The men give me pants and a shirt to put on. I eat one or two spoonfuls of the sour-smelling fariña. Then I’m already full. Apparently, my stomach has shrunk.
Suddenly another two men come out of the darkness. The bad weather—or fate?—leads them all to this shelter, today of all days. It’s Amado Pereira and Marcio Rivera, and they, too, are thunderstruck when they see me.
“Whom do we have here?” Don Marcio asks with surprise.
And again I have to tell what happened. Again the response is pure astonishment. We exchange information, and I learn details about the large-scale but unsuccessful search operation. That evening we speak for a long time.
“We’ll get you out of here,” says Don Marcio, and he confers with the other men. Actually, they want to get me as quickly as possible to a doctor, as if they were afraid I might have more serious injuries, after all, and could die on them. But then they agree that it’s safer to spend the night here. The three men who first found me will remain in the forest, as they originally intended. Don Marcio and Don Amado volunteer to take me to Tournavista early the next morning in the boat.
That night I don’t dare to say how uncomfortable I find the palm-bark floor in the shelter and that I’d rather sleep in the sand. So all six of us spend the night in the tambo. The men give me their only mosquito net, but I sleep poorly, anyway. My wounds, out of which we have meanwhile taken about fifty maggots, hurt unbearably. Early in the morning, when it’s still dark, we set off. I try to walk, but they carry me over the last stretch, lay me in the boat and cover me with a tarp.
And then I simply let go. I’m so boundlessly tired. I doze off, again and again. During my waking hours I look at the riverbank gliding past me and talk to the men. I learn the name of the river. It’s the Río Shebonya, and it really is still completely uninhabited.
It’s not long before the story of my rescue fills newspapers all over the world in the most unbelievable variations. The wildest version is the myth that I built a raft for myself, out of branches and leaves, and floated down the Río Shebonya on it. Indians saw me drifting by, unconscious, and pulled the raft ashore. When I came to, I said only: “There are dead people,” and then I passed out again. Once it’s out there, hundreds of journalists copy this account. Even today you can still read it in newspapers or on the Internet. I’ve received letters mainly from rational-minded children like those first graders from Warner Robins in the United States who were justifiably eager to know how I managed to build a raft without any tools. And why didn’t my raft made of branches and leaves sink? Other reports describe my journey on the boat with Don Marcio and Don Amado like this: Then she fell into a deep oblivion. That was not the case. On the contrary—though I repeatedly nodded off, I took in much of the monotonous journey.
The trip goes on forever, and it’s a long time before we finally reach the mouth of the Río Shebonya where it flows into the Río Pachitea. On the bank of the Pachitea lies the village of Tournavista. It becomes clear to me: I could never have managed this alone.
Around noon the men stop to eat something. We go ashore to a house in the middle of a pasture. As I approach, some children run away, screaming; and a woman turns away with horror, her hand pressed to her mouth: “Those eyes! I can’t look at them! Oh God, those terrible eyes!”
I ask my companions: “What’s wrong with her? What’s going on with my eyes?”
And then they explain to me that my eyes are completely red. Apparently, all the blood vessels have burst, and there’s no white left, everything is bloodred. Even the iris has turned red. I’m surprised, for I can see quite well.
Later I will look in a mirror and understand well the woman’s terror. It really does look as if I no longer have eyes, but only bloody sockets. No wonder these people here think I’m a jungle spirit. Nonetheless, they give me a bowl of soup, but again I get almost nothing down.
Around four o’clock in the afternoon, we dock in Tournavista. Our arrival provokes great excitement. Immediately a stretcher is brought over, and I find that embarrassing, for I can walk on my own!
The nurse who comes to meet me I know from the past. Her name is Amanda del Pino, and she once gave me a tetanus shot, back before I came to Panguana. Now she wants to give me penicillin, but I refuse. My father is highly allergic to this antibiotic, and I don’t know whether I might have inherited this intolerance from him. Sister Amanda lets herself be persuaded, and she injects me with a different medication.
