Trauma training, family drew Vernon Hills doc to volunteer after Hamas attack in Israel

Over the years, Dr. David Kawior has treated earthquake victims in Haiti, gunshot and stab wounds in Chicago and trauma patients at Northwestern Medicine Lake Forest Hospital.

Last month, the 39-year-old doctor from Vernon Hills took on a different mission — treating the injured in Israel following Hamas’ deadly attack on Oct. 7.

“Now this thing was happening and I was formally trained to be helpful in this situation,” he said. “Almost everything I had done in my life had reached that point where I could help.”

His medical training was a large part of why he volunteered, but he says family history played an important role.

An estimated 94 relatives of Kawior’s perished in Poland and Lithuania during the Holocaust. His grandfather, sent to Japanese-occupied Shanghai, was the sole survivor.

And it was his grandfather’s dream that one day David would become a doctor.

“That’s not a lot of pressure to, like, do something,” Kawior said.

As a student at Columbia University Medical Center in New York, part of the Medical School for International Health, his training led him to Haiti, treating victims of the 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake.

In 2012, Kawior performed trauma surgery in Gaza as part of Operation Pillar of Defense.

Kawior did his residency in what he called “the best trauma units in Chicago” — Resurrection, Cook County and Mount Sinai. “Best” means the worst of what budding doctors term the “knife and gun club” of stabbings, shootings and vehicular accidents.

Kawior — pronounced like “caviar” — now practices emergency medicine at Northwestern Medicine Lake Forest Hospital.

But he was moved to take his skills across the globe again following the news of more than 1,000 killed by Hamas in Israel on Oct. 7. The next day, Kawoir applied to a number of services he could help abroad.

Yet when the father of three young children brought up the idea of volunteering in Israel, his wife Emily did not share her husband’s enthusiasm.

Twice he had to convince his wife — first, when initially asked to head the emergency room at Yoseftal Medical Center in Eilat, and then again when officials decided he was a better fit for a more dangerous assignment, to join mobile critical care units run by Magen David Adom, the Israeli Red Cross, near Gaza’s northeastern border.

"I told her that and she was, like, ‘100% you’re not going,’“ Kawior said.

After tearful conversation, his sense of duty and lineage prevailed.

Kawior departed Nov. 11 with about 10 other doctors for a two-week deployment — a term intended to minimize mental stress and not significantly disrupt families back home — aboard Israel’s national airline, El Al, bound for Tel Aviv.

“You have to take a circuitous route to avoid the missiles,” Kawior said.

He was stationed mainly in Sderot and Ashdod, respectively just northeast and north of Gaza on the Mediterranean Sea.

Employing military helicopters and armored and non-armored mobile care units, Kawior handled civilian and military casualties and took people to medical facilities that, according to him, rivaled any in the United States.

When rockets struck, Kawior often was among first responders to survey the scene for injuries and live munitions. Much of the time he was in the field, he said.

Kawior often worked 24- to 36-hour shifts, long periods of monotony suddenly broken by a whirlwind of activity, rushing to the scene of a catastrophe.

“To be perfectly frank, that is exactly what it sometimes feels like in an emergency room,” he said.

Though an emergency room veteran and an instructor in advanced trauma life support for the American College of Surgeons in Chicago, treating cases such as the loss of limbs was “a completely different type of theater,” Kawior said.

“Even the civilian emergencies that would be run-of-the-mill were some of the worst medically,” he said.

Kawior compared the mood in Israel to a Jewish Shiva house following a death, a place filled with grief but also solidarity. At times it felt like the COVID-19 lockdowns.

“If you only have five seconds to find shelter or drop before a missile hits you, you’re not going to go grocery shopping,” he said.

Kawior, who still holds the license issued by the Israel Ministry of Health to serve there, will consider the “privilege” of future deployment.

For now, he assesses the privilege of living on safer shores.

“We have no idea how lucky we are,” Kawior said. “And we can’t take it for granted. Ever.”