‘This isn’t real’: teacher’s narrow escape from Austria school shooter

AFP | Graz

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A teacher told how he found himself in a corridor with the shooter who killed 10 people in an Austrian school as he fled his empty classroom.

Religion teacher Paul Nitsche was working on his own with the door open on the upper floor of the Dreierschuetzengasse secondary school in Graz when the shooting started.

“I heard this bang. And I blocked it out,” the 51-year-old told reporters, whose students were elsewhere sitting their final-year exams.

It was only when he heard the sound of bullet casings hitting the floor of a corridor outside, that “something snapped inside me” and the realisation dawned, he said.

“I jumped up and thought, that as a teacher alone in a classroom with a possible attacker, this is a very bad situation.

“And I decided to run.

“I ran out quickly through the corridor, which is only a few metres long, and then down the stairs.”

It was then that the evangelical pastor saw the shooter in the corridor of the floor below.

‘You try to block everything out’

“He was trying to shoot the door (of a classroom) open with his rifle.

“He was busy.... and I didn’t look around much either... I didn’t hang around,” Nitsche said.

“And as I ran down the stairs, I thought to myself, ‘This isn’t real, this is a film.’” But when he got to the lower floor “I saw a student lying on the floor and a teacher was there, and I knew, ‘Ah, this is serious.’

“As a human being, you really try (to understand what is happening), but (at the same time) you really try to block everything out,” the pastor added.

“I think the emergency services were there a minute or two later, thank God.”

What struck Nitsche was the eerie silence that had fallen over the school.

“There was total silence. No screaming, nothing. That’s not what school is like.

Nitsche said it was hard to grasp the enormity of what had happened. What he experienced was just one part of “a mosaic with lots of pieces”. He went back to help comfort students outside the school Wednesday.