Tag #108129 - Interview #91135 (Icchok Grynberg)

Religious Jews, like my dad, didn’t want to go to the army. They were afraid to eat non-kosher things from an army pot. In order to be relieved from army duty, they would cause a hernia to appear. Father got himself a hernia some time ago already, when they wanted to draft him into the tsarist army. Every day he wore a special belt that held the hernia. It was called ‘bendl’ in Jewish [Yiddish]. But during the war he forgot that belt and was walking around without it. He would hold his belly with his hands and could somehow bend. But at work he strained himself and got a hernia. He spent about four days in the hospital in Lomza.