How does one turn pain and injustice into hope while facing all the beauty and ugliness of the world? How does a beautiful woman emerge as an active world citizen and teach lessons of humanity after losing a third of her body? It takes inherent humane tenderness, benevolence, willpower, courage and, most of all, zest for life.

Turkish parliament member Safak Pavey was a 19-year-old student of arts and cinema in Switzerland when she lost a leg and an arm in a train accident while seeing off a friend diagnosed with a brain tumor.

“I was getting Mira into the train when I felt the train begin to move with the doors still open. One of us was going to fall; there was no escape. I remember pushing her in and … me falling,” Pavey told Al-Monitor. “In the movies, people fall under trains and then rise up and go on with their lives as if nothing has happened. It didn’t work like this for me. My life was completely transformed.”

After the May 24, 1996, accident in Zurich, Pavey underwent a long process of treatment and recovery. The extraordinary willpower she displayed during that time made her the subject of an academic thesis at University Hospital of Zurich. It was later published as a book.