“Time heals”, they say. But for Rabbi Shimon Rosenberg — the grandfather of Moshe Holtzberg who survived the 26/11 carnage at the age of two, having lost his parents to the terror attack on the Nariman House — time could not heal their trauma despite a decade has passed since the tragedy struck the family.
In 2008, on this day, Moshe became an orphan. His father Rabbi Gavriel and mother Rivka, who was five months pregnant at the time, were killed by Pakistani terrorists along with four other hostages at the Nariman House, Mumbai’s Chabad Lubavitch Jewish centre.
Moshe was in the same building that time. His Indian nanny Sandra Samuel found him sitting next to his parents’ bullet-riddled bodies, crying and alive. She risked her life and fled the building with the baby.
The boy, who is now 12 years old, lives in Israel with his maternal grandparents. Sandra, 54, has been felicitated by the Israeli Government as an honourary citizen. She lives in Jerusalem but visits Moshe every weekend.
“Time heals, they say, but for us the pain has only intensified over the last ten years as we see the boy growing,” Rosenberg told PTI on the 10th anniversary of the nightmarish attacks that shook the world.