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Beating the Odds: Stories of Surviving Extreme Situations
Fate does not treat everyone the same — there is no doubt about that. To some, even when confronted with certain death, as exemplified by Vesna Vulovic, she gives a second chance. Sometimes also a third, fourth, fifth and so on….
Vesna Vulović fell from 10 km and survived.
More than forty years ago, in January 1972, a Yugoslavian Airlines plane took off from Zagreb to Copenhagen. While it was over Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), a bomb exploded in its hold — as the official report stated: planted by a separatist group of Croatian Ustasha. The plane broke into pieces and fell from an altitude of more than 10,000 meters.
All the passengers and crew were killed…. Almost all of them. Rescuers who arrived in the vicinity of Srbrna Kamenica found a person alive between the bent sheets of the tail: 22-year-old flight attendant Vesna Vulovic. Her condition was serious, with fractured skull bones, broken both legs and three vertebrae. From the waist down she was paralyzed. Nonetheless, she survived, which was akin to a miracle. After two surgeries, she regained the use of her legs.
