Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
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“Get over it.”
Most survivors don't waste a lot of time lamenting mistakes and losses.
They move on and deal with the situation, unhampered by paralyzing regrets and dis-
appointments.
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“Bad patients.”
Bernie Siegal, founder of Exceptional Cancer Patients, observed that
survivors who beat the odds against cancer and other life-threatening diseases were
usually “bad patients.” These patients typically questioned their doctors and took an
active role in their recovery, whereas “good patients” did just as they were told, ques-
tioned very little, and often died right on schedule.
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Rule followers.
Like the “bad patients,” survivors are generally not good “rule fol-
lowers.” Many of the victims of the 9/11 World Trade Center collapse were told by
security guards that the second tower was safe and to return to their offices. Others
were told by firefighters to stay put until they returned and escorted them out. In his
topic,
Deep Survival
, Laurence Gonzales tells the story of Julianne Koepcke, a
seventeen-year-old teenage girl who survived the mid-flight breakup of an airplane
over the Peruvian rain forest. Ill equipped and without any survival training, she took
eleven days to find her way out of the jungle to a hunting cabin and rescue. During
the same period of time, a dozen adult survivors of the same crash “followed the
rules,” stayed put, and died while waiting for rescue (Gonzales 2004, 172-74).
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My father-in-law, Joseph Jussen, was a resistance fighter in World War II and a Dutch soldier during the Indonesian
revolution. He was credited with saving many Jewish, Dutch, and Indonesian lives with numerous courageous acts of
resistance and sabotage. In the first part of 1943, Joseph was captured while driving a truckload of smuggled food for
the resistance, and accused of being a saboteur and an “enemy of the people.” Such accusations were usually followed
by execution. He was imprisoned, and routinely tortured, for a period of six and a half months as they attempted to
crack his spirit and force him to release the names of his friends in the underground. When he passed out, they would
revive him with buckets of ice water and begin the torture again. Faithfully Joseph stuck to his story that he worked
alone and had no accomplices, because he knew that if he cracked, he would be sentencing his friends and comrades
to a similar fate of torture and death. In an effort to break his spirit, on three separate occasions he was placed in front
of a firing squad and shot with blank cartridges. Joseph never gave up. Finally, when they realized that they could not
break him, he was sentenced to death in a public trial held by the puppet government under the control of the Nazis. A
friend of Joseph's was sitting in the audience during the trial. He caught Joseph's eye and winked at him. On the day
scheduled for his execution, several resistance fighters disguised as Nazi officers boldly walked into the prison where
Joseph was held and requested to “take the prisoner to the yard for execution.” When he got to the prison yard, instead
of the anticipated firing squad, they surprised Joseph by hoisting him to the top of the tall prison yard wall. Joseph leapt
to the sidewalk below, breaking both ankles, and was carried into a waiting getaway car. The authorities posted his
picture throughout the area, so for the next year, until the liberation of Europe by Allied Forces, he was unable to show
his face in the light of day.
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Intuition: A Survivor's Powerful Ally
