His wife is murdered in the Bataclan terror attack in 2015. Shortly after, Johannes Baus meets Floriane Bernaudat,
who's fiancé was also killed there. They become a couple, and have to learn what it means to love another.

Written by Katharina Render, last updated Nov. 18th, 2023. Published in the "Christ & World" section of DIE ZEIT.

Translated by @Grzmot

When the breaking news from Israel on October 7th pop up on Johannes Baus' phone, he instantly remembers the moment when he was lying on the floor of the Paris music club Bataclan. Islamist attackers shot into the crowd of people, killing 90 attendees, his wife among them. He felt "incredibly cynical morderous energy" in the room, on the 13th of November, 2015, he tells today.

He can feel this murderous lust today, through his smartphone, when the algorithm puts the Hamas hunt for people into his timeline. Videos of young women and men, who like him then, just wanted to dance, murdered, raped, or kidnapped. Johannes Baus defends himself against this hate. The hate of the terrorists now, and even his own. Under no circumstance must he give in to the hate. Get up and live instead! But how are you supposed to do that, when one of the in total 130 victims in the Paris terror attacks in the Bataclane, the Stade de France, bars and restaurants, was the one for him?

In the past four years as a reporter I've talked multiple times with Johannes Baus and visited him in Paris. When we last video-chatted, I asked the lawyer, who's found his home in the french capital; how does one believe in the good of people, when you were forced to live through the most vile thing that people can do to another? When a stranger, because of his upside-down view of religion extinguishes the love of your life? When he makes jokes with his accomplices during the murdering? When you have to bury your wife in her wedding dress, which she wore five months earlier? I wanted to understand: How does hope work?

Two months after the terror of Paris, in January of 2016, hope stands in front of Johannes Baus. She is wearing the same hat like his late wife Maud, and knows like no other, what he has been through. She has lived through the same thing. Floriane Bernaudat, then 27, lost her fiancé Renaud in Bataclan. He was 29. The first bullet hit him in the back, the second entered his groin and exited at his jaw. It was five AM when he died, alone in the hospital, while Floriane Bernaudat was driven to the police with other survivors and a relative of hers called every hospital in the area. When
the relative was finally told, that there is a patient who fits the description, he was already dead. Twelve years they were together. Almost half their lives. Two weeks before the attacks, she had chosen her wedding dress.

And suddenly, there is this stranger, who in a Facebook group for mourners, comments on her post about Renaud: "Your message has touched me deeply, I lost my wife in Bataclan. If you want to meet..."

The so-called Islamic State quickly admitted responsibility publicly, and celebrated the killing of innocents as a "holy raid" against the "crusading France". Almost 700 people were wounded by the terrorists. Floriane Bernaudat and Johannes Baus did not suffer any bodily injuries. But the wounds, that the barbaric murder of their loved ones cut into their souls were so deep, that neither of them imagined, the lawyer nor the headmistress of a private university, they would ever heal. How could they keep on living? The day they first meet, they talk about these thoughts. Till the owner of the restaurant closes for the night, that's how they both describe it.

From a surface perspective, a romance begins to blossom here, how only Hollywood could tell it. It would maybe even be too cliché for the authors of TV soap opera scripts. Too much does this story rely on the "all ends well" trope. It's because it's not true. Not quite. Their love does not grow quick and strong, they are not made for one another. The backdrop of their tale is no idyllic Cornwall, but a Paris, where violence and murders still happen.

Guilt, jealousy, trauma

It's no innocent love between the two, like you could see it on the pictures of the two with their earlier partners. Of photoshoots in tranquil forests and colourful sunglasses on vacations. Floriane Bernaudat and Johannes Baus didn't make their love easy. There was guilt. Jealousy. Secret dreams of their dead partners. Lingering trauma. The fear of being the second choice. At some point they looked at each other and honestly asked: What keeps us together? Are we two sinking survivors who just want to drown together, or do we want something more?

The something more is now five and two years old and doesn't know or understand, what brought their parents together. The first daughter the two survivors called Bérénice. A name of ancient Greek origin, which means: The one who brings victory. The second they called Madeline, "The Illustrious".

When the terorrists storm into the concert of the Eagles of Death Metal, Baus and his wife Maud are standing close to the entry. The tickets were a surprise for them. The 37 year old Maud honestly wasn't in the mood, didn't know the band and was tired from work. In the subway still, she was unsure if she wanted to attend. But when she's there, she really likes it, is how Baus tells me. A happy grooving together. Until they hear the bangs. Like fireworks.

