The War
Boris Edelman’s Story
some clothes by then. I walked out to the door and saw Germans running to the houses and assembling the people, and there were people already standing on the main street in the square, ready to march to their graves. When I saw that, I told my older brother, ‘Alex, let’s run!’ He said, ‘I’m sick and cannot run.’ I ran out- side and saw a neighbor, Lazar Raber, get down on his knees and crawl between the weeds near a little creek, and I followed him. He was older than me and jumped over the water. I jumped, too, but fell. I grabbed hold of a fence, but it was rotten and collapsed on me. A German standing on a nearby bridge heard the noise and started to shoot. At that moment, my sister Riva came out of the house and when she saw the German aiming his rifle at me, she ran back into the house and shouted, ‘Mommy, they have shot Boris!’ My mother said, ‘Don’t worry. Boris has long legs. He’s going to run away.’ “Riva ran out of the house in the same direction as me, and was shot and wounded. She was suffering. I learned later, from a woman who was watching from a hiding place in a double wall, that the German commissar, who knew her — she was pretty — went and shot her, and told the soldiers to bury her immediately, right there. “Lazar and I, and a girl who was with us, wandered for a couple of days. Lazar went to a place in the woods where a few farmers lived and found his family there. But there were too many of us for the farmers, and Lazar’s family said I had to leave. I went back towards Bistricht. “As I went alone through the thick woods, I met up with five wolves, standing and looking at me, not fifty feet away. I understood that wolves are afraid of fire, and went down on my knees, grabbed some leaves — it was autumn — and made a small fire. The wolves were just standing there and staring at me. I was scared. Then they walked away. They did not run. Today, the thought occurs to me sometimes that we have to be afraid of two-legged animals, not four-legged.
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