She was 17 when she was the sole survivor of a plane crash in the jungle. This is how she made it back.

• Juliane Koepcke was the sole survivor of a plane crash that killed her mother in 1971.
• Then 17, she survived in the jungle in thanks to what her zoologist parents taught her.
• Her story echoes that of four children who recently survived in the Colombian jungle for 40 days.

This is a translated version of an article that originally appeared on June 13, 2023.

Completely exhausted, her shoulders sunburned, her thoughts clouded by hunger, Juliane drags herself up the riverbank. It takes her hours to cover just a few meters. Her wound on her back hurts, maggots have eaten a deep hole in her skin. But above all, she feels relief. After ten days of struggling alone through the rainforest of Peru, she finally finds what she hoped to find: a sign of human civilization. A boat and a tambo, a simple shelter made of poles and palm leaves. Her only chance of survival.

She waits in the tambo. Sleeps, hopes, waits. Occasionally, she tries to catch a frog to satisfy her hunger. In vain. Night falls, day breaks. What if no one comes? But she is too weak to go on. And then, finally, on the eleventh day, three men emerge from the forest – and look at her in shock. "I am a girl who crashed with Lansa," she says in Spanish. "My name is Juliane."

The story of Juliane Koepcke, who was 17 years old at the time and is now Juliane Diller, went around the world. The German-Peruvian survived the crash of a plane in the eastern part of Peru at the end of 1971, in which 91 people died. She then fought her way through the jungle for ten days before being rescued. Her story echoes how, five decades later, four siblings aged 13, nine, four, and one, were the only survivors of a small plane crash and struggled through the Colombian rainforest for 40 days before rescue.

The children, part of an indigenous community, survived thanks to their oldest sister. "We owe it to her and her leadership that the other three survived, thanks to her care and her knowledge of the jungle," Colombia's President Gustavo Petro said during a visit to the hospital.

Juliane also benefited from her knowledge of the laws of the jungle: She had grown up in the Peruvian rainforest on a research station with her parents, who were zoologists, and was therefore familiar with the environment. Four decades after the plane crash, Juliane herself wrote a book titled "When I Fell from the Sky: How the Jungle Saved My Life," which was translated into twelve languages.

Row 19, Seat F

It is December 24, 1971, Christmas Eve. Juliane and her mother navigate through the crowd at Lima Airport. Chaos reigns in the departure hall. Some flights had been canceled the day before, and now hundreds of people are trying to catch a plane to be home for Christmas. Among the waiting passengers is director Werner Herzog, who would meet Juliane many years later to make a documentary – "Wings of Hope" – about her experience. He plans to fly with his crew to Pucallpa for filming, the same destination as Juliane and her mother. From there, they want to continue to the Panguana Research Station, their home. They were only in the Peruvian capital for Juliane to receive her graduation certificate the day before from the school she attended there.

Unlike Herzog, mother and daughter manage to secure seats on the plane of the Peruvian airline Lansa. It is a Lockhead L-188A Electra turboprop, and as Juliane later recalls in her book, "when we finally see the plane, it appears magnificent to us. In my eyes, it looks brand new." Later it turns out: it wasn't.

The two women take their seats. Second-to-last row, number 19. Juliane is by the window, seat F, with her mother in the middle of the three-seat row. The flight from Lima to Pucallpa is supposed to take about an hour. The mood was cheerful, everyone is excited for Christmas. The flight attendants serve sandwiches.

After half an hour of flying, the euphoria disappears. Panic spreads. The plane is heading straight into a thunderstorm. Juliane later describes it as flying "right into the jaws of hell." The plane shakes and there's lightning outside. People are screaming. Luggage falls from the overhead compartments, cups are flying through the air. Juliane hears her mother say, "Now it's all over." It would be the last time she hears her voice.

The seat Juliane is strapped to tumbles through the air alone. How exactly this happened is still subject to speculation. It is likely that the plane broke apart due to a lightning strike, and the seat was ejected with her still in it.

Juliane falls. She loses consciousness. Keeps falling. She wakes up. Sees the jungle approaching. The dense tree canopies remind her of broccoli heads. She feels the belt strangling her.

When she regains consciousness, she is lying on soft jungle ground. Her body is covered in mud, her glasses are gone. Her left eye is swollen, she has a concussion and a broken collarbone, as well as multiple flesh wounds – but she is alive. She doesn't feel fear in that moment, she recalls later, but a "boundless feeling of abandonment." "I will never forget the image I saw when I opened my eyes: the treetops of the jungle giants and golden light illuminating all the shades of green," she writes about the moment she woke up.

Flowing water, a path to freedom

She searches for other survivors, especially her mother, but finds no one. The children from Colombia also lost their mother in the plane crash. They reportedly told their grandfather, after being rescued, that she had lived for four more days after the crash before she died.

Juliane doesn't find any wreckage or luggage, only a bag of fruit candies. She realizes that she must leave the crash site to survive; the canopy where she crashed is so dense that she cannot be spotted by search planes.

In her summer dress, with only one sandal on her foot and the bag of candies, Juliane sets off and soon comes across a trickle of water. This discovery fills her with great hope, she later writes in her book. This find probably saved her life. She knows that even the smallest streams usually turn into a creek, which in turn becomes a larger watercourse that eventually flows into a river.

During the day, she follows the flowing water, and at nightfall, she seeks a sheltered spot by the riverbank. the tells time by the intensity of daylight. She can hardly sleep: when it rains, the hard drops and the cold keep her awake, and when it's dry, mosquitoes and midges torment her. She thinks a lot about her mother and clings to the thought that she might have already been rescued. Besides the candies, she eats nothing. She has no knife or lighter, so she can't catch fish or cook roots. The children from Colombia were able to survive on wild mangoes and passion fruits and food packages dropped by the military over the jungle. But for Juliane, since it's the rainy season in December, there are hardly any fruits.

On the sixth day, Juliane comes across a large river. To avoid the risk of stepping on poisonous snakes or spiders, she starts by wading through the water, and later allows herself to be carried by the current in the middle of the river. Although there are caimans, she knows that they generally don't attack humans. "My advantage was: I had lived in the jungle long enough. My parents were zoologists, and there was hardly anything they hadn't shown me," she explains in her book.

Swimming, resting, hoping, doubting. The days pass by, and Juliane's strength dwindles. The sun scorches her skin, flies lay eggs in her wounds. She starts to fantasize, suddenly seeing rooftops and hearing chickens clucking. "I can hardly motivate myself anymore, knowing that I need to eat if I don't want to die. But what?" she writes later. She sits down on a gravel bank – and from there, she spots the boat with its shelter, where she is found and rescued by three loggers on January 3, 1972.

It's only decades later that she can talk about her experience. "Only recently did it become clear to me how I've lived the past 40 years: surrounded by an armor that is slowly crumbling now," she told the Süddeutsche Zeitung in 2014. Even at the crash site, she created a "shield" to keep all the "terrible things" away from her and survive in the jungle.

After the tragedy, Juliane's father sent her to her aunt in Kiel, Germany, where she completed her high school diploma. She then studied biology and earned a doctorate in bats. Later, she worked as the deputy director of the Zoological State Collection in Munich and still leads the Panguana research station in Peru, which her parents founded. In 2021, she was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit for her commitment to nature and the people of the Peruvian rainforest.

During the cold, sleepless nights in the jungle, she often pondered why she, of all people, had survived, she later said. Over time, it became clear to her: she wanted to continue her parents' life's work. "I was given a second life. I use it to protect the forest."