Ordinarily, he would probably have been shot, but the guards recognised the early symptoms of typhus in him and perhaps decided to spare themselves a bullet.[citation needed] He was nursed back to health by a neighbour, and on the advice of friends, decided to flee for another location. His friends obtained forged identification papers for him, with the name of Yuri Vasilievich Kondratyuk, born in Lutsk in 1900 (who in reality had died of tuberculosis in 1921). With this new identity, Kondratyuk lived in and around Kuban and the North Caucasus, working as a mechanic and railroad worker.