If you ask Mike Klamecki when he knew he had hit rock bottom, he’ll say it was nightfall on that second day, sitting with his thoughts on the bank of the still river. His father was dead. His 5-year-old daughter was missing.
Klamecki, a pastor, held a Bible in his hands and stared through the darkness at a thicket of trees across the Kankakee River. He wondered whether anyone, much less a 5-year-old, could survive a night out there alone. He considered chucking the book into the river.
“By that point I had already stopped praying they would find her,” Klamecki said. “I prayed to cope with her loss.”
So when Hannah Klamecki turned up the following afternoon, naked but unhurt, at the rescue staging area near the river, her remarkable tale of survival not only restored a family but a family’s faith.
Hannah is 6 now, and in most ways she’s like any other 1st-grader at North Elementary School in Villa Park. She doesn’t talk much about those two June days she spent alone in the woods after her grandfather drowned in a twisting current of the Kankakee River.
News coverage of Hannah’s story circled the globe. But after interviews stopped, the Klameckis tried to slide back into a “normal life.” That wasn’t easy, Klamecki said, because Hannah had become a type of celebrity.
“Kids would want to talk to her about it at school and at church, just about wherever she went,” said Klamecki, pastor at New Hope Community Church in Villa Park. “One girl, also named Hannah, saw my daughter’s picture on television and said that she wanted to be friends with her. A little later we got a birthday invitation to her party.”
Hannah said she was uncomfortable being a center of attention. She still is. The girl is different now in subtle ways, her parents say: more cautious, less comfortable being left alone.
When asked what she misses most about her grandfather, Hannah says, “That he won’t take me shopping and to see grandma.” Then she squirms away.
Mike Klamecki misses his father more than ever. And something else gnaws at him too: unanswered questions about how Hannah survived in the woods. How she kept warm at night, evaded animals and wandered perfectly toward the rescue camp as if guided by invisible hands.
“There’s a lot I’m dying to know,” Klamecki said. “She’ll tell me when she’s ready, or maybe she never will. We don’t always know what God has to teach us.”
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jhood@tribune.com