Everyone is very careful with me. They handle me with kid gloves. Someone takes a photo that will soon appear in Life magazine. In it, I’m standing on a porch. Someone has put a bathrobe over my shoulders. The nurse is holding me by the arm and looks very concerned. She barely asks me any questions. Still, the next day there’s an interview in the newspaper that I definitely didn’t give.
After my wounds have been cleaned and disinfected, and I’ve received an injection, an American female pilot named Jerrie Cobb appears and offers to take me on her plane to the Instituto Linguístico de Verano in Yarinacocha, where the missionaries are studying the languages of the Indians and translating the Bible. There are some doctors there, she says, and I could get better treatment and recover comfortably. Though the prospect of getting on a plane again frightens me, I’m too weak to protest energetically. And she’s probably right, I think.
So a short time later, I’m aboard a twin-engine Islander, and as Jerrie Cobb tries to reassure me with the information that she’s the first woman in the world to be trained as an astronaut, and with her I will fly as safely as in the arms of an angel, I don’t find the strength to insist on being allowed to fly sitting up. Jerrie finds it safer for me to lie down, and so the twenty-minute flight becomes a torment for me. Above all, it happens when Jerrie, who apparently doesn’t notice my fear, really leans the airplane into the turns.
The “linguists,” as the missionaries of the Wycliffe Bible Translators in Yarinacocha are generally called, give me a warm welcome. The family of Dr. Frank Lindholm takes me in, and immediately I receive medical attention again. The doctor removes more maggots from my arm, as well as from the cut in my leg, in which the beasts had also nested. The hole in my arm is deep. How deep no one knows exactly, and therefore I now receive the first of countless treatments during which I have to clench my teeth to keep from screaming loudly: Dr. Lindholm soaks a twenty-inch strip of gauze in iodoform and stuffs it deep into the wound. It has to remain there until the next day, when it will be pulled out and replaced with a new one. That’s the only way, he explains to me, to make sure that the tubular wound heals cleanly from the inside to the outside. Then he pulls a pretty long wooden splinter out of the sole of my foot, which I hadn’t even perceived. All over my body I have insect bites, which are inflamed and swollen. These are now treated too.
When this is over, I’m asked what I’d like to eat. On impulse I say: “A chicken sandwich.” To my great joy they immediately make me one, and I eat it very enthusiastically.
I’m safe. And with this certainty I fall into a deep sleep.
In the restaurant our food is served. It’s a gorgeous late afternoon. The light glistens gold on the water, gently rippled by the wind. Over there, a bit farther up the lagoon, is where I rested back then in Dr. Lindholm’s house. Today there are only a few linguists left there. When I came with Werner Herzog, they already had to reduce the size of their camp. Just a few months ago, after an interview with me was broadcast on CNN, the widow of another doctor, whom I had moved in with after several days, Mrs. Fran Holston, sent me a photo showing me with her two daughters in the garden. You can scarcely tell by looking at me in this picture that I had just gone through that eleven-day odyssey. In a skirt and blouse, borrowed clothes, I’m smiling at the camera. I was surprised how little I felt at the sight of this photograph, as if the girl in it were someone else entirely. I had a similar experience during the shooting of the documentary Wings of Hope with Werner Herzog.
To this day it seems to m
e a stroke of good fortune that in 1998 our telephone rang at home in Munich and a man introduced himself with the words: “My name is Werner Herzog. I’m a film director. I would like to make a documentary about your fate.”
By that time the crash was twenty-seven years in the past. I hadn’t had many good experiences with journalists and filmmakers, and so had shied away from all that, years ago. Those days I rejected interview requests categorically, and was all the more averse, of course, to appearances on talk shows. I was tired of being asked the same questions over and over again, all my life, and being perceived exclusively as the rare survivor of an unbelievable story. Since then, I had a life of my own, had been married for nine years, and there was in my opinion a host of topics more exciting than rehashing, again and again, the details of the crash. Especially since it had been my experience that, whatever I said, the journalists seemed not to listen and in the end would write what they had already imagined, anyhow, or what they thought the readers wanted to hear. But suddenly I had Werner Herzog on the telephone, and he wanted to shoot a film with me!
