Greg Krentzman was on vacation with his wife and daughter in Nice, France, when a man drove a truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day on July 14.
He and his daughter were injured, but he told KTLA that he wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for a stranger who took him to a hospital as he was bleeding from a badly broken leg.
His 9-year-old daughter was also injured when debris hit by the truck struck her leg. The attack claimed more than 80 lives and injured hundreds others.
“My wife screams out to me… ‘Greg look out! There’s a truck coming.’ I look straight in front of me, there’s that big white truck barreling right towards me,” Krentzman recalled.
Krentzman, of Culver City, said the driver was swerving back and forth to hit as many pedestrians as possible.
“I decided to jump to my left … and thank God I did — because if I went to the right I would have been dead,” he said.
The truck’s bumper ended up clipping Krentzman’s right leg, breaking bones and cutting him, which led to significant blood loss.
He had to wait some time for help to arrive, given the severity of other people’s injuries, when a stranger in a vehicle pulled up to him, picked him up drove him to a hospital.
“He proceeded to whisk me down these curvy French streets,” Krentzman recalled from his hospital bed. “Just zigzagging in and out of the streets.”
A five-hour surgery and a blood transfusion followed. He is recovering and waiting to return home, but he continues to think about the man who helped save his life.
“I’d like to give him a reward, give him some cash, just, in my broken French ‘merci beaucoup,'” Krentzman said.
Correction: An earlier version of this article spelled Krentzman’s last name incorrectly. The story has been updated.