Es Magazine

Healing Beauty

ES Magazine, January 2006

Czech model Petra Nemcova tragically became the face of the Boxing Day tsunami when she and her British photographer boyfriend were swept up by the wave in Thailand. He died, but she survived to turn a disaster into a personal crusade.

Just over a year ago, in Thailand, Petra Nemcova had finished watching a romantic movie with her British boyfriend Simon Atlee when their beachfront bungalow was wrecked by a giant wave and both were swept away by the flood waters. Atlee perished, but Nemcova, who made her name and fortune as one of a cluster of Eastern European blonde bombshell models to emerge in the late Nineties, managed to grab a palm tree and wedge herself in its high branches. And there she stayed, injured, her clothes torn from her like a shipwrecked maiden, until the waters receded and she was let back down to earth.

Nowadays the obvious scars from her ordeal are no longer so visible. Her pelvis, which was broken in four places, has healed and there's nothing overt to suggest she's had any kind of bad experience at all, especially not when she puts on her model face for the camera. But you only have to have a glance at her book, 'Love Always, Petra', a strength-through-adversity memoir of her ordeal, to know that Nemcova could locate the inspirational message in any bad situation. While it doesn't fit into the current literary vogue of memoirs, there's enough loss and longing in it to recommend it to fans of that genre.

'I learned a lot from the whole experience,' she says over a lunch that involves refusing food in the fashion in which models specialise. 'It's strange how something so horrible can also bring lots of things to learn and so much love, too.' Almost as soon as she had recuperated, Nemcova returned to Thailand in the vain hope of finding her boyfriend, but also to begin work on what is now her passion: raising money to educate the children affected by the devastation through her charity, Happy Hearts Fund. So far the charity has raised at least $1.1 million. 'I'm less about modeling, now.' she confirms. 'The charity is not a job, it's my passion.'

Nemcova, 26, says she wrote the book to shine a new light on the tsunami and make sure the world never forgets the victims' pain. 'Disasters, natural and otherwise, have the power to destroy, and yet they also have the power to create a new and better world. That is why I wrote this book. I wanted to put a face to a catastrophic event,' she writes. Before coming face to face with death and devastation - an event, she says, that brought perspective and meaning into her life - Nemcova had reached the pinnacle of her glamorous modeling career: a contract with Victoria's Secret underwear and the coveted cover of Sports Illustrated spring swimsuit issue.

Certainly, she was not bored with fashion, but she was looking for new opportunities. She was, she recounts, in love with her romantic British boyfriend, a fashion photographer from Stoke Newington who was 33 when he died, and the pair were making plans for the future. That's when they arranged to go on holiday, and ended up on the beach in Thailand. Nemcova was packing, getting ready to leave her bungalow, when she heard screams. 'A rush of water rose up suddenly. There was not a second to think. It came from all directions hurling us out over the balcony and into the furious current. For one split second, before the water separated us, I saw Simon's face. "Petra!" he screamed. "Petra! What's happening?" I couldn't answer. I didn't know. Then I lost sight of him. Seconds later, whirling in the tumbling waters, I saw him again, a few yards ahead of me. Behind him, a rooftop was sticking out of the water. "Catch the roof! Catch the roof!" I shouted. Then he was gone.'

Stuck up a palm tree, badly hurt, drifting in and out of consciousness as bodies bobbed by, is an experience that, Nemcova concedes, could turn a happy woman dark and negative. But the ordeal and her recuperation, which included three weeks in hospital in Thailand and three weeks in Czechoslovakia, have done nothing of the sort. It simply taught her 'what is beautiful can turn ugly; what is benevolent can turn vicious; and what is living and loving can be swept away'.

Petra, known as Kventrinka (little flower) to her family, was brought up in  Karvina, a small town in the mountains to the east of Prague, with her younger sister Olga. It was an impoverished childhood; her father was a bricklayer and truck driver, her mother a teacher. She began modeling at 15, after entering a competition in a nearby town, and moved to Milan at 18. For a young woman who grew up in the dying years of the Communist era, Petra is an abstemious character. She doesn't drink, and only dances on the tables in the company of friends and family. She's not known for hanging out with Russian oligarchs, and is not noticeably part of the international model jet set. This, she explains, is just her choice. She grew up in a country where people queued outside shops without knowing what they were standing in line for. But what sounds like the January sales? Yes, she points out, but in Czechoslovakia, before the velvet revolution, people were standing in line for food, not fashion.

