## Srbská Kamenice Today: The Place Remembers
The Czech village of Srbská Kamenice and the surrounding area of the Děčín District maintain a connection to the events of January 26, 1972, that has been sustained across more than five decades. The place where the wreckage came down — the forested slope where Bruno Honke found Vesna Vulović screaming in the wreckage — is identifiable, memorialized, and periodically visited by those who come to remember what happened there.
The honorary citizenship that the community gave Vulović was not merely a symbolic gesture toward the survivor. It was also an acknowledgment of the community’s own relationship to the event — the fact that this specific place had received the consequences of a terrorist act targeting a Yugoslav aircraft that had nothing to do with the village or its residents. The wreckage came down there because of the route the aircraft was flying, the altitude it was at, and the wind conditions on that January afternoon. The community’s relationship to what happened was entirely involuntary, imposed by geography.
And yet the community maintained the relationship. The annual commemorations, the local memory, the honorary citizenship that Vulović held — these represent a sustained engagement with an event that the community could have allowed to recede into the background of local history. That it has not fully receded — that the crash remains part of the identity of the area — says something about how communities process their involuntary incorporation into historical events.
The Czech Republic’s political relationship to Yugoslavia and its successor states has changed dramatically since 1972 — the Czechoslovakia that received the wreckage was a Soviet-bloc state; the Czech Republic that exists today is a NATO member and a member of the European Union. The political context in which the crash occurred is entirely different from the context in which its anniversaries are now marked. The physical site of the crash exists in continuity while the political geography around it has been transformed.