Trying to live a life 'submerged by permanent sadness' after Bataclan attack

Friday's witnesses came from Los Angeles, from Turkey, from the central French Nièvre region. And, as from the start of the witness testimony, all the stories from the Bataclan survivors and their families are the same. And each is absolutely different.

90 rock fans died as they attended a concert by US band Eagles of Death Metal at the Bataclan on November 13, 2015 Thomas COEX AFP

The woman from Los Angeles lost her brother at the Bataclan. She was 10,000 kilometres away and in a different world when the news came through. 

"How could such a thing happen at a rock concert, in Paris?" 

She spoke of the difficulty of finding reliable information when you live in a different time zone of the global village; then of the day the family was given the body to bury, her parents crying for their dead child. "You can't imagine what that was like! 

"My brother did not deserve to die," she said. "He was a dream of a brother, certainly not an unbeliever."  

On the day his son died, the father learned that he had won his battle against cancer. 

'Like a fist which went through my body' 

A woman hit in the chest by a bullet from a Kalachnikov said it was like being struck by a punch which went straight through her body. "I certainly didn't want a second one!" 

Like so many others, she lay down and pretended to be dead, trying to ignore the pain. Hoping that she would not be "finished off". 

She has tried to live her life since "at 200 percent" but is, in fact, submerged by "permanent sadness". 

"I live my life through the filter of the attacks." 

In a foil survival sheet, waiting for a train 

The man who came from the Nièvre thinks he is probably a better person "in certain circumstances" for having survived the Bataclan massacre. 

When the police allowed him to leave on the morning of 14 November, telling him to go home, he wandered around Paris in his victim's gold foil survival sheet, waiting for the first train to Burgogne. 

"At the end of the tunnel," he told the court, "there is perhaps a sort of light." 

Another escapee had a more precise and instantly clear message, referring to the killers' repeated claim that they had come to murder "unbelievers". 

"The word means nothing," the witness insisted. "We are all unbelievers for somebody. I am happy to be an unbeliever if that means I believe in love, in life, in rock 'n' roll." 

The trial continues.