Are you on the list?

The media ask, on each anniversary of the 11M Islamist attacks that killed 192 people and wounded over one thousand in Madrid, whether we citizens remember what we were doing or where we were on that tragic day.

For me it is an obvious question. I had been on duty as an internist doctor at the Hospital Clínico in Madrid since the day before, 10 March, and I was to remain at the hospital until 9am on the 11th.

I saw a red public bus arriving full of injured people. Then the continuous trickle of ambulances, the screams, the families, the emergency room that emptied of ‘normal patients’ to fill up with victims of the attack. White coats everywhere (no colleague was spared from duty, many gave up their days off to volunteer to help).

As soon as the madness descended into organised chaos, I was put in charge as the hospital’s spokesperson (it was part of my job as a doctor at the time) of compiling the list of those admitted, their diagnoses and prognoses.

Every hour, the list it was updated and passed on both to the hospital management and to the crisis coordination centre set up by the government.

Meanwhile, human stories, parents or friends arriving to ask for their relatives in a state of shock and touring hospitals. Mobile phones stopped working, for security reasons, during the first hours in Madrid. Other phones were damaged in the bomb explosions.

I was still in the hospital until 10 pm, especially because something I will never forget started to happen. Calls, almost two dozen calls from friends (and friends of friends), acquaintances (and acquaintances of acquaintances), brethren in the Christian faith....

All of them had only one question: “Is he or she on the list?” And they would tell me a name. I had direct access to the list of the injured at the hospital. Those who could not find their loved ones, and who were presumably or probably on the bombed trains, were desperate to know if they were on the list of those who had been admitted, if they had survived the bombing.

Not being on the list meant, at that point in the afternoon or evening, that they were almost certainly among the victims.

You cannot imagine the enormous joy I experienced when I was able to say on one of the occasions that ‘yes’, that name was on one of the hospital lists. Nor can you imagine how much silence can cut through until a ‘No, it’s not there, I’m really sorry, I’m sorry’ had to be said.

The good news is that you can pray (and you will be heard) for your name to be on that list. It is written in the blood of Jesus, at the foot of the empty cross, because He overcame with His resurrection the pain, the senseless harm, and the inhuman hatred that nestles to a greater or lesser extent in every human heart.

Will you be on the list? I would love to hear your name, and I say this because I know that I, by His grace, mercy, love and forgiveness, will be there. Yes, my name is in the Book of Life and hopefully yours too. The rest will then be transitory and secondary.

Pedro Tarquis, medical doctor, and former spokesman of the Hospital Clínico de Madrid. This article was first published in Spanish in 2016, twelve years after Al Qaeda's attack.