How could people survive after this terrible experience? We chose to tell you the story that struck us the most: that of Micaela Coletti, who was 12 years old when the tragedy occured. Today she is the President of the Vajont survivors’ commitee, and she has told many times what happened that night.  She lost her parents, her grandmother, two brothers and one sister.

For many years, her brain refused to accept what had happened: Micaela was convinced she was living in a sort of nightmare, and that she would eventually wake up from that dreaming conditions. Something in her unconscious dimension activated a defensive mechanism, that made her replace reality with a less painful alternative. In her opinion, she was living something that it was too absurd to be real, and she thought she would wake up from that absurdity sooner or later. It took her 6 years to understand that she was living a real life: when she turned 18, she lost the child she was expecting, on the same day of Vajont tragedy. All of a sudden she realized that what had happened to her had been real. Terrible and shocking, but real.