Front Matter
Copyright 1989, CANZONA PUBLISHING Winnipeg, Manitoba R2G 1L1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo-copying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of CANZONA PUBLISHING.
ISBN: 0-929130-01-4
Printed in Canada
Number one in series: Gebt der Wahrheit die Ehre Number two in series: Laß dir an meiner Gnade genügen
Design/Layout by G. Loewen Media Services, typography by Heidi Harms, printing by Christian Press
Cover photo: Katharina Fast, mother of the author. Katharina Fast, née Klassen, was born in Neu-Chortitza, Ukraine. At the beginning of this century she moved with her parents to the Orenburg settlement. She attended school in Dobrowka. Her goal of entering missionary service she did not attain. Her husband died as early as 1933, and she was left alone with her five children. The greater part of her life she sacrificed to the care of her children. Her life was, for her loved ones, an example of patience and self-sacrifice for her family, and a blessing to those whom she met.
Photo: 1960
Dedicated to my dear mother Katharina Fast, née Klassen, to my wife Grete and to our daughter Hilde.
"Let my grace be sufficient for you; for my strength is made mighty in the weak."
2 Corinthians 12:9
"The holiest tear that ever flows Is shed when a mother prays for her child."
Adalbert Stifter
Acknowledgement
I wish to thank Dr. Peter Letkemann and Dr. Georg Epp at this point for their valuable editorial suggestions.
Preface to the First Edition
When I wrote the book Gebt der Wahrheit die Ehre in the years 1950, 1951, and 1952, I was fulfilling an urgent wish of my companions in suffering from the years of captivity as a prisoner of war. Many of those prisoners, men and women alike, never returned to freedom, to say nothing of a return to their homeland. Gebt der Wahrheit die Ehre was meant to set a memorial to their remembrance.
Another group of Germans who had to suffer in a particular way were the Russian Germans, some two million of them — a great, silent host that was made to suffer because someone believed he had too little space and too much right, and because others were of the view that it was their duty to avenge a monstrous injustice upon these poor people.
It is difficult, indeed almost impossible, to grasp and describe in full the many experiences of the Russian Germans in the first half of this century. For this reason I have attempted to portray the fate of one Mennonite family from the Orenburg settlement. They, the Mennonites near Orenburg, are a good example of what the Russian Germans lived through in the merciless time of those days.
My dear mother, called "Mutter Siebert" in this book, lived through that time with full intensity. She learned in the school of God and came to know her dependence on the grace of her Master.
Over the eleven years of our correspondence my mother wrote 276 letters. This correspondence served as a source of information of inestimable value. The letters bear witness to weakness and strength, to despondency and courage, to trust and faith in God's goodness. Above all, these letters breathe the love that only a mother's heart can give. Therefore this book, which tells of the fate of my family and especially of my mother, is dedicated to my mother. May it be written in her honor!
The Author
Winnipeg, Manitoba August 26, 1989
Foreword to the First Edition
In the tragedy-laden history of our century, it was again and again the mothers upon whom fate laid the heaviest burden. One need only think of the "Monument of the Mothers" in Strasbourg — a mother holding in her arms her dead sons, driven to their ruin by the madness of this century. I think also of Kornelius Epp's painting, "Mother" — the burden of a century is engraved in the features of this woman. And one must also have seen the "Monument of the Refugee Mother" before the great Mennonite church in Bielefeld. Mothers always had to be strong . . .
Monuments speak volumes. They call us to reflection. The author of this book was moved by such reflection to take up his pen, in order to create a memorial to his mother through the word. His pen traces the fate of a German mother in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era.
This book deserves to become widely known among our people, for this mother walked the road of thousands of mothers — thousands will recognize in this mother the soul of their own mother. If the simple and yet shattering truth of this story stirs us and leads us to reflection, then this narrative will have fulfilled its purpose.
Dr. Georg K. Epp Menno Simons College University of Winnipeg
Part One: June 22, 1941
The Calm before the Storm
Hot burned the summer sun upon the still-green hills and valleys of the Ural Mountains and upon the vast plains that stretched like great terraces from the north toward the south. The fields of the many collective farms were now all sown, and man and beast, dependent on the yield of the earth, hoped for a good harvest — one that would then secure their supply of bread and every other necessity through the long continental winter. That was important, very important: that one had food and drink and a warm house. How often the Siebert family had suffered want!
And it was not only the Sieberts who looked forward to a good harvest. No — all the inhabitants of their village, and the inhabitants of the neighboring Mennonite villages of the Orenburg settlement as well, and the Bashkirs, the Kazakhs, and the Tatars toward the north, had no more fervent wish and no more ardent hope than a good harvest that would bring them bread, provide fodder for their livestock, and yield enough fuel for their houses besides. Indeed, a good harvest would even leave a little money over for the purchase of the most essential things. And what things there were that one wanted to acquire!
How long had Tina been waiting for a new dress, and how long had the boys been looking forward to the new bicycle? All of that was now to become reality — if there was a good harvest, if, after payment of the taxes, the fees for the use of the many farm implements, and the setting aside of the necessary seed grain, something should still remain. For so many years the people had lived in this hope! This year everything was to take a turn for the better. At last the consolation of an improvement was to come true. At last one would be able to eat one's fill and dress decently. And with that, happiness would move into people's hearts and would ease the waiting for the homecoming of the eldest son, Heinz.
In one year, the term of service was to end for the eldest of Mutter Siebert's children. True, in one year Gerhard would be old enough for service in the army, but Heinz would then be home again for good. This certainty alone made her heart beat higher and more bravely. She was afraid for her children, for so many dangers lay along their path in life, dangers from which she so dearly wished to preserve them.
Preserve them! How was she, in her weakness, to accomplish that? She had no control over the education of her children; she had no direct influence on the workplaces where her boys would be put to work, for society — that is, the government offices and the directives of the Party and Komsomol organizations (the Communist youth league) — determined the lives of young people. Mutter Siebert could only counsel and plead quietly, without any insistence. How persistently she must have prayed that God might intervene and help! Her prayers had surely not gone unheard, for Heinz came home at the start of the new school year of 1939–40 and taught in the neighboring village. Gerhard, too, took up a teaching post, and indeed right in Dolinowka, in their home village.
Her prayers had brought her two eldest boys home. She saw her secret wishes gradually being fulfilled. She looked forward to her children's happiness and to a time when worry would no longer be her constant guest. She would at last be able, together with her children, to lead a decent, better-fed, and contented life.
For years now her children had been coming home with hopes of a better future. That things were going so miserably for them was due — as one was taught from official quarters — not to the impossibility of socialist ideas or to the utopian system; rather, the root of all evil lay solely and entirely in human inadequacy, in the remnants of "capitalist" ways of thinking and acting. So the young people were taught, and Mutter Siebert felt ever more strongly that she was no longer equal to the influence of this philosophy on her children.
