The woman who holds the record was a specific person with a specific life: a young woman from Belgrade who joined an airline because a uniform caught her eye, who found herself on a flight she was not originally assigned to, who survived something she has no memory of surviving, who woke in a hospital room in Czechoslovakia to see her parents’ faces and had to be told what had happened to her, who walked again after ten months of rehabilitation, who worked for twenty years negotiating freight contracts, who stood in the streets of Belgrade in the 1990s when it was dangerous to do so, who addressed crowds from a balcony in 2000, who was found in her apartment in December 2016 by locksmiths called by friends who were worried about her silence.
The flight was a commercial aircraft carrying twenty-eight people from Copenhagen to Zagreb on the afternoon of January 26, 1972. It was destroyed by a bomb. Twenty-seven of the twenty-eight people aboard died. The one who did not die spent forty-four years using the life she had been given back in ways that the record alone does not capture.
All three of these things — the record, the woman, the flight — belong together in any honest accounting of what happened and what it meant. The record is the reason most people know the name. The woman is the reason the name deserves to be known beyond the record. The flight is the reason twenty-seven families have been waiting, for more than five decades, for an accounting that has not yet fully come.