A man credits his prosthetic leg with saving his life as terrorists systematically shot their way through a Paris theater.
Philonenko Gregoire was lying on the floor of the Bataclan concert hall with hundreds of others — fearing for his life when a gunman approached him.
“So he was on the floor, legs bent and the terrorist kicked his leg to see if he was dead,” Gregoire’s daughter, Valentine, told Euronews. “My dad gasped a little bit.
“The man did it again, twice or three times again,” she continued. “What happened next? The man stopped beside him, he fired shots just 30 centimeters [12 inches] from his head.”
Gregoire said before the man next to him was killed, he had a red laser from the gun pointed at his forehead.
“I don’t know why I’m alive, only for my legs,” he told the BBC.
Meanwhile, the boyfriend of the South African survivor whose gruesome account of the Bataclan bloodbath went viral posted his own story Monday.
Amaury Baudoin, a 24-year-old French native, called for people around the world who cherish their freedom to stand up to the terrorists.
“The war they lead is that of fear,” he wrote in French on Facebook Monday morning with a photo of him holding his concert ticket. “Show them that we are not afraid and that we are not prepared to fall into the sign of hatred.”
“Do what we did after the killing of Charlie [Hebdo],” he pleaded.
Baudoin recounted his night of horror just a few nights earlier at the Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan theater.
He was near the stage with his gal pal, Isobel Bowdery, when he heard a loud noise.
“Like everyone else I first thought to firecrackers, harmless, which would be part of the show,” he wrote.
Baudoin managed to hide in the bathroom with a few other concertgoers, who collectively decided that “if the killers came we would jump on them at all costs.”
As he heard screaming of people being systematically gunned down, he thought of Bowdery.
“I doubted that she is still alive,” Baudoin said.
Police finally arrived, telling them to leave the building with their hands on their heads. He walked past the stage area, where he had been just a short time before dancing with the crowd to the beat.
“It wasn’t a scene of war, it was a slaughterhouse,” he said. “There were bodies everywhere.”
Baudoin immediately began searching for his girlfriend, but could not find her in the chaos.
But then she found him.
“What a relief! It was unreal, she had nothing, she found herself in the worst place, and she didn’t have a scratch,” he wrote. “We were safe, for us the terror was over.”
Bowdery shared her boyfriend’s post around 9 a.m. Monday, calling him “my hero.”