The fight or flight response can be a powerful instinct.
In dangerous situations, people have achieved extraordinary feats when they've decided to
stay and fight.
In many cases, adrenaline kicks in, giving people superhuman strength and an indomitable
will during a crisis.
Sometimes, it also gives us the ability to make quick decisions that help save the lives
of others even when it means sacrificing ourselves.
Ready to witness the triumph of the human spirit?
I'm Mike with List25 and Here are 25 Remarkable Feats People Have Done When In Danger!
25.
Jim Sherman Blind since birth, this hero heard his eighty-four-year-old
neighbor, who was also blind, cry for help over a baby monitor and quickly sprung into
action.
While the house was on fire, he scaled a chainlink fence and went inside the house, found the
woman, and pulled her outside.
24.
Ken Jones Imagine digging yourself out of not just one,
but TWO avalanches.
That's exactly what this mountain climber did.
After escaping the avalanches, he somehow also made it back down the mountain and 10
miles to the closest town.
Did we mention he did this with a broken leg and crushed pelvis?
He made a full recovery and started his own fitness company.
23.
Juliane Koepcke In 1971, this 17-year-old left Peru with her
mother on a plane headed for her father in the Amazon.
The plane was struck by lightning and crashed in the Amazon rainforest.
All 92 passengers died except her.
She was strapped to a row of seats that plummeted into the jungle, and somehow she survived.
Following a stream in hopes of finding civilization, she was out there for 10 days, with her wounds
filled with maggots and most of her time spent dodging crocodiles, piranhas, and insects.
Eventually, she found a shack and a boat, but rather than stealing the boat, she stayed
in the shack and was found by local lumberjacks who brought her to her father.
22.
Anthony Omari This man and his mother ran the Faraja Children's
Home in Ngong, Kenya, a place of refuge for children in a dangerous area.
They housed up to 37 children.
Omari was the only man on the premises and routinely chased off attackers.
In one case, three men wielding machetes attacked him, and he fought them off with a hammer.
Even when they struck him in the face with the machete, he kept fighting them off.
Once he was fully successful, he locked all the children's doors to keep them safe.
21.
Tom Boyle While waiting his turn to pull into traffic,
this man turned superhero witnessed a driver run over and drag a bicyclist under his Camaro
down the street for a few seconds.
Boyle jumped out to help, and without even thinking, somehow lifted the car off of the
injured bicyclist while the driver pulled him out.
20.
Charlotte Heffelmire Similar to the previous story, this heroine
also lifted a car off of someone; in this case, that someone was her dad.
What makes this story unique is the fact that the car was also on fire, so after getting
her dad out from under the car, she got in the burning vehicle and drove it away from
her family's house before it could explode.
Thankfully, everyone survived!
19.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi This Japanese engineer stayed in Hiroshima
when the first nuclear bomb was dropped in 1945.
He survived, suffering severe burns and temporary blindness and deafness.
He then went to his hometown of Nagasaki when the second nuclear bomb was dropped.
He also survived that attack, though he suffered from leukemia, cataracts, and other illnesses.
18.
Christina Simoes When trapped in her apartment with fire all
around her, this mother of an eighteen-month-old did what she had to survive; she jumped out
of a three-story window with her child.
She suffered severe injuries to her back, but her child had just a scratch.
17.
Maureen Lee As this mother and her daughter walked on
a trail near her home in Brackendale, B.C., a cougar attacked her daughter.
Her maternal instincts kicked in, and she flung the 88 pound (40 kilogram) cougar off
her daughter, grabbed her daughter, and took off running.
16.
Jacklyn H. Lucas While patrolling in Iwo Jima, this Medal of
Honor recipient was attacked by Japanese soldiers.
They threw two grenades at his location and rather than running, he jumped on top of the
grenades, covering them with his body.
He somehow survived.
Undergoing 26 surgeries, he came out alive but with 250 pieces of shrapnel left inside
his body.
15.
Robert Cook When Kimberley Dear went skydiving, her plane's
engine failed soon after takeoff.
Her skydiving instructor, Robert Cook grabbed her and calmly told her the plane was crashing
and to focus on his voice rather than what was happening around them.
He told her to lay on top of him.
When they crashed, he took the full force of the impact and died while Kimberley survived.
She sustained severe injuries.
14.
Desmond Doss On May 5th, 1945, in the battle on Hacksaw
Ridge when his company was in retreat, he decided to stay back and rescue those left
behind.
He saved 75 lives on his own, lowering them down the steep cliff one by one.
13.
Irena Sendler During the occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany,
this brave woman infiltrated the ghettos where Jewish men, women, and children were held
in horrid conditions, and smuggled them out to stay at convents or with non-Jewish families.
She rescued 2,500 children.
Eventually, Nazis captured and tortured her at Pawiak Prison before sentencing her to
death.
Fortunately, resistance members bribed the prison guards to release her.
