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Published on 2 January 2016
Terrorism doesn’t strike only once
By Kathie Kriegel, published in the Jerusalem Post January 2, 2015
“It's been a year since I last worked. A year.”
This is Patrice Oualid’s cry from the heart, his first words of desperation. This is his pain, even before he starts talking about that momentous day when he stared death in the face, the day when life changed completely.
“I had been working since I was 13. Everything was good with my job. And now what I’m doing is just going around in circles. My whole life was destroyed. I’m currently studying at the ulpan [Hebrew language course], but I’m 50 and it’s quite difficult to learn a new language at this age. I’m doing my best to hang on, but for what? What will happen? There is nothing. Not even a job.”
It’s been a year now. But who remembers? Except the journalists, who have papers to sell. “They never stop calling me. They harassed my wife as well,” But he is willing to make an exception for The Jerusalem Post, a publication he says he appreciates.
Living in Israel, he has been unable to escape terrorism.
The current wave keeps turning in his head, never leaving him completely alone. Because after his face-toface experience with the terrorists, abandoning France and a difficult aliya, there is yet another cruelty: indifference from Israel.
“I SAW hate and death in his eyes,” says Oualid of his encounter with one of the terrorists. “No doubt he took drugs, it seemed obvious; he wasn’t human.”
At this point, Oualid believed it was the end, but in a final gasp, thinking of his wife and children, he started to run away.
The machine guns targeted him as he escaped from the store.
“He shot me in the arm. Why not in my back? I was only two meters away from him,” he asks.
Oualid is positive he was saved by a miracle.
“There were lots of miracles that day,” he recalls.
One, for example, when the main alleged assailant, Amedy Coulibaly, shot the cashier twice, but she was not injured. Then he told her: “Since you don’t want to die, come and serve me.”
Another miracle: The bomb that the terrorists had assembled did not explode; apparently the assailants used a faulty detonator.
“Moreover, the store was crowded with people that day. And then, it suddenly became almost empty just a few minutes before Coulibaly arrived in here. A miracle, again, otherwise the carnage could have been greater,” he says... Read more.