With each visit of her children her readiness to argue grew weaker, and she now fell back upon her last support — prayer to God. There help had always come to her, and her hope turned wholly to the Rock on which she had founded life for herself and her children.
The Siebert family would soon be out of its misery — so the boys joyfully declared — and Mutter Siebert and Tina would then live in orderly circumstances and in prosperity. The waiting and hoping would have been worth it. All the fear and the constant anxiety were to come to an end.
Heinz wrote letters regularly, in which much was said of peace and much reported about the life of a Red Army man, a soldier of the "invincible" army of the Soviet Union. Life in the regimental school proceeded according to plan, and after a year and a half Heinz would return home as a junior lieutenant. That
would mean something indeed — that a German in the Soviet Union could earn the trust to occupy such an honorable position.
In the eyes of the young soldiers from the Mennonite, Lutheran, and Catholic communities this was an outstanding achievement, and the existence of a Volga German regiment within the 102nd Infantry Division was interpreted as a convincing sign that discrimination against the Germans in the Soviet Union was now finally over. Those perpetual and dreaded accusations would now cease, and the so longingly awaited era of equal rights was surely dawning. All of that, so Heinz wrote, now belonged to the past. Yes, if all of that came to fulfillment, Mutter Siebert would lead a peaceful and carefree life. Only until the new harvest in field and garden, and then hardship and worry would have nothing more to say. What a joyful time that would be! And then came the horrific 22nd of June, 1941.
Attention!
It was a Sunday like so many other Sundays in the year. There was no time to give oneself over to rest, for the summer was short and the days of supposed rest were few. In the few hours of Sunday and of the evenings after work, everything in house and garden had to be done. That was the most precious time, when one worked for oneself and one's own. Despite the Sunday, people were busily at work — on this so fateful Sunday, June 22, 1941, as well.
"Attention! Attention! Citizens of the great Soviet Union, attention! An extremely important announcement from the Kremlin in Moscow follows shortly! In a few minutes Comrade Vyacheslav Molotov, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR, will speak to the peoples of the Soviet Union. He begins his address at 10 o'clock in the morning. Attention! Attention! Do not fail to gather at the loudspeaker."
What could there possibly be of such extraordinary importance that the entire population of one-sixth of the earth was being summoned to a spontaneous assembly, to a meeting without precedent! Could a group of army commanders have called for a putsch? But the ablest officers, those most feared by Stalin, had long since been liquidated as potential enemies. Many hundreds of the best members of the officer corps had fallen victim to the political purges of Stalin and Yezhov. Could someone have been overlooked? No, that could not be, for in carrying out the Stalinist
purge operations one had experience; one had learned to identify the victims, to arrest them adroitly and as inconspicuously as possible, and then to hold them for life on the strength of fabricated charges. Forced confessions made these repressive arrests legally binding and final. The Finnish campaign and its pitiful successes had already shown how ruinously this purge of the officer corps had affected the Red Army. Little Finland had very nearly inflicted a fatal defeat on its great neighbor. No, a revolt of the army was not to be feared: Yezhov's NKVD (the Soviet secret police) had done a thorough job. The commissars and politruks — the political officers — sat firmly in the saddle, and no officer would be in a position to undertake anything against Stalin and his helpers. It had to be something else.
Had the Japanese found the courage to make an attempt to appropriate a little piece of "holy Russian soil"? Had they perhaps forgotten the experiment at Lake Khasan? Supposedly it had been a bloody defeat for the Japanese. What could possibly be troubling the people in the Kremlin, and what could be so important to tell people so far from Moscow that it could not have waited for a more favorable moment? In the west, after all, everything was in order. Poland had been defeated, and the territory of Poland had been justly and very satisfactorily divided between the peace-loving Soviet Union and justice-loving National Socialist Germany. The Polish officers lay, still four thousand in number, in a mass grave at Katyn. They were no longer a danger to Stalin. On their account no one lifted a little finger anymore.
The remaining countries of Europe? Could they be the cause of this urgent broadcast? Hardly. France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Finland had capitulated. England was entangled in a war against Germany. And Germany? Germany had only recently signed a non-aggression pact with the USSR. This treaty between Hitler and Stalin guaranteed peace between Germany and the Soviet Union. One could rely on that. What, then, was the real reason for this great commotion that had come over the whole Soviet Union? What brought Molotov, on behalf of his all-powerful chief, to the microphone in the Kremlin, the heart of one-sixth of this earth?
At last it was ten o'clock in the morning. The inhabitants of the Mennonite village of Dolinowka had drawn up close to the loudspeakers in their houses. They had only one receiver for the roughly thirty houses in the village. Why, after all, should every house have a
receiver? This way they all heard the same station, and divergent information was thereby ruled out. In this manner one kept firm control over what the people were to hear. No influence, not even the slightest, was to affect people's way of thinking from outside.
The radio operator in the office of the kolkhoz — the collective farm — switched on the reception. The loudspeaker crackled a few times, and one heard the somewhat hoarse voice of Molotov:
"Comrades! Citizens of the peaceful Union of Socialist Soviet Republics! With great sorrow and deep shock I now inform you that since the early morning hours Hitler's armies have been attacking our holy Soviet Union."
In his speech he said that fascism had dared to stick its swinish snout into the garden of socialism. German aircraft had attacked many western cities. They had even bombed Kiev, Minsk, Gomel, and other large places. The attack on the USSR had broken all concluded treaties, and the Soviet peoples had been shamefully betrayed.
Molotov called upon all citizens of the Soviet Union to defend the country, to teach the fascist conquerors a fitting lesson and to annihilate them on Soviet soil. He called upon all citizens to struggle against saboteurs and wreckers. Above all, it was imperative to act against panic-mongers and deserters. Proletarian vigilance was the order of the hour. The Soviet power, Molotov promised, would proceed mercilessly against anyone who in any way allowed himself the least offense in these areas.
All citizens were called upon to remain where they were and to continue doing their duty. Fugitives were to be reported, so that they could be held to account for their harmful conduct.
A new law for the period of the state of war was already in place. This new law declared in wholly unmistakable tones that every citizen of the Soviet Union, man or woman, who from now on committed an offense would be punished with the full severity of Soviet law. All deserters and fugitives from the front zone were to be executed. Their property would be confiscated by the state. In the event that the relatives of the condemned had known of the criminal intent, they too would be convicted and banished. Their property likewise fell to the state.
At the close of his speech Molotov called all Soviet citizens to active struggle against the fascist invaders. Every
citizen, young or old, was to strike the enemy wherever he might be encountered. In this Great Patriotic War there would be no mercy for the enemy and his collaborators. Thus Molotov ended his speech on that morning.
The man in the office switched off the loudspeakers in the houses. The apparatus crackled again, and with that each person was alone with his thoughts, entirely alone. Alone if only because, from that moment on, no one was permitted to speak with anyone else about his thoughts and feelings. Anything could be construed as panic-mongering, as cowardice and rumor-spreading. A paralyzing fear settled over everyone and everything.
