Nariman House attack: ‘My first thought was for baby’

Sandra Samuel, the daring Indian nanny who risked her life to save 2-year-old Moshe Holtzberg during last week's terror strikes in the Jewish Centre in Mumbai, says she felt like a ‘coward’ hiding during the incident and regrets she could not save his parents as well.

Sandra Samuel, the daring Indian nanny who risked her life to save 2-year-old Moshe Holtzberg during last week’s terror strikes in the Jewish Centre in Mumbai, says she felt like a ‘coward’ hiding during the incident and regrets she could not save his parents as well.

“My first thought was always for the baby. Even today, I am thinking I should have sent the baby and done something for the Rabbi and his wife,” Samuel told CNN.

Samuel said she was in the kitchen when she first heard gunshots and came face-to-face with the terrorists. “I was in the kitchen, I came running and saw that one man was shooting at me, he shot at me.”

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“That’s when I was in the storeroom hiding like a coward,” she said while narrating the events of the day when terrorists targeted and seized the prominent Jewish building, the Nariman House, in Colaba.

Samuel grabbed Moshe in her arms as terrorists stormed the Chabad House in Mumbai and fled while the attackers pumped bullets into her employers Rabbi Gavriel Hotzberg and his wife Rivika at the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Centre.

Recounting her feeling of helplessness, she said, “I have nightmares about this. Me sitting between the fridge and another worker near the fridge. We want to do something but we can’t do anything and we go to the window and as we came out we find it is being bombed and glass being shattered everywhere.”

A visibly emotional Samuel said she was not scared for Moshe.