Prayers, Tears for Wave’s Victims

Survivors wept and prayed at mass graves and beachside memorials Monday to mark one year since a tsunami crashed into a dozen nations on the Indian Ocean, sweeping away more than 200,000 lives.

There were mass prayers at mosques in Indonesia’s shattered Aceh province, hundreds of survivors gathering in Thailand and even candlelight vigils in distant Stockholm.

Survivors relived the awe they felt when walls of water churned inland for miles, carrying people, trees, houses and train cars.

“I was more aware than ever that my soul belonged to God,” said Mohammed Yani, 35, who scrambled to the second floor of a mosque and watched a torrent carrying people and debris.

“It was under the same blue sky, exactly one year ago, that Mother Earth unleashed her most destructive power upon us,” Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono told a crowd of hundreds in the provincial capital of Banda Aceh.

He heralded a minute’s silence by sounding a tsunami warning siren -- part of a system that did not exist last year -- at 8:16 a.m., the moment the first wave hit.

A year ago, a magnitude 9 earthquake ruptured the ocean floor off the west coast of the island of Sumatra, at whose northern tip Aceh is located, displacing billions of tons of water and sending 33-foot waves roaring across the Indian Ocean at jetliner speeds.

The waves hit as far away as East Africa and swept a passenger train from its tracks in Sri Lanka.

The lobbies of five-star hotels in Thailand were littered with corpses. A year later, one man sat alone on Patong Beach, weeping quietly as the sea gently lapped before him.

Nearby, hundreds of foreign tourists who had returned for the grim anniversary joined remembrances for those who died.

“I never thought I would come back,” said Sharon Kelly, 49, of Hull, England. “Every day I would cry.”

She survived only because her husband, Raymond, pushed her up onto a wall as a mammoth wave pummeled Patong Beach. He was swept into a shop, where he opened a skylight to climb onto the roof.

Several hundred Swedes, including many survivors, gathered under a stormy sky for a simple ceremony of songs and remembrance at a resort on the devastated beach at Khao Lak.

“Even the skies are crying with us today,” Bishop Lennart Koskinen said.

Though far from the icy shores of Sweden, last year’s waves killed more than 500 Swedes, more than any natural disaster in modern times.

In Stockholm, Parliament Speaker Bjorn von Sydow told hundreds of mourners at an outdoor rite: “The catastrophe entered our homes, ripped apart our families, and cut emotional wounds that won’t fully heal.”