A Mother's Duty
Mutter Siebert still sat mute and motionless before the long-silent loudspeaker. What was she still waiting for? No further instructions were coming. Now there was war, and everyone had a duty in war, young or old, man or woman, willing or compelled. For Mutter Siebert, too, there was a duty: the care of her children.
She had four sons and one daughter, for whom she had worried since the early death of her husband, and for whom alone she had worked and toiled — indeed, for whom she had lived. For herself she had had nothing in the past eight years but care and labor. Only now and then, when her children were all at home, did one see joy on her face — once so pretty, now careworn, worn out by work, and aged far too early. Mutter Siebert was, after all, only forty-four years old. Despite her few years, Mutter Siebert did not have many hopes left for her own life, for by the time her youngest daughter could stand on her own feet, she herself would be quite old and weary of life. And now, on top of it all, came this calamitous war, and with it the heightened fear for her sons. Three sons were with her and safe for the time being. But Heinz! He was a soldier, and it was war. This thought struck her like a bolt from a clear sky. Where might he be on this 22nd of June, 1941, after Molotov's speech? The entire Red Army, praised as invincible, had — according to Molotov's words — gone over to the attack and was to deal Hitler's armies the annihilating blow within the next few days. For Mutter Siebert, however, that was still no comfort, for her son would be in the ranks of the fighting Red Army, defending the Soviet Union against the fascist conquerors with his whole life. Molotov had spoken of fierce and relentless battles in which the lives of the soldiers would not be spared.
Sunk deep in thought, Mutter Siebert pictured to herself the battlefield in the west of Ukraine. She had seen pictures from the First World War, had read books about the war, and had heard the stories of her husband, who had served in the First World War as a medical orderly in the Crimea. All these accounts made her shudder when she imagined her eldest son in the midst of this killing. Her fear showed her Heinz in the most sorrowful situations her imagination could produce. That she might lose her son, lose him forever, did not enter her mind at all. She did indeed see the possibility that he might be wounded and maimed — but to fall, never to come home again: no, that could not be. She loved her eldest so dearly. With these comfortless and tormenting thoughts Mutter Siebert still sat before the mute loudspeaker. To her many questions no answer came from the black dish on the wall. From there came only orders and exhortations to the faithful fulfillment of duty for "Little Mother Russia, for Little Father Stalin, and for the homeland."
For Mutter Siebert, however, there were still greater cares, which she shared with millions of mothers; for the fear for their children was felt by mothers throughout Russia, Germany, England, France, and in the many other countries that had been dragged into this cruel slaughter of the peoples by unscrupulous "Führers" and "Little Fathers."
Answers to her anxious questions, and comfort for her grief, she had to seek elsewhere. That she had always done: she relied on the help given her by God. With him she found comfort. With him she had always come to new strength, and with him she would today once again find the equipment she would need for the time of the war that had only just begun, with all its hardship, its crushing privations, its fear, and its great forsakenness. Calmly and deliberately she laid her folded, calloused hands in her lap. All her care for her children, for herself, and her care for the countless many who were struck by the consequences of the war, Mutter Siebert brought before the throne of her God, and she asked for grace, protection, and preservation in this dreadful time of war which Molotov had announced only today, on June 22, 1941.
With this prayer Mutter Siebert had begun her highest and most beautiful duty: her prayers for her children were never to cease as long as her heart beat in her loving breast. In her communion with God her loneliness and forsakenness came to an end, and she found the strength and the courage to go on along her way. One thing, however, grieved her
again and again: her children did not know her loving and gracious God. They rejected the redeeming power of Jesus and believed they could master their fate on their own. Too deeply had the teachings of school and society penetrated them. But they all knew that their mother carried them on her praying hands, and that especially now she trembled for their salvation. She believed with rock-firm conviction that God would hear her prayers for her children.
The War Seizes Everyone
Germany's attack on the Soviet Union had taken the whole population, and the government as well, completely by surprise. After all, only very recently such sweeping treaties had been concluded, treaties that were meant to prevent a war — and even if the treaties could not stave off war, they would at least postpone a collision, and through these friendship and non-aggression pacts the Soviet Union would gain time to prepare itself for the war with the capitalist world. And there was so much to prepare.
The administration of the country was in a disorganized and non-functioning condition, and from the very first hours of the war an oppressive mood settled over the entire land, bringing the morale of the population almost to the zero point. With the collapse of all order in the west — so swift and so surprising that on the morning of the first day of the war the wheat trains and coal transports were still running to Germany on schedule — an uncontrollable chaos arose in the interior. Under this chaos and the general helplessness it was not only the fighting troops at the front who suffered; the deep hinterland, too, immediately felt this weakness of the vast Soviet realm. There was a shortage of all goods that had to be brought in from other regions. Coal was lacking, oil, foodstuffs of every kind.
The people in the cities felt the shortage most keenly, for they depended on daily provisioning through the delivery of goods by rail. The railway, already overburdened as it was, suffered under the conditions of war more than any other sector of the Soviet economy.
The collective farms came under pressure from the various government agencies right from the start. With the loss of the rich Ukraine, which had for so long been the breadbasket not only of Russia but of all Europe, the other agricultural regions had to be driven to increased production. Orenburg was among the
regions that were now to step in for Ukraine. The authorities — the village soviets, the soviets of the raions and the oblast (the district and provincial councils) — applied their thumbscrews at once, demanding, even before the harvest, increased quotas for the delivery of grain, meat, milk, and eggs, and not only from the collective farms: every family had a quite specific quota to fulfill.
The threats and accusations took on alarming dimensions, and everyone trembled for his life and his freedom at the slightest failure, at the smallest shortfall in the delivery quotas of provisions for the armies set by the government. Everything had quite suddenly become vital to the war effort, and total war admitted not even the most compelling reasons for any failure.
It took only a few days, and Orenburg with its industry and its farmland was engulfed by the widening circles of the flood of war, living now in the same agitation as every other major city of the Soviet Union. Orenburg too, which otherwise lay so far "out of range," writhed under the birth-pangs of the war, and its population was drawn into this total struggle.
With the first day of the war the general mobilization began. All reserves were called up and sent to the various units, which until then had had only peacetime strength. There was hardly time to train the reservists, for the initial losses of the Red Army were counted in millions of soldiers. Thus, for example, Marshal Timoshenko, commander-in-chief of the 2nd Army in the Belorussian sector of the front, lost two million soldiers in the first eight weeks after the outbreak of war. The replacements for these enormous casualties had to come from the hinterland, from the east of Russia. And they came, for their homeland was in utmost danger.
But the replacement of the losses at the front in the west left many gaps in the factories and collective farms, in the mines and other enterprises of the country. To fill these gaps, one did what was done in all the other countries seized by the war: one fetched the women, the underage children, and the old men and put them into the factories, the collective farms, and the pits. And the arms forges, the railways, and the many mines worked ceaselessly day and night, delivering war matériel for the fighting troops on the many sectors of the front.
