Friendship is a strange feeling forged over years, but it can develop even in two and a half hours through extreme experiences. David Fritz Goeppinger, 33, met some of his best friends on the night of November 13, 2015, in a corridor of the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, as they waited for the arrival of a police strike team in the company of a terrorist armed with an AK-47 and an explosive belt. Shortly before, he had spent a good 10 minutes hanging from a window of the building together with two other victims of what would become the largest terrorist attack in French history.
“I knew I couldn’t do anything else. And it was a good idea, because I’m alive. I started talking to the person next to me. With Sébastien, who is now a great friend. I asked him what his name was, I shook his hand and told him that everything would be fine. To this day he still asks me why I said that,” he explains to EL PAÍS in a bar on the Seine.
Fritz, born in Chile and moved to France as a child with his parents, is a professional photographer and writer. That night he had gone to the Bataclan to see Eagles of Death Metal, like the other 1,500 people there. But the concert was abruptly interrupted. In a coordinated attack between 9.20pm on Friday and 1.40am on Saturday, three nine-man commandos with automatic weapons and explosive belts killed 130 people and injured 350 across the city; 90 people lost their lives at the Bataclan. Another 39 died in several terraces and restaurants in the 10th and 11th arrondissements of Paris. Another person died at the Stade de France. The Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist group, which still controlled cities such as Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq, claimed responsibility for the attacks a few hours later. It was a response, they announced, to France’s participation in the international coalition bombing its positions in the two Arab countries.
He didn’t know the reason. But he could imagine. During the hostage-taking, one of the kidnappers asked him his opinion on François Hollande, then President of the Republic. The question was not innocent. Terrorists accused him of France’s participation in the military coalition in Syria. And he refused to comment, claiming to be Chilean. “I was afraid and I went back to my origins. It was a way to protect myself, I didn’t lie. But I grew up in France, I went to school here, I speak French… yet I told him that I was Chilean. It was like telling him that I wasn’t involved in all this. That’s why, after the Bataclan, I felt the need to obtain French citizenship, to reconcile with a part of my personality.”
Fritz was working as a waiter at the time. He understood everything about his life. But when the first chords of “Kiss the Devil” played, it shattered into a thousand pieces. And the worst thing was that he couldn’t find comfort in the people who loved him. “I saw a psychologist who worked with the BIS (the police special assault unit) for seven years. She knew a lot about terrorism and the symptoms it causes, such as post-traumatic stress: hypervigilance, anxiety, insomnia… You know? I still subconsciously record everything I see and hear.”
He can remember everything minute by minute. The entrance into the room, the first shots, the faces of the people, the time spent hanging on the windowsill. The smells, the conversations, the extreme fear. “But what remains with me most of all is not the hostage situation, but the moment I went out into the corridor. I thought it was all over, but when we went down to the first floor I saw almost 90 people dead. That’s what remains, the terrible image that destroys everything inside you. And that’s where the worst wound opens, which is survivor’s guilt.”
Fritz belongs to a club that none of its members would like to be part of, as he often says. He was 23 years old at the time. And he had a passion for music, for a certain type of music, which, in part, was a common thread with his new friends. A group of 12 people named themselves “Potages”: a contraction of “pote” (friend) and “otage” (hostage). He told his story, the story of learning to live after that kind of experience, in two books:A day in our Notre Vie (A day in our lives, Pygmalion) e The failure of life (It was necessary to live, Leduc). But he is also the key to “Des Vivants”, a fabulous series recently broadcast on France TV, in which he participated as an advisor. “It tells us what happened very well. But the most important thing is no longer what happened, but what it triggered in us. What happens in the life of a victim when he comes out of an attack: his social, working, sexual life… You never think that anxiety, post-traumatic stress, could in fact appear at any moment.”
The Potages survived, but endured a severe emotional ordeal that found respite only in psychiatric consultations and in sharing their stories with each other. “You lose the ability to speak and tell your story. That’s why I wrote this book and the previous one. I could talk to my psychologist and little else. That’s why when I started meeting the other victims, I was able to do it. It’s genuine solidarity, it’s something supernatural. Before I had one birthday, now I’m having two. And I share it with all those people.”
Memories accumulate, but they almost always have as their backdrop the corridor where everything happened. Should the place have closed? “It was difficult. They reopened 364 days after the attack. For me, the Bataclan was mine. It didn’t seem possible to me that it would return to normal. But with time I understood that the concert hall already existed before, and had to exist after. What I cannot do, unlike some of my colleagues, is go back to see a concert there. But I am happy and happy that other people can do it. Otherwise the place would be destroyed and its history would be forgotten.”
A large commemorative ceremony will be held on Thursday in the center of Paris, presided over by the victims and the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron. The process helped heal some wounds. But 10 years later, the time has come to do it for good. “Testing at the trial had an effect. Justice was done. And I, as a victim, was no longer useful. My word was enough. Then came the rubble. And from there I had to rebuild, go back to therapy. My idea now is to be a retired victim. Being a victim is not a profession, so I have to go beyond that phase.”
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