People
Lost in the Jungle: The Story of Juliane Diller
Juliane Diller was the only person to survive a plane crash in eastern Peru in 1971. photo
© Carsten Koall/dpa
At 17, she was the only person to survive a plane crash in Peru. That was in 1971. For days she held her own in the jungle. How she was saved.
The rescue of four Colombian children from the Amazon rainforest is reminiscent of the story by Juliane Diller. The German-Peruvian, then with the last name Koepcke, was the only person to survive a plane crash in eastern Peru at the end of 1971 at the age of 17. She then held her own in the jungle for ten days before being rescued.
She benefited significantly from the fact that she grew up with her parents on a research station in the Peruvian rainforest and was familiar with this environment, as she told the podcast “Durchfechter” in December 2018. “It was never a green hell for me,” she emphasizes. “It was a habitat that I knew how to appreciate.”
After the crash, she recalled her father’s advice: If she ever got lost in the jungle, she should find a watercourse and follow it downstream – in the hope of encountering people at some point.
That’s what she did, mostly wading, swimming or drifting. In the rivers, she describes, stingrays buried in the mud posed a greater danger than the many caimans or piranhas. Therefore, when wading in the water, she always groped her way with a stick. Eventually she found a boat on the shore and stayed with it. There she was found and rescued by forest workers.
In 1998, Werner Herzog made the documentary “Juliane’s fall into the jungle” (alternative title: “Schwingen der Hoffnung”) based on the story. To this day, Diller is committed to protecting the rainforest.
Podcast Juliane Diller Panguana Research Station Juliane Diller on the Panguana IMDB website for a film by Werner Herzog