Nine years after the attacks of November 13, 2015, Fred Dewilde, one of the survivors of the Bataclan massacre, ended up killing himself that he had seen too closely, on Sunday May 5, the aid association announced on Tuesday to the victims Life for Paris, of which he was a member. He was 58 years old.
Graphic designer and designer, this gentle giant with the air of a “gruff colossus” had emerged physically unscathed from the Bataclan pit, where he had spent two hours among corpses and dying people, but the “poison” of trauma ended up catching up with him , write those close to him in a tribute sent to the press.
Since “that disastrous evening of November 13, 2015, when he said that a part of him was dead,” wrote his family, Fred Dewilde had recounted his trauma and his slow journey of psychic reconstruction through several graphic novels: Mon Bataclan, vivre encore (Lemieux, 2016), La Morsure (Belin, 2018), Conversation avec ma mort (Rue de Seine, 2021) and La Mort émoi (Editions 13 en vie, 2022). Through these different works, he shared his encounter with death which, he was unaware at the time, had entered him.
“His immense appetite for life carried by the love that he gave as much as he received, his communicative energy, his caustic humor, his poignant works, his projects full of drawers were cut down in one night by an insurmountable suicidal impulse on making us deaf to any future. That night, a spark opened gaping holes in his unbearable wounds which had bruised him for so many years,” his loved ones wrote.
“We, his family, are in shock and devastated by the violence with which this sneaky poison spread by the terrorists of November 13, 2015 relentlessly hit him after more than nine years of fierce resistance. They killed him a second time, without any second chance of “survival” (…). But through everything he shared with us, Fred will continue to show us the way to follow: how attention to others heals wounds, how much speech liberates, how respect for others resolves ills. , how fraternity is strength. »
The “invisible bullets”
Fred Dewilde is not the first Bataclan survivor to kill himself. Two years after the attacks which left 130 dead at the Stade de France, on café terraces in eastern Paris and in the auditorium, Guillaume Valette, who also emerged physically unscathed from the Bataclan pit, was found hanged , on November 19, 2017, in his room at the Val-de-Marne psychiatric clinic, where he had been admitted a month and a half earlier. He was posthumously recognized in 2019 as the 131st victim of these attacks. He was 31 years old.
During the trial of the November 13 attacks, in October 2021, his father, Alain, came to the stand to recount the two years of hell experienced by his son after his release from the grave: “Guillaume did not receive any bullets in the body, but invisible bullets, which killed him, slowly but surely. In the two years that followed, his mental state deteriorated, like gangrene. »
“Her story prompts me to tell you that invisible wounds should be better understood,” he insisted. The attacks generate psychological injuries so serious that they can push people to suicide, like some soldiers returning from combat zones. »
France-Elodie Besnier was not at the Bataclan that evening. She was sitting on the terrace of the Le Carillon bar, just down the street from her home, when three members of the commandos opened fire with Kalashnikovs. She also escaped live ammunition. She too ultimately succumbed to her psychological wounds. On November 6, 2021, two months after the trial opened, she killed herself. She was 35 years old.
