The War
Boris Edelman’s Story
however, so she stayed in the house with the man’s wife and two small children; perhaps there was one child, not two. After a while, we started to stay in the house, too. “While we were there, my father found out that Aharon was alive and lying somewhere across the river, maybe eight or ten miles away, and he persuaded a farmer to go across the river and bring him back. The farmer found Aharon and hid him on a wagon full of straw, and brought him to the house where my mother was hiding. “Aharon was just bones, like a skeleton. He couldn’t walk be- cause his legs were frozen. My mother washed his legs and cleaned him — he was filthy, full of lice — and she gave him clothes. I re - member how excited he was because my mother was cooking some peeled potatoes. ‘Oh, you have peeled potatoes!’ he said. Then his legs started to smell terribly. My mother and I were cleaning them as well as we could. And then his toes started to fall off. We put a knife in the fire to disinfect it, and cut them off, because they were already falling off. “My mother was trying to keep his legs and feet clean with hot water, and maybe she had alcohol, but they were infected. Then one day we learned that there was a German doctor not too far away, about eight miles. This was one of the old-time Germans, people who had lived in the area for a long time. So I carried Aharon on my back — I always carried him on my back — and went through the woods to find the doctor. We knocked on the door, and when he opened it, we pushed ourselves in. We showed him Aharon’s legs, and he gave us some bandages, medication, and liquid disinfectant, and told us that we needed a lot of melted fat because there was no ointment. After that, I went around begging for fat, and my mother melted it and applied it to Aharon’s wounds. She would wash the wounds, put the disinfectant on, and bandage them. We needed a lot of bandages because they got smelly, and we went back to the doctor several times. I remember how my mother was hugging him all the time. It was going on and on and on. Aharon was lying on the floor because there was no other place to put him. I went into
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