The two women were in the wrong place at the wrong time but "by the grace of God," they were spared from death.
Susan Schwartz of Gibsonia, Pennsylvania and her sister Marcia were in the middle of a large crowd of shoppers at an outdoor Christmas market in Berlin, Germany on Monday night when a lorry driven by a terrorist suspect ploughed into the crowd, killing 12 people and injuring 48, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.
Marcia was the first to notice that 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 told the Gazette in a phone interview on 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 believes she felt something supernatural—God's direct intervention—happened that spared 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."
Schwartz, who was visiting her sister in Berlin, said she owes her life to no one else but God.
"All you can think is that 'by the grace of God.' You don't understand why we were spared and other people weren't," she said.
Schwartz said she and her sister had shopped at the popular Christmas market Saturday night with other friends from Pittsburgh and decided to return Monday evening. She could not help but think that if the attack was made during the weekend, when there were more shoppers, more people could have been killed.
"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.
