Vanessa, Karena, Loïc, Robert, Naïma or even Siham, “half Moroccan, half French” like many of the accused including Salah Abdeslam, recounted their upset lives since the attacks which caused the death of 130 people in Paris and Saint-Denis on November 13, 2015.
Unusually in a trial, the many civil parties (more than 2,400 in total), survivors or relatives of the victims of the attacks, have the right to speak again this week before their lawyers’ pleadings begin from Monday. The civil parties who so wished had already had the opportunity to speak at the helm of this extraordinary trial in October.
First to intervene, Vanessa, 33, her voice trembling, recounts her denial the evening of the attacks and long after. “It’s alright, it’s alright,” she repeats to herself, “like a mantra” as bullets whiz around her.
“I did the technique of children when they are scared: waiting every minute for the next one hoping it will be the last,” she says. “That’s how I lasted four and a half hours”, the time the police neutralized the assailants of the Bataclan… The next five years Vanessa continued to “pretend that everything was fine.”
“And then one day, I didn’t sleep anymore. Not a second more. No more rest (…) With the fatigue, I started to think less and less that everything was fine,” she said, sobbing .
Having the opportunity to testify in court has opened up a “space of humanity”, says the young woman orphan forever of the carefree Vanessa she was before November 13.
Karina, a French-speaking American, has a choking voice when she recounts the strange noise she heard from the “tiny closet” where she had hidden at the start of the attack. “I thought it was music and then I realized it was the moans of people dying.”
“Heartbreaker”
Karina survived. “I was saved,” she says. Except that “the next day, I discovered post-traumatic stress. My 5-year-old son just closed a toy that clicked. And I was very scared. And it’s been like that ever since”.
Her children “absorbed” their mother’s stress. “It’s always difficult for my children. And that breaks my heart.”
The testimonies continue and it appears that the suffering which poisons the lives of the survivors remains intact more than six years after the attacks. Often a sense of guilt gnaws at the survivors. “If the bullet did not explode my knee at the time of impact, it was because it had gone through several bodies before me,” said Emmanuel. “I don’t understand why we are miraculous and that there are these people we leave behind,” said Cyprien, accompanied to the hearing by many friends so as not to flinch.
“After the attacks, there was a kind of injunction not to have hatred. Not to stoop. And at the beginning, I said to myself that I was very happy with that. But in fact, yes , I hate,” said François, turning to the dock.
“I hate. And I’m not ashamed of it. It’s normal. I hate all the people who took all those lives, destroyed many others and tried to take others, including the mine. I still have a dull anger deep inside me”.
Naïma, who was only 16 on November 13, also addresses the defendants. “What are you going to remember from all this, you the accused, you whose gaze weighs on me the most?”. In the box, no one flinched.
“I am on the wire, sometimes the wire is twisted, sometimes the wire loose”, says Naïma, all frail and trembling.
“I work every day to stand serenely on this thread for life, with those I love,” she said, moved to tears.