For this new episode of Story Time, jewbuzz gives the floor to Zarie Sibony. Eleven years after the HyperCacher attack, she looks back on that day with striking precision: the first gunshot, the weapon pointed at her, the hostages, the victims, the police assault… but also the aftermath, the invisible trauma and the decision to keep on living.
At the time, Zarie was living in Israel. She had come back to Paris to spend time with her family and save some money to continue her studies.
She was working as a cashier at the HyperCacher supermarket at Porte de Vincennes.
In this episode of Story Time, she recounts in her own words the moments that marked those four hours of hostage-taking.
1:15 pm: the first gunshots
It is Friday 9 January 2015. It is around 1:15 pm when Zarie hears the first shots.
She is at her till. Around her, customers begin to panic and run in every direction.
She, on the contrary, freezes. She is only looking for somewhere to hide, without quite understanding what is happening.
She curls up under her till. Then the store falls silent.
She then hears the terrorist’s footsteps getting closer.
“You’re not dead yet?”
Hidden under her till, Zarie sees the man appear in front of her. He is heavily armed.
The terrorist spots her and points his weapon at her.
“He says to me: ‘You’re not dead yet? Don’t you want to die?’ And then he aims his gun at me.”
Instinctively, Zarie closes her eyes and lowers her head. A shot rings out.
She then hears the terrorist’s footsteps moving away. She realises she can still move and breathe.
“I think to myself: ‘What? I’m not dead.’”
The bullet hit her till. She then understands that she has just been missed by a hair’s breadth.
She becomes one of the hostages
The terrorist then orders everyone present to gather around him.
Zarie stands up and already sees one of the victims on the ground.
He collects phones and passports, then realises that Zarie is an employee of the store.
Because she knows the premises, he orders her to go down to the basement to bring up the people who are hiding there.
He threatens to kill one of her colleagues if she does not carry out his order.
Going down to fetch those in hiding
In the basement, Zarie finds terrified customers. Some are trying to hide behind pillars, under cardboard boxes or inside the freezer.
She asks them to come upstairs, convinced that the terrorist will keep killing if they do not obey him.
But nobody wants to follow her.
She then goes back up alone, aware that her colleague is still under threat.
“You are Jewish and French”
Still trying to understand the attacker’s intentions, Zarie offers to open the tills if he has come for money.
The terrorist mocks her.
He makes it clear that money is obviously not the reason he is there.
In her account, Zarie then reports explicitly antisemitic remarks, also directed at the French people present in the store.
“He told us we were the two kinds of people he hated most in the world: Jews and French.”
Watching those around her die
Throughout the hostage-taking, Zarie is confronted with the victims and the wounded.
She notably recalls a seriously wounded man whose moans irritate the terrorist. He then asks the hostages whether they want him to finish him off.
They all immediately say no.
For a long time, Zarie remains convinced that he will eventually leave the store alive. She would later learn that he did not survive.
The man she tried to keep from coming in
At one point, the terrorist orders Zarie to close the store’s metal shutter.
As she approaches the entrance, she sees a customer trying to get in: François-Michel Saada.
She tries to make him understand that he has to leave, without being able to tell him that an armed terrorist is standing right behind her.
The customer insists on getting in quickly. When he finally understands what is happening, he tries to leave.
He is then shot dead.
“I had just been talking to someone, and two seconds later he was dying before my eyes.”
Zarie freezes.
The terrorist nonetheless orders her to carry on closing the store.
“At that moment, I felt as though I was burying us all alive.”
A mother, her baby and the freezer
The terrorist then tells Zarie to go back down one last time.
In the basement, she finds several more people, including a mother with her baby.
They would rather stay hidden in the freezer than go back up to the terrorist.
Zarie agrees and closes the door, hoping their presence will go unnoticed.
For Zarie, Yoav Hattab remains a hero
Later, a movement leads the hostages to believe that someone may have managed to neutralise the terrorist.
Zarie then tries to open the metal shutter to let the group escape.
But the attacker reappears.
She would later understand that Yoav Hattab had tried to grab his weapon.
He is killed.
“To me, he is the hero of this story. His aim was to do something to help us, to get us out of there.”
The call to the police that goes nowhere
At one point, the terrorist himself asks Zarie to call the police.
She first dials 17, the French emergency number, and gets a holding message.
She then suggests calling the Saint-Mandé police station directly.
When she explains that she is part of the Porte de Vincennes hostage-taking, the woman on the line first thinks it is a hoax and hangs up.
“I thought: he’s letting us call the police and nobody wants to help us.”
Zarie keeps trying until she finally manages to make contact.
Waiting, second after second
The hostages are then gathered together. The terrorist talks to them, reloads his weapons in front of them and sets out his demands.
For Zarie, every sound of ammunition is a reminder that he could open fire at any moment.
“For us, every second that passes, we’re in anguish.”
By then she is convinced she is going to die.
The question is no longer whether it will happen, but how.
“I was convinced I was going to die. The question was: is it going to hurt?”
The call to her mother
During a rare moment when the terrorist moves away, Zarie tries to contact her family.
She calls her brother’s phone, thinking she will avoid panicking her mother.
But it is precisely her mother who answers.
For the first time since the start of the attack, Zarie breaks down.
“Hearing her voice, I felt as though I was saying goodbye to her.”
Her mother tries to reassure her. She reminds her of all the people praying for her and the other hostages.
Zarie replies that she no longer really believes she has a chance of getting out alive.
Yet she explains today that this conversation gave her back some of the strength she needed to keep going.
The metal shutter begins to rise
After several hours, violent blows ring out at the entrance.
The metal shutter begins to rise. Zarie understands that the police are about to move in.
She lies down on the floor near the entrance, her head shielded in her arms.
Then the shooting starts.
“It was like a battlefield. Shots were coming from everywhere. I no longer knew who was shooting at whom.”
A few minutes later, someone announces that the terrorist is dead and the hostages can come out.
After four hours in that atmosphere, Zarie still does not dare to move straight away.
Surviving was only the beginning
For Zarie, the end of the hostage crisis did not mark the end of the story.
Another battle then began: that of trauma, nightmares, images that keep coming back and the need to rebuild a normal life.
“If he hadn’t managed to kill me physically that day, I didn’t want him to succeed in killing me mentally either.”
Zarie explains that she did everything she could to become the person she was before.
She also recounts that her compensation from the French State took ten years.
“I was given my life as a gift a second time”
Over the years, her view of what she went through has changed.
Where there was first anger, questions and incomprehension, Zarie now speaks of gratitude and responsibility.
“I was given my life as a gift, not just the first time when I was born, but a second time that day.”
She explains that she feels a duty to give meaning to the time she has been granted, aware that others were not so lucky.
Story Time: passing on the memory of those we must never forget
With Story Time, jewbuzz gives the floor to those whose lives were turned upside down by a single day, an encounter or an event.
In this episode, Zarie does not only tell how she survived.
She also tells of those who were with her, those who tried to act and those who never came out of the store.
Speaking in their name
Four people were murdered in the HyperCacher attack on 9 January 2015: Yohan Cohen, Yoav Hattab, Philippe Braham and François-Michel Saada.
Eleven years on, Zarie explains that her testimony is also a way of keeping their memory alive.
“Today I speak in their name to keep their memory alive, and above all so that they are not forgotten.”
This Story Time is the account of a survivor. But it is also a tribute to Yohan Cohen, Yoav Hattab, Philippe Braham and François-Michel Saada. So that their names and their story are never forgotten.