A Dark Night to Remember
Friday, 14 November 2025
Today I'd planned to write about our recent trip to Berlin, but yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the 13 November terrorist attacks and the report from across the Rhine will have to wait until next time. This morning all my thoughts are here in Paris.
As the evening's commemoration made clear, the savage strikes that killed 132 people (including two subsequently by suicide) and wounded over 400 have left an enduring scar.
"For all of you and for me," said the then and now Mayor Anne Hidalgo in her speech, "le 13 novembre is just yesterday. Like you, I remember everything...the voices, the cries, the sirens, the noise, the interminable silence that followed. I remember the anguish, the stupor and the certitude that our city, Paris, had entered into one of the darkest nights of her history."
Many people when referring to the 13 November only mention the most deadly attack at the Bataclan theatre, but the list of establishments targeted during the 90 minutes of gunfire carried out by eight men in three commandos is long: the Stade de France, Le Carillon, Le Petit Cambodge, le Café Bonne Bière, La Casa Nostra, La Belle Equipe and the Comptoir Voltaire.
At the time, I wrote three pieces on le 13 novembre: a brief entry the morning after, Here We Go Again; a longer piece, Ode to a Friend, on my beloved city and the strange coincidence of having been within metres of the terrorists' redoubt in Saint Denis two days before the attacks.
I also related the story of two victims, Jérémie and Caroline, which I am republishing here (thank you to fellow writer and friend Harriet Welty for the idea and for your moving reprint).
Ten years later their story still brings me to tears, partly because of the night's barbarity, partly because it is also a tale of our better angels in action. But partly too because Caroline is a friend of my son Christopher.
Paris is in many ways a small town, and that was the thing about this tragedy: almost everyone knew someone who knew someone who was there. It felt personal.
Jérémie and Caroline
Friday, 27 November 2015
Many people have asked about my son Christopher's friend who was shot in both legs during the Paris terrorist attacks on 13 November. They want to know where she was that night and how she is doing now.
A few days ago Christopher sent me an article by Isabelle Rey-Lefebvre in Le Monde, and it's a story worth re-telling.
Jérémie Zerbit, a pharmacy student, was sitting at the back of the café Le Carillon (above) with two friends when the gunmen attacked. "The shoot-out only lasted five to 10 seconds," he said. Seeing that he and his friends were the only table spared the bullets, Jérémie was nevertheless stunned into inertia at the carnage around him. A handful of firemen who arrived quickly on the scene roused him, assigned him to help a young woman who was conscious but sitting in a pool of blood from gun wounds to both legs. It was Caroline, Christopher's friend.
Jérémie used his belt as a tourniquet for one leg, a tea towel for the other. Leaving aside his own phone that was vibrating incessantly with messages from worried friends, he took Caroline's and called her partner Ruter to reassure him that she was alive.
Doctors from the nearby St Louis hospital arrived. Jérémie persuaded Caroline to follow their advice and take some morphine. During the interminable hour-long wait for the ambulances, the two talked.
"She told me that she was called Caroline, that she'd just returned from Iran," Jérémie told the journalist.
"I'll never forget that young woman's courage...her smile, her gentleness and her patience. She saw my anguish and it was she who encouraged me, she who helped me to help her. I looked outside and saw all the bodies covered with white sheets, some wafting in the wind, exposing disfigured faces. People like me, young...I was completely undone. Caroline said: 'Don't look.' To distract me, she asked: 'Tell me, Jérémie, what do you do in life?"
Finally the ambulances came. Jérémie gathered Caroline's belongings, took care to put her stray shoe in her bag, and she was taken away.
Caroline was operated on the next morning. Miraculously, the bullets missed her bones, and she will walk again. In fact, she told Jérémie on the telephone from her parents's house in Normandy where she is now recovering with Ruter, that she is planning to dance in 2016.*
If Jérémie hadn't helped Caroline, she may have bled to death. And had Caroline not helped Jérémie, he may have fallen apart.
Many thanks to you both, Caroline and Jérémie, for showing us at our best in the midst of our worst.
*This July (2025) we saw Caroline, Ruter and their son, with Christopher and his family, at their common friend Michael's wedding in Sweden. And dance Caroline did.