'Now We're Like Family'

At age 8, Elana Koenig beat cancer. By 13, she found a way to save a boy struggling with the disease in a Ukrainian war zone

- K.C. BAKER

After 15 months of being hooked up to tubes and feeling nauseated and exhausted while fighting the aggressive cancer that had hijacked her childhood, Elana Koenig couldn’t wait to leave Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and go home in May 2017. “On the last day of treatment, I was ecstatic to finally be out,” says Elana, now 14, who underwent intensive chemotherapy and 15 surgeries starting when she was 7 to treat Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare bone cancer she developed in her femur.

Too sick to attend school or see classmates, she recalls being “surrounded by all these needles, all this pain, all this suffering. And that’s a hard life for someone who’s so young.”

But as she said her goodbyes, she was hit with an unexpected wave of wistfulness over pals she was leaving behind. “Even though I was done with treatment, others were still suffering,” she says. Standing in the hospital lobby, she told her mom, Rena, she wanted to use the $900 in her piggy bank at their Manhattan apartment to support children in cancer treatment. “I wanted to help kids who went through what I went through,” she says.