of Peace
He says he has often
had sudden outbursts of anger since the attacks. It just happens.
Then he has moments where he thinks about taking revenge on one of
these radicals, as he puts it. "I wouldn't kill him, but I would
torture him," he says. He remembers his defenselessness and
subjection. He remembers how the terrorists pointed their weapons at
them and said, "Take a good listen, listen to the screams --
that's how our women and children scream, the ones France is
bombing."
In such moments,
Arnaud has to pause for a moment and breathe deeply, which helps him
to regain his calm. "I was born in 1974, my generation knows
nothing of wars or suffering. We wanted to go to a concert and we
wound up in a war. We were no match," he says in his kitchen,
standing in front of the colorful tiles.
Killing was also
something the perpetrators had to learn. They brought violence to a
country that had allowed them to grow up in peace.
Arnaud's wife Marie
doesn't want to accompany him when he takes a look around Bataclan.
She says she will never enter the corridor again. She also doesn't
want to be present in the kitchen when Arnaud explains how the two
survived the night.
Arnaud speaks
quickly, in a monotone voice. He constantly draws over his markings
with new ones. Gray becomes black. There's the balcony with its red
railing, the four seats behind the sound engineers' booth underneath
which Arnaud and Marie crawled after they realized what was actually
happening -- that guns were being fired on the floor downstairs at
the concert they were attending.
Arnaud could smell
the gun powder and he could hear the shots being fired, but he only
registered what was happening when he saw two people fall from the
balcony. From under the seats, the pair could hear the Kalashnikovs,
and every time Arnaud tried to look and see what was happening, Marie
would push his head back to the ground.
People crawled past
them. When the shooting stopped after about 20 minutes, the pair ran
to the staircase. The stairs were covered in blood and slippery. They
could hear screams below. Arnaud pulled Marie back to the seats.
"If you don't
do anything stupid, you will live," a person standing next to
them said.
The voice belonged
to Foued Mohamed-Aggad.
"He somehow
looked almost nice," Arnaud says.
A Scene from
Schindler's List
Ismaël Omar
Mostefaï emerged from behind Mohamed-Aggad, with "a bizarre
hairstyle, bangs that looked as though they had been pasted to his
forehead," Arnaud recalls. He says Mostefaï reminded him of a
Playmobil action figure. Both pushed Arnaud and Marie and a few
others in front of them across the balcony and into a narrow
corridor. From above, Arnaud could see a pile of bodies downstairs on
the dance floor. He says it was an image that reminded him of
Spielberg's "Schindler's List."
From the corridor,
two large windows face out onto the Passage Saint-Pierre Amelot, one
of the narrow alleys that flank the side of the Bataclan. Arnaut, the
tallest person in the group, was ordered to stand watch. Marie was
then placed in front of a closed door in the hallway.
"At first, I
was happy we were separated. This, I thought, would increase the
chances that at least one of us would survive and that our daughters
wouldn't be left entirely alone after this night. But I didn't really
believe we were going to survive. Mostefaï was simply crazy. He
repeatedly jammed his weapon into our ribs. It seemed like he was on
drugs. Both kept on talking about their caliphate. When they didn't
want us to understand what they were saying, they would use a few
scraps of Arabic, but it sounded pretty rudimentary."
Mostefaï , 29, was
from a Parisian suburb. What little that is known about him suggests
that his family environment had been radicalized, in contrast to most
of the other perpetrators. He fired down at the street through the
window, telling Mohamed-Aggad repeatedly that it was time for them to
blow themselves up.
But Mohamed-Aggad,
who the hostages understood to be the leader, shook his head. He
originated from France's Alsace region and had never stood out.
Former teachers described him as a polite young man. It is reported
that he wanted to become a police officer, but was rejected by the
police academy as well as the army.
Mohamed-Aggad wanted
to know if there was a married couple among the hostages. Marie and
Arnaud remained silent.
