They survived Paris terror attack to face agony, doubt

Targets who were no longer human to either their hunters or themselves.For more than two weeks, dozens of survivors from the Bataclan concert hall in Paris have testified in a specially designed courtroom about the Islamic State groups attacks on November 13, 2015.

They were animals, many of them say. Prey that had lost all sense of time. Targets who were no longer human to either their hunters or themselves.

For more than two weeks, dozens of survivors from the Bataclan concert hall in Paris have testified in a specially designed courtroom about the Islamic State group's attacks on November 13, 2015. They stand just a few steps away from 14 men accused in the bloodshed — the deadliest in modern France.

The testimony marks the first time many survivors are describing – and learning – what exactly happened that night at the Bataclan, filling in the pieces of a puzzle that is taking shape as they speak. For most, it is their first public reckoning with a night they describe, one after another, day after day, in haunting words that are startlingly similar.

In all, 130 people died that night at the Bataclan, at France's national stadium and in neighbourhood restaurants and bars. Hundreds more were injured in body and soul, 90 of them at the Bataclan, in the three-hour series of attacks. Holding a laser pointer in trembling hands, witness after witness faces a courtroom screen with the Bataclan's floorplan — a floorplan that the technical director handed to police the moment they arrived to locate the doors and windows. The shaking dot of light finds where they were when the attack started, and sometimes where they ended up.

Some of the survivors were in the concert hall for just a few minutes after the shooting started before fleeing outside into the streets. Others remained behind for hours, beneath dead bodies on the dance floor, nested in fiberglass in the ceiling, crammed into a janitor's closet with only a broom to bar the door. Silent, praying that the three men bent on killing them wouldn't find them.

All nine attackers died that night or in the days that followed. The lone survivor of the IS cell, who fled the city after his suicide vest malfunctioned, is among those on trial. The others are accused of helping with logistics or transport.

On the night of November 13, 2015, the American rock group Eagles of Death Metal was playing to a full house in the storied concert hall in central Paris. It was unseasonably warm, and temperatures rose in the dance pit as the second set swung into action.

Clarisse, then 24, was in the coatroom with a friend, getting ready to run out to a nearby convenience store for beers in the time-honored subterfuge of the young and broke. When the shooting started at the entrance at 9:47 p.m., there was only one place to go: Back inside, into the dance pit. But the gunmen followed close behind. “And I'm ready,” Clarisse says. “I'm expecting to get shot in the back. And I think, will it hurt? Will I lose consciousness? Die immediately?” Edith was at the bar near steps leading down toward the pit. She, like nearly every other survivor, told the judge she didn't want her last name to be publicly released.

The laser dot swings wildly on the screen as her shaking hands point to a stairwell she took on an instinct she describes as “something animal, almost reptilian.” In the balcony, she dived beneath a folding chair. A giant of a man lay next to her, both of them breathing as quietly as their panicked bodies would allow. At first the firing came in long bursts. “Then one at a time it begins. A cry. A shot. A phone ringing. A shot. Someone pleading. A shot. There is no way out,” Edith tells the judges, her hands twisting as she pulls rings off her fingers and replaces them one by one. Jérôme, at the concert with six friends, was just below, close to the sound console. They were trapped, lying on the ground during what he described as the “calm cleanup.” He heard the shooter's steady breaths behind him as he fired on one of Jérôme's friends. And then a pause. They were out of bullets. “As soon as they stopped to reload, there was no sound. It was like being in a cathedral, absolute silence,” Jérôme says. By then, the smell of blood and powder was rising, an odor engraved in the memory of all who made it out that night. Thibault and his wife were near the stage, on the ground. He peeked behind him and saw one of the gunmen. “His face is uncovered and I understand that he's not going to flee,” he says. “He's going to end this with the police. And it's at that moment that I understand that I'm going to die.” His cold comfort: “At least I'm not going to leave an orphan.” By now, about five minutes after the three gunmen burst into the Bataclan, the floor was wet with blood. The gunmen seemed to move away, and people surged toward the stage. Clarisse was among dozens to take a back staircase up as far as they could go. They ended up in a dead-end room with a toilet in the corner. She stood on the toilet and smashed the ceiling, breaking through to a snarl of electric wires and fiberglass. Thibault and his wife, Anne-Laure, joined the crowd but lost sight of each other running upstairs. The pipes broke and water started flooding the room. Still, person after person climbed on the toilet and then reached down from the crawlspace for someone below. Anne-Laure did not. “I fled for a hiding space like an animal,” she testified. “I was so angry with myself about that afterward.” Thibault eventually found her nested in the fiberglass and curled around her to wait. “It's going to end this way, either the terrorists will find us or the police will, but I'll be with my wife.” Dozens of wounded and dead still lay in the pit. Among them were Pierre-Sylvain and his girlfriend, in the middle of the room. He felt a flash at the first burst of gunfire and knew he was hit, and so was she. When the attackers went upstairs, he shook the people on the ground next to him. None moved. He lifted his bleeding girlfriend, who seemed to weigh nothing, and looked around.

The first thing he saw was the blinding light of the stage spots, turned in every direction. Then the horror struck.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)