Sometimes surviving calamity is just the beginning of a rough voyage, as evidenced by an article in the December 8, 1935 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. The story:

“David Warshauer expects to get his wooden leg by the first week of the year, and then he hopes to work again.

‘I can still drive a truck, I guess,’ he says, stolidly, at his home, 1925 47th St.

Slightly more than four years ago Warshauer was given up for dead. He and his brother-in-law had been rescued after nine days in a disabled floating motorboat at sea; nine days without shelter, food or drink, nine days toward the end of which they ate bugs from the side of their tiny craft, and drank a poisonous liquid from a fire extinguisher and swore solemnly that the last to die would naturally have to eat the other’s body, and in return for the gift of life would try to take care of the other’s family.

Unconscious When Rescued

The cannibalistic pact was never carried out, because both became unconscious at about the same time, and were lying side by side in several inches of water when the boat was picked up by the cutter Cuyahoga.

Both were suffering so from the moist gangrene, exposure and other injuries that the doctors shook their heads at Staten Island Hospital when they were brought in. There was no hope, they said.

Irving Tuchyner, 28, a pocketbook manufacturer, did die the next day, but Warshauer, a Wallabout Market truckman with an unusually strong physique, lingered on. Even then the doctors shook their heads. Whole areas of his body were affected.

Of the four years since then, of the transfer from hospital to hospital and the endless skin-grafting, Warshauer today does not like to talk.

‘Those four years were worse than the nine days at sea,’ he says. ‘I can’t understand myself how I came through.”