The longer the war lasted, the scarcer working hands became, and with that the output declined in the enterprises, now for the most part converted to war production, and in the collective farms, which were scarcely permitted to keep for themselves the
bread they needed. The want grew ever greater and cast ever wider circles of its devastating influence.
The Scapegoat
The announcement of the German Wehrmacht's attack on the Soviet Union struck the population of German descent — and that included the Mennonites — doubly hard. The designation "German" in one's identity papers was a mark of Cain even in peacetime, and now there was war! A war begun by Germany! A war against the first socialist state in the world! A war against all the rights of nations and in defiance of many peace and non-aggression treaties. Through this attack, all Germans became guilty of the war! Not only the Germans of the Third Reich — that would still have been comprehensible — but the Germans of the Volga Republic with its flourishing cities, its industry and culture, its many schools and other institutions; the Germans around Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk, Melitopol, Arkadak, Orenburg, Barnaul, Alma-Ata, Karaganda, and in the Caucasus were in the twinkling of an eye stamped as henchmen and accomplices of the fascist conquerors. "Nazi," "Fascist" — these were names that suddenly clung to these innocent people. And there was no law that protected them; there was no means that could wipe this stigma from their name and from their passport.
These people, who had given their all to bring honor to their name, who strove to be loyal to their Russian fatherland and to serve it honestly — people who could truly never be blamed for the fact that in Austria there had been a Hitler, who then removed himself to Germany and there exploited the conditions to build up a power with which he now enslaved Europe and today attacked the Soviet Union in order to wipe it from the face of the earth according to his plans — they bore no guilt for this human tragedy. They were as innocent of this calamity as they could claim no credit for the fact that in Germany there had been a Beethoven, who delighted the whole world with his music and who to this day still delights and moves the hearts of many people, in the Soviet Union as well.
No, the Germans of the Soviet Union bore no guilt for Hitler's insane attack on the Soviet Union. They had only one wish, and that was to be allowed to live and work in peace and quiet. They had scarcely survived the last wave of deportation — even if at a cost of thousands of their best men and women — and already the rails were laid for a new, unbridled
repression. Now, it was feared, they would be accused of espionage, of sabotage, of wrecking, and of countless other alleged crimes. June 22, 1941 opened the floodgates of the fury of persecution against everyone and everything that was German. A scapegoat was needed now, and it now had to be furnished by the Germans.
From now on the examining magistrates would work long hours of overtime fabricating the most incredible indictments against the innocent "criminals." Their powers of invention knew no bounds. Here someone had brought a tractor to a standstill by strewing sugar and sand into the cylinders. There someone had let a nag, worked half to death, perish; and at the other end of the village a cowshed had burned down when the kerosene lamp grew too hot. The front was still thousands of kilometers away, but here, supposedly, sat a spy who had not pulled the blackout curtain in his house all the way down, intending thereby to show the enemy the target for a bombing raid in the Ural region. Dangerous days were approaching in the wake of Molotov's speech.
The arrests began on June 22 itself. The men who had long since been marked disappeared quite inconspicuously and landed somewhere in the many camps as criminals whose only guilt consisted in having been born of German parents and bearing a German name such as Kliewer, Fast, Meyer, and the like. Often, too, they had ended up on these lists because their fellow citizens had sold them to the NKVD out of envy, anger, or out of fear and weakness. These victims knew nothing of their guilt; they knew nothing of the betrayal by those who bore them ill will; they had no inkling of what awaited them in the immediate future; and they comprehended in no way that they had been chosen to toil for the next four to five years as slaves in the many camps, in coal and iron mines. They could not and would not know that in the years that lay before them they would be subjected to treatment that would defy all description.
Right at the beginning of the war, measures had also been taken to evacuate the German settlements, under any and all circumstances, into the eastern regions of the Soviet Union and thus to secure them against the grasp of the German troops. One was convinced — and not without reason — that the Germans in Russia were not the most convinced adherents of Communism. On the other hand, these people were needed as labor in all branches of the economy. The evacuation of the Germans was carried out in headlong haste, and
many settlements in Ukraine were left behind, overtaken by the rapid advance of the Wehrmacht. What could not be accomplished by way of deportations in Ukraine could be managed in the Republic of the Volga Germans, with its almost one million people. That included other settlements such as Arkadak as well. Overnight, before they rightly knew it, these poor people had been declared criminals and collaborators with the enemy. They were branded as Nazis or Fascists and as such were sent to the north of the Urals, into the taiga, into the midst of a region never before inhabited by human beings — there to give up their lives, come what may, with women and old men, with frail children, for the defense of their homeland.
Other trainloads of these "collaborators" dragged their way into the expanses of Siberia, far out to the city of Magadan, to die here in the mines and factories, or, as survivors, to build new settlements. Large portions of the Volga Germans took yet another direction. They were sent into the deserts of Central Asia, to remain here in the republics of the Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kirghiz, and Turkmens as cheap labor and later as a good admixture in the politics of nationalities. Deportations on this scale affected principally the Germans throughout the Soviet Union, although the Crimean Tatars, the Kalmyks, and Caucasian peoples were also drawn into this operation. Even after the war, these peoples were never again permitted to return to their territories. They were condemned to remain forever in regions foreign to them.
The Germans tried to explain to themselves this sudden transformation of their situation, but to their great sorrow could find no plausible answer. As early as 1941 the newspapers and the radio began the propagandistic slander and the incitement of the non-German population against the German inhabitants. The blow against this segment of the Soviet peoples was prepared deliberately and thoroughly. But the full measure of the consequences of the artificially inflated hatred against the Germans began in earnest only in the year 1942. The true intentions and the real attitude of the authorities — not of the general population — became apparent with the conscription of further segments of the population into the so-called "Trudarmee" (labor army). It was clear to everyone that labor was needed, and that the population not yet directly affected by the war would have to supply it.
The Germans in the Soviet Union were all earmarked for the Trudarmee, which at bottom was nothing other than a
veritable concentration camp with an especially harsh regime. Here the citizens conscripted into the Trudarmee were held under the strictest guard, behind multiple rows of barbed wire, robbed of every freedom. In the morning they were led to work under guard, and in the evening, after ten and fourteen hours of labor, they were brought back — to the yapping of the German shepherd dogs — into the filthy barracks, utterly infested with lice and bedbugs. Under these conditions unworthy of human beings, thousands upon thousands of people worked and lived for years, solely because they happened to have been born of German parents and bore a German name. That was their only crime. To end up in one of these camps was quite simple: if on the line that followed the question of nationality there stood "Nemets" — "German" — one belonged, in those days, in one of the many concentration camps with the other "criminals," of whom in those years there were so many.