Screaming people run into their direction. He searches for her hand and doesn't find it. He jumps behind the bar and in a break of the shooting, runs out through the backdoor into the open air. Later the police tells him, where they found Maud, who was shot in the heart by the terrorists: Supposedly, she was next to him behind the bar. When you ask Baus to go through it by the minute, he remembers many details, for example a fan which he found and "armed" himself with, until he realised just how stupid that is against an assault rifle. To this day the idea of Maud being right next to him does not fit into his head. His memory of her blanks the moment they run and his hand doesn't reach hers. He believes that
his brain is protecting him from the thought that he could have left his wife behind.

That Madeline and Bérénice "the victory-bringer" were born, is a victory over the doubts. The choice to give in to hope, despite everything. Hope for a world, where the girls will live well. A second yes to life, and the opposite of what drove the terrorists of Paris, who sought their salvation in the next life and some of which blew themselves up.

One of the main culprits of the attacks was later caught in Belgium: Salah Abdeslam, 34, convincted to life in prison. Baus and Bernaudat didn't really follow the court case. They didn't want to give the individual any more attention. It's important that the judiciary is doing its job, they say, but at the same time they understand that the case isn't going to give them any satisfaction. A warmer idea to them is the thought that "our story inspires someone or gives them hope, especially to someone who is afraid of terrorism or the general tragedy of life. That would be wounderful. But it would be even better, if a potential suicide-attacker, who is in danger of seeing a nihilistic act of self-destruction as the best alternative to life, became inspired to see the positives of life and take small steps in a good direction."

This point of view is the result of a long process of therapy and intense work with the human condition. It's an attempt to escape the role of a victim which society attributes them with. Johannes Baus doesn't want to be damned to mourn forever. His thoughts are shared by the journalist Antoine Leiris, who put a similar impulse to paper after the attacks. His wife also died in the Bataclan club. The journalist wrote, addressed to the perpetrators: "I will not give you the gift of hating you. Even when it is what you want. To answer your hate with rage would mean to give in to the same ignorance that made you who you are."

"Make it stop"

Floriane Bernaudat likes this perspective, she tells today. If she liked it back then, when she was hiding in the little space between ceilings, which she climbed to from the wardrobe? The biting glass wool which was supposed to isolate the space, but didn't protect her from hearing the execution shots below her in the hall? When she was one of the last survivors to leave the building, and the policemen told her to look up into the air and not down at the corpses? At Renaud's funeral, when she hated the musical arangement, which her late husband would not have liked?

Both find it difficult to give general advice, for example to the survivors in the middle east. Part of the fact is, they explain, they wouldn't know where they would be without each other. At the same time they agree that love by itself is not the answer. But their example shows, that even close to the wounds on their soul, new moments of happiness can grow. Though they point out, it would be a lie to say that it is easy to remain humane after having witnessed so much inhumanity. Just recently a Algerian colleague of Bernaudat's told her that it's beautiful, that she is able to treat him as a Muslim exactly the same how she treats everyone else. There are many people in France, and not just there, who after the terror of 2015 cannot tell the difference between members of a religious group and islamist fanatics.

They want to teach their daughters that. Of course they should also know, that the "first loves of their parents" existed. But now it's too early. For everyone. That's how Baus and Bernaudat think of it. That's why there are no pictures of Maud or Renaud in the little house in the Paris suburbs, into which the family moved four years ago. But what remains still, is the close connection of the parents to their dead partners. The children have four grandmothers and four grandfathers. Sometimes, Floriane says, she feels like Maud and Renaud guided her and Johannes together from
the afterlife. "They are in our hearts, and our hearts told us, what is right".

In October 2017, almost two years after the attacks, Johannes Baus and Floriane Bernaudat marry. At the wedding, they announce that they are expecting their first child Bérénice. Bernaudat wears a dress which is very different to her first wedding dress. The best man of the wedding, Mehdi, was Baus' best man at his first wedding too. "Maud gave me a part of her gentle soul", believes Johannes Baus. Floriane got a little tattoo of a fox on her arm. In French, "renard" means fox, which almost sounds like Renaud, who is now forever under her skin.

She still sees that last image of him in front of her eyes. How he's dancing happily on the Bataclan stage and waves at her, wanting her to come closer. Floriane is standing a little bit away. She's tired and needs a short break, and it's hot on stage. Then the attacks happen, and pure chaos bhreaks out. Shots, screams, blood everywhere. A man, hit, falls on top of Floriane and begs for help. When Floriane sees the shooters reload, she crawls out from under the injured man and runs to an exit. With approximately fifteen others, one of them a mother with a young son, she ends up in the wardrobe for the musicians. A man takes her hand, "I don't want to die!" Someone manages to punch a hole into the ceiling. Bernaudat climbs into it, crawls over electric cable and fibreglass wool, until she can't anymore. She hears phones ring and shortly after shots ringing. She doesn't dare calling Renaud, but writes a message, "I'm in the ceiling, where are you?"

