Defenders of Freedom – Apollo News

“I can neither move nor speak, I can only blink my eyes to communicate,” writes Simon Fieschi in October 2020. He looks back to January 14, 2015 – the day he woke up from his coma. He only slowly comes to consciousness. He’s confused, feeling like he’s drowning in his “own drool.” There are tubes everywhere in his body – including his neck. He “chokes” and “twitches.” The machine that breathes for him is “terribly invasive.”

It takes Fieschi days to understand what is happening to him. It is his mother who tells him at his bedside what has happened – “who is dead, alive or injured”. Because everything is a blur for him, he can’t remember. His mother tells him that he was the first Charlie Hebdo employee to be hit by Saïd and Chérif Kouachi’s Kalashnikov bullets. From the run of two Al-Qaeda terrorists who stormed the editorial offices of the satirical magazine because of Muhammad caricatures – “as revenge for the honor of the Prophet”.

January 7, 2015 initially started like any other day. As a webmaster, Fieschi just took part in the weekly editorial conference. He was probably talking to the editors and illustrators about the next cartoons and texts when the door flew open. Amidst loud shouts of “Allahu Akbar,” the Algerian terrorists burst in and opened fire. The illustrator Corinne Rey had let them in – she typed in the door code at gunpoint after briefly trying to direct the terrorists to the wrong floor. She did what was asked because she knew what would otherwise be done to her and her daughter, whom she had just picked up from daycare.

On the ground floor, just minutes before, the Kouachi brothers had demonstrated that they had come to kill. There they met their first murder victim: Frédéric Boisseau, who had worked as a maintenance worker in the building. His colleague and friend Jérémy Ganz later told the court that the terrorists opened fire as soon as the door opened. They shouted “Charlie”. Boisseau was hit and thrown against the wall by the force of the Kalashnikov. Meanwhile, Ganz insisted that the two men were only on a maintenance job – that it was their first day in the building. And they were ‘lucky’, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi left them.

Jérémy Ganz desperately dragged his friend into a toilet. He clutched “Fredó” and never stopped applying pressure to the bullet wound, even though his diabetes caused him to have a hypoglycemic attack. He couldn’t reach the police and feared that every second could be their last – that the terrorists would return to kill them. The “smell of blood” spread while Ganz pressed his finger “into the bullet hole” in an emergency. A smell that, seconds later, would also fill the Charlie Hebdo conference room on the second floor.

Over 30 shots are fired in “one minute and forty-nine seconds.” This is how the illustrator Laurent Sourisseau, alias Riss, later describes it in his book of the same name. Previously, the terrorists and the editorial team looked each other in the eye – “For a second, maybe two.” When Riss “reflexively” sought shelter under a desk, the black-clad assassins appeared surprised to find so many people in the room. “But their amazement was immediately wiped away by their task,” describes the current director of the magazine – “they were supposed to kill.”

Before Riss is hit in the shoulder, two bullets rip through Fieschi’s body – one enters his neck, pierces his lung and injures his spinal cord. He collapses in his chair and loses consciousness. Maybe that way he won’t have to watch the Kouachi brothers execute ten of his colleagues and friends – won’t have to hear them shout the names of their victims before they pull the trigger. Riss, who probably only survived because he played dead, heard the terrorists shouting the editor’s nickname.

They shouted the name of the man who had drawn the Muhammad cartoons: “Charb.” Perhaps it was no coincidence that a caricature by Stéphane Charbonnier appeared in Charlie Hebdo on the day of the attack. It was a picture of a small terrorist, over which was written: “Still no attacks in France.” The armed, bearded man replies to the sentence: “Well, just wait and see. You have until the end of January to send out holiday greetings.” It’s almost as if Charb had a dark premonition – a man under police protection because of death threats.

Charbonnier died alongside his bodyguard – 49-year-old police officer Franck Brinsolaro, a father of two children. But Fieschi is alive. When he wakes up, it’s quiet – he’s struggling to breathe. Then he hears the voice of a colleague. He says, “Oh shit, Simon,” before it gets dark again. When he wakes up from the induced coma, all Fieschi feels is pain. He discovers “the feeling of a broken bone, of bruised flesh, of a screaming nerve.” As the physical pain displaced the psychological one, he began having strange visions and paranoid thoughts.

Simon Fieschi repeatedly wanted to scream and jump, but he couldn’t – he couldn’t move or speak. He was intubated, his body paralyzed by the spinal cord injury. Over the next eight months in the hospital, Fieschi slowly learned to move again. “As soon as I could write, I called my partner into my room and asked her to leave,” he says five years later. He didn’t want her to have to live with the cripple he apparently felt like. She was supposed to start her life “freely” and anew without him – “but she refused”.

Fieschi’s wife, an Australian, stayed – “she’s still there”. Like Maisie, with whom the 40-year-old has a five-year-old daughter, he never really gave up. Although doctors told him he would never walk again, he learned to walk with a crutch. Simon Fieschi stood up – even if he was now seven centimeters shorter than before. And he also insisted on “standing” at the trials of the terrorist brothers’ supporters in September 2020. Simon Fieschi told his story in court, noting: “I lost the thumb resistance. It sounds silly, but I can’t give middle fingers anymore, sometimes I get itchy.”

“We will continue (the gesture) for you,” wrote the editorial team of Charlie Hebdo last Saturday – in an obituary, because Simon Fieschi is dead. On Thursday, October 17, 2024, his lifeless body was found in a hotel room in Paris found. The Paris public prosecutor’s office has launched an “investigation to determine the cause of death”, which is still completely unclear. So we don’t know why the father of the family is dead – whether he died of natural causes, external influences or suicide. Even though Simon Fieschi wrote at Charlie Hebdo in 2020 that he had learned to “live with what I lost and with what I still have” – ​​he was still struggling with the consequences of the attack years later.

The newspaper LCA News He said in early October that he had burnout 18 months ago. He could no longer bear the constant risk of being attacked. He longed for peace and quiet, which he wanted to enjoy “without too much guilt.” And worried about being a “parasite” on society because of his small disability pension. But he wasn’t. Simon Fieschi was a “tireless defender of freedom” – a man who refused to “let those who wanted to destroy it win” (Charlie Hebdo).

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