He apparently sensed my hesitation, for he said: “If you want more information about me, then you can read about me on the Internet. I would also be happy to send you a few of my films.”
“That’s not necessary,” I said after I had overcome my initial surprise. “Of course, I know who you are, Mr. Herzog.” I had always admired this extraordinary director. I had seen many of his films. I could hardly believe I was talking to him on the telephone. And his proposal also seemed unbelievable to me at first.
For Werner Herzog did not just want to conduct interviews with me, as so many others had done. He was planning something unheard of: twenty-seven years after the crash, he wanted to return with me to the place where everything had happened. He also wanted to retrace my path back to other people. Should I actually do it? On the other hand: How can anyone really turn down an offer like that?
Herzog suggested that I think about everything. He sent me books and some of his films I hadn’t yet seen, and gave me time. I consulted with my husband, for his opinion was always really important to me. He has incredible insight into people, and I know that I can rely on his advice. He said: “Maybe it will be good for you. You will probably never have an opportunity like this again.”
And so I contacted Werner Herzog and informed him that I was interested in his project. We met at an excellent Munich restaurant. On this occasion I became acquainted with the cameraman Erik Söllner. Later, too, during the filming, Werner Herzog set great store by his opinion.
That evening Herzog explained his plan to us: He wanted to send an expedition to find and make accessible the spot where the wreckage of the Lockheed L-188A Electra still lay scattered in the jungle, for the crash site was still roughly known among the locals. I put Werner Herzog in contact with Moro, who had looked after Panguana over all the years during which I couldn’t come to the research station. Despite his help and that of several natives, three expeditions Herzog sent to locate the wreckage of the Lockheed Electra returned empty-handed. Only the fourth was successful. Together with his then-eight-year-old son, the director proceeded to the location to view the pieces of wreckage, which were strewn over a stretch of about ten miles in the jungle.
On his return to Munich, he told me that I’d be amazed how well some of the wreckage was still preserved. But he also had to face the fact that the terrain was so rough that on some days it took experienced native macheteros hours to advance even only a hundred yards. The film crew, along with all the equipment, couldn’t possibly make it to the crash site on foot. Several times it looked as if the project might fail, but not with Werner Herzog. He balked at no means or exertion to put his plan into action. If you couldn’t get there on foot, then it would have to be by air. And so he decided to have a small swath cut in the jungle near the largest pieces of wreckage, just large enough so a helicopter could land.
Everyone thought that all this would upset me terribly, but to my astonishment I realized that I was confronting everything oddly emotionlessly. More than the prospect of seeing the place again, what made me nervous was the fact that I’d have to speak on camera, and I wondered whether I would manage that well enough. My husband always says that I’m a perfectionist, and he is undoubtedly right. But when you’re standing in front of the camera for someone like Werner Herzog, then you ultimately want to do a good job. And then, in early August 1998, things got under way.
With American Airlines, we flew via Dallas to Peru, which was not the shortest route and made the trip still longer and more arduous than a direct flight from Europe already is, anyhow. But that airline permitted substantially more baggage than any other, and, of course, a film crew has a great deal of luggage and equipment. Some of it had been sent ahead already, and once again it was Alwin Rahmel who saw to it that everything got through customs smoothly.
With the crew we got along excellently from the beginning. Everything was perfectly organized, and I enjoyed not having to worry about anything, for once. In Lima, we visited the archives of the two large newspapers, La Prensa and El Comercio. Here I saw photos of another LANSA crash, the one near Cuzco, pictures of corpses on a field that were so horrible that they could not be published at the time. The bodies were battered, twisted and contorted from the impact, and the sight shocked me profoundly, for I, of course, could not help thinking constantly of my own accident and in what condition the people must have been who had not been as lucky as I was.
