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Fire Survivor Reunited with Hero Neighbor: 'I Opened the Door and You Grabbed Me'

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In an emotional embrace, a 66-year-old grandmother tearfully thanked the man who saved her from the deadly Grenfell Tower fire.

"I opened the door and you grabbed me," Clarita Ghavimi tells Luica Branislav in a heartwarming video captured by the BBC.

I couldn't leave, I'm still crying," said Ghavimi

In fact, both Ghavimi and Branislav shed tears as they hugged for the first time since the deadly fire last Wednesday.

Branislav was fleeing the 11th floor after a fire ripped through the building.

He stopped to knock on Ghavimi's door, risking his own life.

Ghavimi, who has lived at the tower for the past 34 years, could not make her way through the thick smoke filling the hallway of the tower.

"Three times I opened the door and the smoke pushed me inside, so I closed it again," Ghavimi told the Evening Standard.

She said, "I went to the kitchen window, and then back to the door again, and smoke was still coming in.  I could see the fire was coming up towards me."

Branislav put his neighbor over his shoulder and carried her out of her 11th floor apartment as flames tore through the building.

"You couldn't breathe properly. You'd been in shock completely," Branislav tells Ghavimi in the video. 

The devastating fire last Wednesday claimed the lives of 79 people. 

Officials have warned that the death toll could rise because a number of people are still missing.


 

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