But that was days ago, Emil thought as he searched the streets for something new to eat. How much longer can this go on? How much longer can I survive?
Emil had been fending for himself since his family was thrown off its land in Friedenstal, more than three years earlier.
His father, mother, and his sister, eight-year-old Rese, had gone to live in Pervomaisk, a city to the east on the Bug River. At first, Emil had been lucky. He had farming skills and had little problem finding work on a collective farm as a field laborer.
He was quiet by nature, but he did not miss much. As a boy, he’d learned that the key to survival under Communism was to be silent, do your job, and not aspire to leadership of any kind. Within three months of his parents’ leaving him to his own wits, he had learned that people who spoke up, people who tried to do things better or tried to teach others a better way, tended to vanish or to die young.
Emil slept where he could that first year on his own, and he made enough to keep food in his belly. The second year, 1931, was even better when he was given a tractor to drive.
But in the fall of the following year, Joseph Stalin decided to quash all opposition to Soviet rule in Ukraine. He withheld almost all food to the region. His goal was to starve its entire population.
As Emil trudged through Birsula six months into the Holodomor, he had the wind in his face, and he was lost in a series of dull, repetitive thoughts of fear and want. He didn’t realize that he’d wandered to a road that ran along the rear of the rail yard and the train station.
Emil had not wanted to come to this place ever again, but there he was, and he looked all around now, seeing newly starved corpses and the near dead sprawled against the fence that surrounded the rail yard. Scattered among them and still standing, the merely starving and desperate clung to the chain-link fence, looking at a small mountain of wheat not eighty meters away.
Four armed soldiers stood around the huge wheat pile while others worked at it with shovels, turning the grain over, exposing the kernels to the mist so when the sun returned and beat down on enough food to feed the city for weeks, it all would simply rot. Emil did not want to look at the wheat, but he could not help himself. He went around a weeping woman holding her dying child and to the fence where he gazed at the grain as if it were a mirage or dream.
He fantasized what he might do with his pockets and hands full of that wheat. He could almost smell the bread in the oven.
One of the soldiers laughed. Emil heard him, shook off the fantasy, and then saw him. Cigarette in his mouth. Hacking laugh. He’s not starving, is he?
The more Emil thought about the well-fed Russian soldiers deliberately destroying food in front of starving people, the more a primal anger flared in him. What had he ever done to Joseph Stalin? What had any of his family done to Joseph Stalin? Why would you kick good farmers off their land and then deny food to innocent people?
Why would a just, kind, and benevolent God let this happen?
Since the Horror began, Emil had been to the rail station twice before, and each time he’d left feeling helpless and doubting the existence of a power beyond himself. Before he could sink into those dark feelings this time, he remembered his father telling him that God helps those who help themselves.
But then a weaselly voice inside him said, Trust in no power but your own, Emil. If you want to be saved, save yourself.
At once unnerved and emboldened by that voice, Emil decided he would have to venture outside the city again. He would walk and search until he found food or dropped dead in his tracks. He pondered which direction to go in. To the east, he might find an unharvested beet or turnip patch. But he decided instead to head west toward farmland that had creek bottoms running through it.
From his days on the farm, Emil knew that by early March, creek bottoms that had not flooded were often green and lush with edibles if you knew what you were looking for. He might find the baby ferns his mother used to pick and cook or pickle in brine. Or baby asparagus shoots. Or mushrooms. Or freshly laid duck eggs. Or the carcass of a winter-kill rabbit, still frozen in the last of the snow.
Or he might walk until his legs would not work anymore.
Emil had seen the way starving people went from walking and talking to suddenly tipping over on legs that would no longer support them. Then they just lay there, some of them mewing like newborn kittens, begging their mothers for milk.
Go west, he thought, and tore himself away from the fence around the rail yard. Those creek bottoms.
But within blocks, Emil knew he would not make it to the first of the creeks nearly five kilometers away. Or if he did make it, unless he was lucky and found food immediately, he’d probably die there. He was simply too weak to walk all that way and then forage.
All he really needed was just a little food. A little food and he could make the walk with enough energy left to find his next meal and the one after that.
It began to snow. Emil sat down by the side of the road to conserve his energy and to decide whether to seek shelter or food. Across the street, in a little park, he noticed a starving woman, who stumbled, sprawled, and did not move. He felt sorry for her, and if
