She survived something that should not have been survivable. That fact is now part of the permanent record.
## Srbská Kamenice: The Place That Received the Wreckage
The physical location of the crash — the village of Srbská Kamenice and its surrounding landscape in the Děčín District of what is now the Czech Republic — is an often-overlooked element of the story. The landscape that received the wreckage of JAT Flight 367 was not an abstraction or a set of favorable conditions; it was a specific place with a specific community.
Srbská Kamenice is a small municipality in northern Bohemia, situated in a landscape that was heavily forested and hilly in 1972 and remains so today. In January 1972, it was part of Czechoslovakia — a Warsaw Pact state, politically very different from the Yugoslavia whose airline’s aircraft fell into its territory. The people of the village and surrounding community found themselves, on the afternoon of January 26, 1972, in the middle of an international aviation disaster.
Bruno Honke, the villager who found Vulović and administered first aid, was an ordinary citizen with an extraordinary background — the wartime medic training that made him the right person to be first at the scene. The community he was part of received what the explosion sent down: wreckage, the bodies of twenty-seven people, and one screaming survivor.
The community’s connection to the event was formalized in the honorary citizenship they gave Vulović. She visited Srbská Kamenice in subsequent years, and her relationship with the community and with the Czech Republic was a sustained one — an acknowledgment of the geographical bond that the crash had created between her and this place she had never intended to visit.