ELSEMIEK DE BORST was 17, about to enter her final year of high school. She enjoyed playing the piano and worked part-time at a pancake house near her father's home outside The Hague; she dreamt of one day becoming an architect. But first came the summer holidays. On July 17th 2014 she packed her suitcase (purple with red flowers) and set out with her mother, step-father and half-brother for a package tour to Malaysia. As she left that morning, she sent her father, Hans de Borst, a message on WhatsApp: “The taxi is coming here at 9, and at 12 o'clock we fly. Bye bye.” It would be the last time Mr de Borst heard from her.
Along with 282 other passengers and 15 crew, Elsemiek boarded Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport. Nearly three hours later a surface-to-air missile darted through the sky over eastern Ukraine, where Russian-backed separatists had been waging war with the Ukrainian government for several months, and met MH17 head-on. The plane came down with such force that "the earth receded," said a local in the town of Hrabovo, where the main parts of the airliner crashed. When this correspondent reached the crash site, the passengers'...Continue reading
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