They survived Paris terror attack to face agony, doubt

PARIS >> 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 Nov. 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 neighborhood 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 Nov. 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?”