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We are never ready to lose a loved one. It is super hard to accept the death of an infant. The tragedy is confounded by the tragedy of it all. Often the truth is by far harsher than can be imagined. Closure is ever so important to those left behind. As we have learned about our infant sister Anna, so it has always been. Uncertainty is the hardest cross to bear, or is it?
Anna was born in January 1944 and was called to heavenly home where there is no pain in July. The pain was more pronounced with those who had to learn of such young life having been ended with no chance to reach her potential. Such a short life. What promise would she have had? We will never know. Her short life left a definite imprint on her parents and her siblings. The memory remains painful each time she is remembered.
She was my baby sister whose name was chosen to honor my favorite Aunt Anna. When I learned of her death, perhaps I was too young to take it in. At that point in time, I had not seen her for a number of years. It was somewhat surreal to me living under inconsistent conditions during and right after World War II.
As we were refugees in Germany, the part of our family learned of her death more than five years after she had died. Our father was always writing letters trying to locate the part of our family that was overrun by the advancing Soviet Army while they were still on our farm.
As we traversed Latvia, most of the letters that were delivered to us in the several camps that we stayed by other means than regular post. Individuals who had risky access to the Baltic States transmitted letters. We learned through such correspondence that little Anna had met her death by starvation. At the same time, we had learned that our Nanny had also died. The priest of our congregation was tortured to death.
These stories I heard repeatedly from relatives and other adults residing in Displaced Peoples camps as more and more information became available. As rumors go, there were a variety of scenarios offered, but the one our father and grandmother told us was that she probably died when separated from Mother and since she was not yet weaned from nursing by our mother.
She probably was not able to handle alternative feeding and thus succumbed to starvation. We had also learned that our mother had been sent to hard labor camp in the coalmines of Siberia.
The two boys were placed in a children's home. It was common practice to segregate families so younger members could be indoctrinated into the communist philosophy.
Even though I was too young to grasp the situation, I assumed, as Grandmother had told us repeatedly, that perhaps she just refused to eat.
As hard as it was to believe this circumstance, it seemed quite plausible. We cried, we prayed, we mourned and assumed it as a fact. In this way, at least, we had closure.
It was not until years later after disintegration of the Soviet Union that we learned the truth. We learned from our brothers Venjamins in Latvia and Nikolajs in Ukraine as well as other relatives who had witnessed her death in 1944. What we learned was far more gruesome than what we imagined.
Brother Venjamins related what he had been told when he was old enough to understand, that his sister had died in our home alone. She had cried herself to death from heat causing dehydration and lack of nourishment.
We all called our Nanny, (Starushka) Granny, who had also been nanny to our father and his two sisters. Granny told the boys as to how their sister died.
To my surprise, it was not at all what we thought or believed. She endured the most painful death that a person can suffer, that of starvation. I felt both anger and sadness deep in my heart.
Here are the sad details of her passing: On the day when we girls had left our home with grandmothers, our aunts and their children, the Soviet Army re-occupied our homestead.
Our father had gone ahead days earlier. Our mother had to retrieve Nikolajs from our neighbors where he was visiting since early in morning that day. Mother sent the Old Granny to get Nikolajs and bring him home so that she and our seamstress and the other two little ones could follow and catch up with us.
When Old Granny returned with the boy, she had taken a shortcut through the woods from our neighbor's house because she had seen soldiers approaching neighbor's homestead as she was leaving. She was aware that their next destination down the road was our homestead.
Old Granny collected the two boys and told our mother to go on, get away from the house and hide out in the woods until the soldiers. She and some of the remaining farm hands would look after the little ones.
Our baby sister Anna was asleep in the house, Old Granny planned to get her and bring her to mother where she was hiding. She warned mother not to try to come to the house as long as the soldiers were about. Mother was thirty-two and was a very attractive lady; Old Granny knew full well what the soldiers would do to her.
As evening fell, Granny asked the soldiers if she might get the baby and take it to her mother as she was crying loudly now. She was told "bring the woman here and she can get the child." She said she didn't know where exactly she was, but wanted to attend to the infant.
She was told again that she could not enter the house to get the child unless the mother came. Further, she was told not to enter the house under any circumstances and to take the boys down the hill to the farm workers living quarters. They were commandeering the house and no one was allowed in it. The door to the baby's room was shut. Soon, she had stopped crying; perhaps she had cried herself to sleep.
The next morning, Granny begged the soldiers and again was told to provide the woman, which she refused. She was told to go down below. She heard faint whimpering from the inside of the house while soldiers were reveling in the kitchen and starting on a new bottle of Vodka.
Again and again, Old Granny tried to plea. She was shoved away. She was ordered to go below and not to bother them.
In the meantime, Mother stayed in the woods and survived on berries and other vegetation. Since it was July, it was warm enough to sleep in one of the sheds in the woods. She also knew where there was a spring of potable water.
On the third day, there seemed to be no crying sound coming from the inside of the house. As soldiers were departing, staggering from too much drinking, they shouted to Old Granny "Go ahead and get the kid."
When the soldiers had traveled some distance, Granny and our seamstress entered the house to find Anna dead from dehydration and starvation. Mother arrived as she saw the soldiers move on. It was too late for Anna.
The best they could do was to find a priest to give proper burial for the infant.
What a horrible and painful death for someone who was innocent and blameless. To me, it seems like the ultimate display of "man's inhumanity to man."
This kind of suffering was repeated time and time again all because of Stalin and Hitler's thirst for world domination. We see the same pain endured by Ukrainians today.
People find all kinds of excuses to inflict unimaginable cruelty on one another.
It is so sad that people cannot ever learn that greed no matter in what form makes no sense. Be it World ordination or intolerance on religious bases or pure intolerance of allowing other people to exist as we seen today in Middle East and Ukraine as well as other war tom areas on this planet.
Perhaps the day may come when men can live humanly.