A Sheild Against Hatred

LONDON — For a moment, after a suicide bomb ripped off both her legs, Gill Hicks thought she had died. It took an hour for emergency medical workers to make it to the deepest tunnel of the London subway, and she drifted in and out of consciousness. But she remembers vividly finding a label on her wrist in the hospital: “One unknown, estimated female.”

This label transformed her life perhaps as much as the July 7 attacks that struck at the heart of London’s public transport system 10 years ago.

“What that label told me was that people were prepared to risk their lives and save as many ‘unknowns’ as they could — regardless of faith, color, gender or nationality — all that mattered was that I was a precious human life,” Ms. Hicks, now 47, said in a recent interview near the King’s Cross subway stop, the site of the attack. “For me, that created a powerful shield against hatred.”

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