Survival

Fourteen-year-old snowboarder Jeff Thornton, who survived six days lost and dazed in the San Gabriel Mountains, ate his first meal in a week Saturday as doctors reported that his condition has improved. "His vital signs are stable," said Jean Palmer, spokeswoman for Foothill Presbyterian Hospital in Glendora. "He is in good spirits, and he has enjoyed his first meal." Palmer would not comment on Thornton's frostbite, which doctors said Friday night caused "a lot of pain" to his hands and feet.

They went looking Friday for a body in the snow--and with it a sense of closure for those thought to be praying in vain for the lost teenage snowboarder from Brawley. "That's one of the reasons we thought we were going out today," said Tom Burhenn, president of the Sierra Madre Search and Rescue Team. "But we had closure of a different kind, a much better kind." More like the incredible, headline-grabbing kind.

He hung on through 70-mph winds, when the driving snow made it impossible to see. He hung on through deep black nights of subfreezing cold, lost at 5,600 feet in the San Gabriel Mountains. He hung on long after he had lost track of time, through miles of aimless wandering, through days of snowfall so heavy and hopeless that rescue teams stayed home. And on Friday the 13th, after six days and nights in the steep, forested canyons near Wrightwood, 14-year-old Jeff Thornton came out alive.

On Monday, Rena Drexler will share her life story with complete strangers--a tale about suffering and hate, about injustice and death. It has become a common ritual in her life, but the pain remains as strong as it was more than 50 years ago when she was a prisoner at the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz, Poland.

By the time Daniel Chanoch landed on the shores of Haifa with a bruise-blue number tattooed on his forearm, he had lost his Lithuanian parents and sister to the Nazis and had worked as a pimp, providing Hungarian girls to American GIs liberating Europe. He was 13--the age at which a Jewish boy officially becomes a man. More than half a century later, Chanoch, 65, is a proud grandfather and businessman whose green eyes reflect what he calls his "unrealistic optimism."

A neat towel rests over what is left of her legs and a wide scar appears on her hand where a finger used to be, but Ana Maria Garcia Serrano, 30, who survived a near-fatal battle with flesh-eating bacteria in February, says her spirit is intact. "I am fine, and even through all of this, I never lost my sense of humor," she said, explaining how neither she nor her husband, Roberto, have permitted themselves to become depressed. Sinking into despair, they said, would mean they might never recover.

It was five years ago when Andrea Brone was kidnapped, beaten, raped, sodomized and stabbed 42 times by a man who lived in her neighborhood. Her attacker left her for dead when he abandoned her body in a trash container in an apartment alley. But Brone, 26, survived the attack and now devotes her time sharing her experience with others.

On July 24, Dr. Norman Bravo returned home from work in time for his son Adam's ninth birthday celebration. Bravo usually organizes games for such events, but in the heat of summer, with a hint of solace in the evening, he decided to take the children on a hike down the hill from their Lake Arrowhead home. He grabbed his walking stick and led them down, telling a ghost story about a family from long ago that still lived in the woods.

Tuesday, 37 days after Christopher James survived a botched physics experiment that exploded in his face at a Newhall high school, the 17-year-old walked out of the Grossman Burn Center. "There was a period of time . . . when I wasn't sure if Chris was going to survive," said Dr. Peter H. Grossman, son of burn center founder A. Richard Grossman. "I wasn't sure, but Chris was."

Jack Ratz closes his eyes and he is a boy again, running with his brothers along the streets of Riga, Latvia. They are playing stickball down the street from their house, which doubles as their father's tailor shop. Their mother is calling them to get cleaned up for dinner. Then the nightmare takes over. Tanks rumble into the city, cracking the stone streets. Jack and his family are herded into a ghetto. Firing squads kill his mother and brothers; their bodies are buried in unmarked mass graves.