Koepcke wakes up next to her bench
They are scraps of memory, fragments of the misfortune that emerge from the interviews that Koepcke gave on her way of coping with memories. These are remarkable statements from a person who not only lost his mother as a result of this misfortune, but also his previous life. Juliane Koepcke, then just 17 years old, had just celebrated her graduation the day before. One photo shows her as a small, petite woman next to a rather brawny classmate. A fashionable updo frames an open, young face. The contrast to the facial expression of the mid-40s in Herzog’s report is enormous. “I was a very sheltered girl,” but the accident “suddenly made her an adult,” she says on the podcast.
About 20 hours after the accident, Koepcke woke up lying next to her bench. Completely alone and without any sign of a fall in the thick foliage. “The jungle seems to have simply swallowed the plane and its passengers,” writes Koepcke in her book. In fact, the debris from the LANSA machine had spread over a stretch of 15 kilometers of dense forest. It is also assumed that up to twelve people survived the crash. Several of the 91 bodies that were found around two weeks later showed slight signs of decay, so that it is assumed that the people were unable to move due to their injuries after the crash, but probably lived for days.
Could they have been saved if the rescue teams had been on the scene faster? The search planes had circled unsuccessfully for ten days over the vast area that stretched from the Andes to the lowlands. The search was even canceled at the beginning of January. Koepcke’s father, who later had to identify the body of his wife Maria, assumed for a long time that she was one of the survivors. A fact that, in his opinion, the authorities were trying to cover up. Mainly because the remains of his wife were swapped when they were transported to Germany and the body he had identified disappeared.
Trees adorned with the belongings of the victims
When parts of the wreckage were discovered later, “it was a dramatic, harrowing experience,” says the director of the largest search operation in Peruvian aviation history, Juan Zaplana Ramirez, in Herzog’s documentary. “Then we saw trees hung full of pieces from the travelers’ possessions. Suitcases had opened in the air and the presents were hanging in the branches like Christmas trees. “Many of the bodies are also said to have been found in trees.
Koepcke had lost her glasses in the disaster and her left eye was also swollen shut. But above all through the noises, the bird calls, she perceived that she was in a jungle that resembled the panguanas. It later emerged that the crash site was actually only about 50 kilometers away from her parents’ research station. The fact that Juliane Koepcke accompanied her parents into the jungle as a child and last lived in Panguana for a year and a half probably saved her life. Because after she did not find any dead or survivors of the disaster or other debris, she decided to follow the small trickle of a spring. Her father had impressed on her, should she ever get lost in the jungle, she would have to look for flowing water and follow it, as it would sooner or later lead to navigable rivers and thus to human settlements.
© Getty Images / Bettmann (detail)
Juliane Koepcke at the age of 17 | The high school graduate had just finished school when the disaster struck her mother.
She was hurt a lot more than she could have realized at first. Koepcke suffered from a severe concussion, had a broken collarbone and two flesh wounds several centimeters deep, which probably did not bleed due to the shock. Except for a bag of sweets she found at the crash site, she did not eat anything, but drank a lot of water. Along a stream, she came to a river on which she could partially drift.