Press Review: 'The person I was before died in the Bataclan': Nov. 13th attacks 5 years later

"The person I was before died in the Bataclan," survivor Anne-Sophie tells Le Monde. "I had to rebuild my life on the ashes, start from the beginning."

Wreath and flowers have been laid by a commemorative plaque set outside the Bataclan concert venue during ceremonies across Paris marking the fourth anniversary of the terror attacks of November 2015 in which 130 people were killed on November 13, 2019 in Paris. AFP - STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN

Daily paper Libération writes about the importance, for all of us, of what we are doing today: remembering. The stories we tell ourselves about the past, whether as victims or as distant witnesses, are crucial to the way we recover psychologically and socially.

There is no forgetting for those who saw their friends die; but there is no escaping the healing exercise of memory either.

La Croix looks forward, to next year's opening of the vast judicial process at which the law will do what it can to give a voice to the survivors, and ju dge the one attacker still alive, Salah Abdeslam, and 19 others, five of them killed by the security forces, the rest accused of complicity.

The trial involves 1,765 individuals or institutions as plaintifs; the evidence collected over the past five years fills 472 volumes; the charge sheet alone runs to 348 pages.

And Jean-Camille, shot in the back, says that, for him, the trial won't help. Despite the superlatives. Even if the man who shot him was on trial, says Jean-Camille, "I would have nothing to say to him. I don't think there's any possibility of dialogue."

He does, however, have one hope: that the unfolding of the police intervention in the course of the attack will finally be clarified, moment by moment. Not that he criticises the special forces who went in to confront the killers and save those who could be saved. "They made their decisions and they did what they could," he says. But he wants to know what was happening while he lay on the ground surrounded by the dead and dying.

La Croix points out that the memebers of the security forces present on the night have the same need to remember, to know the broader details. To confront the story they have told themselves since with a different, more inclusive, narrative.

Le Figaro notes that a special rock concert will be presented tonight on the internet, by the Californian group Queens of the Stone Age, friends of the Eagles of Death Metal, the band onstage at the Bataclan five years ago. The proceeds will go to two charities . . . Life for Paris and the Nick Alexander Trust, named for one of the victims.