That account, when it surfaces, will complete a story that Vesna Vulović lived in one dimension and never fully knew in another. She knew what happened to her body. She did not know, with certainty, who had caused it to happen. The full story of January 26, 1972, belongs to both: the woman who survived it and the twenty-seven who did not, the perpetrators whose names are named in archives and have not yet been tested in a court, the villager who heard screaming in the snow, and the forested slope in Bohemia where, against all expectation, someone was still alive inside the wreckage.
## The People Who Were Not Saved: A Necessary Reckoning
Any full account of Vesna Vulović and JAT Flight 367 must contend with an asymmetry that is easy to lose in the narrative momentum of a survival story: the story of the person who survived is the story that gets told. The stories of the twenty-seven people who did not survive are, in almost every treatment of the case, background material — names without faces, casualties without narratives.
The press coverage in January 1972 included reporting on the crash victims. Twenty-three passengers and five crew members died when the aircraft broke apart. Their names were recorded in the official reports. Their families were notified. In the weeks following the crash, they were mourned by the people who had known them.
In the fifty-four years since, they have faded from the narrative in the way that crash victims typically fade — present in the official casualty count, absent from the story that circulates. The crash of JAT Flight 367 is known, in popular memory and in aviation history, as the crash from which Vesna Vulović survived. It is not known, primarily, as the crash in which twenty-three passengers and four other crew members died.