Her experience in Thailand taught her to be prepared for any natural disaster-type situation. In an earthquake, she has twice learned, one should stand under the lintel of a doorway because, if the house collapses, the wall will fall one way or the other but not straight down. In a tornado there's a particular corner of the basement in relation to the door that's the safest from the vortex. With charging elephants, you lie down and pretend to be a log and they will simply step over you. The same technique doesn't work with bulls. 'We all travel so much and you never know what will happen, so it's important to recognise and know what to do in a earthquake in Japan or a mudslide in Puerto Rico.'

But, she concedes, 'I don't really know what to do in a mudslide.' The bad dreams she suffered in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami experience have diminished and she's no longer startled as she was by loud noises. But nor is she really over it. The New York papers recently reported that Bruce Willis was seeking her company after donating $50,000 to her charity at a fundraising dinner in the city before Christmas. But Nemcova spurned his advances and was instead going on holiday with her family, and her late boyfriend's mother Chis, his stepfather and sister, with whom she remains close. After Simon's death, Chris gave Petra a gold band which she wears on the third finger of her right hand. 'I'm not ready yet. I'm not stuck in the past, and I look forward to the future. Whenever the time is right to move forward I will know.'

In her book, Nemcova writes about her relationship, recounting how she and Simon met on a photoshoot in early 2003; how she'd left her boyfriend for him. By the time they went to Thailand they were talking of how many children they hoped to have (two, one adopted).

Nemcova credits the speed of her recovery in part to her adherence to Spiritual Human Yoga (SHY), and offshoot of Reiki. She learned to receive and give healing energy under the tutelage of Master Dang, aka Professor Doctor Sir Luong Minh Dang, a Laotian teacher with a habit of announcing imminent planetary upheavals. SHY is not, she says, anything like Kabbalah. 'You can never ask for money when you heal somebody,' she explains. 'It's just about helping people.'

By practising meditation each day for 20 minutes, she's been able to reach a measure of acceptance of her experience and she now looks forward to the future, or rather the present (which she likes to call the present, as in gift). This discipline has helped her to put her own troubles in perspective. The lesson she's learned is compassion. With so many natural disasters happening over the past year, Nemcova has been asking herself the question; is nature trying to tell us something? 'Nature is trying to tell us to be more connected. Without nature there is no us. We need to help each other because tomorrow we may need help.'

And Nemcova is genuinely moved to help. She's become a spokesperson for the American clothing company Rampage. Returning to modeling after her experience, she says, was ' a really hard time. I felt like I had to do things with meaning and I had a really hard time doing back-to-back modeling. On the first job, I was just thinking, "what's the purpose in this?"'

That was last September. Since then, the supermodel has found her new purpose. Nemcova is no floozy; at school she sat up straight and excelled in history, art and chemistry; there will be more and more ambitious projects to follow. Another book, for instance. A children's book or Petra Nemcova's guide to surviving disasters - what happens when the hot water breaks down, what to do in an earthquake, what to do when you can't find the right shoes. There could be product tie-ins, such as inflatable armbands...? For the first time, Nemcova, like Garbo, laughs. 'Petra Nemcova's swimming rescue balloons!' And Nemcova may become a regular presence at scenes of natural disasters. Early this year she plans to visit Pakistan with fellow model Veronica Varekova to survey the aid efforts, or lack thereof, for victims of the earthquake.

Only a fraction of the international outpouring of attention and aid given to South East Asia after the tsunami was offered to India and Pakistan. But she's a realist and knows a pretty face can help in a bad situation. It may not be right but it's the reality. 'We want to go to Pakistan because there were no tourists there so they didn't get any help.' More to the point, we pay more attention when tragedy has a beautiful face. 'It's really sad that it's this way,' she concedes, 'that when there are normal people in a tragedy we don't pay so much attention.' It's her responsibility, she adds, as a known person, to take the opportunity to help. 'For me it feels like the right thing to do. I do not want to miss out on the chance to help. You never know what life brings.'