A Miracle in the Waves: One Man’s Survival in the Thailand Tsunami

Twelve years after surviving the devastating tsunami in Thailand, Israeli survivor Chaim Borstein opens up for the first time about those terrifying moments when he found himself between life and death.

Chaim had been on vacation, traveling from Bangkok to the beautiful island of Phuket, planning to continue on to India. It was a gorgeous day, and he decided to take a scenic tour of the island.

He hired a taxi, and the driver began the journey. Just minutes into the ride, the car suddenly shook. “I was looking out the window at the shops and the mountain in the distance,” recalls Chaim, now a 67-year-old retired lawyer and businessman. “No more than five or six minutes passed when I felt myself lifted into the air by a giant wave beneath us.”

The massive wave crashed the taxi toward the shops, then pulled it back out to sea. The water reached their necks. “Suddenly, we were hit hard. I believe it was a boat or a yacht that struck us and pushed us back toward the shore until the second wave came.”

That’s when the nightmare really began.

“When I was underwater, I could barely see. The water was dark and full of debris, cars and even people,” Chaim recalls. “For a moment, the taxi stopped spinning in the water, and the driver and I kicked out the windshield and began to swim.”

At that point, they were trapped in a whirlpool. “The water and the taxi spun so fast, I didn’t know where I was swimming, up, down, left, or right. At some point, I thought: ‘I’m not getting out of this.’ I stopped fighting. And then, suddenly, I rose to the surface.”

With the little strength he had left, Chaim swam toward a nearby building. He reached for the roof tiles, but they weren’t attached. The water pulled him back into the current. That’s when a miracle happened.

A palm tree stood in just the right spot to stop him. He clung to it tightly. “At that point, I had no sandals, no phone, no glasses. But I was alive.” When the waters finally began to recede, Chaim climbed up the tree and waited.

From there, he could see the full scale of the destruction. “I watched in silence. Everything was gone. For three hours I sat in that tree before I had the courage to climb down and run toward the mountains.” There, he found hundreds of others, also shaken and silent, sitting in shock.

Next to him sat a British man who had a working cell phone. Chaim asked if he could borrow it. He managed to reach his son in England. “I told him, ‘Listen carefully, I’m on someone else’s phone and the battery’s almost dead. Call the whole family and tell them I’m okay.’ He asked, ‘Why wouldn’t you be okay?’ I said, ‘Turn on the TV.’”

As soon as Chaim ended the call, the phone battery died. That night, people on the mountain lit bonfires and searched desperately for their loved ones. “It was heartbreaking. Children were missing. Parents were lost.”

Eventually, Chaim made his way back to the hotel. “It was located on higher ground, so the main building survived. Everything by the beach had been swept away. Thankfully, I had left my passport at the front desk and not in my room, so I didn’t lose it.”

Strangers helped bandage his wounds, and he waited for evacuation. After 24 hours, it was his turn. “We rode to the airport and boarded a flight to Bangkok, full of injured people. On the flight to Tel Aviv, I discovered someone had stolen my wallet. But I was alive.”

Despite the challenges, Chaim recovered relatively quickly. “I’ve been through a lot. I was badly injured in the army and returned to serve in an artillery unit during the War of Attrition. Just six months before the tsunami, I had open-heart surgery.”

He adds, “This didn’t change my daily routine, but it deepened my sense of Hashem’s protection. When you survive something like that, you realize how precious every moment of life truly is.”