I concur completely with Oakape's post #1314 and his grim conclusion.
At the risk of clapping my hands and setting Mr Oozlum off on yet another circuit, forgetting all the 'wizardry' of the machine, amber crosses, ECAM messages, whatever, I suspect yes, they knew they were in Alternate Law but did not know what it meant and I'm sure had the 'AB will look after you if you just pull back' message running through their heads.
Diverting to a larger issue, I return to my proposal some years ago now that autotrim should have some sensible limit, beyond which Hal can say "David- this is a really unusual tail trim setting you have here - please press TRIM OVERRIDE if you wish to continue trimming nose-up".
I am hopeful that such a call would have alerted both this crew, the PGF AB crew and the AMS Turkish crew to the problem. In all three accidents Autotrim contributed greatly to the event. Even if the crews miss the 'call' in the rush of sensory input, the tail would stop trimming into the ridiculous.