“Am I lucky or unlucky?” Wichian Temthong pondered the question. “I guess I’m lucky, because I’m still here, still alive.”
The 37-year-old farm worker, Wichian, recently returned to Thailand after being one of the 23 Thai hostages released by Hamas last month.
He now resides in a small room in an industrial suburb south of Bangkok with his wife, Malai. Unfortunately, three young Israeli men Wichian met during his captivity were mistakenly shot dead by Israeli soldiers.
Wichian had traveled to Israel in late September seeking better job opportunities on Israeli farms, common for many Thais from the impoverished northeast.
After nine days, he was relocated to an avocado orchard on the Kfar Aza kibbutz. On his first morning there, on October 7, he woke up to gunfire. Initially told it was normal, the situation escalated, leading to a violent encounter with gunmen.
“I crouched down like this and shouted ‘Thailand, Thailand, Thailand’, he said, showing how he pulled his arms over his head. “But they kept beating me. All I could do was keep my face down. One guy stamped on me with his feet. I crawled under the bed to hide. I tried to text my wife to say I was being taken, but they dragged me out by my leg.”
Eventually, Wichian was taken down into tunnels that extended far beneath Gaza, where he would remain for fifty-one days. Being the only Thai person and not knowing any English, he had to rely solely on drawings and hand gestures to communicate, which made it an isolating experience for him.
Things were bad. The captives were fed just once a day, sometimes with nothing more substantial than a dried date and a piece of bread.
“When I was distressed they would come and talk to me, to calm me down, but I could not understand them. The only way I got by was by thinking of the faces of my children, my wife and my mother.
“When there was nothing else to do, I’d just sit against the wall and meditate. I kept thinking about the same thing over and over, which was that I had to survive.”
Recalling the fellow hostages in the tunnels, Wichian specifically remembers three young Israeli men—Yotam, Sammy, and Alon.
Sadly, they continued to be in captivity after his release, only to meet a tragic fate. They were shot dead by nervous Israeli soldiers as they emerged, waving a white cloth, last Friday. When we arrived to interview him, he had just seen the news along with their photographs.
“Every day my foreign friends and I tried to support each other. We would shake hands and do fist bumps. They would cheer me up by hugging me and clapping my shoulder. But we could only communicate by using our hands.”
He found out that Yotam was a drummer, and Sammy loved riding his motorbike, and worked in a chicken farm. Wichian tried to teach them some Thai words. Wichian said two of the Israelis were in the tunnel with him from day one. The third joined them on 9 October.
He says he was treated leniently by his captors, but that in their first weeks underground two of the Israelis were sometimes beaten with electric cables.
“We were always hungry. We could only sip our water. A large bottle had to last four to five days, a smaller bottler for two days.”
He really suffered from not being able to wash. They were allowed to sleep in the day, not at night. They were always damp – nothing dried in the tunnels.
He kept himself busy by trying to clean their living area. He even helped the Hamas guards move rubble that came into the tunnel after it was struck by a bomb.
After a month the four hostages were moved to a new tunnel. “At around 7pm they brought us up. But as soon as I saw it, my heart wanted to run back down to the tunnel.
“You could see bright lights everywhere from the aerial fighting. I heard drones flying all over the place, and the sound of gunfire. We had to run for 20 minutes, trying to avoid the drones.”
Wichian says his captors encouraged him to count the days on a calendar, and even brought him a clock, because he kept asking them the time.
The end of his ordeal came suddenly. “They came pointing to me and saying ‘you, you go home, Thailand’.” He saw daylight for the first time in 51 days, and was handed over to the Red Cross and driven over the border to Egypt.
“All the time I was down there I never shed a tear. But once I came up, and saw the two other released Thais, I hugged them and cried. We had a group hug and sat down with tears filling our eyes, asking ourselves how we could have survived.
“When I got back to Thailand they gave me a new name. They called me ‘the survivor’ and ‘Mr Plenty of Fortune’.”
However, he still needs to pay back the substantial debt he incurred – around 230,000 Thai baht ($6,570; £5,180) – to cover the cost of his trip to Israel. He never had the chance to earn any money there.
So, like his wife, Wichian is taking a job in a factory. The salary is low – just 800 baht a day. They cannot save much. Their two children are living with their grandparents in their home province of Buri Ram.
Wichian sometimes has trouble sleeping, and wakes up calling for his mother. But, he says, he would go back to Israel, just for the chance to earn, and save, a little more.