Out of the Silence: After the Crash (2012, English version 2019) is the memoir of a survivor of the 1972 Andes Mountains plane crash with 45 people on board, including the Uruguay rugby team.
Thirty-three people survived the initial crash of the flight that left Montevideo bound for Chile. This is the truth of the 72 days on the mountain after the crash, and what the survivors have to do to continue living—at 3,500 metres (11,700 feet) in freezing, treacherous conditions.
The silence refers to the author’s long silence in talking about it. It also refers to the first silence, straight after the crash, before the moaning and acknowledgement of survivors. It also refers to the silence of death.
A mountain climber finds Eduardo Strauch Urioste’s wallet near the crash site in 2005 and returns it to him. This is the impetus for Strauch, who was twenty-five at time of the crash, to break his silence and write about the tragedy, and the rescue, and how it changed his life forever.
Thinking they would be rescued the next day, the crash tests the limit of each person’s moral identity, integrity, resilience, determination, and spirituality: ‘most of us had never faced a decision more difficult than what subject to study at school, whether to start or end a relationship, whether to accept or reject a job offer.’ After the crash, their decisions meant life or death. There were individual decisions to be made, and decisions that must be made by the remaining group.
An avalanche killed eight, and weeks later, two men—Nando and Roberto—set off on yet another exploratory trek to find help (the previous attempts were aborted).
Despite several books and movies about the tragedy, Strauch writes his own personal account of the ‘quiet but continual battle between fear and hope.’ Half of the book is about the mountain and how he survived, and the other half is about his life after the rescue of the final 16 that survived.
Decades after the crash, love, family, and friendship are the main themes. And time and transcendence. And the elements and nature.
This well-told, easy-to-read memoir is both interesting and revealing in its honesty and poignancy.
MARTINA NICOLLS
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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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