Part Two: The Trudarmee
The Call-Up Order
The Siebert family, too, was now very soon to come within the orbit of the Trudarmee, even though Mutter Siebert was already forty-five years old in 1942, and Gerhard only nineteen, Hans seventeen, Peter fifteen, and Tina nine. The Siebert family accordingly had four members who came into question for service in the Trudarmee. Rumors spoke of an imminent "call-up" into the army of the enslaved.
At the beginning of 1942 the moment arrived. Gerhard had gone early to the school where he had been teaching since the start of the school year when the messenger from the village soviet brought him the card with the order to report immediately. The content of the card seemed entirely peaceable and harmless. One read, in simple and plain language, that citizen Gerhard Siebert was to report this very day, at three o'clock in the afternoon, to the village soviet in the neighboring village. He needed to bring nothing special apart from warm clothing, a spare set of underwear, fork and spoon, and, if possible, sturdy shoes. All of that could be packed without difficulty into a simple sack.
Warm clothing, sturdy shoes! If only one could get them! Today at three in the afternoon it begins. No one knows where to, or for how long. Mutter Siebert received the news without any particular reaction, for she could not grasp that she would so soon have to give up the second of her sons. Since the beginning of the war there had been no trace of Heinz. Either he had fallen, or he was one among the prisoners — although according to the propaganda reports no Soviet prisoners were being taken. It was claimed that the Germans killed all the Soviet prisoners.
Now it was Gerhard's turn. Mutter Siebert worried especially about her second son. Yet it was a comfort to the mother that Gerhard did not have to go to the front; he was going, after all, into the distant hinterland. At that time it was not yet known that the losses in the Trudarmee were very great. At the front one died suddenly, amid the roar of battle. Here, at the front of the Trudarmee, one died a slow death amid the pains of hunger, of beatings and threats, and of the deepest humiliation.
"Mother, don't be sad," Gerhard tried to comfort her, "I'll soon be back. My service is only for the duration of the war, and the war
can't last much longer. Our army will beat back the fascist conquerors. They will soon enough regret having stuck their swinish snout into our garden. I'll soon be back."
"My boy, when Heinz left us almost two years ago, he spoke exactly the same way. And who knows where he is now. No one has any idea where the division and all the other units have gone. Vanished they are, as if wiped from the face of the earth. Heinz meant to be home again in two years. I have such a dark foreboding that we shall never see him again."
Weeping quietly to herself, Mutter Siebert packed up the few belongings for Gerhard, and by two o'clock he was ready to travel. He was, by the way, not alone in having to set out on this hard road. Together with him, the whole birth-year of 1923 had to report. In silence the young men walked from their farmyards, followed by the family members still remaining. One last embrace, one last "farewell," and they climbed onto the trucks that had driven up, which carried them in the direction of the next town, where the militia — and not representatives of the army — was waiting for them.
Now they were all together, the youth of the settlements in this region. Here and there one heard patriotic speeches, larded with phrases learned by heart from the newspaper. Yes, one would certainly defend the fatherland in this Great Patriotic War and show the others, the fascists and capitalists, that they would be far better off if they left the first state of workers and peasants in peace. Most, however, pursued their own thoughts, which carried them either homeward or far away to the most remote regions where they had relatives and acquaintances.
It was not good to speak about the true conditions in the camps of the Trudarmee. Conversations of that kind were construed as undermining the fighting morale of the home front and were punished with particular severity. It was best to keep silent and give one's thoughts free rein. Thoughts were still free.
The lists were read out, and then the open trucks drove up. The men, who often still looked like children, climbed aboard. A timid waving and quiet weeping was the parting farewell from the beloved homeland. For some it was the last farewell, for it was not granted to many, many of these men ever to come home again. Of them this war demanded the greatest sacrifice a human being has to give: they died, and no one knows their graves. And whoever does know them does not
wish that others should know them too. Too many mothers, wives, fathers, and children would go seeking the resting place of their dead.
Slowly the trucks hauled their precious load up the hill and then disappeared behind the crest of the next rise. During the drive scarcely anyone spoke a word. Only now and then one heard the question of "Where to?" But to that no one had an answer. There were, after all, so many places where working hands were needed, for the war — this scourge upon all mankind — devoured everything that human hands had ever created and were creating. Insatiable were the demands of the war, and the hinterland had to give up what it had. These German boys from the regions around Orenburg knew that, and they did not set themselves against this demand.
After barely two hours the transport arrived in Orenburg and halted in a large yard that was guarded on all sides by soldiers in the uniform of the NKVD: sentries stood at the gate, watchtowers rose at the corners, and along the fence, on the outside, soldiers accompanied by German shepherd dogs paced casually up and down. At the sight of this array of security measures all conversation fell silent, and an anxious questioning came over most of the men.
"What are we supposed to be doing in this yard, and what is the barbed wire for?"
"Isn't this a camp for criminals?"
"Are we not all honorable citizens of the Soviet Union?"
"Have they confused us with some other batch of people? Surely there's a mistake here! We'd better clear it up right away."
But there was nothing to clear up, for while the recruits were still looking around anxiously, they had to form up in rank and file. They were led to receive food, and immediately afterward, once a meager travel ration of provisions had been handed to them, they were marched through the city to the railway station. The people on the sidewalks looked at this motley crowd and asked themselves involuntarily what these people could have done wrong, that they were being led through the city under such heavy guard, in the middle of the street, far from the sidewalk. Or could there be so many enemies of the people in the Soviet Union — and so many of them among the young?
The track on which the freight cars designated for this transport stood was located on the outermost side of the freight yard. Ten large freight cars, painted red, with small windows set high up, stood there with their doors flung wide
to receive the men. Before each car a group of sixty men came to a halt. They had been counted very precisely. The NKVD soldiers who had guarded them until then handed over their groups, at full count, to the guards of the railcars. Before the order to board was given, a lieutenant of the NKVD stepped before the recruits and in a grave tone addressed the following words to them:
"Citizens, you know that Hitler's Germany has attacked our beloved Soviet Union. Large parts of our homeland have been laid waste by these fascist German barbarians. Our country is defending itself resolutely against these foreign invaders with every means at our disposal. You are Germans, and it might occur to one or another of you to help the Nazis through sabotage or espionage activities of some kind. You will have no opportunity for that. Take a look around you. Do you see the troops on the roofs of the railcars, the bars on the windows, and the dogs with their handlers alongside the trains? They will travel with you to your final destination. I want to warn you against daring any attempt at escape, for that will cost you your life on the spot. Stay with your group! From now on you have your last opportunity to prove that you are loyal citizens of the Soviet Union. You will prove this best through fulfillment of the work quotas and through exemplary conduct. As Germans you are, after all, accustomed to diligence and discipline. For each railcar we have appointed an elder. Should anyone have a complaint or a request, report to your starshina — your senior man. I advise you once more: take my instructions seriously. We depart very soon."
