‘I WAS THE ONLY SURVIVOR’
Annette Herfkens lived through a plane crash that killed everyone else onboard, including her fiancé. Then her rescuers died, too. She shares her story
Former Wall Street trader Annette Herfkens, 55, a native Dutch woman now living on New York’s Upper East Side, was the sole survivor of a horrifying 1992 plane crash in Vietnam. At the time, she was 31, living in Madrid and engaged to her boyfriend of 13 years — who died in the accident, along with the 22 other passengers and six crew members. Herfkens’ extraordinary memoir, “Turbulence,” is out Tuesday. She tells The Post’s JANE RIDLEY her inspiring story of physical and psychological endurance.
MY head is light. The plants around me are radiant. I do not feel the pain any longer. I am both out of my body and close to my body. I have left, but I am present.
Darkness is mixed with brightness, the day with the night. I feel as protected as I possibly can be. I have surrendered myself completely. To the trees, the leaves, the crickets, the ants, the centipedes, life. Or is it to death I have surrendered? I am within the moment. A timeless moment of ecstatic freedom. A moment that gives me peace, unity and joy.
That was my near-death experience on my penultimate day in the Vietnamese jungle — seven days after the plane I was on crashed into a remote mountain ridge. Although seriously injured, I was the only survivor. The other 29 passengers and crew, including my 36year-old fiancé, Willem van der Pas, whom I called Pasje, all perished.
It was Saturday, Nov. 14, 1992, when Pasje and I boarded Vietnam Airlines flight VN474 from Ho Chi Minh City for a romantic five-day vacation in Nha Trang, a resort on the South China Sea.
The trip was a surprise for me — visiting from Madrid, where I was temporarily based with Santander Bank — and to provide much-needed respite for Pasje, who had moved to Vietnam six months earlier to set up two banking branches for his employer, ING.
We had been together for 13 years after meeting at Leiden University as students in our native Netherlands. We knew we were destined to get married from the fourth year of college. After school, we lived for a while in Amsterdam; later, because of our work as bankers, we lived together or apart in various financial capitals in South America and Europe.
When I arrived in Vietnam it had been eight weeks since I’d seen Pasje. We were aching to be together. As usual, he met me at the airport, then took me on a whirlwind tour of the city before an intimate dinner at one of his favorite restaurants. We were blissfully happy. Neither of us could wait for the day when we could tie the knot and hopefully live somewhere like New York City and start a family.
I was excited for the surprise getaway. But I felt so claustrophobic I shuddered as we boarded the cramped plane.
“Can’t we take a car instead?” I asked Pasje.
“The jungle is very dense, and the road is horrible,” he replied. “It would take days. By the time we get there, we would have to leave again.”
I sat down nervously. Fifty excruciating minutes later we experienced a tremendous drop, and Pasje looked at me with fear. “Of course, a sh--ty little toy plane drops like this!” I said, reaching for his hand. “It’s just an air pocket — don’t worry.”
But he was right to worry. We dropped again. Someone screamed. It went pitch-black. Seconds later, we made impact.
Idon’t remember exactly what happened, but I guess I tumbled around in the cabin like a lonely piece of laundry in a clothes dryer, hitting my head and limbs against the ceiling and lockers. I may have been the only one not wearing a seat belt. At some point I must have landed and slipped under a seat, legs first, and gotten stuck. This kept me in place for the second, bigger impact, which caused the plane to break up. I awoke after four, maybe five hours. I saw Pasje across the aisle. He was lying in his seat, which had somehow flipped backward, and had a smile on his lips. A sweet little smile. But he was dead, his ribs crushed into his lungs by his seat belt. Shock must have set in, because I don’t remember crawling out of the plane. Soon, I was sitting outside of the cabin, on a mountain slope, under the trees in dense undergrowth. Everything hurt and I couldn’t move. My wraparound skirt had been torn off and I could see four inches of bluish bone sticking out through layers of flesh on my shin. I didn’t know it at the time, but my hips were fractured, I had a collapsed lung and
my jaw was hanging loose. As the days went on, gangrene set into my toes.
There was a weird, unreal reality. Everything was green. The more I listened to the jungle sounds, the louder they became. I could see dead bodies strewn below me and, although I didn’t see anyone, I could hear faint moans from people still inside the plane.
Beside me was a Vietnamese man, alive but badly hurt. “Don’t worry, they will come for us,” he said. To protect my modesty, he somehow managed to open his little square suitcase and give me a pair of trousers, which were part of a suit. I felt comforted by his words and his presence but, after a short conversation, we both retreated into our injuries.
A few hours later, I saw the man was becoming weaker. Before long, he had difficulty breathing. The life went out of him. He was gone. There were no longer any sounds from the plane. I was completely alone.
After that, I tried to move. Shifting even an inch was agony. But I tried not to dwell on my suffering and focused on what I could achieve, rather than what I could not.
Over the following days, even though I was grieving for Pasje, I concentrated on my survival. What alternative did I have? I painfully pulled myself around a small section of the wreckage, dragging my body by my elbows.
I stayed outside, because I couldn’t bear to see the corpses inside the plane. Once, I’d looked over at the man I’d been speaking to and a maggot crawled out of his eye. Those were terrifying images I didn’t want to see.
