How Residents are Coming to Terms with the Devastation of loss in Paris

PBS News Hour

NewsHour special correspondent Malcolm Brabant speaks to a TV producer, multi-faith campaigner and dean of the American Cathedral Paris about how the city’s residents are coming to terms with the tragic events of Friday.

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WILLIAM BRANGHAM:
Newshour special correspondent Malcolm Brabant is also in Paris and files this report about a city trying to come to terms with tragedy.

MALCOLM BRABANT:
Forty eight hours on, Anne Sophie de Chaisemartin is trying, but not succeeding, to suppress the recurring images of carnage.

Grabbing bandages from home, she managed to save four lives thanks to the emergency battlefield medical techniques she learned as a television producer.

ANNE SOPHIE DE CHAISEMARTIN, PRODUCTION CHIEF, FRANCE24:
As soon as I realized that the gunshot stopped because it did ‘di di di di, di di di’ many times, then it stopped and I thought, I have to help those people. There was an absolute silence all around the cafe.

The windows were smashed. People were lying down dead, blood everywhere and I don’t know, I got out of my body.

My mind, I don’t know what I was thinking but I just rushed there, took my stuff and just tried to save the ones that were still moving and I think when people started to be hurt and realize the pain, they started screaming and this was the terrible part because they were screaming at me and trying to get my attention to get help.

MALCOLM BRABANT:
International sympathy for France’s agony was expressed exquisitely during services at Paris’s American cathedral. The two nations are inextricably linked by this attack, because it was at the concert by an American band, that most of the victims were murdered.

Dean Lucinda Laird appealed to the congregation not to blame all the followers of Islam for Friday the 13th.

LUCINDA LAIRD, AMERICAN CATHEDRAL PARIS:
It’s bad religion when people twist it to their own purposes and it is good religion when it opens us up, binds us one to another and leads us to peace.

We can not react the same way as those terrorists, but we can deny them their victory by refusing to submit to a world created in their image.

MALCOLM BRABANT:
Does this feel like the start of a war?

LUCINDA LAIRD:
We are all afraid it might be the start of a war and we seriously hope not, but it might be. It keeps going and I don’t see an early end to it.

MALCOLM BRABANT:

What do you think Christians have to do in relation to this because there are some people who like to foment trouble between Muslims and people who are not Muslims?

LUCINDA LAIRD:
Yes you are completely correct. Christians have to stand for peace. Have to stand for working together with our Muslim brothers and sisters.

Have to differentiate between good religion and bad religion. Bad religion that twists what is good. Good religion Christian, Muslim, Jew any religion that works for peace, justice and the humanity of all people. That’s where Christians need to be.

MALCOLM BRABANT:
From the other side of the religious divide, Samia Hathroubi, a French Tunisian campaigner for multi-faith understanding, issued a similar plea for peaceful co-existence.

SAMIA HATHROUBI:
The terrorists sent us a letter. They sent us a trap. And I’m afraid, I’m really concerned that we might fall in this trap.

This trap of division. This trap of division and hatred and this fight that we could have with the French people and if we fall into this civil war, I am afraid of myself, I’m afraid of the life of my nephew and nieces and iIm afraid of each one person in this country and not only the Muslim community.

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