Every two hours, even through the night, I covered him with a fresh cold wet bedsheet--on his head, too. I could have used the water in the house, but the well water was colder. We didn't have a refrigerator in those days.
He was already in bad shape with his broken arm and wounded leg, and weighing so little. Now he had a constant fever over 100 degrees. I went out to the deep well across the road to soak a bedsheet. You had to pull the water up with ropes.
Every two hours, even through the night, I covered him with a fresh cold wet bedsheet--on his head, too. I could have used the water in the house, but the well water was colder. We didn't have a refrigerator in those days.
Everyone said that the best thing to bring down a high fever was cottage cheese, but cottage cheese was a luxury, and the farmers wouldn't sell it. Normally we never could get it, but people knew we had him at home and now when I asked the farmers, they gave it to me. And we couldn't eat any! I soaked the cottage cheese in cold water and then covered Paul's feet with it, along with the wet sheet, every two hours, day and night, for about eight or ten days. Jerry had to go to work, so I spent the time with Paul, running here, running there. A bedsheet is large; wringing it out with your hands--it's work.
We were living by ourselves in a small house at that time. Jerry and I gave him our bed. Since Jerry had to go to work, he slept on a little couch we kept in our bedroom. I put three chairs together with some blankets close to the couch, and slept on that. Jerry really helped. In another family the man might not allow his wife to wash a strange man and be there with him twenty-four hours a day, but Jerry never complained.
It was dangerous, but we called the doctor twice. He gave him a little medicine--not much--because he only had a little. On the second visit he said it looked like typhus, and Paul shouldn't stay with us any longer. He needed some injections the doctor didn't have; he needed a hospital.
Paul was crying; he was afraid to go to the hospital. He knew the war was not really over. The Russians were pushing hard, but the Germans were still in charge. The hospital Jerry took him to in Kralovice was a temporary one, set up in a school building to care for the wounded people coming back from the Sudetenland.
A very good doctor there gave Paul the injections he needed. When he left him at the hospital, Jerry gave Paul one hundred crowns and said, "Paul, when the barber comes, ask for a haircut." One hundred crowns is what Jerry got for six days work. Later, when he was all right, the money was still there under his pillow.
We went to see him everyday. When they went to Kralovice my mother and father went to see him too. One day I asked him, "Paul, could you tell me your wife's name?" and he said, "Oh, it doesn't matter. I will die."
I think maybe it was a mistake for him to go to the hospital. While he was in our house he was conscious, but when he went to the hospital, they didn't have the wet bedsheets and towels, and after two or three days he went into a coma.
When Paul had been unconscious for about eight days, the doctor said to Jerry, "I won't give him any more injections. I need to save our medicine for people I know will get through. This one is dying." My husband begged the doctor to give him just one more. He didn't want to do it, but finally he agreed. Jerry didn't leave the hospital until he saw the doctor give him this last injection. Later that night Paul woke up! Jerry really saved his life.
A few days after Paul was conscious again, we had a call telling us the hospital was going to close. Those who could take care of themselves had to leave, the very sick would be moved to a hospital in a bigger town. They asked would we take Paul home or should they send him to the bigger hospital? We didn't know how long it would be for, or what would happen when the Russians came, but Jerry brought him home.