"Can you tell me where we are going?" one man ventured to ask.
"You will find that out at the final destination. The journey lasts approximately a day and a night."
With that the conversation was over. The travel rations had been drawn, and the journey could begin — without a destination and without a stated purpose. One had suddenly become a number, behind which there was only a single notation — "German." This notation also determined at once how one was to be deployed, how one was to be treated. What mattered was that one produced something. If one was broken by the pressure and the inhuman treatment, not much was lost. There was simply one German fewer — no matter where he came from, from Hitler's Germany or from Stalin's Soviet Union.
"All aboard! All aboard!" rang out along the track. The great sliding doors of the railcars slammed shut. The lieutenant checked
every fastening and once more gave the guards the strictest instructions in case any of the Trudarmee men should take it into his head to flee. Inside the railcar the sixty travelers began to settle in. Each found a place on the bare floor. One crouched down and was glad to get a place by the wall, near the barred window and as far as possible from the large bucket that was now to serve sixty men as a toilet (latrine). Since the bucket was emptied only once a day, the slop spilled over with the jolting of the railcar and ran under the prisoners' seats, making it impossible for them to remain there for long.
The mood of the Trudarmee men grew ever more dejected the longer the monotonous rattling of the wheels carried the train northward, always along the slopes of the rising Ural Mountains. Only rarely did the train stop. On the evening of the following day the train halted once more on a siding. The locomotive uncoupled the cars. So they had reached their destination. But where could they be? The men all looked at one another questioningly. With a rattle the heavy doors were shoved aside, and the soldiers gave the order to disembark.
Surely This Must Be a Mistake!
"Form up in ranks of five! Baggage is to be taken along!"
"Skoreye! Davay! Davay!" — "Faster! Move! Move!" — they bellowed at the people. And already the column set itself slowly in motion. From all the lying and standing, the men's limbs had grown stiff. Laboriously they dragged themselves toward the station.
"Korkino" gleamed on a sign at the station. The name sounded foreign to most of the arrivals, so unknown was the region.
But here they now were, in "Korkino," about fifty kilometers south of Chelyabinsk. Gerhard Siebert remembered that this city was a center in the coal region of the Urals. It lay quite apart from the other cities. Only the railway and one road connected it with the outside world. The city had no airport. Dense taiga surrounded it from the north, east, and south. To the west it bordered on an endless expanse of swampland. The entire city served the coal-mining industry. Many thousands of people had been herded together here to extract the energy for the war industry. Gerhard and his companions in suffering were now to make their contribution to this great cause of their fatherland.
At the edge of the city, set apart from the so-called free population, lay the camp, enclosed by barbed-wire fences two meters high.
Between these fences lay coils of barbed wire, meant to stop any would-be fugitive in his flight. Three meters in from the inner side of the fence ran the warning wire. If anyone came up to this wire, he had to reckon with coming under fire from the towers at the corners of the camp without further warning. Between this wire, which ran fifty centimeters above the ground, and the fence lay the death strip, neatly raked and very well tended, for whoever was ever caught in this strip left it only as a corpse. Along this fence there was only one language, the language of the submachine gun. Gerhard did not trust his own eyes. An installation like this existed, surely, only in the capitalist countries — in Hitler's Germany, at any rate — but never in the Soviet Union, the freest country in the world. No, something must be wrong here, for they — that is, he and the other Germans from Orenburg — no, they by no means belonged here inside this enclosure. Only a few days ago he had been worthy enough to educate the youth of the Soviet Union, and now he found himself and his friends surrounded by an insurmountable barbed-wire fence. Such a thing could not be true. It must be a mistake, one that would surely be cleared up within the next few days.
Gerhard understood and accepted that he was needed for the defense of his homeland, urgently needed — but that he was to be degraded into this deep humiliation, down to the level of a prisoner, no, that he did not understand, and his friends did not understand it either.
The column halted before the camp gate. The escort detail, tired and irritable from the long journey, negotiated with the officer of the guard, and finally the handover of the Trudarmee men began, in a laborious procedure.
The whole column formed up in rows of five. The ranks were counted. Each rank had to have five men. Everything tallied according to the list. The column had arrived in Korkino at full strength. Now the marching-in of the ranks, always five to a row, could begin. Again there was counting. And now one rank fell into a small muddle, and at the end a man was missing. The agitation mounted with every moment. The camp guard detail refused to sign the transfer protocol. And the counting began again from the beginning. At last the number tallied and the protocol was signed. Gerhard and the other men from Orenburg had now arrived in Korkino, for the fulfillment of their honorable duty toward their homeland.
Within the enclosure stood low barracks for the Trud-
armee men. Each barrack held three hundred men. For beds, three-tiered plank bunks had been built, and each man received such a berth, which from now on would be his home. There was no chair, no table, no bench, no private little corner — only the bunk. On the plank bed lay a straw mattress and a pillow. Both were filled with straw, and on top of them a thin blanket. The bundle with the few belongings from home now lay on the bed, at the very top, on the third tier of the bunk. Gerhard was happy to have his bed on top, for up there one had a little more personal freedom than below, where someone was always sitting on your bed — and from above, everything always fell down onto the lower bed frames as well.
Worst of all were the bedbugs, which dwelt in every crack, between the boards and under the straw mattress. When it was dark, these bloodsuckers ran about everywhere and tormented the people. As soon as the light was switched on, they let themselves drop from the upper boards and landed on the other boards below. In this way the plagues multiplied enormously for the occupant of the lowest bunk.
Between two bunks was a narrow passage, about one meter wide, and in this cramped space six grown men moved about with everything they owned — in the morning when they got up and in the evening when they went to sleep. Here they had stowed everything that still belonged to them in the little bundle under the pillow. Gerhard looked at his bed and his surroundings, and an indescribable sadness came over him.
The first evening settled over Gerhard and his friends in the camp of Korkino. The older Trudarmee men came into the camp worn down, utterly exhausted. They had been twelve hours in the mine shaft, digging coal, blasting rock, setting props, and hauling coal. The lamps on their foreheads were still burning and showed their black faces in the dusk. Slowly the gray mass of humanity dissolved and disappeared into the low, long-stretched barracks of the camp.
It was already dark when the signal for supper was given. Instead of a bell, a piece of iron pipe was struck against a piece of railway rail, and everyone streamed into the mess hall, where long, narrow tables stood. Each man had brought his eating bowl and spoon and received his food, which consisted of a soup and of millet, buckwheat, or sometimes mashed potatoes. The bread ration was issued in three pieces of 200 grams each. One piece was given in the morning, the second piece was intended for the midday break, and the third piece was to be eaten in the evening.
The midday bread, however, was usually eaten already at the breakfast table. One was hungry, and the bread in the dirty coat pocket was an irresistible temptation. So one simply ate only twice a day.