Johannes Baus sits next to Floriane Bernaudat on the couch. The kids are colouring in princesses. He caresses her arm, the arm with the fox tattoo on it. They talk about the Hamas attacks once more. And to the question, what gives hope in the pitch black. During therapy, the myth of the phoenix rising from the ashes played a big role repeatedly. To gain strength even when facing complete destruction. Maybe that's what it's about, says Bernaudat.

Johannes Baus finds his words in songs, which he composes. Music has always given him much. The bass of his songs plays Matt McJunkins, 40, the ex-bass player of the American band Eagles of Death Metal, who were standing on stage on the 13th of November 2015. McJunkins hid with others, in part injured ones, in the room behind the stage and survived there. Baus asked him some time ago, if he wanted to teach him. Now they make music together.

In the song Chaos Rebuild Baus writes in English how it feels when the world falls apart. When all security is lost and you are thrown into chaos. What do you do then? Then, the song goes on, it's your duty to build a new world. In the chorus of the song, Baus gives us a picture of his new world:

Make it good

Make it just

Make it clean

Make it gentle

Make it stop

I'm helping some friends setting up a bar/little restaurant. they have some tvs and are looking for an audio system.
The idea is that they can put on some music videos/sports and it shows up on all TVs and audio goes to their (to be bought) soundsystem.

all this has to be as cheap as possible, as we're in a low income country.
The environment is quite loud. so it needs some power.

So I think I just gonna buy a cheapish hifi-system with 4 passive speakers, connect it with their "smartest" tv (they are all off-brand) and run audio cables to the different areas and speakers.

how to synchronize the tvs I still have no idea, but it is not really a priority

So my questions

• What is something like this even called? with the keywords I tired i only find nothing or very expensive pro solutions.
• how would you resolve the video part? 3x 15m HDMI cables seem quite expensive, but might be the only solution. how do i split the signal?
• might it be better to buy active speakers and use a small mixer?

If you have experience in this I would be very happy for your advice/opinion.

I have something I need to vent about, that I've tried to vent to friends about as well, but where nobody has been on the same page as me before.

In short, I despise gambling (casinos, sports betting, loot boxes in games, etc.), I think it destroys lives, often slowly and discreetly, and I think advertisements for it should be as taboo as tobacco advertisements and should even be illegal.

In long:

I've seen a trend in the last few years of sports betting becoming advertised to an unbearable degree. I can't watch any sport without a commercial for draft kings or fan duel. I can't even watch youtube without content creators being sponsored by draft kings. Advertisements for sports betting, specifically, are literally everywhere. I'm even in a basketball chat and there are several people there that DON'T EVEN WATCH BASKETBALL, they're specifically there to talk about the bets they make for a sport they don't watch.

I've seen at least a dozen friends sign up due to the ridiculous amount of advertising and with almost every single one, they claim they're getting "free money" since DK does give you free bets on a first deposit or something, but then every single one, after running out of the "free money" doesn't cash out and delete their account, they put five more dollars in, then put ten in, etc. until it starts to control their life and their finances. There shouldn't be a person alive that doesn't know how gambling can destroy you, but people still sign up for this bullshit. Nobody seems to understand that the only reason draft kings can give you free money on signup is because, on average, they make MORE than that per person.

On the subject of casinos, I went to Las Vegas for the first time last year. I already knew how elaborate and rich the casinos on the strip are, that part did not surprise me. What did surprise me is that if you go just a few blocks off the strip, it's almost entirely run down low income housing. You have possibly one of the richest areas in the United States in the form of the strip and seemingly none of that wealth is being shared to neighboring communities. It just goes back into the strip, getting sports teams to move to Vegas, getting F1 races, etc.

It just baffles me that so many people gamble and, even when warned about it, even after losing money, they insist that it's fun or that it's not so bad, but I truly think that gambling culture and companies running gambling schemes are some of the biggest evils out there. My parents divorced partly because of gambling. My dad permanently fucked his life up because of it. He has zero money, is now at an age and health where he can barely work, and my sister and I will likely be stuck footing the bill for his care later in life when just 15 years ago he was in a position to be set up pretty well for the rest of his life.

And yet, people still go to Vegas and lose hundreds or thousands on slots or cards, people still sign up on draft kings and lose hundreds or thousands on bets, and seemingly everyone I talk to is entirely blind on how bad of a situation this is and thinks me radical when I say that gambling advertisements should be illegal.

I value personal freedom, I don't think gambling should be banned, but I do think it can pose just as much of a danger to ruining someone's life as cigarettes can, but as a society, nobody seems to have any issue with ads for sports betting and casinos.

In addition to all of the above, we still have loot boxes in video games and collectible card games as a whole, but that would be another 2 pages of writing and I don't want to get in that deep.

If you stuck with me this whole time, thank you. I don't expect many people to agree, but I at least really needed to vent this out, even if it's into the void.

Do any of you have positive or negative experiences regarding gambling to add?