It really was a strange journey the director took me on. To persuade me to get on an airplane again, twenty-seven years after my accident, that flew the exact same route as the one on which I crashed was still relatively simple. After all, I had already had to take that flight several times since then to save time getting to the jungle. But he even put me in the same seat as on the LANSA plane out of which I fell from the sky back then: row 19, seat F. Actually, I would have preferred to have traveled by bus, for here, too, a great deal had changed since the days of my youth, and now it took “only” twenty hours from Lima to Pucallpa. But Werner Herzog is a man with great powers of persuasion, and so I changed my mind and agreed to fly with him. Today I’m glad I did so. For if the filmmaker had not brought me face-to-face with that part of my past and drawn me closer to the public again, who knows whether I would now be capable of advocating this way for Panguana to a larger audience?
So I overcame my fear. And on camera we flew over the spot where it had happened. Werner Herzog used that moment, of course, and interviewed me: At that exact point I recounted how I had experienced the crash. And fortunately it went so well on the first try, we didn’t have to repeat it. My husband was at my side the whole time, and that was enormously important for me. I believe that you can tell in this film how much we support each other, how much we’re there for each other when the other needs it.
On the way from Pucallpa to the jungle, I experienced many a surprise. Along the new Carretera Marginal de la Selva, the forest was being cleared everywhere. With saw and fire civilization was boring its way into the wilderness. My heart bled, for I knew quite well how much life perished in the flames. Meanwhile, an iron bridge had been built across the Río Shebonya, the river I followed; and a couple miles from it, a woman from the Andes had opened a kiosk, where we stopped to get something to drink. I did not believe my eyes when I saw what she had leaned against the outside of the house: It was actually a fully intact door from the LANSA plane, which someone must have brought here. On it the Indian woman had written in flawed Spanish: Juliana’s door. This enterprising woman had apparently realized immediately what a magical appeal this relic of my past would have. Indeed, everyone I talk to about it calls this kiosk, which has meanwhile grown into a small grocery store that sells drinks, “The Door.” Of course, Werner Herzog filmed me there. Whenever I’ve passed by since then, the people accompanying me say, “Juliane, stand there for a moment, please,” and they take a photo. That still feels strange to me. I find
it unpleasant, because for me it’s not a tourist attraction, but a door through which ninety-one people went to their deaths, including my mother. I was the only survivor. And that has preoccupied me a great deal ever since.
That door changes constantly: each time I come by, it looks different. Something new is written on it, or something is painted over. For example, written on it recently was: This is the door through which Jhuliana escaped. Which is, of course, not true. Once the owner of the kiosk heard that she had misspelled my name and the date was incorrect, she took me aside and said: “Now you have to write down your name correctly for me, so that I can do it right.” And those are the moments when everything comes up in me. Have things already come so far that someone can do business so directly with the horror of that time? And then they are back again, the feelings of those days, even if only for brief moments.
Of course, I quickly push all that back down. For people can’t help it, and, of course, they don’t mean any harm. And I realize how deadened I’ve become since then, out of sheer consideration and understanding. Was there ever actually a time in which there was space for my original, unbridled feelings, uncensored by rationality? I was preoccupied with these questions as I traveled on toward Panguana with Werner Herzog’s film crew.
I had not been back to Panguana for fourteen years. Until recently the presence of the terrorist organization Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru in the area had made any trip into a life-threatening risk. Meanwhile, the original houses in which I had lived with my parents had decayed. My father had hired Moro to build a new guesthouse: a wooden hut on stilts, like all the houses here in the rain forest, with three small rooms and a covered terrace. Now I could take a close look at it for the first time. My husband and I stayed with Moro’s family, who had relocated their farm to the edge of Panguana’s grounds, so that they could better look after everything. And the not-exactly-small film crew managed to pile into the rooms of the guesthouse and onto the deck.
When I Fell From the Sky Page 12