What It Feels Like To Be In Munich Right Now

I spent an hour last night hiding in the basement of a restaurant, not knowing if my husband was alive or in the middle of it all. This morning I woke up after a night punctuated by helicopters and sirens, and I’m scared to go outside. If you haven’t read the news, here’s a quick recap, from the Guardian’s excellent reporting of the situation:

• Nine people were shot and killed, and a further 21 injured, in an attack at a shopping center in Munich on Friday evening
• The gunman shot himself, bringing the death toll to ten.

I arrived in Munich yesterday after a flight from SFO took me through Copenhagen. I felt, in Copenhagen, like I had to be moderately awake — but once I got to Munich, it was like coming home. I’ve come to this part of Germany every year since I was two, or three. Every year, almost without fail, missing only the recent years in which I was too sick to travel. And so for me, when I see the landscape of Bavaria; when I navigate the train-ticket machine, there is a part of me that feels — “finally, I’m home.”

And so I made it through the airport, and to the main train station, and then walked down the open pedestrian street and checked into my hotel, and then to stave off the jetlag just a little longer, my stepdad and I found a table in the hotel restaurant right by the window and ordered some food.

We were almost finished eating by the time the screaming started. We’d been keeping an eye on the weather, and my first thought, when thirty people ran from outside into the restaurant, was that there was a storm. Flooding.

“KELLER! IM KELLER!” everyone was yelling. “Basement! Get to the basement!” Someone said “Oder zum Zimmer!” — “or to the hotel room!” but then the “KELLER” directive was louder. We got up, looked outside — I was looking for flooding, but couldn’t see anything besides the same drizzling rain we’d noticed twenty minutes earlier. “KELLER! KELLER!” and so we ran — my stepdad reminding me to pick up my jacket, though he ended up leaving his on the chair — or actually we walked, silently and as calmly as we could. I kept thinking, “this is ok, this is happening, this is ok, this is happening, this is ok, this is happening.” I didn’t feel scared. I just felt sort of outside myself. Watching myself neutrally. I had the explicit thought: “Oh, this is how it is to be in an attack.”

“SCHIESSEREI!” I heard. “Shooting.” And here’s where German doesn’t hold up to translation. Schiesserei is a much more active word than “shooting,” it’s like … “shooting party.” I guess “shooting spree,” but that word has lost its meaning the more I’ve heard it in English. “Shooting spree” has been used so many times that it’s lost the actual meaning of “spree,” but hearing the word in German — there was no meaning lost. “Schiesserei” makes me think of tens of gunmen, everyone shooting, just an all-out craziness. And that’s what I thought was happening. Right outside our hotel.

Hotel staff brought us down into the hotel basement. People who had phones got on their phones, but we didn’t know anything. I heard reports of a shooter at the main train station, where I’d walked through an hour earlier, dazed from jetlag and with my headphones in, listening to Taylor Swift’s Out of the Woods. I could have been there. I could have been shot, just listening to Taylor. I feel so safe in Germany. I always have. I heard reports of a shooter roaming the central square. I heard that there were shooters right outside our hotel. I heard that we shouldn’t leave the basement because we didn’t know what was out there — “it could be a slaughter,” one of the hotel staff said. Everyone was tense. I made more prolonged eye contact with strangers than I’ve made with most of my friends. And it wasn’t eye contact that led to a smile. We were just… staring at each other. Trying to see if the other knew something. Trying to see how to behave?

A group of teenagers was dressed up for prom, or some kind of summer party. One of them was crying, her mascara running down her face, her silky dress looking so out of place in the basement. Her date held her, comforted her while she cried. They made a little nest on the floor, his coat, her coat, her purse, her shoes, and he held her. If I hadn’t been so numb I would have felt their love.

My husband was on a different flight than I was, arriving Munich right around when the shooting started. Or maybe he was arriving earlier. All I knew was that I’d heard there was shooting in the main train station and I had told him, the morning earlier, “just get to the main train station and then walk to the hotel.” I went over this in my head, my telling him to get to the main train station and then hearing that there was a shooting at the main train station. I went over and over arrival times with my stepdad, trying to figure out the math, trying to soothe myself. “He can’t have gotten to the city yet,” I said, and my stepdad agreed, “he hasn’t even got his luggage,” and I thought of my husband, who doesn’t speak any German and doesn’t know his way around the city.

