"I was very lucky. If the terrorist had found me, that's it, I wouldn't be here," Sara Vaturi, 54, recalled after surviving a terrorist shooting attack Sunday in which two of her co-workers were brutally murdered. "Fortunately, he disappeared after a second or two."
Vaturi, a factory management worker in the Barkan Industrial Park in Samaria, recounted cowering under a desk in her office after being shot in the stomach by the terrorist.
The terrorist later came back into Vaturi's office but didn't see her, she recalled.
After the attack, Vaturi was treated for moderate wounds. Miraculously, the bullet missed all her vital organs. Before she was discharged from the hospital Monday, she recounted the moments of terror at the factory, where she had been working for only five months.
"I came to work in the morning as usual," she said. "I said good morning to everyone and suddenly one of the girls at the office, Lena, came into the room shaking. I thought someone must be ill."
"As soon as I walked into the lobby, the terrorist was in front of me, and he shot me. I ran back into my office and hid under the desk. I put my hand over the wound and I saw that I was bleeding. The only thing going through my head was, 'Breathe, it's going to be alright, breathe.' Then I heard four or five more loud gunshots."
"I curled up under the desk and the terrorist came back into my office. I saw his legs – his jeans and his sneakers. Within a second or two he was gone, and there was silence."
"A few minutes later two warehouse workers – Bassel and Yogev – arrived. Bassel came first, and he didn't leave my side. He took care of me with unbelievable dedication. He was the one to tell us about the tragedy, he was yelling that Ziv and Kim were no longer alive," Vaturi remembered, tears flooding her eyes.
"He didn't stop taking care of me until the paramedic arrived, together with an ambulance that was manned by angels, not mortals. They treated my trauma in a way that I can't even describe. After the CT scan, they told me that the trauma was not internal. The bullet went in and out only through fat and there was no harm to any internal organs. I'm going home today," she explained.
Vaturi insisted that the attack, perpetrated by a Palestinian former factory employee, will not keep her from continuing to work there, despite the many Palestinians on the employee list. "I will go back to work as usual. I don't think they're all bad and all want to harm us. This is the reality in our country. I think that this will agitate the co-existence for two or three weeks and then it will go back to what it was, as normal, with all of us working together, and everything will be fine. That's my hope and I wish that it will be that way."
She is not afraid, she said. "I worked with Arabs in my previous job as well, for many years, and I'm not scared. Sadly, this was not my first incident, and it won't be my last, and I'm crying over the friends we've lost. I don't feel like a hero or anything."
