Novoshakhtinsk, Russia ? Blinking in the sunlight they hadn’t seen in a week, 11 of 13 coal miners who were trapped in a deep shaft in southern Russia were brought to the surface alive Wednesday. One said the men didn’t have long to live when help arrived.

“When we saw the rescuers, that was like the appearance of Christ before the people,” said Vasily Avdeyev, one of the freed miners whose coal-blackened, grim faces attested to their ordeal.

One of the other two miners remained missing today, and the last was found dead, apparently crushed against mine walls by the waters that rushed in from an underground lake and trapped the men last Thursday.

There were 71 men working about 2,625 feet underground when the icy water began roaring into the mine, named Zapadnaya. Twenty-five managed to escape, 33 others were rescued Saturday, and workers tunneled through solid rock to reach the rest.

As they emerged, relatives who had kept vigil cried out their names. A crowd of doctors, police and rescue workers surrounded the men as they were hustled into ambulances, their shoulders wrapped in cheery pink and blue blankets. Some reached out to pat the miners on the back in a restrained show of relief.

Nikolai Lazaryev, an uncle of one of the rescued men, said the long wait was a grueling ordeal. “We could not live — we just existed,” he said.

The success of the rescue operation boosted spirits in this hardscrabble coal-mining region, but a gas explosion that killed five in a mine on the other side of the country was a grim reminder of the dangers for workers in Russia’s mines.

Sixty-six other miners were rescued after that blast, in the town of Partizansk, said Viktor Beltsov, a spokesman for the Emergency Situations Ministry. After learning of the rescue and the Far East blast, President Vladimir Putin told a Kremlin meeting that to his regret, mine accidents in Russia “were taking on a systematic character.”

Working in poor conditions, often going unpaid for months, Russia’s miners have learned to be forbearing, and the seven days of being trapped in the Zapadnaya mine tested the 11 men harshly.

“We had one or two mouthfuls of water from the shaft, but it was undrinkable. It was very bad,” miner Vladimir Mikhailov said in the hospital where the men were taken.

Rescued miner Igor Shilkin embraces a relative in a central hospital in Novoshakhtinsk, southern Russia. Eleven of 13 coal miners who were trapped in a deep shaft in southern Russia for six days were rescued Wednesday.