HILO — A Hilo couple was in Paris during Friday’s terror attacks that killed at least 129 people and injured hundreds of others.
Hal Glatzer said he and wife, Kathleen Frankovic, “were in the neighborhood” where much of the carnage occurred, the 11th Arrondissement, but didn’t see or hear any of the attacks as they occurred. Paris has 20 arrondissements, akin to the boroughs of New York City.
“We heard the sirens, but we didn’t hear the gunshots,” Glatzer told the Tribune-Herald on Monday in a Skype call from France’s capital city. “We heard the aftermath. We did not hear the events themselves; we were not close enough to hear them.”
“We have yet to meet anyone who was, quote-unquote, ‘there,’” he added.
Glatzer and Frankovic, who are active in Hilo’s theater, music and arts community, realized something catastrophic occurred when friends contacted them online.
“We’d seen the posts on our social media going, ‘Are you guys OK?’ And then we knew something had happened,” Glatzer said, adding the couple has experienced only minor inconveniences because of the attacks.
“We had tickets for the opera on Saturday night, but the opera was closed,” he said.
The terror group Islamic State claimed responsibility for the series of shootings and suicide bombings in bars, restaurants, a packed concert hall and the national stadium — where a soccer match was in progress.
The couple was dining at Astier restaurant on Friday evening when one of the attacks took place.
“We were just finishing up our dinner and leaving the restaurant when we heard sirens, both police sirens and ambulance sirens,” Glatzer said. “They were not going our way. We were walking back to our little studio apartment; they were basically going in the opposite direction. We thought it must’ve been something, maybe a big automobile accident or a fire or something urban. And we figured, whatever it was, we would find out about it in the morning. We didn’t switch on the TV that night. We just waited until the morning.”
Another restaurant in the 11th Arrondissement, La Belle Équipe, was the site of an attack that killed 19. Mourners placed memorials of flowers and candles outside the restaurant.
“There are still crowds outside of this restaurant,” Glatzer said. “There is still, at least, one television crew. There is still a police presence for a block in any direction and at the site. As we walked to a restaurant tonight — obviously it was not the one that was shot up — we saw police pull over a delivery van and question the driver. What became of it, I have no idea. But they are obviously on a significantly high alert. How high is that alert? I don’t know, but there obviously has not been any follow-up attacks. Maybe there was never intended to be any follow-up attacks. It’s clear nobody really knows what’s going on in the minds of the perpetrators.”
Frankovic said the arrondissement’s city hall provided a therapeutic service to those affected by the tragedy.
“There was a book open and people were signing it and writing their thoughts about what had happened, because a lot of the shooting took place in the 11th Arrondissement,” she said. “We have not been to the Place de la Republique, where there is an enormous memorial that has been set up. The flowers and the candles at the local restaurant that we saw has been magnified 40 times at Place de la Republique.”
Frankovic said despite the horror, there are signs life in the City of Lights is returning to normal.
“There are manifestations of the aftermath, but they’re slowly being changed,” she said. “For example, around the restaurant that was the scene of one of the attacks, yesterday (Sunday) and Saturday, pretty much for two blocks, everything was closed. They started opening up today. This afternoon, as I understand it, people were allowed again up the Eiffel Tower, which had been shut down for a couple of days.
“Even (Sunday), we walked along the Seine. It was a beautiful day. People were out, sitting there taking in the sun, playing with their dogs, all the usual things that you would see. There were probably fewer people there than there would’ve been otherwise, but there were people there.”
Frankovic, a former CBS News director of surveys, said she was in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, and “can see a lot of similarities” between the 9/11 and Paris attacks.
“I was working for the four days after 9/11, and I had no idea what was going on in the neighborhood,” she said. “But I remember on the Saturday after the Tuesday attack … going to Times Square, and it was empty. And restaurants that normally cater to tourists were totally empty. And I was affected by this, thinking the economy of New York City has just been devastated. And then you walk two blocks away where our apartment was, and you found people on the street, in restaurants and in bars, talking to one another. Life went on. And that was four days after the 9/11 attacks, which killed far more people than the attacks here in Paris.
“And you can see some of that happening here in Paris, as well.”
Email John Burnett at jburnett@hawaiitribune-herald.com.