Brussels Commemorates Attack Anniversary With Both Silence and Noise<br />"That was a lesson for European democracy." In a powerful<br />and defiant gesture, the Brussels transit authority called for commuters at the Maelbeek station to applaud and make noise at 9:11 a.m., the time when the bomb ripped through the station a year earlier.<br />By DAN BILEFSKYMARCH 22, 2017<br />Belgians of all political stripes and backgrounds united in their small, divided country on Wednesday to commiserate and remember the coordinated suicide bombings<br />that struck Brussels one year ago, killing 32 people and injuring more than 320.<br />Le Soir, a leading daily, referred to "that day in March where we lost our innocence." In Belgium, a country divided into Dutch-speaking Flanders in the north<br />and French-speaking Wallonia in the south, the commemoration was a rare moment of the two communities coming together.<br />Titled "Wounded but Still Standing in the Face of the Unthinkable," the 66-foot-long sculpture consists of two stainless steel slabs, crushed<br />and pocked with holes, bending upward toward the sky in a gesture of hope.<br />Among them were a Belgian filmmaker, a Swedish illustrator, a Congolese business school graduate<br />and father of two young girls, a Chinese entrepreneur, a Belgian Muslim teacher and mother of three, and a couple from the United States who had come to Europe in search of adventure.<br />President Trump once publicly called Brussels "a hellhole,"<br />but the city has shown resilience over the last year, even as the scars from the attacks exposed endemic weaknesses in Belgian law enforcement and a lack of social cohesion.
