David Fritz, victim of 2015 mass shooting at Bataclan in Paris: ‘The worst wound for a survivor is guilt’

Friendship is a strange feeling forged over the course of years, but it can also develop 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 hallway of the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, as they waited for the arrival of a police assault team in the company of a terrorist armed with an AK-47 and an explosive belt. Shortly before that, he had spent a good 10 minutes hanging from a window of the building alongside 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 his name, shook his hand, and told him everything would be alright. Even today he asks me why I said that,” he explains to EL PAÍS in a café by the Seine.

Fritz, who was 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 in the venue. But the concert was abruptly interrupted. In a coordinated attack between 9:20 p.m. on Friday and 1:40 a.m. on Saturday, three nine-man commandos with automatic weapons and explosive belts killed 130 people and wounded 350 across the city; 90 people lost their lives at the Bataclan. Another 39 died on various terraces and restaurants in the 10th and 11th arrondissements of Paris. One more person died at the Stade de France. The terrorist group Islamic State (ISIS), which still controlled cities like Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq, claimed responsibility for the attacks hours later. It was a response, they announced, to France’s participation in the international coalition that was bombing its positions in the two Arab countries.

He didn’t know the reason. But he could imagine. During the hostage situation, one of the kidnappers asked him his opinion of François Hollande, then the president of the Republic. The question wasn’t innocent. The terrorists blamed him for France’s participation in the military coalition in Syria. And he refused to comment, claiming he was Chilean. “I was afraid, and I went back to the basics. It was a way of protecting myself; I didn’t lie. But I grew up in France, I went to school here, I speak French… yet I told him I was Chilean. It was like telling him I wasn’t involved in all that. That’s why, after the Bataclan, I felt the need to obtain French citizenship, to reconcile myself with a part of my personality.”

Fritz was working as a waiter at the time. He had his life all figured out. But when the first chords of “Kiss the Devil” played, he shattered into a thousand pieces. And the worst part was that he was unable to find comfort in the people who loved him. “For seven years I saw a psychologist who worked with the BRI [the police’s special assault unit]. She knew a lot about terrorism and the symptoms it causes, like post-traumatic stress: hypervigilance, anxiety, insomnia… You know? I still unconsciously register everything I see and hear.”

He can remember everything minute by minute. Entering the room, the first shots, people’s faces, the time he spent hanging from the ledge. The smells, the conversations, the extreme fear. “But what stays with me most of all isn’t the hostage situation, but the moment I stepped out into the corridor. I thought it was all over, but when we went down to the first floor, I saw almost 90 dead people. That’s what remains, the terrible image that destroys everything inside you. And that’s where the worst wound opens up, which is survivor’s guilt.”

Fritz belongs to a club that none of its members would want to be a part of, as he often says. He was 23 at the time. And he had a passion for music, for a certain kind of music, which, in part, served as a common thread with his new friends. A group of 12 people they christened “Potages”: a contraction of “pote” (friend) and “otage” (hostage). He told his story, the story of how to learn to live after that kind of experience, in two books—Un jour dans notre vie (A Day in Our Life, Pygmalion) and Il fallait vivre (It Was Necessary to Live, Leduc). But he is also the key to “Des Vivants,” a fabulous series recently aired on France TV, in which he participated as an advisor. “It narrates what happened very well. But the most important thing is no longer so much what happened, but what it triggered in us. What happens in the life of a victim when they emerge from an attack: their social, work, sexual life… You never think that anxiety, post-traumatic stress, can in fact appear at any moment.”

The Potages survived, but they endured an emotional ordeal that found respite only in psychiatric consultations and by sharing their stories with one another. “You lose the ability to speak and to 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 with the other victims, I was able to do so. It’s genuine solidarity, it’s something supernatural. Before that, I had one birthday, now I have two. And I share it with all those people.”

Memories pile up, but they almost always have the backdrop of the hallway where it all happened. Should the venue have closed? “It was difficult. They reopened 364 days after the attack. For me, the Bataclan was mine. It didn’t seem possible for it to go back to normal. But with time, I understood that the concert hall already existed before, and it needed to exist afterward. What I can’t do, unlike some of my colleagues, is go back to see a concert there. But I’m glad and happy that other people can. Otherwise, the place would be destroyed and its history would be forgotten.”

A major memorial service will be held on Thursday in the center of Paris, presided over by the victims and the president of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron. The trial helped to heal some wounds. But 10 years later, it’s time to do so definitively. “Testifying in the trial had an effect. Justice was served. And I, as a victim, was no longer of use. My word was enough. After that 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 isn’t a profession, so I have to move beyond that phase.”

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