Gustavo Zerbino Stajano

My name is Gustavo Zerbino. I am one of the 16 survivors of a disaster that occurred in the Andes in 1972. 

I was 19 years old. I was going to play rugby in a team called El Christians. We were flying on vacation from Montevideo to Santiago de Chile, but unfortunately, we never got there. 

At a speed of 600 kilometers per hour we crashed into a volcano, the one in the center of the Andes Mountains. The plane broke into thousands of pieces, and we fell into a valley called the Valley of Tears, at a 4,400-meter altitude. We had to live and survive for 73 days and 73 nights, surviving temperatures of minus 30 and minus 40 degrees Celsius. Minus 40 degrees! Without clothes, without food. 

Each of us lost ten kilograms or so in just one day. During one night, the body goes into a hypercatabolic state in order to maintain its temperature of 36.5 degrees. First, the fat is burned, then the muscles, then the bones. It's like a deflating balloon. 

In other words, since we didn't die and continued to live, the body was still burning calories trying to raise the temperature above 36.5 degrees, because under 36 degrees you get hypothermia and die. 

At that altitude there was no grass or lichen growing, we had no food. At first each of us drank a scoop of wine, ate one peanut and chocolate, a small piece of chocolate. We also ate cream - feminine hair fixer.  We tried everything, and we were so hungry that we had to choose between life and death. And we decided that we wanted to live. We made a deal that we were a team. And we said that we were willing to sacrifice the body of our dead comrade so that his friends could live on.  

And when we all agreed on this, we started discussing how we were going to do it. In order to make a decision, you first have to overcome psychological taboos, religious taboos, physiological  and emotional taboos. 

So when we were ready to do that...  Saying that was one thing, but doing that with our own hands was quite another one. The body was frozen in sub-zero temperatures. We didn't have any tools. With a piece of glass, a piece of tin or metal from the airplane we first had to try to cut the pants. It was like taking a lamb from the freezer. It was as hard as a marble statue. So it was very difficult. It was a really tough taboo at first, but by the next day we crossed the line, and this became natural for us. 

However, there are two things I want to tell you. First, there is no such thing as hunger. When you don't eat, your body begins to digest itself. You start synthesizing enzymes, protease to digest protein, lipase to digest fat, amylase to digest starch. So what you feel as unbearable is actually thirst. It is thirst. We were getting water from snow, we were chewing it, and our gums were bursting, our mouths, our lips were bursting from chewing ice. Until we invented a machine for obtaining water. The thirst was unbearable. We drank water and immediately urinated because there was no salt in it. 

One molecule of salt is what holds four molecules of water. So we were drinking water and losing sodium, potassium, and magnesium. The color of our urine was similar to the color of Coca-Cola. And there came exhaustion. We were completely exhausted. We kept pushing and pushing away the threshold of pain, the threshold of anguish and the pain of hopelessness. We went through the most unbelievable hell one can imagine, but since we had no choice we had to deal with that.