For 31 days he walked into the jungle convinced he would never return home.
When he heard voices in the trees, he thought the end had come.
Instead he was about to meet the people who would save his life.
Fred Hargesheimer's story begins during World War II.
He was 27 years old when his plane was shot down over the island of New Britain, in today's Papua New Guinea.
He managed to survive the crash.
But he found himself alone, wounded and without food, in the heart of a jungle that seemed to have no end.
For more than a month he survived between hunger, rain and fear.
Every noise could mean the arrival of a Japanese patrol.
Then, on the 30th day, he heard voices.
They were the inhabitants of the Nakanai people.
They found him at the same time.
They knew that helping him could cost them their lives.
The Japanese soldiers promised rewards to those who handed over allied aviators and severely punished them.
And yet no one hesitated.
Fred was so debilitated that he couldn't even feed himself.
A woman from the village, Ida, made a decision that he would remember all his life.
For several days he worked with his mother's milk, while still nursing his son.
It was that gesture that allowed him to slowly recover his forces.
For seven months the villagers protected him.
When the patrols approached, someone alarmed and Fred took refuge in the jungle.
On the beach, the children erased with palm branches his prints on the sand to prevent it from being discovered.
No one ever betrayed him.
In February 1944 some Australian commandos finally managed to reach the village and organized its recovery with an American submarine.
Fred survived the war and returned to the United States.
But he never forgot who saved his life.
In 1960 he returned to New Britain.
The whole village was waiting for him on the shore.
Revide Ida.
She knew the child she was nursing when she decided to share her own milk with him.
And he found those children who, now adults, once erased his prints on the beach.
He discovered that the community needed a school.
From that moment he decided to return at least one part of what he had received.
Over the years he raised funds in the United States and helped build schools, libraries and a medical clinic.
He and his wife Dorothy also lived on the island to teach the children of the village.
In 2000, the Nakanai people named him honorary tribal leader.
Six years later, now ninety, he was accompanied to the remains of his plane, still hidden in the jungle where he had fallen over sixty years earlier.
Fred Hargesheimer died in 2010, at the age of 94.
Throughout his life he tried to thank those who gave him a second chance.
Because there are debts that cannot be returned.
You can only honor.