Ten years after being taken hostage by the Kouachi brothers in his printing works in Dammartin-en-Goële, Michel Catalano told AFP that he was still engaged in “reconstruction” work, and insisted on the “family” dimension of the drama .
On January 9, 2015, he was held for two hours by the brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi. Boss of the Seine-et-Marne printing press in which the perpetrators of the attack on Charlie Hebdo took refuge before being killed by the GIGN gendarmes, Michel Catalano has just spoken out in a book.
“I no longer have nightmares, but I sleep badly,” says “the printer from Dammartin” – the title of his work published in Cherche-Midi – in an interview with AFP, who will be 58 years old on Tuesday.
“January 7, it’s not my birthday that flashes in my head, it’s a tragedy.” The anniversary of his birth marks the start of a bloody series of jihadist attacks.
Some childhood fears returned to him. The black “anxieties” him and, wherever he is, he insists on standing “facing the door”. Above all, with each new attack, memories come back.
Today, “I can’t say that I feel good, because that’s not true,” he confides.
If the day of January 9, 2015, the day during which he “prepared to die” as he recounts in his story, constituted the first trauma, the weeks and months that followed were all new ordeals.
It is the insurers who offer a paltry sum, a document that must be signed on the day his father dies, an envelope containing 2.50 euros which is given to him on the occasion of an evening…
“There is a gap between the general compassion that we can hear and what you experience every day,” he testifies. “People have the impression that everyone is nice to us when in fact they are not.”
Michel Catalano then has “the impression of being disconnected from the rest of the world”, sometimes with moments where he feels “alone, even surrounded by (his) family”.
With his wife, he today feels “much stronger” and “united”. “But we had moments, during the ten years, on the verge of separation.”
Some couples who have experienced this type of event “did not stay together, because it is of a violence that we cannot imagine”, he emphasizes.
– “Optimistic” –
Even though he is getting better and better, Michel has “trouble finding” certain pleasures, particularly in sport.
“I have the same envelope but actually, I am not the same man”, describes the man who now says he is “more contemplative”.
Very quickly after the events, he decided to rebuild his printing shop, destroyed by the onslaught of the police, and in the same place, despite the initial reluctance of his family.
“I couldn't rebuild myself personally, as a being, if I didn't rebuild my building,” he says, adding that he “didn't want to leave” and “didn't want to no more scars in this industrial zone.”
“This building would have probably remained destroyed for years, it would have been everywhere on social networks.”
The year which has just ended should be one of profitability, while the Covid-19 crisis at the beginning of 2020 had caused him and his wife to plunge back into the water, just as they were getting their heads above water.
At that time, “with my wife and my son, and even my colleagues, we said to ourselves: 'Well, we've had worse, so we're going to recover too, we're going to continue,'” he recalls.
The man, who describes himself as “someone very optimistic”, continues to intervene in prisons and schools as a victim of terrorism, and “is trying to change the world”.
He says he learned a few lessons from his ordeal: the importance of getting help, of consulting a psychologist, even though he never thought he needed one. “The weakness is not going there,” he believes.
