survivors of terrorism move to high schools

They have lived it in their flesh or lost loved ones during attacks. Today, they testify to students. On the occasion of the Day of Tribute to the Victims of Terrorism, the story of moving encounters at the Lucie-Aubrac high school in Courbevoie.

Louise Berthelot hesitated. She first wanted to bring her guitar, out of love for rock music, then she wondered if she could bring her dog, who has done her so much good. Finally she came with a black notebook, scribbled “of all the thoughts that [la] crossed, especially the goriest ones”, those she couldn’t share with her parents, “to preserve them”. This notebook, she started it on Friday, May 13, 2016, six months exactly after the very first concert of her life, “a concert of adults, in the pit” : the tragic one of the Eagles of Death Metal, at the Bataclan. That night she was 14 and “a rocker look”, she now has 20, rings on all her fingers and flamboyant lipstick. In a corner of the CDI of the Lucie-Aubrac high school, in Courbevoie (92), she tells her story to Isée, a first-grade student who, faced with the impressive story, twists her hands in silence.

The meeting, singular, takes place within the framework of the educational actions of theFrench Association of Victims of Terrorism (AFVT), which brings together several times a year witnesses to terrorism, victims or families of victims, and classes of high school students. Here, the project is quite special: the fourteen students, Latinists, from Courbevoie each exchange with a witness, during a unique face-to-face. A dialogue is tied between them around objects that evoke terrorism to the students, or the attack they experienced to the victims. Material or immaterial, they are a pretext to facilitate the meeting, but they will also be part of an exhibition of the future museum-memorial of Terrorism. The interviews make it possible to evoke years of terrorism, of the attack against Charlie Hebdo to those of November 13 in 2015, passing through that of Nice in 2016, Bombay in 2008, Cairo in 2009, Toulouse in 2012, or the attack against the UTA DC-10 in 1989.

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