Members of a U.S. rescue team pull UN staff member Jens Kristensen from the rubble of the United Nations mission five days after the earthquake struck Haiti. (Marco Dormino/MINUSTAH/Handout/Reuters)

A Danish United Nations worker who spent five days trapped in the remains of the UN building in Port-au-Prince that had been destroyed in Haiti's earthquake said he always held to hope that he would be rescued.

"I was thinking that it was too early to die, thinking that it couldn't be, that there were too many things I still had to do" Jens Kristensen told CBC News in an interview.

"I always had the hope. I always had the belief that if I managed to make noise, if I managed to bang on the table, my chair or the leg of my table, [if] I managed to stay positive and in control of myself and in control of my own behaviour so I didn’t go into panic mode, that I would eventually be found."

He also said he had a lot of thoughts about death.

Kristensen, a senior humanitarian officer with the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti, said he was sitting at his table, going through documents for a meeting the next morning, when the Jan. 12 quake hit.

He said he thought about running to the door but it was too far away. Instead, he scrambled under the table which, combined with an office chair and a bookshelf that was over the table, protected him from falling debris.

"There was debris all over the place and I couldn't move anything but amazingly I was protected without hardly a scratch," he said.

Kristensen was conscious when rescue workers eventually pulled him out, and he went back to work just days after he was rescued.