95 year old Alfons Varsano has been married to Genny Varsano for 48 years. Alfons shares his international love and adventure story below:

I asked her to marry me, at midnight, in a chalet in the Romanian mountains close to Poland. She is younger than me….maybe this is the secret for my longevity. We love each other. I care for her and she cares for me, almost like my mother did. She is the one and only in my life. We are sharing our life like no others, we are best friends to each other. Together we crossed the ocean and started a new life in Canada, with not a penny in our pocket.

Alfons and Genny were passengers on Spantax Flight 995 from Madrid–Barajas Airport to New York via Málaga Airport on September 13, 1982. “When the DC-10 aircraft was rolling for take-off from Malaga, the pilot felt a strong and worsening vibration and aborted the take-off. The flight crew lost control of the aircraft and were unable to stop in the runway available and the aircraft overran the runway and crashed. An emergency evacuation of the aircraft was carried out but 50 on board died of both burns and other injuries. A further 110 people were hospitalized.”

We came out with not scratch from plane crash in Malaga, Spain. I am the one in white shirt. I have a bag under my left arm and I carried another with my right hand. The lady in black pants and red blouse is my wife. Beside her is a Romanian girl from New York. She was sitting far in the back….when the plane start burning she dropped everything she had and ran over chairs, bodies and reached the front were she did slide to the chute, as we did too.

We lost everything we had except a camera, and two Lladro figurines that we bought in Torremolinos, Spain. The picture was taken by a friend of the blonde girl on my left side.

We were left with nothing, but like Phoenix we were reborn from the ashes. We thought that we will never fly again, but we did. We decided to travel the world. We did fly at least once year. The longest one was 33 hours from Toronto to Singapore via Hong Kong.   

-Alfons Varsano, October 2024