Cheryl Shapiro could hardly believe her eyes when she walked into a Walgreens store in Northridge on Saturday looking for Hanukkah gift wrapping paper with her grandson and saw one that appeared to have dark blue swastikas embedded in its design.

“We were wandering around the store and saw the wrapping paper and I looked at it and said, ‘These are swastikas,’ and I just blew it. I didn’t know what to do,” said Shapiro, 63, of Porter Ranch. “I called my rabbi. It was 4 in the afternoon but it was still Shabbat so he wouldn’t pick up the phone.”

Shapiro then spoke to the store manager. He was “appalled,” she said, by the design overlaid on shiny silver wrapping paper. He assured her it would be taken off the shelves across the country.

• VIDEO: Woman finds ‘swastikas’ on wrapping paper

A label on the Hallmark product indicated it was made in the U.S. and exclusively distributed to Walgreens, Shapiro said. The greeting card company, in a written statement, said it was recently brought to their attention that a holiday gift-wrap pattern “has an unintentional offensive background image.”

“As soon as we were made aware of the situation, we began taking steps to remove the gift wrap from all store shelves and we will ensure the pattern is not used on any product formats going forward,” said the emailed statement from Linda Odell, a Hallmark spokeswoman.

“We sincerely apologize for this oversight and for (the) unintended offense.”

A Walgreens spokesperson confirmed that the wrapping paper was in the process of being taken off shelves nationwide. Shapiro said she received a call from Walgreens on Monday and said she was surprised to hear how quickly they responded to her request.

Television stations picked up the story over the weekend. Shapiro’s rabbi informed her husband that it was even picked up by the Times of Israel, she said.

“I had no idea it was going to skyrocket like this,” Shapiro said. “All I wanted to do was to get it out in the U.S. and get it off the shelves so no one would have to have that wrapping paper in their home for Hanukkah.”

Shapiro, however, has a hard time believing the design was inadvertent. The company could have chosen any other design for its Hanukkah wrapping paper, she said.

“If you have grown up knowing all your life what that symbol meant,” she said, adding, “I had (distant) family in the Holocaust, I know what that symbol was. There was no mistake. My belief is that it was intentional.”

The swastika image, which bears different meanings in various cultures, was adopted by the Nazi party in 1920 as a symbol of Aryan identity. It’s also a sacred symbol in some religions, including Hinduism and Buddhism, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.