Down into the Mine Shaft
Gerhard stood for the first time in line to receive his food. Standing in a queue — whether in front of the store or anywhere else in town — was something he had done often enough, but for the sake of a soup in the evening, no, that was something entirely new for him. Dejected and downcast, he sat down at the table. He knew only an occasional workmate near him. Everyone was busy spooning up his soup.
Finally the man across from him turned to him with the question:
"You're one of the new ones, I suppose?"
"Yes, arrived only this afternoon."
"From where?"
"From the Orenburg region, from the German settlements."
"I know — we already have several from there. Your boys work hard here, but for that they also don't last long. One has to know how to spare oneself, and very few of your men have learned that. And then they are as naive as can be. They believe in honesty and sincerity! When reporting the day's output they always tell the truth, and with that one doesn't get far. One gets a smaller bread ration, the pocket money shrinks, and then one is very soon at the edge of starvation, and the work output drops again and the bread diminishes. On top of that come the abuses of the brigadiers and overseers, and they become more frequent and more spiteful. No, here one lives differently than in freedom. Here everyone's own shirt is closest to his skin. You new ones must learn that quickly, before it is too late."
A piece of worldly wisdom like this was something entirely foreign to Gerhard, and he knew that he could not live by the rules of this experienced Trudarmee man. His upbringing at home had taught him something quite different. He remembered only too well the proverb his mother had always taught him and his brothers: "Practice always truth and honesty!" And by that he wanted to live, as well and as long as he could. He had eaten his soup and his porridge. The bread he would savor later, on his bed, in peace and quiet. His bunk neighbors were already back from supper as Gerhard squeezed his way through between the people. They were talking over the various events of the day. Gerhard climbed up onto his bed and stretched out at full length.
In these beds one did not undress; one took off one's shoes and stretched out.
He closed his eyes and thought of home. He had been away from home only a few days, and already he felt he had been gone for months. It seemed as though he had not been in the classroom for a long time. And yet tomorrow at seven o'clock he was to board the mine cage for the first time and descend into the shaft. Yes, tomorrow he would take up the trade of a miner. And what a difference between the teacher's profession and mining! From tomorrow on he would be a pitman among pitmen. Entirely new experiences would come his way. Hard, very hard it would be for him. A pity that no one called out a comforting "Glückauf!" — the miner's blessing — to him. What a change! But it was war, and one had to reckon with everything.
By now Mother would soon be withdrawing to her room and, as always, reading in the Bible, and then she would, as always, kneel down at her bed and lay all her care, all her sorrow, before God. She had done that as long as Gerhard could remember his mother. She drew all her strength from God's hand, and she would do so today as well. In her prayers she never forgot to pray for her children. She thought of Heinz, from whom she had had no news since the beginning of the war; she named all the others and pleaded for God's protection and support for them, and above all things she pleaded for the grace that her children might yet come to the recognition that they were dependent on the love and mercy of God.
Gerhard knew for certain that his mother would be thinking of him too, and that brought him calm and peace in this first night in Korkino. Yes, he said to himself again and again, his mother's prayers had always been a guiding star to him and his brothers and sister — and surely that would remain so in the future as well.
Six o'clock in the morning. The piece of railway rail shakes everyone awake: the guard detail and the Trudarmee men alike. Everything is still dark, outside and in the dimly lit barrack as well. Everything now comes to life, for the night shift is waiting to be relieved. There is no need to wash and shave in the morning; that can be done in the evening, or on rest days, if there are any. One quickly eats one's breakfast — again a soup, but without the usual porridge, which contains most of the calories. The piece of bread meant for the midday meal is likewise eaten at once, or stowed in the jacket pocket.
At a quarter to seven the rail rings again for assembly, and the march-off begins. Slowly the column moves through the camp gate, and the men are counted by the NKVD details and led away.
The march through the gray morning and through the snow-covered streets is not far, but with the slow pace, and accompanied by the shouts and curses of the convoy guards, it seems to last half an eternity. Gerhard and the other newcomers have never been in a coal mine, and now they stand once more before a heavy gate in a barbed-wire fence, and just behind it rises the headframe of the pit, from which a constant stream of hard coal flows; only at the change of shifts do the Trudarmee men, the miners, come up into the daylight out of the cage. The work brigades — as the smallest unit of the column is called here — silently board the cage, and down it goes into the depths, into the mine gallery.
Gerhard is assigned to a group of experienced miners. From today on he is to become a miner. There will be much to learn, for the mine is a complicated structure, and the trade demands a great deal of knowledge and all manner of skills. Today he is to learn how and where to set the props to secure the roof of the gallery. It is dangerous work and at the same time a supremely responsible task, which Gerhard will have to learn within the next few days. He only hoped that he might come through this period of his life unharmed, even if no one had called a friendly "Glückauf" to him at his first descent into the shaft.
Gerhard's shift ended at seven in the evening. The unaccustomed labor, the meager morsel of damp bread, and the unfriendly treatment from the free supervisors made the day long. Wearily the men, covered with a thick layer of coal dust, dragged themselves toward their barrack. Gerhard would have liked best to climb straight onto his bunk and lay himself down to rest, to fall asleep and think of nothing, nothing at all, anymore. But there was always the morning with its new cares and tasks, and woe to him who did not crawl out of bed when the rail clanged across the yard and over the fences and roofs. Then one had to go along again, and one even had to be in good strength and fulfill one's quota if one wanted to eat again the next day. So it went every day, and so it was to go on into the future, day after day, until the war was over — or until one's strength was at an end. With these thoughts he went to the washrooms and cleaned himself quickly, and then the call was already sounding for supper and the issuing of bread.
The Brothers Meet
The Siebert family at home still numbered four persons. From Gerhard mail came only rarely, and from Heinz there was still no news whatsoever. Life in the kolkhoz went its old way. Everyone was at the harvest, for the country needed food for the cities, for the fighting army. The demands grew ever greater.
In the west of the vast realm, industrial works of every kind were being lost in ever greater numbers, and no one had any idea how long these retreats of the Red Army might yet continue. The hinterland was mobilized, with everything it had, to rebuild and replace in the east what had been lost in the west. The exertions of the Soviet peoples had long since risen beyond any imagined measure. These exertions grew greater still when it was realized that Hitler had not come to Russia to liberate the peoples but to subjugate them and harness them to the aims of Greater Germany. The Soviet people had to choose one of two evils: Hitler they did not know; Stalin they knew — and they decided for Stalin.
The mobilization of the civilian population took on further dimensions, and again the call-up orders came into the German settlements. This time it struck the seventeen-year-olds, who were scarcely out of school. Hans Siebert received his call-up order in the late summer of 1942, just as he was getting ready one morning to drive his tractor out to the field for the harvest work.
The call-up orders and the farewells were by now daily occurrences, and they no longer caused the same reaction as in the earlier months. People had wept themselves empty, and it almost seemed that one no longer felt the pain as before. One had wept so often — first when the fathers were taken, then the eldest sons, and then again the older sons who still remained, and now it was the seventeen-year-olds' turn. They too were to bring their sacrifice — for the war they had not wanted, for Little Father Stalin and for the homeland. So it was said in the newspapers; so one heard it from the loudspeakers of the radio.
