Survival

In his 89 years, Sol Berger has gone by many names. He started life in Poland as Salomon Berger, then became Jan Jerzowski. Then he was Ivan Marianowicz Jerzowski, then Shlomo Harari, then Sol. During World War II and its aftermath, the names kept him safe, protected him from the concentration camps and eventually allowed him to seek refuge in the United States.

A young woman walked into a restaurant last week and sat close enough to get a good look at Anne Hjelle's face. A mountain lion had torn off the left side four years before, leaving it hanging by a flap of skin. Six surgeries hadn't camouflaged the scars. "She saw me and had a deer-in-the-headlights look," said Hjelle, 35, of Mission Viejo. "She quickly got up and moved so she didn't have to look at me." The stranger's reaction didn't hurt Hjelle's feelings.

Deng Rufu sits on a rock watching the exodus of his people from their ravaged homeland. A young Qiang man with a sweating brow carries his 82-year-old grandmother on a wooden contraption strapped to his back. Another elderly woman climbs painfully with a hand-carved walking stick. A little girl in pink sneakers lags behind the rest. "At this point, we don't know how many we've lost," Deng said as he tapped on one of the few items he'd salvaged, a traditional sheepskin drum.

Abu Hassan took deep breaths of joy as he crossed the double-decker bridge spanning the Tigris River. The water below may have stunk of sewage. The air may have been choked with traffic fumes. It didn't matter to Abu Hassan. He was free after nearly a year hidden inside his house, the only place he had felt safe from the gunmen and killers who had taken over his neighborhood in south Baghdad.

When Patti Waggoner saw a baby-size tuxedo displayed in a department store, she didn't think "wedding" or "baptism" or any sort of celebration. "My first thought was, 'Oh, a little casket suit,' " she says. There's a bleak side to this 36-year-old survivor of Hodgkin's lymphoma from Valley Village. Her skin is pale, her nails painted black. Tattoos circle her ankles and run down her back and upper arms: of pirates, bats and the seven deadly sins.

When Nicholas Rice awoke just before midnight July 31, he was confident that the next day he would stand on the summit of K2, the world's second-highest mountain and the most challenging to climb. The forecast was for good weather, and after some earlier health issues, Rice was feeling strong. The 23-year-old climber from Hermosa Beach planned to climb K2 as he had other Himalayan peaks, alone and without supplemental oxygen.

Edwards Lifesciences Corp.'s minimally invasive heart valve kept 94% of patients alive a month after surgery, the best results yet for a technology that may grow into a $1.3-billion market for medical device makers. The death rate was half that in past studies of Sapien, a $30,000 valve that can be implanted without open-heart surgery. In another trial, closely held CoreValve Inc. reported a 93% survival rate after 30 days for its device.

Straddling a wooden crate filled with $1 million in cash ransom, a cranky old pirate bellows names from a notebook as his anxious, bleary-eyed minions lean against the stone walls of their cramped hide-out. The grizzled buccaneer, chain-smoking Marlboros as he taps into his calculator, checks the notebook again for outstanding loans or fines before counting out each man's share of the bounty in musty $100 bills paid to release a hijacked Thai ship off the Somali coast.

Danny Lloyd was hit by a rocket and a mortar round while serving in Vietnam, and to this day, he can't go through an airport metal detector because of the shrapnel lodged in his body. Still struggling with his Vietnam demons in 1984, Lloyd got into a bar fight, during which he was stabbed in the chest. Police later accused him of assaulting several patrons, attempting to kill one man with a knife and shooting at another. He eventually served time after pleading guilty to some of the charges.

JOHAN looked up. Jenna was running toward him. She had yelled something, he wasn't sure what. Then he saw it. The open mouth, the tongue, the teeth, the flattened ears. Jenna ran right past him, and it struck him -- a flash of fur, two jumps, 400 pounds of lightning. It was a grizzly, and it had him by his left thigh. His mind started racing -- to Jenna, to the trip, to fighting, to escaping. The bear jerked him back and forth like a rag doll, but he remembered no pain, just disbelief.