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"We Started Praying." How a Pittsburgh Woman Survived Berlin Attack

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When Susan Schwartz of Gibsonia, Pennsylvania, and her sister found themselves in the middle of a terrorist attack at an outdoor Christmas market in Berlin, they began to pray.

According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Schwartz had been visiting her sister Marcia for Christmas. 

The two women were holiday shopping at the busy Christmas market on Monday when a truck plowed into the crowd, killing 12 people and injuring 48.

Schwartz's sister first noticed something was wrong when the lights strung above the market's wooden shops began to sway.  

"My sister said, 'Something's wrong, we need to get out of here,'" Schwartz said in a phone interview with the Gazette Wednesday night. "She grabbed me by the arm, and we started walking through a narrow passage. Then more people started coming our way in more of a hurry, knocking tables over and breaking glasses. We saw a man fall down and people stacking up on top of him. We got to the other side of the church and we started praying."

Schwartz, a nurse, said talking about the event is painful and causes her to tremble, but she is convinced that something supernatural happened to spare their lives.

"The place where the truck came to rest was directly across from where we were standing," she said. "I keep thinking that if I had decided to try on a coat I was looking at or if I'd stopped to eat the sandwich I bought, we'd have been right there. If we had done just one thing differently, we would have been there. There's no explanation why. It was awful."

She thanks God for surviving the attack.

"All you can think is that 'by the grace of God.' You don't understand why we were spared and other people weren't."

Schwartz and her sister had gone to the popular market Saturday night with other friends from Pittsburgh and decided to return Monday evening.  She said more people could have been killed if the attack had happened during the weekend.

"If it had happened on Saturday, it would have been way worse. It was so crowded, you could barely move. If it had happened Saturday, easily, three times as many people would have died," she said.

Meanwhile, German police are searching for a Tunisian man in connection with the attack, offering a $100,000 reward to help find him.

 

 

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