Today marks one year since the tragic Tempe train crash in which 57 people, mostly youths, lost their lives when the Intercity train and the commercial train collided head-on at 23:22 PM on February 28, 2023.
Speaking to MEGA, Dina Magdalianidis described what she experienced and thought at the time of the fatal collision. “The collision happened, my eyebrow was torn, that's the first thing I remember, and my leg was broken. One side of my leg came up. The people around me had fallen on me" said the young lady initially.
“The train was starting to derail and things were falling on me. The first thing I thought about the accident is how my mom will react to it, how my sister and my grandmother will live with it. It scared me and I said "I shouldn't die". That's where the survival instincts come to the fore. At one point I wasn't in pain, I was numb and I was saying that I had to get out even though I had dissolved, my body had dissolved. It's instincts I believe, it's not that one is better than the other. Some of us were given a chance to be in better shape or not get chemical burns or be killed instantly like the kids in the first car," he continued, adding that "what I thought was 'this opportunity Dina you must not miss, you must to live"".
Continuing her account of the first moments after the collision of the trains, the girl said that "I was crawling on my back side and I found a crack, I got out and fell on the tracks with my almost amputated leg. This resulted in many parts of my body being broken worse, I had a fractured neck. I crawled until I found a light and that was where the fire had started in the stream."
The sister of another one of the victims, Dimitris Oikos, also spoke to MEGA, who sent her messages to share with her the reflection on the fateful, as it turned out, route. "Usually we didn't talk all the time but at that time we exchanged a lot of messages. He told me that there was almost an accident in Paleofarsalo and that by a "miracle" we did not mourn the dead. Terrible messages if you hear them' with Dimitris' description in the audio message chilling as the young man was unaware of the tragic game of fate that was to follow.
Source: protothema.gr