A nine-year-old girl with skull fractures is clinging on to life in hospital, nearly two days after her younger sister, just six, died at the scene in Taiwan’s deadliest train crash in decades.

At the accident site, their father had repeatedly pleaded in the ear of the rescue worker who helped him out of the tunnel where the train derailed. “My two daughters are still inside, please help me save them, quickly!” the worker recalled the middle-aged man saying.

Moments later, another rescuer emerged with the man’s elder daughter, with blood streaming down her face but still conscious. By the time his younger daughter was carried out, her limbs were limp and her face drained of blood.

“Can you let me hug her for just a while more?” the father asked. Tears welled up as the girl was put into her father’s arms.

It was a family outing gone terribly wrong, as all three had set off together for Huadong Valley to celebrate Taiwan’s Children’s Day on Sunday. In his narration on Facebook, the father’s rescue worker said he nearly broke down having to watch the scene unfold in front of his eyes, as he too had become a dad.

This and other memories of the rescue operation were keeping him awake, he wrote. But he believed the best support he could give was to soldier on and fight through the grief.

Tales of horror and poignancy are emerging from survivors and rescue workers who had to witness crash victims pick up the remains of their loved ones as they combed through the wreckage.

An eight-car train carrying hundreds of passengers went off the rails in a tunnel near Hualien in eastern Taiwan on Friday morning, killing 51 people and injuring 188 others. The identities of 47 among the casualties had been verified. Many sustained severe injuries to the face and would require a longer identification process, of comparing DNA samples with family members.

For some survivors of the fatal accident, the psychological trauma proved more difficult to deal with than their physical injuries. A 32-year-old woman, who went by the surname Wang, burst into tears when telling her mother how helpless she felt as she kept hearing the desperate pleas of other victims crying out to be saved. Wang, who was waiting to be rescued from the top of the trashed train, said it broke her heart to be unable to extend a helping hand to those in need.

The tragedy notwithstanding, moments of humanity shone through, said Xu Ruoqian, one of the survivors. While trying to leave the wreckage, people did not push one another or scramble to get out first, and many held hands in support.

Xu said she was touched to see victims who had made it out, return to help others with their luggage, evacuation efforts and the distribution of food and water.

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