KADDISHEL
A Life Reborn
At first we had matches that Masik had given us, but when they were gone, we started fires by placing some dry grass on the ground and focusing the sun’s rays onto it with a piece of broken glass. In no time, the straw would start to smoke and then ignite. Lighting a fire was dangerous because we might be seen but we had no choice because we had to keep warm and roast our potatoes. The lice plagued us, so when a fire was already burning, we would put our clothes over the smoke, and the smoke would cause the lice to loosen their grip and fall off. You could hear the crackling of the lice as they fell into the fire. The smoke from our fires put us at risk. The area was reasonably flat, with some small hills, so if someone looked at the forest from a distance, they would probably have seen the smoke on the hori- zon. Maybe that is how the Ukrainians later discovered where we were. We were there for about a month until, suddenly, we were at- tacked by a group of Ukrainian police. They had hunted us down and came in shooting their machine guns from every side. We all ran in different directions and did not know what happened to the others. I hid in a bush. When everything was over and things were quiet, I thought I was the only remaining survivor of the group. Then I heard a wom- an calling, “Children, where are you? Where are you?” Her voice did not sound familiar. Then she started to call names, my father’s name, my sisters’ names, and my name. I realized that it was my mother calling out, and I ran to find her. I saw she had been shot in the arm and the bullet had shattered the bone. She had been lying for hours and had lost, God knows, most of her blood. She was in terrible condition. I dragged her under the bush where I had been hiding, and after bandaging her wound, I made my mother a sling out of her underwear. I remembered that we had left some potatoes lying on the ground near the fire, which had been burning for many days and was still hot. I ran and threw a few potatoes onto the coals, then ran back
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