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Published on Wednesday, February 4, 2004
in the WPBFChannel.com
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- A couple who were rescued from a canal after a crash on Interstate 95 said Tuesday that they are grateful to the strangers who saved their lives.
Joe Steg, 80, watched the rescue video from the I-95 crash that somehow didn't kill him.
"Oh my God. The car is flipped over," Steg said. "I can't believe it. We're alive."
Total strangers who witnessed the crash and a Florida highway patrol trooper climbed over the car and trudged through muddy water to pull Steg, and his wife, Sylvia (pictured, right), 77, to safety.
"I remember getting hit somewhere, and my car started to go toward the canal," Steg said. "That's all I remember. Nothing else."
Steg said the FHP trooper, Mary Godino, and several witnesses were brave.
"I really wasn't thinking except when I got there, I knew I was going in," Godino said.
"I did what I had to do without thinking, I guess," rescuer Crady Baker said.
"The help I received from the fire department and police and from strangers is most unbelievable," Steg said.
This survival story for the Stegs doesn't compare to the one that they endured decades ago.
The Stegs are Jewish. Joe escaped several labor camps during World War II. Sylvia survived four years in concentration camps during the Holocaust.
They both lost most of their families.
Liberation is a feeling they've experienced twice now, with hope and strangers to help set them free.
"Amazing what a human being can go through," Steg said.
FHP officials said the 18-year-old driver who hit the Stegs on I-95 was not severely injured in the crash. Investigators said he has not been charged in the crash, but an investigation is under way.