Panic in Paris: Variety Journalists, Nearly Trampled, Describe Their Ordeal
False alarms send locals running for cover Sunday night.
PARIS — As if the Friday night attacks on Paris weren’t horrific enough, it’s the sequel that scares me.
Here in Paris, there’s a feeling that life must go on. We can’t let the jihadists win. If it’s terror they want, then we refuse to be scared. In a show of determination and strength, Parisians have embraced the Latin motto “Fluctuat nec mergitur” (“Tossed but not sunk”) that appears on the city’s coat of arms.
But stepping out onto the streets of Paris, it’s a false confidence we feel. Sunday afternoon, the crowds had returned to public places — Notre Dame, Les Halles, Place de la Republique — even if the institutions themselves remained closed by official order: church concerts canceled, public cinemas and museums closed, mass gatherings forbidden in public spaces.
Still, this crisis is a long way from over, and it’s reckless to think there can be a return to normality now. I learned that the hard way Sunday evening — not just me, but also a colleague who lives across town as well. After staying indoors Saturday...I wanted to see how the city felt firsthand, showing solidarity with those who won’t be intimidated, while paying respects to the sites where the tragedies had taken place, as hundreds others were doing with banners, flowers and candles in Place de la Republique.
A few hours later, over what felt like as normal a dinner as could be had under the circumstances, panic swept through Rue Mortorgueil and into the restaurant, the Cafe du Centre — literally, a cafe in the center of Paris, and in retrospect, probably the worst place to try convincing oneself that the terror is behind us.
Out of nowhere, around 6:30 p.m., a crowd of people came rushing into the restaurant from the street outside. A wave of what I can only describe as terror went surging through the room as strangers pushed their way inside, screaming and ducking for cover, forcing a mass of furniture and dishes and bodies onto the floors as they sought protection — but from what? Was this another attack?
In the melee, I felt myself hurled from my chair and pushed to the back of the restaurant. As I tried to make my way back to my companion, who sat huddled beneath the table where we’d been dining moments before, a man bleeding from his forehead stumbled into the room. A woman torn apart from her young son cried out his name. Another flattened against the tile floor near us reached out a trembling hand, seeking connection amid the fear.
For several minutes, we sat there, surrounded by broken plates and glasses, scanning the room and the windows all around for clues. It wasn’t just our restaurant that had been affected, but others in the street — and apparently elsewhere in Paris as well.
Half an hour later, virtually the same experience happened to fellow Varietyreporter Elsa Keslassy, who’d taken her son to see the mourners gathered at Place de la Republique and stopped to order a hot chocolate at a nearby cafe: Without warning, screaming civilians ran past the restaurant yelling that there was another shooter nearby. She and her son jumped from their chairs with the rest of the diners and rushed inside to hide in the bathroom, while the cafe’s managers blocked the doors with chairs and turned off the lights.
In the bathroom, the panic-stricken diners looked at each others in silence, a group of young Parisians quite similar to those who had been targeted two nights earlier. (It’s worth noting that the Bataclan — located in the 11th arrondissement, halfway between Charlie Hebdo’s headquarters and Place de la Republique — and the nearby cafes also hit on Friday weren’t chosen at random: They are all gathering places for young people, intellectuals, journalists, film professionals and the like. The neighborhood also harbors a significant Jewish community.)