She died in 2008 at the age of 98.
12.
Lauren Kornacki While her father worked on his BMW 525i at
their home in Glen Allen, Va., this hero found him trapped underneath the car and unconscious.
He wasn't breathing and his heart had stopped.
Yelling for her mom to call 911, she sprang into action and lifted the car up and off
her father.
She instantly started CPR and after two mouth-to-mouths and three sets of chest compressions, he started
breathing again.
11.
Robert Ingram During an ambush in a rice paddy in Vietnam,
he tried to help his fellow Marines, but at each turn, he was attacked.
First, he was shot in the hand.
While trying to help his platoon leader, he was shot in the knee, and while treating a
fallen comrade, he was shot through the right cheek below the eye and out the left jaw.
Regardless of his wounds, he pushed forward and kept fighting.
He pulled a wounded soldier into a hedgerow and picked off enemy soldiers before heading
back to his command post, disoriented from blood loss.
10.
Witold Pilecki This soldier and founder of the Polish resistance
during World War II was the only man known to volunteer to be imprisoned at Auschwitz.
When he went inside, he recruited resistance fighters and learned of the gas chambers.
Gathering evidence and information inside the camp, he sent messages in 1941 to Britain
and the United States about the Nazis extermination of the Jews.
However, after realizing the Allies had no plans to liberate the Jews, he and a few others
escaped from the prison after two and a half years staying there.
9.
Rukhsana Kausar When Pakistani militants entered her home,
demanding food and beds for the night, this twenty-one-year-old woman's father refused,
and he was beaten for it.
In response, she struck one of them with an ax, took their AK-47, and shot the terrorist
dead.
She continued to shoot at the other militant as he ran away.
Police hailed her bravery and nominated her for the president's gallantry award.
8.
Sir Ernest Shackleton Joining an expedition in 1901 to the Antarctic,
disaster struck for this man and his crew when his ship, the Endurance, was crushed
by ice.
They drifted on sheets of ice for months until reaching the deserted Elephants Island.
Shackleton and a few others took a 22-foot lifeboat and headed for South Georgia where
they found a whaling station and organized rescue efforts.
When they came back to rescue the remaining crew on Elephant Island, none of them had
died.
His entire crew was saved.
7.
Warren â€œTinyâ€ Everal While Vietnam vet Steve Kux tried to land
a helicopter, it suffered electrical problems, and he lost control, crashing it into a nearby
stream.
His co-worker, Warren "Tiny" Everal, sprung into action and somehow found the strength
to lift the helicopter off of Kux and save him.
6.
Rhonda Carlsen When realizing a school bus driver was incapacitated
while driving, this New Mexico mother ran after the bus and got a student inside the
bus to pull the lever to open the door.
Once it was open, she hopped inside and pressed on the brake before attending to the bus driver
who was suffering a seizure.
5.
Peter Hanne After finding a man trapped in his truck as
it teetered over the road and risked falling into the river, this teenage hero risked his
life to save the man inside.
He crawled into the hanging wreckage and successfully pulled the man to safety.
Had the truck fallen into the river, the man would have assuredly been crushed by the trailer
behind it.
4.
Shavarsh Karapetyan On September 16th, 1976, this professional
swimmer saw a trolleybus, carrying 92 passengers, lose control and drive into freezing water.
He didn't hesitate to dive in after the bus which sank 32 feet (10 meters).
He broke one of the windows with his foot and one by one saved 20 people's lives.
He pulled more out, but not everyone made it.
He stayed in the water for 20 minutes and did approximately 30 dives to save them.
3.
John Rabe A Nazi businessman who firmly believed in
Nazism, this unlikely hero was stationed in China and helped shelter 600 people during
the Rape of Nanking, a brutal conquest by the Japanese that murdered, tortured, and
raped 300,000 prisoners and civilians.
Ironically, he used Nazi flags as safe zone markers for victims.
He and his family faced constant threats from Japanese soldiers with guns and bayonets.
2.
Lydia Angyiou Living in a small village of three-hundred
people near the Hudson Bay in Quebec, this mother turned around and saw a polar bear
sizing up her seven-year-old son.
She told the surrounding children to run and got in between the bear and her son, immediately
kicking and punching it.
When it swatted at her with its paw, knocking her down, it got on top of her, but she kicked
at its legs with a bicycle motion.
A neighbor heard the noise and brought a gun, firing a few warning shots, before firing
at the bear and killing it.
Fortunately, this brave mother only suffered a few scratches and a black eye.
1.
Wim Hof This man has 26 world records specifically
within cold endurance.
Performing great feats while in dangerous situations is practically his entire life.
His entire body remained in ice for one hour and fifty-two minutes once, and he ran up
Mount Everest in shorts.
Because of these feats and many more, he's nicknamed "The Iceman."
So, have you ever been in serious danger?
Let us know in the comments below, or tweet your answer to us @List25.
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