Not far from the waves crashing against Sri Lanka's palm-fringed shores, the train stopped Thursday to mark the moment a deadly tsunami hit the country 20 years ago.
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Sri Lanka's Ocean Queen Express has become in the collective memory a symbol of the largest natural disaster that hit the South Asian country on December 26, 2004, when giant waves fell on the carriages.
Around 1,000 people were killed, both passengers and residents who had rushed to the train, desperately seeking shelter after the first wave hit.
After they boarded, two even larger waves hit the train, derailing it and throwing it onto its side, when it was more than 100 meters from the coast.
Since then, every year on the anniversary of the tsunami, the Ocean Queen Express stops at the same place, in Peraliya, a peaceful village about 90 kilometers south of the capital Colombo, to commemorate the victims.
“For me, all this brings back very painful memories,” says Tekla Jesenthu, whose two-year-old daughter died when the first wave hit the coast. “I don’t want to think about it or talk about it. It hurts too much.”
“Monuments won’t bring her back,” she adds.
Climb onto the roofs
Survivors and relatives of the victims board the train in Colombo early in the morning, before it heads south and then slows and stops, in a gesture of remembrance.
In silence, the train passengers get off. Mourners lay flowers and light incense at a seaside memorial to the 1,270 people buried in mass graves, with Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and Muslim ceremonies.
Sarani Sudeshika, 36, a baker whose mother-in-law was among the victims, recalled: “The animals started making strange noises and people started shouting 'the waves are coming!'”
AFP
“When I saw the first wave, I started running to escape it,” recalls Ms. Kulawathi, 73, whose daughter was killed, swept away by the waves.
“The water reached the level of the roofs and people climbed on them to save themselves,” she said.
The 9.1 magnitude earthquake off the west coast of Sumatra Island, Indonesia, triggered huge waves that crashed into coastal areas of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and nine other Indian Ocean countries.
A total of 226,408 people died due to the tsunami, according to EM-DAT, a recognized global database. Of these, 35,399 were in Sri Lanka.
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