Udin Ahok was forced to make a choice that no one would ever want to make: save his wife or his mother and baby.

The 46-year-old Indonesian had just gone to sleep on Saturday evening when—without warning—a wall of water smashed into his house in Way Muli village on the coast of Sumatra.

Panicked, he fought to reach his sleeping 70-year-old mother and one-year-old son but then he saw his wife about to drown in the swirling waters. He plucked her to safety and they survived the fury of a volcano-triggered tsunami that smashed into Indonesia’s coast, killing more than 400 people who had no time to escape. Ahok’s mother and baby were found dead under mountains of debris.

“I didn’t have time to save my mother and son,” a weeping Ahok told AFP from a local shelter for evacuees in one of the stricken region’s hardest-hit areas.

“I regret it so much. I can only hope they’ve been given a place in God’s hands.”

Sulistiwati, another Way Muli resident who is six months pregnant, only survived thanks to a neighbour who saw her tumble into the salty water. “Luckily, he spotted me and pulled me out of the wave and we ran to higher ground with our other neighbours,” she said.

“It was pitch black. I didn’t know I could run that fast being pregnant. It was so scary. We waited for a few hours until the water went down.” Across the Sunda Strait in Java island, Saki stood amidst the rubble of what was once Sumber Jaya village and wondered aloud how he would get his life back on track.

“I can’t rebuild, everything is gone—my clothes, my money,” he told AFP.

“I had 19 million rupiah ($1,300) inside the house,” said the 60-year-old, who has been left with nothing but his white Muslim skull cap, a t-shirt and a sarong.

Meanwhile, desperately-needed aid flowed into a stretch of Indonesia’s tsunami-struck coastline yesterday, but humanitarian workers warned that clean water and medicine supplies were dwindling as thousands crammed makeshift evacuation centres.

Fears about a public health crisis come as the death toll from Saturday’s volcano-triggered disaster topped 400 with thousands more displaced—many left homeless after houses were flattened by the killer wave.

“A lot of the children are sick with fevers, headaches and they haven’t had enough water,” said Rizal Alimin, a doctor working for NGO Aksi Cepat Tanggap, at a local school that was turned into a temporary shelter.