Paris Massacre Survivors Recall an 'Ocean of Blood'

The parents of two said they kept thinking about their two daughters.

ByABC News
November 14, 2015, 8:57 PM

— -- A French couple said that they were hiding among corpses during the Friday shooting in a Paris concert venue, fearing they would be next.

Benjamin and Celia were in the crowd at the Bataclan concert hall when three attackers opened fire as part of a coordinated assault across multiple sites in Paris.

"I didn't feel fear or anything," Benjamin told ABC News. "I thought my time had come. I was lying on the floor and I felt that the next bullet would be for me."

The couple, who have two daughters, were watching the U.S. band Eagles of Death Metal perform Friday evening when they heard shooting.

They thought it was fireworks, the couple told ABC News today, until people started dropping around them. Celia saw the faces of the attackers clearly and said she noticed the bulk of their suicide vests.

The attackers methodically made their way from the back of the hall -- where Benjamin and Celia were -- toward the front, shooting as they went. The attackers seemed disciplined, they said, and never switched their weapons to automatic -- always on semi-automatic.

She said she heard the attackers, whom she described as being in their 20s, yell: "You killed our brothers in Syria and now we are here.”

The attackers ordered people not to move and shot those who did, the couple said.

Benjamin and Celia were separated by a body, and said that felt people dying on top of them.

"He was bleeding on my feet," Benjamin said of another concert-goer. "I felt the blood dripping on my feet, and there was another one lying on my back. ... We were stacked up."

Celia described "an ocean of blood" around them.

"We were covered with blood,” she said.

They tried to make an escape when there was a lull in the shooting, but as soon as they stood up, they said they started to hear shots again so they dropped back down to the floor. Eventually, they heard a policeman telling them to head toward him, so they did so and, as they made their way out, they saw a string of dead bodies.

"We were climbing [over] corpses," Celia said.

"There were dead people lying on the stairs. ... We understood this is how the terrorists [got] in -- shooting the security guards and people selling tickets and things," Benjamin said.

The Bataclan concert hall was just one of the six sites attacked in Paris Friday night. The attacks left 129 people dead and 352 injured, according to French officials.

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