He was looking for
someone he could dispatch to negotiate with the security forces
deployed to the Bataclan, a person he could be certain would return.
By that point, no one doubted any longer that it was only a matter of
time before a BRI unit would storm the corridor.
At regular
intervals, a hostage was forced to shout "get lost or else we'll
all be blown up" through the door. In the end, two cousins spoke
up and one was sent outside. Mostefaï and Mohamed-Aggad began
collecting the mobile phones of their hostages before setting them on
the floor. The phones were almost permanently vibrating, with the
word "mom" flashing on some displays.
Terrorists 'Not
Particularly Bright'
"The two
weren't particularly bright. They also weren't well organized. After
they thought aloud for a while about how they could secure a pair of
Walkie-Talkies, one of us proposed that they use one of the mobile
phones to negotiate. That was dangerous, though, because you weren't
supposed to address them. Eye contact, particularly with Mostefaï,
was to be avoided because it would make him aggressive. He could no
longer hear correctly out of one ear --probably because of the
ear-shattering noise of his weapon. At one point, one of us began
laughing hysterically because things just kept getting more absurd.
Mohamed-Aggad kept trying to tell Mostefaï something, but he was
unable to understand him. That got Mohamed-Aggad worked up. When he
heard the laughter, Mostefaï made the hostages stand up and fired
shots close to their heads. If that happens again, you're dead, he
screamed. Both were getting increasingly nervous. I don't think the
hostage-taking had been planned."
A BRI source
confirms Arnaud's statements and says he shares his assessment. He
says that the same police officer who negotiated with Amedy Coulibaly
in January 2015 also spoke with the two terrorists inside the
Bataclan. "Coulibaly was very calm, but these two were extremely
nervous," says the BRI source, who is also familiar with the
contents of the phone calls.
Mostefaï and
Mohamed-Aggad took Marie's mobile phone to conduct the negotiations.
There are recordings of the telephone calls. In them, the men come
across as being erratic. "We can see the red laser points of
your sharpshooters. We can hear you behind the door. I want to know
who I am talking to. I want you to leave the country and for your
armies to withdraw. I want a signed paper. It's 11:32 p.m. right now
and if I don't have anything within five minutes, I will kill a
hostage and throw that person out the window."
Or: "I don't
care. We aren't afraid. We want to negotiate. We will let these
people go and everything will go well." Five calls were made
between 11:27 p.m. and 12:18 a.m. During the final call, they said,
"Clear the door, we have explosives belts and we will blow
ourselves up if you get any closer. We have hostages."
Arnaud continued to
stand at the window, his body in pain from the tension. He found
himself dreaming of the apartment on the other side of the street,
where a television could be seen playing behind the curtains.
At 12:18 a.m., the
BRI's 80-kilogram Ramses shield pushed open the door separating the
balcony from the corridor. The lights went out. Stun grenades were
volleyed through the air. Arnaud turned around and could see a
panicked expression in Mostefaï's face.
"Come here,"
he shouted at the hostage at the window as he fired toward the door.
Arnaud is the only one who followed him.
According to the
findings of the investigation, the explosives Mohamed-Aggad had been
wearing were triggered, but only the front part. It is unknown
whether he detonated it himself or if it exploded when struck by a
bullet. Mostefaï's explosive belt reportedly remained intact.
When Arnaud opened
his eyes again, he saw a severed foot. His back was hot and wet and
he could feel himself bleeding. It was Saturday, at 12:23 a.m. Half
an hour later, he was standing in the courtyard of a neighboring
building hugging his wife. All the hostages survived.
Most plan to attend
a concert on Tuesday, Feb. 16, in the legendary Olympia concert hall
in central Paris. The Eagles of Death Metal have come here to finish
the concert that got interrupted that Friday night.
Marie plans to go.
Louise Jardin will be there, and Alex Jofre will also attend.
Arnaud is going to
stay home with his two daughters.
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