Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [104]
Next, Olian tried swimming between the ice blocks. He had been a powerful swimmer in high school and still swam several days a week. He plowed his arms through the water, but got nowhere. The plane had shattered the ice, but the fragments were still too close together to allow him to pass through. “It was like a jigsaw puzzle. Every piece was in exactly the right place.”
Plans A, B, and C had all failed. “I’m getting into the Greek alphabet, and I’m beginning to think I’m in trouble.” So Olian did the least elegant thing he could do. He threw himself up on an ice block, then crawled across it and fell back into the water. He did this over and over again, slowly working his way toward the wreckage. Every couple minutes, he yelled to the passengers: “Hold on. I’m coming!”
When Olian entered the water, his temperature was probably about 98.6 degrees, or normal. For a while, his body could keep his core at that temperature through the constriction of his blood vessels and the hard work of swimming. As he began to cool further, though, his temperature began to drop. The Potomac was one degree cooler than the coldest water used in the Dachau experiments. In general, doctors consider patients in need of treatment when their temperatures drop below 95 degrees—and in danger of dying below 90 degrees. Below 87 degrees, the rhythm of the heart becomes abnormal. At Dachau, the Nazis concluded that death becomes almost certain below 75 degrees.
Olian didn’t know the people he was trying to rescue. I asked him if he experienced any feelings of doubt or regret as he thrashed about in the water, his body lacerated by cold. “I wondered vaguely if I would ever regain use of my hands,” he says. “But some switch in my head said, ‘It doesn’t matter. Keep going.’” Olian admits he was not behaving logically. “If rational thought had entered my head at any point, I wouldn’t have done it.”
If you ask heroes why they did what they did, they invariably say they had no choice. How could they watch a man drown? Or starve? Or burn to death? Heroes are universally uncomfortable with the label. They attribute their actions to the situation, rather than their own profile. “I am just a guy who happened to be somewhere and do something,” says Olian. “If it happened again next week, it might not work out so well.”
But at the Flight 90 crash site, there was a control group. At least a couple dozen people did not jump in. That was a fair decision. If they had, there may have been even more casualties that day. But what was the difference between Olian and everyone else?
It’s not, Olian assures me, that he is such a great guy. “A lot of people may not even like me,” he says, laughing. “I’m always mad at someone for something.” He is not particularly optimistic about his fellow humans. “Ordinary human behavior generally sucks.” Had the crash not happened, he would have been stuck in traffic, he says, swearing at the people around him instead of trying to save them.
Profiling a Hero
Over the past twenty-five years, sociologist Samuel Oliner and his wife, Pearl Oliner, have interviewed more than four hundred documented heroes—all people who risked their lives to rescue Jews during the Holocaust. The Oliners also interviewed seventy-two other people who were living in the same countries at the same time and did not save anyone. They asked them every imaginable question: Did your father belong to any political party when you were growing up? What was your