Hostage at Bataclan Recalls Terrorists During Paris Attack

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/01/world/europe/bataclan-hostage-paris-terror-attack.html

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PARIS — He was one of a dozen-odd hostages captured by a group of terrorists as they finished their massacre in November at the Bataclan, living for over two hours in their grip in a narrow upstairs corridor at the Paris concert hall and then through the final assault of the police as bullets flew.

But what most haunts David Fritz-Goeppinger, a young photographer of Chilean nationality who was raised in France, is not the improbability of his own survival.

He remembers the laugh — the strange chuckle of one of the terrorists even as he continued to fire, and kill, and kill again, in the pit of a music hall already lined with bloody corpses.

“In front of us,” Mr. Fritz, 23, recalled. “He was in front of us. Like you are in front of me. He had a gun in his hands. He fired, and he fired. And he laughed. There was a sort of triumph in death. He was like a wolf in a sheepfold.”

Shortly after, he saw one of the three terrorists exploding after being shot by the first policeman on the scene. “It was like confetti,” Mr. Fritz recalled. “And there was a very, very strong odor.”

That explosion upended the dynamic in the music club, and probably saved him and the other survivors, Mr. Fritz said.

Mr. Fritz is one of the few who had sustained contact with the terrorists and has chosen to tell what he heard and saw at the Bataclan on the night of November 13. Ninety people died at the music hall that evening.

Calmly, soberly, and with a photographer’s eye for detail, Mr. Fritz recently sat down in a cafe here and recounted an awful intimacy — he referred to the terrorists by their first names — with the men whose bloody rampage killed 130 people across the city and continues to shake this country.

The terrorists threatened to kill him, asked him about his political views, appeared to lose interest when he told them he was Chilean, and finally — to his astonishment — spared him and the others.

“This is a question that continues to bother me,” Mr. Fritz said. “Even when the police launched their assault, they didn’t try to kill us. There had been exchanges, something that reminded them of humanity — so they didn’t kill us. As my brother said, they were replete with death.”

Mr. Fritz had been on the Bataclan’s second floor balcony when the killing started. Very quickly he realized what was going on. The bodies had begun to pile up in the pit. “The odor of blood and gunpowder, very strange,” he recalled.

He attempted to call the police emergency number on his cellphone, but there was no answer. Still, he has nothing but praise for the police that night. “Superhumans,” Mr. Fritz called them.

As people fled the second floor, one of the terrorists shot at them while they descended the stairs.

When the killing moved upstairs, Mr. Fritz made a run for an open window and tried to get to the roof of the Bataclan. In vain. Hanging from the window, high above the street, he was sure that night was his last. “How am I going to die?” Mr. Fritz recalled asking himself. “Will I fall?”

One of the terrorists saw him and ordered him to climb back in, saying that “he had just killed 100 people and one more would not make any difference.” Mr. Fritz complied.

“I came down from the window and I remember looking into his eyes, and he had beautiful blue eyes, blue like the sky, there was something magnificent about his eyes. The Kalashnikov was big. He said, ‘Do you believe in God? Where is your God now?’ ”

One asked him his nationality, and when Mr. Fritz replied that he was Chilean, “there was something that was extinguished in their look, because I was a foreigner. He said, ‘But you have an opinion about French politics?’ And I said, ‘No, no, no.’ For them, it was legitimate to have that kind of dialogue.”

As the two remaining terrorists worked to assemble their hostages, a police officer from the Brigade Anti-Criminalité killed one of them. And that completely changed the situation inside the Bataclan.

“I thought we were going to be killed,” Mr. Fritz said. “But the behavior of the terrorists changed. We became a burden to them. They lost their footing.”

Despite the change in mood, he said, the ending to the horrific night felt just as tense.

The terrorists ordered the hostages at gunpoint into a service corridor, behind a door, Mr. Fritz recalled. The gunmen wanted to speak with the news media. They took a cellphone from one of the hostages, and forced some against the windows as shields.

The hostages could hear noises on the other side of the locked door, and they knew the police were there. Two women were ordered to place themselves against the door, additional human shields. Tense minutes of exchanges on the cellphone followed, but “there was no negotiation. There was nothing to negotiate,” Mr. Fritz recalled.

“I knew there was going to be an intervention” by the police, he said. “And I knew it was going to be complicated. There was only one entrance to that corridor.”

The door began to shake, and fall in, Mr. Fritz recalled. The terrorists were at the end of the corridor, and the police fired at them. Remarkably, in the chaos of bullets and explosions, none of the hostages were killed.

“I salute the professionalism of the BRI,” Mr. Fritz said, referring to the police. “They came in, and they did not kill anybody, they did not wound anybody.”