Mexican in Paris: I survived by sheer luck

Natalia Arroyo said she survived the Paris attacks by sheer luck. Last Friday she was at the Bataclan concert hall when several gunmen entered the building and fired into the crowd killing over 80 people.

Natalia, from the state of Michoacán, said she was on the balcony when the shooting began. At first she thought it was part of the show, but when she saw blood and corpses everywhere, she realized that she could also die.

She was hidden behind the seats, hearing the sound of gunfire bursts. 

"When I saw the corpses I knew I had to hide," Natalia told in an interview with Carlos Loret de Mola, “I was so scared, I took my cell phone and sent messages of farewell. I wanted to say goodbye to my loved ones."

She said she sent messages to a friend and her boyfriend, and when she was about to contact her parents she noticed that there were people crawling into a room and she followed them. "They shouted 'hit the deck', I wasn’t thinking clearly, it was pure survival instinct, I just followed them."

That's how Natalia survived. She followed the people to a room, where there was a kind of skylight.

They found a way up onto a neighboring roof and stayed there for almost three hours until the police operation finished.

When firefighters rescued them, she saw a dead young woman, just like her, laying on the floor, she told herself “I can't believe I'm alive, it's sheer luck, this is not an act of God, it's just sheer luck, why her and not me? It was very hard.”

Natalia said that the experience shows that such killings are committed by intolerance and that's absurd.

Also she said that Paris is not the only place where these attacks occur and called to raise awareness of what's happening in the world.

"We humans are dangerous, no matter where we are, we are dangerous," she said.