Sole Survivors - Part One

Last week, a Yemenia Airbus crashed, claiming over 150 lives. It was originally reported that the only survivor was a five-year-old boy; however, the next day news sources were citing a 14-year-old girl as the sole survivor. I searched the crash to find out what had happened to the boy, thinking that he had possibly died and they'd found another survivor. It turned out that the earlier report was an error. While searching, though, I stumbled upon several accounts of other airplane catastrophes from which there emerged only one living person. I spent a couple of hours reading the accounts of these people, which left me thinking about what it would feel like if I were the only survivor of a disaster that cost the lives of everyone else involved. How would I handle the survivor's guilt? Would I spend my life always trying to "be more," feeling like I was spared so that I could do something significant? Would I feel like a failure if I didn't do something that I deemed worthy enough? Would I ever even be able to LEAD a normal life again? Would I be thankful for the gift I'd been granted and live life to the fullest? Or would I be a shell of a person, living the terrible day over and over?

It's definitely something I'd like to address in a short story. For now, I'd like to share some of the stories I found about sole survivors. Whether you call it sheer luck or a miracle, these are fascinating stories of survival.

Here is the first one.


Juliane Koepcke

Today, Juliane Koepcke is a librarian at the Zoological Center in Munich, Germany. But 38 years ago, in the Peruvian jungle, she was a survivor.

December 24, 1971. Christmas Eve. Koepcke was seventeen years old. She and her mother boarded a Lockheed Electra turboprop in Peru for a flight into the Amazonian rainforest, where Koepcke's father, a zoologist, was studying wildlife.

The airline had already lost two plains, but Koepcke and her mother were determined to spend the holidays with her father and figured things "would be alright."

About halfway into the hour-long flight, the plane flew into heavy clouds and began shaking. A bolt of lightning, seen only as a flash from inside the plane, hit one of the fuel tanks. The right wing was torn off of the plane, sending the aircraft into a nose dive.

Koepcke remembers her mother saying, 'This is it!'" She also remembers presents flying through the cabin and the screams of her fellow passengers.

The plane broke into pieces in midair, thrusting Koepcke out of the plane.

"Suddenly there was this amazing silence. The plane was gone. I must have been unconscious and then came to in midair. I was flying, spinning through the air and I could see the forest spinning beneath me."

Koepcke lost consciousness again. She fell more than two miles into the jungle canopy but miraculously survived with only minor injuries. The other ninety-one people aboard Flight 508, including her mother, perished.

Koepcke says she is not a spiritual person and has tried to find logical explanations for why she survived.

"Maybe it was the fact that I was still attached to a whole row of seats," she says. "It was rotating much like the helicopter and that might have slowed the fall. Also, the place I landed had very thick foliage and that might have lessened the impact."

Koepcke survived with only a broken collarbone, a right eye that was swollen shut, a concussion and large gashes on her arms and legs.

"I didn't wake up until nine o'clock the next morning. I know this because my watch was still working. So I must have been unconscious the whole afternoon and the night. When I came to I was alone, just me ... and my row of seats."

Koepcke found herself injured and stranded in the jungle since rescue parties were unable to locate the wreckage. During her time spent at her parents' research station, her father had taught her how to survive in the rainforest. She would need it in order to survive the next portion of her horrific ordeal.

The day after the crash she found a creek and started to wade down stream. Her father had told her to follow the small bodies of water to the larger ones and that it would eventually lead to people. The journey wasn't easy, though. She subsisted on candy she recovered from the crash site.

There was also the problem of parasites.

"I had a cut on my arm and after a few days I could feel there was something in it. I took a look and a fly had laid her eggs in the hole. It was full of maggots. I was afraid I would lose my arm. Later, after I was rescued it was treated and more than 50 maggots were found inside. I still wonder how so many maggots could have fitted into that little hole, it was no bigger than a one euro coin."

As she travelled , Koepcke discovered more wreckage from the plane, including other victims.

"I found another row of seats with three dead women still strapped in. They had landed head-first and the impact must have been so hard that they were buried almost two feet into the ground. I was horrified--I didn't want to touch them, but I wanted to make sure that my mother wasn't one of them. So I took a stick and knocked a shoe off one of the bodies. The toe nails had nail polish on them and I knew it could not have been my mother because she never used nail polish."

Juliane waded through jungle streams infested with crocodiles, piranhas and devil rays.

"Sometimes I would see a crocodile on the bank and it would start into the water towards me, but I was not afraid. I knew crocodiles don't tend to attack humans."

It took ten days before Koepke finally came upon a small boat and a hut on the river. She stayed there, hoping someone would find her and rescue her. The next day a group of Peruvian lumberjacks found her and brought her to the next town.

The events of 1971 still haunt Koepcke and she says the memories are especially clear when she is confronted with airline disasters like those in recent months.

"It just horrifies me. I only hope it all went quickly for those on board."


(Source: http://www.cnn.com/)