I’d had a premonition when I left for the airport that something was going to happen, that we shouldn’t be flying separately, but I ignored it. And so, sitting in the basement, drinking water out of a cup even though for the first time in my life I wasn’t thirsty, I thought about that — my thought, my premonition.

I don’t think I actually had a premonition. I think this is just how scared I am. All the time. Because of everything else.

For context, on my way to the San Francisco airport, I got a message from my doctor telling me that a followup ultrasound found another solid mass on my right ovary. This will be my third solid mass. And so that’s what I was worried about, thinking about, let’s be real — obsessing over. That’s what I was talking to my stepdad about when “SCHIESSEREI” was yelled and we ran into the basement.

I tried to borrow peoples’ phones to contact my husband, whose phone I was sure was off. He doesn’t like roaming charges. So I emailed him. He doesn’t have a laptop. My husband and I have been through so much with my health and also, we don’t have a contingency plan for possible shootings. We didn’t have a plan.

Eventually we heard that it was safe to go upstairs, but not to leave the hotel. We still didn’t know what was going on, and as far as we knew, there were coordinated attacks all over the city. My stepdad and I came upstairs, got onto our laptops, and I posted on Facebook — and got onto Twitter. I finally understood the value of Twitter as I was tracking #munich and #airport and getting updates that were conflicting with the newspapers, and also reading reports of shootings at the airport, and then remembering that sometimes people just post rumors. I tweeted at someone who’d been in the airport, asked if it was locked down, he said the city center was inaccessible but people at the airport were fine.

I asked my stepdad how long I should just wait before going to the airport to find my husband. At what point does a person go to sleep when she doesn’t know what’s happening? I could feel my jetlag mixing with my exhaustion mixing with a German-Shanghai soup dumpling. I refreshed Twitter every few minutes. I texted with my friends. I tried to explain what this felt like, how we hadn’t known what was going on. I tried to remember all the things I know about my husband. That he’s smart. That he’s aware. That he almost became an Army Ranger. If anyone would be fine during a possible mass attack, it would be him.

Right?

Today, this morning, I see that there was one shooter, who killed nine people and then himself. And so you might think that I would feel relieved. Or that I didn’t need to worry so much. And I know now that I didn’t need to be that scared, but I didn’t know that then. I was just as scared as the situation, as far as I could understand it, called for. And so I spent 5–6 hours in a state of heightened consciousness and fear and not-knowing and not being able to find my husband.

How ironic, I thought too. We’d been through so much medical shit together. We’d been prepared to lose each other through procedures or diagnoses. Last night reminded me that we could lose each other by going on vacation.

I’m scared to leave my hotel room today. I know that doesn’t make any sense. The city is better guarded now than it has been at any other point. They brought in the German special forces. And yet, even though my mind understands, the shooter is gone and it was one attacker, and it may or may not be terrorism-related although it is a *terror attack* and I am still here and nothing happened to my husband (except that Air France lost his luggage, which he is VERY upset about), I can’t so easily unwind from that hour in the basement, when things I’ve only seen on TV were suddenly so very very real for me.

I’m writing this because there’s so much out there that’s reported, and that’s so important, and yet I think that it has always been so easy for me to consider for one second the people who were in something like this, and then to just be relieved that they’re OK. I can acknowledge that I should be feeling the relief that I’m OK — I can feel others’ relief, but I don’t feel my own yet. It doesn’t feel like a relief to have spent the night listening to siren after siren after helicopter.

I hope that this isn’t the new world. I hope we won’t just get used to it. In the basement, we sat around the table with a few women. One of them was clearly shaken. One of them was totally casual. The last few years I’ve always felt like the people who take these things totally casually have some greater strength than I do. But I am grateful that I’m totally shaken. I’m grateful that I can still be shocked by this — by any — level of violence. I’m grateful that I’m not cynical about this, and I’m grateful to be surrounded by people who understand that I’m going to process this however I’m going to process it. I’m grateful every day for every breath that I take. Today, I might be even more.