In October 1972, a rugby team from Montevideo went to compete in the Chilean capital, Santiago. In the plane of the Uruguayan airline, besides them, there were also passengers and five crew members - a total of 45 people. However, none of them made it to their destination. Because of the fog, the pilot made a mistake in the calculations, did not see the mountain peaks of the Argentine Andes and at an altitude of 5000 meters sent the plane directly to one of them.
When the pilots discovered their miscalculation, it was already too late: the black outlines of the mountain peak were rapidly approaching. Moments later, a jagged ridge ripped through the plane's steel skin, and the fuselage fell apart. From a terrible blow, several seats were torn off the floor and thrown out together with the passengers. Seventeen people died on the spot when the Fairchild plane crashed into a snowdrift.
The picture of the fall resembled a scene from a horror movie: blood was everywhere, the moans of the wounded, the corpses of the dead. And terrible cold!
This tragedy happened almost thirty years ago and at one time attracted the attention of the whole world. Newspapers of all countries wrote about her, and in 1973 American filmmakers shot the feature film "The Living". It recreates with documentary accuracy all the vicissitudes of the terrible misfortune that befell the passengers of the Uruguayan airliner. As a result of the plane crash, people spent two months in a snowy hell - at an altitude of four thousand meters, at a temperature of minus 40 degrees.
After the disaster, 28 people survived, but after an avalanche and long exhausting weeks of starvation, only sixteen remained.
Among the passengers of the ill-fated liner was Carlito Paez, the artist's son, who grew up (like his friends) in the wealthy suburb of Montevideo. His father tried to organize a search for the victims of the plane crash and got everyone to their feet. Rescue teams went on foot and by helicopter to search, which, unfortunately, did not lead to anything.
Days and weeks passed, and people, without warm clothes, continued to live in a forty-degree frost. The food that was stored on board the crashed plane did not last long. The scarce supplies had to be divided up bit by bit in order to stretch them out for a longer time. In the end, only the chocolate and the thimbled wine norm remained. But then they ended too. The survivors took their hunger: on the tenth day they began to eat corpses.
A sensational report of cannibalism in the Andes spread around the world in January 1973, after rescue teams dug up the graves. Many then began to make cynical jokes about cannibal rugby players: they say, they were sitting quietly on a mountain peak and - wow! - fed on the flesh of their comrades. Many were outraged. Most people wondered: is modern man really capable of such a thing? The first who decided to eat the dead was Roberto Ganessa. A medical student, besides a devout Catholic, he cut off a piece of meat from a corpse in the snow with a razor. It was not so easy: reason resisted, but hunger turned out to be stronger than reason. To the horrified comrades, he explained that their main task is to survive, and the norms of morality are the tenth thing. “This dead flesh is absolutely the same as the beef that we eat every day,” he reassured.
Promotional video:
The plot of the film "The Living" is quite simple: people who survived the plane crash have been waiting for more than two months for help to come to them. But she still does not exist, because it is simply impossible to quickly find the unfortunate among the endless Andean highlands. Nando Parrado, the best and most enduring player in his team, and Roberto Ganessa (or rather their cinematic heroes) on the fifty-eighth day went on a long journey for help. They headed in the wrong direction, carrying homemade sleeping bags (made from the upholstery of airplane seats) and a meager ration of dried human meat. And they didn’t even suspect that there was a small Argentine village just 16 kilometers east of the crash site.
Despite severe exhaustion, they managed to walk ten kilometers a day. Only on the tenth day new landscapes opened up to their eyes: instead of snow and ice, they saw sand, pebbles, a stream bubbling in the valley, bordered along the banks by thickets of stunted bushes.
Nando and Roberto couldn't believe their own eyes when they saw the first signs of another life - an empty soup can, a horse's shoe and … a man. It was an Argentinean shepherd who was scared to death by the sight of two ghosts in rags. In the film, this scene symbolizes a happy ending. helicopters are circling over the crash site and "Ave, Maria!"
But in life everything was much more complicated. The shepherd just ran away from them then, and the helicopters arrived much later, and even then they were able to take only part of the people. However, soon the happy joy of those who survived was overshadowed by a sense of shame, and then psychotherapy sessions were supposed to remove the feeling of guilt from the victims of the disaster. However, the victims themselves, despite the painful memories, were not all oppressed and not all felt special guilt for themselves. During medical sessions, they chatted about sports, joked a lot and asked psychoanalysts how they would have behaved in their place? Today, 45-year-old cardiologist Ganessa ironically recalls those days, and intersperses his stories with episodes of his favorite film - "The Silence of the Lambs" He especially likes the scene when the man-eating maniac dreams of trying a human liver and beans with good Chianti.
They returned to their old world as completely different people, and their outlook on life has changed a lot. Subsequently, Carlito Paes recalled: “Down here everyone is trying to devour his neighbor. And up there, our relationship was pure, deeply moral. Yes, yes, no matter how strange it may sound. And I would give anything in the world to relive it."
He remembers with gratitude the concern of friends there, in the Andes, and fifty-year-old farmer Kocha Inchiarte. He was so weak that he could no longer get up - and friends brought him melted snow in a bottle, a true jewel. Without their help and support, he would not have survived. Of course, not everything went smoothly for them: sometimes friends quarreled and swore if at night one stepped on the hand or face of another. They also cursed the one who inadvertently forgot to close the crack in their wretched hut, and the icy air rushed inside. However, in spite of everything, they did not hate each other, as is often the case in thrillers. On the contrary, even today, when the snow-capped peaks of the Andes rise before their eyes, tears blur the outlines of the mountain cliffs. Every year, on the day of their salvation - December 22, friends gather with families and all together revive the past in memory - endless days and nights in the Andes,when they clenched cigarettes in their cracked lips, dreamed of a homemade dinner and silently cried, regretting that they would probably never see Christmas again …
From the book: "HUNDRED GREAT DISASTERS N. A. Ionina, M. N. Kubeev"