A 17 year-old became a model of coolness under fire following an August 20 attack on an Israeli town. Using knowledge gained from a book she’d read when she was 12, she saved the life of a man left for dead by utilizing scraps of material found in the wreckage.
The heroism has won Arina Shestopolov Censor a full college scholarship to Ben-Gurion University.
Hearing cries for help, Censor and her father rushed out of their building to find Nati Hachakur seriously wounded by a missile attack launched from nearby Gaza.
Her father thought Nati had been killed. “I moved on to a second man because I couldn’t find a pulse and his eyes were closed,” he said.
Despite her lack of formal training and in the midst of the havoc, Nati would have bled to death without Arina’s quick thinking when she noticed his eyes opening.
“The last time I had looked at the book I was 12, but the diagrams just floated into my mind,” she said.
“I found some cloth and a stick and I made a tourniquet. The first two tore, but the third one held,” Arina recalled.
“When Nati was brought in to the ER, we took a picture of Arina’s makeshift tourniquet,” said Dr. Michael Sherf, director-general of Soroka University Medical Center. “I want to use it to teach this generation how to improvize using materials that are at hand.”
“Without their help, Nati would not have made it,” Sherf said.
On September 1, BGU President Prof. Rivka Carmi presented Censor with a certificate of appreciation for her efforts and a full scholarship to BGU.
(READ more from BG University)