Putting her backpack down, she climbed over the fence and jumped into the rushing waters of the Danube below: The 16-year-old girl was the 29th attempted suicide to be saved by Renato Grbic, a Belgrade fisherman and restaurant owner.
On that October day “she was lucky that I was nearby with a friend to pull her out,” said her rescuer, an athletic 55-year-old.
“I was sitting in my taverna when a neighbor ran in and said someone had jumped from the bridge. So I took my boat... I pulled her out,” Grbic said in an interview.
Built in 1946, the Pancevo Bridge has the notorious distinction of being a hot spot for Belgrade’s most desperate. Until 2014, the road and rail bridge was the only crossing point over the Danube River in the Serbian capital and was spared during the 1999 NATO bombing campaign against Serbia over its war with ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
The city’s central Brankov Bridge is another draw for suicide bids, but the Sava River flowing underneath “is a pool” compared with the Danube, said Grbic.
The mighty Danube might conjure up romantic visions of epic waterway tours through enchanting European countryside in some of the 10 countries it flows through.
However, Europe’s second-longest river will carry anyone who wants to jump into it for many kilometres and in winter, its temperature is barely above 0?C.
“Life expectancy” before fatal hypothermia “is 15 to 20 minutes,” Grbic said, whose family of river fishermen has lived at their waterside residence for four generations.
On the section where his tavern, At Renato and Goca, is located, the Danube is almost 1km wide. In the winter mist, it is hard to make out even the other side of the bank.
Some victims die of cardiac arrest when jumping or hitting the water about 20m down, such as a 73-year-old man two years ago.
“Those who survive have a survival reflex. They scream, swim,” Grbic, a married, father-of-three grown-up sons, said.
Every year the authorities register 25 to 30 suicide attempts off Belgrade bridges.
“But these are only registered cases,” said Sasa Knezevic, deputy chief of Belgrade’s river police unit, adding the figures peak toward the end of the summer.
Police usually act to prevent suicides when they spot potential cases through video surveillance, but the closest river police station is about 15 minutes upstream, said Grbic.
“I have known Renato forever,” Knezevic said. “If it was not for him, many people would not be saved after jumping into the river.”
Grbic said he spent 90 percent of his time fishing.
His 29 rescues of Pancevo Bridge jumpers span about two decades and his efforts have won him official recognition.
A wall in his restaurant is adorned with elaborate certificates for bravery awarded by local authorities, as well as newspaper articles about him. He was also among around 200 Serbs recognized for their outstanding achievements in 2008.
Serbia is in the top third of European countries with the highest number of suicides, at 16.8 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the most recent WHO data for 2012.
Grbic believes that most suicide attempts are a cry for help since, he says, most jump in the daytime.
“They want to be seen, they want to alert,” he said.
Those who really want to die opt for the Brankov Bridge for its concrete river banks, he said.
As far as he knows, Grbic says that out of the 29 people whom he has saved, only one, a postman, did it again and ended his life by going for the concrete.
The first person he rescued was a young man “about 17 or 18 years ago.”
“It took me several attempts and I literally begged him to give me a hand” to pull him out, Grbic said.
He often wonders about what has become of those he has saved.
However, only two young women out of the 29 got back in touch.
One of them, now a mother, “understood that life was worth much more than what she wanted to do.”
A psychiatrist, who once came to the restaurant, “told me that... those people were eternally grateful, but were embarrassed to face me.”
“Nevertheless, I would really like to know something about them ... that I offered them a second life and that they kept living,” he said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema