Nastya Buryk was just 4 years old when her mother, Mariya, noticed that something was seriously wrong.
She called her husband, who had enlisted in the Ukrainian military just a few months earlier at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
“My wife told me in a phone call that our daughter started eating poorly and looked really thin,” Artem Buryk told RFE/RL’s Current Time. “They went to Kyiv, and there they confirmed it was leukemia.”
Nastya went to a hospital in Odesa, where the family lived, but the kind of treatment recommended for her was not available there. Artem took a leave of absence from the military to be with his family and decide what to do.
The parents learned that they could get state-of-the-art treatment for Nastya in Israel. They decided Mariya would take their daughter there while Artem stayed behind to keep fighting.
They received help from a Ukrainian charity, Chance4Life, which arranges financial support for cancer patients and their families.
Nastya’s grandmother Olena -- Mariya’s mother -- came to Israel help them through the course of treatment. Later, her two cousins, 10-year-old Kostya and 14-year-old Ilya, also moved to Israel. Their visits seemed to cheer Nastya up.
But the battle with cancer was long, and Nastya had several relapses. The cost of treatment also took a toll on the family. Mariya began fundraising online to try to cover the medical expenses, posting videos of Nastya on Instagram.
One video was shot just after war erupted between Iran and Israel in mid-June. Mariya filmed Nastya and spoke about the sounds of air strikes hitting nearby.
“We've had an exciting night tonight, with a lot of sirens and explosions,” Mariya said in the video. “It was noisy. We didn't get enough sleep. Only Nastya seemed to get enough sleep, right?”
Artem later said that Nastya didn’t seem afraid when they spoke. “She told me that she saw missiles flying. She said she saw one of them shot down. She didn’t say she was scared or anything like that,” he said.
On June 15, Iranian missiles struck the city of Bat Yam, a suburb of Tel Aviv where the family was staying.
Elena Kamennaya, a volunteer who had helped the family, immediately rushed to their neighborhood to look for them. “I was just running through the street, shouting their surname – Buryk,” she said. “I hoped they’d come out of the crowd and respond to their name.”
The apartment where they lived had been partially destroyed in a missile strike, killing and injuring many civilians. Among the dead were Nastya, Mariya, Nastya’s grandmother, and the two young cousins.
The news reached Nastya’s father the next day, when the girl’s aunt called him. “She told me to sit down,” Artem said. “I sat down and she told me that a missile hit the building in Israel and killed everyone.”
He said that the shock and pain he felt was impossible to describe. “This is something deeply personal, inside me,” Artem said. “I’m just trying to hold it together and to not fall apart.”
Others who knew them shared the sense of outrage that a family fleeing one war had been caught in another, all while fighting their own private battle with cancer.
Inna Bakhareva, a co-founder of the Chance4Life charity, told Current Time: “These were people who simply wanted to live -- who were escaping war and illness, and then another war.”
