“I didn’t wait for the shooting to start,” says Riss. He dropped to the ground and was nonetheless shot in the shoulder—but still managed to draw four new pieces for the January 14 edition printed to show to the world and to the attackers that the paper was still, defiantly, alive.

Eric Portheault gravely describes retreating behind his desk when shots rang out during the morning editorial meeting. He witnessed one attacker coldly execute a colleague in front of his eyes, then waited a few harrowing minutes in silence after the gunmen fled. When the killing had subsided, the office dog padded over to Portheault’s side and obscured his face, he muses, as if to shield him from the horrors outside.

Cartoonist Corinne “Coco” Rey shares the most tormented testimonial of them all. Visibly upset, she recounts how the two gunmen first approached her, recognizing her and calling her by name before forcing her to punch in the security code that would lead them to her unsuspecting colleagues.

“They said, ‘No jokes, no jokes,’” she says, tearfully recalling how they identified themselves as al Qaeda. They were looking for Stéphane Charbonnier aka Charb, Charlie Hebdo’s editor-in-chief. “That’s when I thought I was going to die. I put my hands behind my head. I was panicking. That’s when it dawned on me, after coming upstairs, that it could all end right there.”