Chilling Netflix film Society of the Snow is a retelling of the 1972 plane crash that left the surviving passengers stranded in the Andes mountains. Their struggle to survive is a harrowing story that has been recorded in books, documentaries, and films, including 1993’s Alive and this latest account from director J.A. Bayona. One of the passengers, Numa Turcatti, is the narrator of the film and provides the audience with context and insight as the film unfolds, but sadly he does not make it out of the situation alive, succumbing to an infection from a leg injury.
What Happened to Numa Turcatti at the Andes Plane Crash?
Numa was born on October 30th, 1947, and was just twenty-four years old when he took the tragic flight in 1972. The law student was friends with some of the players in the amateur rugby team that was on board.
When the plane crashed, Numa managed somehow to escape the incident relatively unharmed and was keen to try to find some way out of the area that they had crashed in. Numa would try to find a way to get help and try hiking as far as he could to try and raise an alarm. He would take part in an expedition with Roberto Canessa and Gustavo Zerbino to try and find a way out of the valley they were in, and to try and find help.
Numa would hike for two days and make it to the top of a fourteen thousand foot mountain top, before struggling to return to their base camp. A leg injury would cause terrible problems for him. With no antibiotics to treat the wound, he would slowly become weaker, and when the terrible reality of the situation forced the survivors to eat human flesh to survive, Numa was against the decision, and could not bring himself to do it. This only led to him becoming weaker.
Numa would pass away from his weakened condition, sixty days after the crash. He was only twenty-five years old. Despite his own decision not to eat the flesh of the dead passengers, he did permit the survivors to use his body for sustenance. He had taken a page from the bible and held it in his hand. The page would read, “There is no greater love than that which gives one’s life for one’s friends.”
Survivors sitting outside the fuselage | Image via ABC News
How did Numa Turcatti Die?
The infected wound in his leg was the main reason for the death of Numa Turcatti. Numa was also one of the passengers who could not bring himself to eat the flesh of the dead passengers, and in his weakened condition, he would not be able to fight off the infection.
Why did some passengers not want to eat to survive?
Apart from the obvious reason that cannibalism was just something that some of the survivors could not process, there was also a religious reason for their initial abstinence. They felt that they would be eternally damned for committing that sin, however, eventually, they were convinced to take part when it was explained to them that eating the flesh was akin to receiving Holy Communion.
The Catholic Church would initially condemn the actions that the survivors took to survive, but they would change their stance, absolving the survivors, and recognizing that they were only able to do what they did as they had been inspired by the story of Jesus and The Last Supper, where he offers bread and wine to his disciples and calls it his body and his blood.
