The people who knew her from her opposition activism in the 1990s describe someone who understood the stakes and made her choice deliberately. She was not naive about what Milošević represented or what opposing him could mean. She had been, by the 1990s, a public figure for twenty years. She understood how public figures could be managed, pressured, and punished by the state. She had seen it happen to others. She chose to stand on the wrong side of the government anyway.
In the account she gave in the 2008 election campaign interview — the quote about the choice being too stark to remain silent — she expressed the logic clearly. She had thought she was done with politics. The specific political moment of the 2008 elections, in which the question of Serbia’s EU membership path was on the ballot in a meaningful way, struck her as requiring her participation. She was sixty years old, in declining health, on a modest pension. She went out and campaigned anyway.
The combination of these two kinds of extraordinary in one life is not common. Most people who survive extraordinary physical events do not subsequently do anything particularly notable with the years they were given back. Most people who demonstrate political courage in difficult circumstances do not also happen to be the holders of a world record for surviving the highest documented fall without a parachute. Vulović’s life contained both, and they are both part of what the historical record is preserving.
## The Mechanics of Amnesia: What She Lost and What It Meant