AR death of father

The death of my mother led to many changes in the life of our family. My father no longer felt it was right for us all to take advantage of the Dirks’ hospitality, and so he moved his family to the other side of Gnadenfeld into a house belonging to his older brother Aron. Later, we moved from this house into residential quarters attached to a once-active implements store set farther to the rear of this rather large lot.

The Revolutionary War had, meanwhile, run its course, even in the extreme south of Russia, with the remnants of the White army departing on English ships from Russia’s Black Sea ports. The Bolsheviks fastened their iron grip on the entire Russian domain.

Now came the time of the cruel secret police, then known as the Cheka, and the arrest of men, often at night, to be questioned, often under torture, and many times never to be seen alive again. Now also came the time of confiscatory and impossible demands for grain and other foods, including poultry and livestock.

A wry political joke was told in Gnadenfeld. A rooster had hanged himself and had left a note explaining that since the government had counted the whole flock and had demanded one egg from every member of the flock every day, he had to kill himself since in no way would he ever be able to comply with that demand and he feared the punishment.

Now also came the time of famine in this richly blest agricultural land where food production had been made almost totally impossible by the war, the requisition of all horses, and by government demands.

Closest to home for our family was the arrest of four men of the village, one of them being my uncle Aron, one of my father’s brothers, and uncle Abram’s son Heinrich, who was, of course, my cousin. From what I then overheard as an eleven-year-old boy, these men were falsely accused of having buried, or in some way hidden, a quantity of grain. For many months they were all held as prisoners in Russian railroad box cars and shuttled from one city to another on the railway.

In the dead of winter, not long after the start of the new year, 1922, word arrived in Gnadenfeld that the four men taken from the village had been acquitted and would be allowed to return home if someone would come and get them. It was also known that my uncle Abram, at the time, was very ill.

My last glimpse of my father was his walking away on this mission on a cold, snow-covered January day. For this venture, he was joined by Jacob Krause, the son-in-law of uncle Abram. These two men set out to make their way to the city of Kiev, and then to the associated town of Tarashcha.

For many weeks, our family received no word from this rescue party, nor from the prisoners to be freed. Famine was upon the land, and emaciated beggars often came to the door pleading for food. My younger brother, Rudi, long sick in bed, his failing health made worse by the hunger diet we were all on, died in the spring of 1922 at the age of nine.

With only such food as we could raise by hand, or with the aid of our milk cow as a draft animal, and with the food demands made by the government, there was not enough to eat, or to see us safely through the winter and early spring. And on one such early spring day, when we were all out of the house, with my brothers and sisters busy planting, we returned in the evening only to find that the kettle full of cooked millet porridge intended for our evening meal had disappeared from the house. The empty kettle was returned to us by our neighbors the next day, after they found it left behind in their outhouse! The hungry fellow had found a place where he could eat his stolen prize all alone and in peace.

Week followed week and month followed month with no word from father, and brother Rudi had passed away. Eventually, Jacob Krause returned to Gnadenfeld together with my cousin Heinrich A. Rempel, and presumably with the two other men of the village who had also been apprehended with my uncle Abram and cousin Heinz. My father, and his brother, whom he had made such an effort to rescue, did not return. Both had succumbed to typhus and had been placed in a hospital so filthy and full of lice that the seams of the bed clothing were lined with them! Jacob Krause brought word that father had died at Tarashcha on the 5th of March, 1922. I never cried so loud and so hopelessly again in all my life.