People were dead and dying around them. and a mother who knew caught up in the chaos, had to hold still her young children and calm, if they wanted a chance to survive. So, as shots the air rent, began to sing it. She reassured their children as they "played dead" for hours at the hide from the armed militants, the besieged had the Kenyan Mall were.
The family began terrorist charged in Nairobi's Westgate Mall last September fire on unsuspecting buyers open a group of armed men. The mother panicked, (Wambua Lüdeling identified by NBC as believe), which had bought with her son and her daughter, grabbed the children and ran into a corner, where they face on the ground and tried not to move. "We were only there - it would shoot come on, then it would stop," told NBC News last year the terrifying experience. "There were times, I could hear the cartridge sleeve, falling on the ground in the vicinity of us. We smelled the gunpowder and we'd really be scared."
New York Times photojournalist Tyler Hicks, who won a Pulitzer Prize this year for his coverage of the terrorist attack on Nairobi's Westgate Mall, this now iconic photo of the family, captured as they before the armed hidden:
Revealed in an interview with NPR's "fresh air" this week Hicks more harrowing details of the family struggle to survive. He said Wambua Lüdeling and her children hid for five hours, before they managed to escape the Mall. "The music that plays in the shopping mall-somehow this quiet music-played in the whole thing, so in the midst of the shots and all the action happened, you this kind of Mall music, who had played during the entire attack", said Hicks. "[The mother] actually sang along with these songs, their children, calm and quiet to op - in particular the young, she rarely said, can sit still for five minutes and she had to hold him for five hours calm and quiet."
Hicks, who says that he and the mother recently via Skype talked, said, the photo of her and "really means their children what happened" at the mall that day. "[The family was] just petrified," he added, the "breath of fresh air". "Outside of the frame all around them around and on the floor of this mall were, a man next to an ATM... a woman who somehow managed to avoid the still in the hand of a shopping bag that had been killed, and they that."
During the attack West Gate Mall more than 60 people in the last year were killed. Al Shabaab, a militant Islamist group based in Somalia has assumed responsibility for the killings.
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