“I thought that if I died, I would be proud that my body would be used for someone else,” Dr. Roberto Canessa said in a new interview.
Survivors of a plane crash in the Andes in 1972, said the upcoming Netflix movie Society Snow he brought him back to a terrible ordeal.
“I was immersed in that place again,” said Dr. Roberto Canessa Today in an interview published Thursday. “I’m back [in] body.”
At the time, Canessa was a 19-year-old medical student when the plane he and his Uruguayan rugby teammates were on crashed while on their way to a match.
Sixteen of the 45 passengers on that crashed plane survived, but they had no food and were surrounded by snow. As he detailed in his 2016 book. I had to survive: How a plane crash in the Andes inspired my calling to save livesCanessa and the other survivors resorted to eating victims who died in order to survive.
During the interview with TodayCanessa was asked about the moment the group decided they were “going to have to eat” their “loved ones.”
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“I thought I would be proud that if I died, I would be used for someone else,” Canessa said. Today fateful decisions.
Canessa wrote in his book that the survivors cut flesh from their bodies “with much torture and soul-searching” as their hopes of being rescued dwindled. “We laid thin strips of frozen meat sideways on a piece of sheet metal,” he wrote. .. “Each of us finally consumed our bit when we could bear it.”
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Canessa and another teammate came out of the mountains to get help and reached civilization about a week later. “We got in touch with the pastor,” he told PEOPLE in 2016. “He was generous enough to go and get help for us, [even though] he did not know us and no one believed that we were alive. And in this way, a very modest person saved the life of my friends.”
The survivors were rescued 72 days after the accident. “It’s not how you survive, it’s why you survive,” Canessa told PEOPLE, reflecting on how he overcame the trauma. “I very vividly remembered that my mother and I went [visit the mother of] a friend who died and she was devastated. And my mother told me: ‘If one of my children died, I wouldn’t be able to live, I would die of sadness.’ I had to go back and tell my mother: ‘Don’t cry anymore, I’m alive.’ So I think that was the driving force for me.”
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The accident was famously dramatized in the 1993 film Alive, starring Ethan Hawke. According to Todaythe latest retelling of the story was filmed at the actual crash site, putting the cast and crew in similar conditions to the survivors.
Canessa is now a pediatric cardiologist and has attended annual gatherings with other survivors and their families. In the years since the accident, he has learned from that ordeal. “You shouldn’t wait for your plane to crash to enjoy and be grateful for life,” he previously told PEOPLE.
Society Snow will open in theaters next month and will begin streaming on Netflix on January 4.
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Source: HIS Education