Ewa Prunesti was watching a comedy film on the coach’s video screen when a scream penetrated her earphones.

When the 24-year-old agricultural student regained consciousness, she was lying at the bottom of a French ravine surrounded by the smouldering corpses of fellow pilgrims. Ewa had been sitting in the third row from the back of the bus. The person who had been sitting next to her was now just a crumpled heap of bones; a passenger from the last row was alive and crying for help.

It was as if God had pointed a finger at the busload of devout Polish Roman Catholics and said: “You . . . Not you . . . You.”

The coach crashed through a roadside wall on a sharp bend at the bottom of a steep descent near Grenoble. As the vehicle flip-flopped down a 130ft ravine, some pilgrims were thrown clear. Many were incinerated in their seats when the coach burst into flame as it landed. At least 26 people were killed and some of the survivors are still fighting for their lives in hospital. Others, like Ewa, emerged with minor fractures.

In many cultures there is a bellow of rage when a seemingly avoidable catastrophe kills so many; there is a search for the guilty man, the defective machinery or the negligent bureaucrat. There is often also a more profound accusation. How many disasters have I covered as a reporter – from the mid-air crash over Lake Constance to the ski-lift blaze in Kaprun – where, afterwards, wellwishers light candles in sympathy and pin up a denunciatory note with one scrawled word: why? Meaning, of course, why God, did You let it happen?

The Poles are not like that; it is not in the nature of their Catholicism to be angry at a seemingly unjust God. The Polish cult of the Virgin Mary gives them a more forgiving tinge: she is not a remote goddess on a pedestal. She is, as some theologians have written, with the Church, not above it. When Poles kneel down to pray in front of the image of Mary they often talk to her conversationally, as to a mother. Anger at God barely comes into it.

Instead they are searching for a miracle, seeking evidence of a benign God among the carnage. They may have found it in the form of the retired 61-year-old lorry driver Jozef Mordas. When the tumbling coach came to a quivering standstill last Sunday, Mr Mordas found himself buried inside the bus under a pile of corpses, gasping for breath. He reached upwards, between dead leg and dead arm, hoping to find a grip. Instead he touched and held on to a book. This, he says helped him to stay conscious. “It’s not yet clear whether it was a prayer book or the Bible,” says the Szczecin priest Ryszard Kaminski. “Whatever – if it’s true, it’s miraculous.”

The search for a miracle is the search for meaning; it is a reassurance that God is a protector. There are Poles who believe that Karol Wojtyla’s survival after being knocked down by a German lorry during the Second World War – the future Pope was working in a quarry – was a miracle. Cynics say it was simply a bad knock. But the point is clear: miracles are one way in which God can shape individual destinies.

It was Father Kaminski who blessed the pilgrims before they set off on a tour of European shrines to the Virgin Mary. At 6am on July 10 he gave them, and their air-conditioned bus, the sign of the cross. Earlier he had heard their confessions. “They were spiritually prepared for the trials and tribulations ahead; not, of course, for death. But they knew that a pilgrimage is not easy – nor is it supposed to be.” So, naturally, it is Father Kaminski who is now facing the puzzled faces of his parishioners. A pilgrimage is supposed to bring you closer to God – but surely not in such a brutal manner.

Poland is a nation of travellers, and not just in the search for waitressing and plumbing jobs in the West. Every year well over three million Polish Catholics embark on a spiritual pilgrimage of some sort; to Pope John Paul II’s grave in Rome, to Lourdes, to Marian shrines across Europe. Above all, at this time of year, they wind their way through the country lanes of southern Poland towards the Jasna Gora Monastery in Czestochowa, which houses the Black Madonna. The icon – so-called because the image of the Virgin Mary is darkened – is supposed to have inspired a handful of Polish monks and soldiers to repel a huge Swedish attack in 1655. A miracle? The Poles seem to think so, and their trek every year is as much to do with a sense of nationhood as of spiritual renewal.

Every Polish priest over 28 speaks some Italian: Pope John Paul ensured that tens of thousands of priests did a stint in Rome to prepare them for what he saw as the missionary role of Polish Catholicism, the building of a bastion against materialism. Under the Polish Pope, accompanying believers on pilgrimages became part of the missionary task and a sure way to promotion.

“Life itself is a pilgrimage,” Father Kaminski tells his parishioners as they crowd into the narrow chapel of St Mikolaj Biskup. “Death is always with us and life on earth is transitory.” He knows that is not quite enough for parishioners who have been horrified and transfixed by the news of the catastrophe. So he adds: “We must find meaning for those who survived to understand the deaths of the others.”

I heard something similar from a pulpit in the German lakeside resort of Ueberlingen five years ago. When two jets crashed – one of them a Russian aircraft full of schoolchildren – heavy chunks of burning machinery and scorched bodies rained down on the pretty little town. Yet nobody on the ground was hurt. “We have to ask ourselves the question: why were we protected?” said a local priest at the time. “Do we now have a special mission, a special responsibility to ourselves and to God?”

This is not an academic or even purely pastoral matter for Father Kaminski. It’s personal. Among the dead in the crash was his protégé, Father Przemyslaw Redes, a burly 29-year-old, who had become a very active organiser of pilgrimages. He was a jovial, even witty figure; a popular character at theological college and one of the reasons why young worshippers were still coming to St Mikolaj. Shortly before embarking on the fatal pilgrimage he had passed his driving test and was contemplating buying a car; there was talk of him one day driving his own pilgrimage coach. As we talked with his mentor, Father Kaminski, there was a knock on the door; it was Father Redes’s distraught brother who took flight when he saw a journalist and a photographer. “Sorry,” said Father Kaminski. “This is hurting us all. I thought I could deal with this – after all I conducted 37 funerals in this parish last year. But somehow it’s not the same.”

