Ahead of the 35th anniversary of the Montreal Massacre on Friday, Annie Ross, a mechanical engineering professor at Polytechnique Montréal, said she often thinks of those who lived through the tragedy but still suffer silently.
On Dec. 6, 1989, a man motivated by a hatred of feminists shot and killed 14 women and injured 13 other people at the Montreal engineering school affiliated with Université de Montréal.
Ross was in her fourth year in mechanical engineering at Polytechnique, and narrowly avoided the gunman. Her friends weren’t as lucky.
“That day, I was studying at Polytechnique, preparing for my exams and I was supposed to go in class with them — with that group. They were presenting their final project and it was all exciting,” Ross said in a recent interview.
But instead of walking into class, she decided to go home and study. “That was minutes before the tragedy happened (and) by the time I got home, it was over.”
Many of her friends were murdered that day, people who were her lifeline to the city, as she had just moved to Montreal from New Brunswick. “It’s stupid, but I did feel that I let them down because I wasn’t there for them even though it’s not rational at all.”
In the aftermath, during events to honour the dead and the survivors, she felt like an intruder — that the memories of the day didn’t belong to her. “That was pretty difficult to go through.”She didn’t witness the violence but was deeply affected by it. And 35 years later, Ross, who also serves as the deputy vice-president of research at the institution, avoids certain parts of the school.
She imagines that many people are dealing with something similar — struggling in silence. “They’re suffering, they’re still hurting and that will be for the rest of their lives, so it’s a big, big hole.”
The names of the 14 women who were killed that day are etched in the hearts and minds of Montrealers; many can recite their names from memory: Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Maryse Laganière, Maryse Leclair, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Michèle Richard, Annie St-Arneault, Annie Turcotte and Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz.
One of Ross’s classmates was Nathalie Provost.