He holds in his hands the ticket of life for himself, but also the ticket of death, as he says with emotion, for 57 of our fellow human beings. THE Theodoros Katsioulis he was sitting in seat 41 in the third car, when the terrible collision of the two trains took place at Tempe, with him momentarily losing consciousness. When he opened his eyes, it was as if he saw his death.

“As soon as I opened my eyes, I saw my death. I was on the ground, beaten, there was darkness everywhere. I said my prayer“, he recounts, shocked by what he experienced. “The wagon was engulfed in flames. There was smoke everywhere, I couldn’t breathe, I’m still breathing hard… A young man was trying to break the window, when he succeeded with an iron, I got up to jump out of there. When I got closer, I saw that we were very high, I thought we were on a bridge».

Theodoros Katsioulis is polytrauma, was hospitalized for three days at the general hospital of Larissa as he suffered microfractures on the head, he broke his nosewhile his body is full of bruises and abrasions from the windows that broke and injured him.

From those tragic moments he remembers with emotion the solidarity of the world. “Everyone was trying to help. In the darkness I heard the woman sitting next to me, asking me to help her children. I had seen them greeting their father on boarding. I took the one child in my arms, he was pale, scared and I held his hands. I told him not to be afraid and to jump out of the window. I did the same with the second child. We all helped, no one thought only of himself».

As soon as the conversation reaches his fellow passengers, who were sitting in the first seats of the carriage, he looks down. “I saw them a few minutes before and after the crash. when I opened my eyes and saw the fire, I went crazy… I couldn’t believe that they didn’t exist, they had disappeared. There are no words…tragedy“, he manages to blurt out.

“I haven’t closed an eye all these days, I can’t calm down, I can’t get the images I saw out of my mind. I lit a candle and pray for the people who lost so unjustly“, concludes Mr. Katsioulis.