Vulović herself did not often speak about who had done this to her. Her public engagement was with the consequences of the crash — with her survival, her recovery, her record — rather than with the question of responsibility for the event itself. Whether she had views about the perpetrators that she kept private is not something the historical record reveals.
What the record does reveal is a life defined not by victimhood but by activity. She made choices — to oppose Milošević when it was dangerous to do so, to continue traveling by air when others would have found that impossible, to describe herself as an optimist when the material circumstances of her later life gave her grounds for resentment. The choices were hers, and they are part of what makes the story of Vesna Vulović something more than the story of a remarkable physical survival.
The crash gave her a second life. She used it.
## The Language of Survival: How Vulović Talked About What Happened
The interviews Vesna Vulović gave across five decades — to aviation journalists, to Serbian press, to foreign correspondents, to documentary filmmakers — constitute a substantial body of testimony. She was not a reluctant subject. She had strong opinions, a sharp tongue, and a willingness to discuss what had happened with a directness that interviewers consistently found striking. But the way she talked about the crash was shaped, always, by the fundamental gap at the center of her experience: she had no memory of it.
What this produced was a distinctive interview register. She could speak with complete authority about her life before January 26, 1972 — her childhood, her decision to join JAT, her delight at the Copenhagen layover she had been looking forward to. She could speak with complete authority about her life after she woke in the hospital, saw her parents, and began the long process of understanding what had happened. But the event itself — the forty-six minutes of Flight 367 between Copenhagen and the Bohemian hills, the detonation, the fall, the landing, the screaming in the wreckage that Bruno Honke heard — existed for her entirely as a secondhand narrative.