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A Downed Pilot Who Ran Away in a Stolen Enemy Plane and Other Historic Escapes

Khalid Elhassan September 13, 2020 28 min

A P=51 making a low level pass on a German airplane. Art Station

21. How Many Times Can a Man Escape Death?

The Grim Reaper must have grown frustrated with his many failed attempts to gather in Frane Selek. Pinterest

For as long as Frane Selak can remember, the Grim Reaper seems to have been out to get him. Yet he somehow managed to escape his clutches time after time. Born in Croatia, Selak has often been labeled the world’s luckiest unlucky man. Unlucky because he faced more than his fair share of horrific mishaps and accidents. Lucky because he survived and managed to escape with his life – and some of those accidents were of a type that nobody had any business surviving.

Selak’s record of mishaps includes being in a train that derailed and plunged into a river. He was in a bus that skidded off a road and fell into a river. He was blown out of an airplane. His car erupted into flames while he was driving – twice. He was hit by a bus. His car hit a guardrail and plunged 300 feet off a cliff.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.