My main goal was drinking water to stay hydrated, something I did by collecting rainwater in small sponges. I fashioned the sponges from insulation I found near the shattered wing of the plane. Standing up to retrieve the insulation was torture, and putting one foot in front of the other impossible. I wrung the moisture from the sponges into my mouth. In a vain attempt to stay dry, I wore a blue plastic poncho I’d found in someone’s pack. But I didn’t take anything from anyone else. It didn’t seem appropriate.
As for emotions, I realized I couldn’t cry — because crying makes you weak. I knew that if I started, I would give up. Every time I thought of Pasje, I forced myself to stop. I would look at my engagement ring, but then I wouldn’t allow myself to think any further. It wouldn’t do any good.
Instead I stayed in the now. I listened to my heart and instinct, and not to my mind, because the mind makes up stories that can frighten you.
For example, I could have thought: “What if there are no rescue workers?” or “What if that’s a tiger or that’s a snake?” But I knew I would deal with the snake or the tiger when they were in front of me. And if there was no rescue, I’d cross that bridge then.
ANOTHER saving grace was the sheer beauty of the mountain. I would look at the varying shades of green on the leaves. How the sun would reflect in a raindrop. Meditating on nature became my distraction. I wouldn’t allow myself to think there was a chance I was going to die.
My profession as a bond trader helped too. I divided everything into reasonable steps. Numberwise, I was instinctive. I gave myself a week to stay in this one spot. If nobody rescued me by Sunday, then I would need to go into the jungle in search of food. But, in reality, I was physically incapable of doing that. All I could do was shuffle on my elbows, dragging my useless hips.
Gradually, I retreated into the tranquility of the place. The jungle became more beautiful by the day. It was the perfect setting for my neardeath experience on the seventh day, when I thought about my happy childhood and felt the love of my friends and family encircle me. I brought up treasured memories about my mother, father and siblings, who had always been so supportive of me in my life and career.
But then, suddenly, I heard the sound of cracking wood. On the other side of the ravine was a man in an orange hood. I wondered whether he was real or a phantom. Some version of St. Peter? I waved frantically. “Hello? Can you help me?” He just stared at me and stayed motionless. Then he was gone.
The orange man, a local policeman, turned out to be my savior. The authorities were looking for me. And although he first thought I was a ghost — he’d never seen a white woman before — he raised the alarm. The following day I was rescued by a team of Vietnamese workers. They showed me a passenger list from the flight and I pointed out my name. They had body bags with them, thinking that nobody could possibly have lived.
They moved me onto a canvas and carried my broken body down the mountain. At first I was terrified to be leaving my ridge, the spot that had kept me safe in the aftermath of the accident. I didn’t want to leave Pasje. My first true love. It sent me into a panic being taken away from him.
But, after a while, I rallied. Gratitude swept over me as the men took off their shoes so they could step more lightly on the rocks and not aggravate my injuries.
Next, I was airlifted to Ho Chi Minh City before being transferred to a hospital in Singapore. I was surrounded by family and friends who had flown in from Holland and other parts of the world. They’d naturally feared I was dead when they heard about the crash. My incredible survival story made headlines across the world. After surgeries on my jaw, and a series of skin grafts and treatments for gangrene, I started to heal.
Psychologically, however, it was hard. Pasje and I had been together for 13 years, so it felt like I was widowed. I attended his funeral on Dec. 10, 1992, in Breda, Holland. Brought into the church on a stretcher, I felt surreal — like a bride taken down the aisle to meet her groom in his coffin.
Ifirst walked again on New Year’s Eve, when I was convalescing at my parents’ home. Taking those first few steps were painful but I was so relieved I had enough strength to stand upright and move on two legs, instead of elbows.
People might think it strange, but I returned to my job in Madrid in February. I loved my work and wanted to at least try to piece my life back together.
A few years later, I married my Santander co-worker Jaime in secret — office relationships were frowned upon in those days in finance — and settled in New York in 1996. We had two beautiful children, Joosje, now 19, and her brother, 17-year-old Max.
But our lives since the crash have not been smooth. In 2001, at the age of 2, Max was diagnosed with autism. As any specialneeds parent knows, it’s easy to go into denial. It’s tempting to think: “What if he’s never able to go to a proper school?” or “Will he never get a job?” But, just as I accepted my circumstances in the jungle, I focused on the here and now — and not what should be. Max is now doing well at the Child School on Roosevelt Island.
Sadly, my marriage fell apart, and Jaime and I were divorced two years ago. But I truly believe that every loss you take in life makes you a bit wiser, and every year, more accepting.
To this day, the cause of my plane crash is unknown.
One of the biggest shocks to come out of the whole affair was my discovery 10 years ago that there had been two air crashes in the jungle that November in 1992. While researching my book, I had gone back to Vietnam to retrace my steps, revisit the mountain and meet my rescuers, including the orange man.
A young girl approached me as I left for Ho Chi Minh City. “My father went to rescue you and never came back!” she sobbed, falling into my arms. It turned out, a helicopter had been dispatched to get me off the mountain, but tragedy had struck when that aircraft also crashed. Eight people onboard were killed, including the girl’s father, a doctor.
I struggled up the mountain, where I made my peace with Pasje and his memory. I left a small seal ornament because that was my nickname for him. It wasn’t closure that I found back in that place, but an opening to my own future.
Beside me was a man, alive but badly hurt . . . Before long, he had difficulty breathing. The life went out of him. He was gone. — Annette Herfkens on a fellow plane passenger