It is, priests tell us, all about linkages; life, death and resurrection. The suffering of Christ opened the way for new life; so too accidents, with their pain and shock, can recalibrate lives. Pope John Paul, who had repeatedly declared that the Virgin Mary was the Queen of Poland, visited Fatima in Portugal where Mary is supposed to have appeared to some children. Later, in 1981, when he was shot by a Turkish fanatic in St Peter’s Square he said that Mary had, in effect, caught the bullet and saved his life and that his pilgrimage to Fatima was the key. Yet will these almost mythical linkages help Ewa Prunesti to solve the riddle of why she lived?

We meet an hour after she has been released from hospital, in the Zachod housing estate of Stargard, a garrison town that is a half-hour drive from Szczecin. She lives in her parents’ genteel apartment in a well-kept, working-class district.

Plants are suspended from the low ceilings; the fine porcelain is kept in glass cupboards for special occasions. “I don’t get the logic of it,” says Ewa in a voice dulled by painkillers, and if her neck had not been constrained by a hard plastic brace she would surely have shaken her head. She did not mean: why did God let devout Catholics die a horrible death? Rather, she meant: if I was allowed to survive and sit in my parents’ home, what is my hidden obligation? What do I have to change about my life? “All my life now,” she says, “I will be trying to work out why I was allowed to live.”

Until now, it has been a hard but focused life: studying at the agricultural academy in Szczecin, hoping to go on to become a vet, and working part-time at the local Tesco to support the family budget. No time for a boyfriend.

Now survival has set her apart. One by one, her relatives come to see her and even her grandmother greets her tentatively as if she is a privileged stranger. When we finally persuade the family to sit together for a portrait they feel safest in the living room under a huge protective portrait of Christ bearing the motto Jezu Ufam Tobie – Jesus, I put my trust in you.

Ewa’s father, Franciszek, thinks he knows why she was allowed to live. Some years ago he was told he had multiple sclerosis and since then Ewa had become even more devout. She decided to use her savings to go on the pilgrimage this year to pray for the recovery of her father – at the healing waters of Lourdes and at the Notre Dame de la Salette sanctuary that was the last port of call for the pilgrims. “When I heard what had happened, everything went dark,” said Franciszek, 56. “It was like the end of the world. She had gone there for me! And now I was desperately praying for her health instead of she for mine.” The power of prayer, in other words, is not a one-way street. The spiritual energy that Ewa poured into her father’s recovery was returned and will build a new relationship between father and daughter.

But being saved presents its own complications when so many in the community have lost loved ones. The Prunesti family – Ewa’s sister, a trained nurse, is working as a cosmetician in Folkestone – wanted to give thanks for her safe return in the local church, an echoing multistoreyed building smelling of detergent and fresh paint. It is one of several new churches that have been established on Polish housing estates since the fall of communism. “But it is difficult, you know, to turn up there and celebrate something when so many people are, you know . . .” breaks off Ewa’s mother, Jadwiga. The father chips in: “Personal joy and common suffering, that’s what we’ve got.”

The pilgrimages are likely to continue. More, says Father Slawomir Zyga, who is in the office of the Metropolitan Archbishop of Szczecin. “Catastrophes like the one we have just experienced seem likely to strengthen the resolve of young pilgrims.” In some ways the doomed coach was a microcosm of the new Polish Catholicism. There were 13-year-old boys on board (both saved) and a 70-year-old; there were shopkeepers, language teachers, nurses, students, pensioners. As they drove across Europe they would sing church anthems and recite prayers, following the lead of one of the three priests accompanying the group. It must have been a very intense experience. One of the dead was a 60-year-old paralysed former maths teacher who had hoped that a visit to Lourdes would allow her to cast aside her wheelchair.

The miracle cure did not come for her; nor did Father Przemyslaw ever fulfil his dream of driving his own pilgrim bus. But you do not have to be a professional optimist, or even a parish priest under pressure, to explain the unexplainable, to sense that something positive may emerge from Sunday’s tragedy, something more than a collection of traumatised survivors. “What happens next?” asked Ewa and, as she moves painfully across the room, repeats: “What happens next?”

Guilt of those who live

Everyone’s response to a traumatic incident is different. Most will experience some form of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but some might recover in weeks, others in years. Both short-term and long-term symptoms, psychological and physical, will usually appear within a few weeks. We all have different personality structures: those with solid structures, a firm sense of self, will find it easier to recover than someone who is sensitive, vulnerable and nervous. Physical symptoms can include depression, a fear of spaces (or, in this case, transport), insomnia and nightmares.

Survivors’ guilt is common. Where others have died near by, for example in concentration camps, people often ask why they have been chosen to live and whether they are worthy. The guilt often doubles if the survivor knew the victims. Sometimes the renewed need for life purpose can lead to a more proactive lifestyle, and increased happiness. Religion can actually help: it is a support structure and can help people to find meaning.

Guilt often increases where the survivor has been unable to help others, or even fight their own way out. In our centre we sometimes set up a structure in which people have lots of people lie on top of them and have to wrestle their way out with muscular and mental determination. It gives them back a sense of control.

The most effective way of overcoming PTSD and survivors’ guilt is sharing memories of the incident and subsequent reactions to it. You can do that with friends and family, but a professional may take a more psychotherapeutic approach, focusing much more on each reaction, and investigating its background.

— Simon Meyerson, Consultant psychologist Traumatic Stress Clinic, London