This limitation has shaped how she has discussed the event across many interviews over five decades. She is consistently straightforward about what she remembers and does not remember. She does not pretend to recall details she has only been told. In the culture of survival narrative — in which eyewitness accounts are often embellished and the pressure to provide vivid recollection is significant — her consistency in acknowledging the limits of her memory represents a form of integrity.
The honest account of her experience begins, for her, with the hospital room and her parents. Everything before that — the flight, the bomb, the fall, Bruno Honke, the surgery — is history that happened to her body while her mind was elsewhere. The history is real; the memory is absent.
Investigators who have reconstructed the event have done so from physical evidence: the flight recorders, the wreckage, the forensic analysis of the debris, the accounts of the people who were present at the crash scene. Those reconstructions are the basis for what we know about how the aircraft broke apart and how the fuselage section landed. They are the product of careful technical investigation, not of eyewitness testimony from the person who was inside the wreckage.
The combination of these two knowledge sources — the forensic reconstruction and Vulović’s own testimony about her life before and after the event — is what makes it possible to tell the story at all. Neither is complete alone. The physical evidence tells us what happened to the aircraft and the wreckage; Vulović’s testimony tells us who the person inside the wreckage was, what she had been before the crash, and what she chose to do with the years the crash gave back to her.