PART III
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Belaya Tserkov, 1920
Times were difficult in Belaya Tserkov; even if Isaac had the money to buy food for his growing family, very little was available. Hunger was so rampant in Ukraine that people were literally dying around them each day. Starvation, possibly the greatest hardship that they had ever encountered, left an even greater void in their hearts than their stomachs.
A Jewish boy who lived near the Caprove family in Stavishche later recalled that while in the city of Nikolayev, near the Dnieper, he heard a rumor that young children were being kidnapped and murdered for their human flesh, which was then being passed off and sold as animal meat. It was unknown whether there was any truth to these cannibalistic tales, but Stavishchers who fled to that city were terrified by these stories and kept a close eye on their children.
In Belaya Tserkov, a malnourished Rebecca had been ill for some time with a high fever, and for a while, Isaac feared his wife would not recover. Rebecca had fallen victim to the typhus epidemic, which spread quickly in Ukraine. She could hardly nurse, her breast milk supply dried up, and one miserable day, the couple’s baby daughter Fay died of malnutrition while Rebecca lay whimpering in bed.
Rebecca, bedridden and delirious, watched helplessly as seven men entered the apartment and removed her beautiful dead baby from the bed. In front of her two horrified daughters, they wrapped Fay up in a white sheet and carried her tiny body off to her little grave. There was a place nearby where they made the little coffins.
Channa and Sunny cried day and night for their baby sister. Channa, who, as the older sister, had the advantage of age and more words at her disposal, turned to her father for answers: “How could this happen?” It wasn’t that as a child she had no experience of death—people were dropping like flies every day, and the memory of her grandmother’s passing was still vivid in her mind—but when her innocent little baby sister shared the same cruel fate, she was in a state of disbelief.
With their mother so ill, it was up to Isaac to comfort the girls. He held his daughters in his arms, telling them soothingly, “There will come a time when everybody will get together in the sky, and all of the people who have passed away will be there. Fay will come back to us then, and we will all see her again.”
Channa and Sunny clung to that story with desperation; each girl wished with all their heart and soul for it to be true.
Their grieving mother, her body ravished from typhus, could not even summon the strength to lift her head up off the bed where her youngest child drew her last breath. Channa watched as her heartbroken father sat by her mother’s side with Sunny clinging to him. He may have been able to comfort his daughters, but he didn’t know how to console Rebecca.
Outside on their stoop, Channa sat alone, watching beggars roam the street, pleading with passersby for a piece of bread. How could Fay be gone? The pain seemed unbearable for an eight-year-old to endure. The only way that she could find comfort was to think of happier days.
She closed her eyes and summoned up wonderful memories in Stavishche, when children ran barefoot through Count Branicki’s magical gardens. The perfumed fragrances of rosebushes and the sheer beauty of purple lilacs in bloom were not far from her mind. The scent of those tall pine trees that lined the forest where she once ran joyfully through the woods with other boys and girls was such a delight!
How Channa would have loved to catch another glimpse of those little peacocks fluttering their feathers while tiptoeing around the nobleman’s exotic park. She yearned to stand again at sunset in the rolling valleys of her homeland as peasant boys, singing folk songs, passed her by.
How she missed those fleeting days before the Revolution, when life was simple yet charming, before innocent lives were inexplicably snuffed out. Channa longed for the time when the galoshes-maker was more prosperous, and in greater demand, than the tombstone-maker. How she longed for the days when the main cause of death was old age.
When Isaac found his oldest daughter sitting on the stoop and interrupted her from her wistful daydreaming, the painful reality of Fay’s death hit the child once more. Although Rebecca eventually recuperated from typhus, she never fully recovered from her baby’s death. None of them did.