Motti Glustein spoke to Israel National News about the terrible bus tragedy in Jerusalem, in which his sister-in-law Shoshana (Shoshi) and her daughters Sarah and Chani were killed.
Glustein, who is also a medic, was there on the spot, and looking back on the terrible sights of the accident, he became very emotional.
“Everybody talks about the tragedy and about everything but we forget to think about the miracles that occurred,” he said. “My wife, my kids, myself - we received our lives as a gift.”
He was searching for his wife, he couldn’t find her and didn’t know what had happened.
“We were looking for her and again like I said, it’s really difficult for us to talk about it, but the one thing I can say is that we must not forget to think about the miracles that happened. Many more people survived than were killed,” he stressed.
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When asked if he initially was afraid it was a terror attack, he replied: “Yes, the thought did pass through my mind, but then I zoomed out for a second just to realize what’s going on right there and then, so I could start to run through the process we trained for and do whatever we needed to do to save as many people as we could.”
He used his medic's training to take charge of the horrific situation occurring around him and to start managing the rescue.
“The easiest thing is to get into a panic, you know that’s natural, that’s what happens, people freeze. I was trained for years, but nobody can really be prepared for this kind of thing, and that was the hardest thing to do, to try to be focused and to concentrate on helping to save as many as people as possible,” Glustein explained.
He and his family are still in shock over the death of his sister-in-law.
“Shoshi was a person who was always thinking of others,” he said. “I think that she would have wanted us to do our best to carry on with our lives. If she had been here she would have told us, ‘Don’t worry about me, worry about yourselves and continue living.’ It’s very difficult, it’s very hard, we’re all broken. We all need to be there for each other. We’re a big family and we are all together in this -- and she was like the linchpin of the family, everybody was connected to her. She was always involved, and we’re going to need to try our best to keep going without her… She was a really, really special person.”
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