French Letter: Remembering the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks
The trial that opened this week in Paris of 20 men charged in connection with the terrorist attacks in 2015 that left 130 people dead and another five hundred injured, took place on a day that for me would otherwise have been notable mainly because of a lunch I had enjoyed with the Observer correspondent Kim Willsher.
Kim had chosen a restaurant not far from her home in the district that surrounds the Canal St Martin in the tenth arrondissement. The Hotel du Nord – once celebrated as the location for the 1938 film of the same name in which all the characters are lowlife criminals or their hangers-on – appears to exist exclusively in black and white. All colour is drained from its patrons the moment they enter the dining room. I almost expected to see Commissaire Maigret at the next table, or perhaps the late Jean-Paul Belmondo as the ethically challenged criminal Michel in À Bout de Souffle.
Our lunch, perfectly good, based, I would guess, on a menu last updated in the months following the Liberation, was fueled on gossip and red wine, as if we had never left Fleet Street. But it had to end. Kim had work to do and, as she disappeared round the corner into the Rue de la Grange aux Belles, I found myself at something of a loose end.
To while away the time, I took a walk along the tow-path of the canal, formerly a working waterway but these days dedicated to tourism and idle pleasure. After a bit, I veered off into the streets behind, passing, on the corner of the Rue Alibert and the Rue Bichat, two unremarkable restaurants, Le Carillon and Le Petit Cambodge.
I didn’t linger and would almost certainly not have remembered the names of either establishment but for the fact that five hours later, while dinner was being served, they were attacked by Islamist gunmen, who opened fire on customers sitting outside, as well as passers-by, killing fifteen and wounding ten more, some of them horribly.
(One of the miracles of that day was the fact that among the survivors of the shooting were a number of doctors and nurses from the nearby Hôpital Saint-Louis, whose professionalism almost immediately overcame the shock they must have felt, resulting in several victims being saved from certain death.)
But not while I was there. Oblivious to what was about to happen, I continued on my whimsical balade. I was due to meet up with my artist wife, who had spent the afternoon sketching in Montmartre. We drank a glass or two of wine in our favourite bar, Chez Amad – one of the last in central Paris untouched by progress – before drifting downhill to the apartment we had rented on the Rue Germaine Pilon, whose owners were a former bank-robber married to a professor of American history.
At about the same time that the killers were preparing to make their way in a stolen car to Le Carillon and Le Petit Cambodge, my wife and I cooked dinner, watched a movie and retired early to bed. It had been a long day. We only knew that something out of the ordinary was going on when we heard the police and ambulance sirens screaming along the Boulevard de Clichy on their way, first, to the Canal St Martin and then, shortly afterwards to three other locations where, as we were to learn, a hundred more had died.
The news on the internet and television was ragged and confused. It took a while before the enormity of what had happened was properly understood. Five people had been shot dead at La Casa Nostra, a popular Italian restaurant. Another 21 people were cut down when the terrasse of the restaurant La Belle Équipe was targeted. Finally, it was the turn of the famous nightclub, Le Bataclan, on the Boulevard Voltaire, where the American rock band The Eagles of Death Metal were playing to a packed audience.
Here, as the attackers cried out Allahu Akbar! (God is great), more than two-hundred people were shot, ninety of whom died at the scene. The chaos and the indiscriminate nature of the carnage were unprecedented in Europe in modern times. The dead and wounded lay on top of one another. Those still able to move, spattered with blood, crouched low or else joined the crush desperately trying to reach the emergency exits. The assailants kept on shooting and shooting, loading and re-loading their weapons, filling the air with the smell of blood and cordite. It was only the arrival of special forces that prevented an even greater loss of life. Seven of the attackers were shot dead. Just one survived.
At our apartment, we were in shock. The situation felt unreal. As a much younger reporter, I had sometimes felt the breath of history. I had covered the Troubles in Northern Ireland and seen many of the dead and the dying of that conflict. I had been shot at by Ceausescu’s security police in Bucharest during the Romanian Revolution, escaping death by inches. In Boston, my wife and I had by chance eaten at the Charles Hotel in the week prior to 9/11 (the twentieth anniversary of which falls today), sharing the dining room with two of the terrorists who would later crash their hijacked jets into the Twin Towers.
But in Paris, the most uncomfortable I had ever felt was in 1997 when rioters threw a rock through the glass of the telephone booth from which I was dictating my account of the week’s unrest to the Sunday Telegraph, sending shards of glass streaming down my jacket and jeans. Frankly, the incident provided a welcome addition to an otherwise less than compelling narrative.
November 13, 2015, was, by contrast, a day to remember. And now, nearly six years on, in a specially built courthouse within a courthouse in Paris, 20 men accused of complicity in mass murder are standing trial in proceedings that will last for at least the next nine months. Justice has to take its course. The families and friends of those who died deserve nothing less.
Dominique Kielemoes, a Paris city councillor, whose son Victor, aged 24, was shot dead on the terrasse of La Belle Équipe, said this week that hearing victims’ testimonies at the trial would be crucial to both their own healing and that of the nation.
“The assassins – these terrorists – thought they were firing into a crowd, into a mass of people. But it wasn’t a mass. These were individuals who had lives, who loved, had hopes and expectations, and that is what we need to talk about at the trial. It’s important.”