Babysitting Blog

A brave nanny saved her 2-year-old charge in last week’s attacks in Mumbai. The article is chilling to read (the boy’s parents were both killed), but here is a reposting of the event and how the nanny risked her life to save the child.

Mumbai nanny Sandra Samuel knew there was only one way she could save herself and the life of the boy she looked after.

At first, his gentle sobbing was quiet.

However with each louder cry, it was inevitable the crazed gunmen on the floor above would hear them.

Their house, which doubled as the headquarters of the Indian branch of the Jewish Chabad faith, had been overrun by murderous zealots wielding high-powered machine guns as part of last week’s terror siege in Mumbai.

Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, 29, who lived there with his wife, Rivka, 26 and their 23-month-old son Moshe, was on the telephone to the Israeli Consulate when the gunmen burst into the multi-story building.

“Something’s wrong,” the rabbi said before the line went dead.

The rabbi, his wife and possibly five other adults in the building at the time were herded on to the first floor and apparently bound with nylon ropes, security sources said.

Ms Samuel, a local nanny who regular babysat for the Holtzbergs, had climbed into a hiding spot on the ground floor when she saw the gunmen storm the building.

She heard yelling and shooting from the floor above, before Moshe began to cry and call for his mother.

Ms Samuel knew it would only be a matter of time before the terrorists heard him and came for them.

Steeling herself in the face of possible death, Ms Samuel burst through the boy’s bedroom door, grabbed Moshe, and ran down the stairs and out the door to safety.

“I just grabbed the baby and ran,” Ms Samuel, 44, told the website Ynet.com. “It was terrible. There were explosions everywhere, gunfire — they tried to shoot me.”

Security experts believe Ms Samuel’s heroic run caught the terrorists by surprise and she was out of the line of fire before they could react.

Sadly, the others in the building were not so lucky.

When Indian commandos stormed the building yesterday in a bid to free the hostages, they found only bodies — including those of Moshe’s mother and father.

The women appeared to have been slain a long time before their bodies were recovered and the males may have been tortured, security sources said.

“Gavi and Rivka Holtzberg made the ultimate sacrifice,” said Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky in New York, where the couple had previous lived before moving to Mumbai five years ago.

Mrs Holtzberg’s parents, Shimon and Yehudit Rosenberg, traveled from their home in northern Israel to Mumbai yesterday to take custody of Moshe, who had been taken to the highly-protected Israeli Consulate in Mumbai.

“He still doesn’t understand the nightmare he was saved from,” his grandfather said.

He praised the nanny’s actions as “heroic”.

“During a time of terrible sadness, her courage reaffirms our faith in the capacity of good to triumph over evil,” Mr Rosenberg said.

[…]

Wow.

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