Exclusive | Six Californians describe terrifying moments they lost everything to LA wildfires: Like being in a war zone
As the southern California wildfires continued to rage, victims of the sprawling tragedy tried to pick up the pieces of lives not just shattered, but reduced to ash.On Saturday, The Post’s Dana Kennedy, Katie Donlevy and Chris Harris spoke with six people who lost everything — except their will to endure.Joshua Kotler, 39, an occupational therapist and his wife Emily, 39, lost their family home in Altadena, where they lived with their two daughters, Liberty, 4, and Eve, 2.
We got out of our house safely, thank God.The whole house burnt down with everything in it … My wife and I snuck back up to the house, which is at the very top of the mountain and the firefighters happened to be on our street, casing house to house to tag them as “total destruction.” I asked one of the firefighters if it’s stupid for me to push things around to try to find anything that was salvaged.
And she said, “No, it’s not stupid — a lot of times things fall on top of other things, and don’t burn.” My wife and I recovered only one thing from our entire house, and it was my Holocaust-survivinggrandmother’s menorah.It was insanely powerful.
The night before, I was on the phone with my cousin crying that I had time to grab it and I didn’t.And the fact that I went there and it was the only thing recovered from the scene was just an insane feeling.
The firefighters had to hold me up.I almost collapsed.
We knew the Pacific Palisades fire was burning.My mom called me from New York and said, “You guys okay?” I said, “Yeah, yeah, it’s so far from us, everything’s good.” And then about 6:30 p.m.
we looked at the wind forecast, it was pushing east.We were west.
We were thinking we were going to be okay.But I looked at my wife and I said, “Let’s pack the overnight bag.
Get out of here.” We didn’t think the house would burn down.We packed two pairs of clothes for my kids, two pairs of clothes for us and as a weird precaution, I took three pieces of ar...