Hans Siebert, too, was called, and Mutter Siebert brought yet another sacrifice. She had by now almost become a silent sufferer. Three sons the war had demanded of her. How much sorrow, in the end, can a mother's heart bear!? Mutter Siebert bore her grief, for she still had two children for whom she had to live,
and besides, there was still always the hope that her sons would one day come back.
Hans Siebert went with his friends down the same road that Gerhard had gone. Fate would have it that he too, after the journey to the north, caught sight of the name "Korkino" at the station of the final stop. The march from the station into the camp for the coming years ended in the same camp in which Gerhard had been since the beginning of 1942.
For Hans, too, the creaking gate opened, and he was handed over as a number from one guard detail to the other. The news of the arrival of the newcomers spread quickly through the barracks. At such news everyone ran to the gate to catch sight, among the new arrivals, of someone from his circle of relatives and acquaintances, and in this way to learn something from home. News from the home village was so scarce. One was indeed allowed to write letters, but who, after the long workdays, still had the desire and the strength to write? And if one did write, the mail traveled so slowly, because the censorship took up so much time — and thus many a letter was lost, because it simply never came out of the office of the NKVD chief.
The regulations governing correspondence were strict, for who knew what the Trudarmee men might report home? Who knew their mood? Letters to the homeland would surely have much of interest to offer about the internal condition of the mine's workforce. Particular caution was exercised with these Germans. They might so easily write something of military importance from this industrial region.
"Hans, Hans Siebert! Here is your brother Gerhard! Do you hear me?" Gerhard shouted at the top of his voice.
Hans looked around in all directions and could not make out Gerhard in the uniform mass. They had not seen each other for a long time, and the work underground in the mine had taken a heavy toll on Gerhard and changed his outward appearance.
Suddenly Hans recognized his dear brother. What a coincidence that Hans had come to the very camp in which Gerhard had now been housed and working for almost a year.
"Man, Hans, how do you come to be here? Isn't it a true stroke of fortune that we shall now be together? Of course it is sad that you too have now come into these conditions. On the other hand, it is a true dispensation of God — that is what our mother would call this meeting — that we now have each other as support, instead of always being alone. You know, Hans, I have been very
lonely here in this time, very much alone. That will now be different. How do things look at home?"
"At home? — Sad is how it looks. The men are all gone. Women and children must do the work, and so much remains undone that absolutely ought to be done. Our mother is in tolerable health. Her glandular consumption is not troubling her further. She has to work hard, of course, but in that she is no exception. Everyone must pitch in hard now. The war has taken everyone into its rough hands, and now it planes them all alike, without mercy and without showing any feeling. If our mother knew that we are here together — or if she had even suspected that we would meet! Yes, the poor soul grows ever quieter and more modest in her wants. She is probably making the greatest sacrifice of all. Three of her sons the war has taken from her so far. For any mother that is much, much too much.
"Otherwise, want rules at home. Look, we must deliver up everything we produce in the kolkhoz. We still have the cow, but of the milk only very little remains to us. Every morning we carry it away. At the collection point the fat content is tested, for people try to dilute the milk with water. If someone is caught in a spot check, he must accept heavy penalties for defrauding the state.
"With the meat delivery it is no different. First Mother tried it with half a pig. She kept one half and the neighbor took the other. The neighbor's pig was delivered up. That source of food has now failed, because there is no feed for a pig. For that reason we got ourselves rabbits, and they now serve as our meat suppliers. Since I am away now, there is no one left to feed the creatures.
"The same picture in the henhouse. The few eggs the hens lay go first to the kolkhoz, and what is left over is for us. Not much is left."
"And Peter and Tina? How are they?" Gerhard wanted to know.
"Peter and Tina — the war has played its tricks on them too. No one remains untouched. Peter has left school, because at thirteen one is nowadays already considered fit for work. He works on the livestock farm — that is, he herds cows, calves, and other cattle of the kolkhoz. Tina, at eleven, is for the time being still in school, but the teaching is not going properly. The children work along at home, and the teachers are being replaced by untrained people. The evil war makes itself felt everywhere."
"All newly arrived men fall in!" someone suddenly shouted across the camp yard. Hans and Gerhard parted. But Gerhard
did not abandon the new arrivals. When Hans had been assigned his barrack, the two of them went to Hans's bunk, and Gerhard, who by now had experience as a Trudarmee man and was therefore regarded as an "old hand," was able to give his younger brother many a helpful piece of advice. Even if they did not live in the same barrack and were at different workplaces, they were still always in a position to visit each other and comfort one another. The mere knowledge of having a flesh-and-blood brother in the camp was a strengthening beyond all measure. Gerhard was truly glad to have someone from his own family near him.
The very next morning Hans marched with the many others into the pit. Briskly he took hold of the tools and set to work on fulfilling the daily quota. Here he was considerably better off than his brother, who in recent years had scarcely done physical work. Hans was practiced in bodily labor. That was a particular advantage here. What Hans possessed in physical advantages, Gerhard made up for with his inner calm and composure. They complemented each other in their difference, and that alone made their lot more bearable. Hans quickly grew accustomed to the new conditions and soon found his way at the workplace as well.
As often as the brothers had opportunity, they visited each other. There was, after all, nothing else to do but work, eat, and sleep. On these visits the conversation turned first of all to topic 'number one' — food! Hunger steered the men's thoughts toward memories of eating. Then they would line up the various dishes from home, from better times, and in spirit they saw themselves sitting at the table with all the delicious things. Their expressions let one guess how splendid those meals of long ago must have tasted. The mouths of the two brothers watered. Their eyes lit up brightly.
"How our mother managed always to bring something to the table when everything became so scarce has always remained a riddle to me," said Gerhard.
"Yes," replied Hans, "I too wondered where the food came from. Do you remember how, after several days of forced fasting, we suddenly had millet porridge in the house?
"It was like this, Gerhard. Mother had, you know, still kept her doll room from her childhood — with the doll and all the other bits and pieces — in the parlor. We boys were never allowed to play with it. It stood there waiting for the day when Tina would be old enough
to enter into her inheritance. One day the doll was missing. But in its place we had millet soup on the table. Mother had let go of her doll room. First went the doll with its laughing porcelain face, and then, at intervals, the individual pieces of furniture, one after the other."
Gerhard was silent.
"She never once complained about it."
The Bitter Lot
Spring 1943 came into the land. Stalingrad, the city on the Volga, had fallen, and for the Germans the lost battle, with its great losses in men and war matériel, had become the beginning of their defeat, while for the Soviet Union Stalingrad became the beginning of the victory over Germany and its allies. On both sides, however, it was only a beginning. The two years that followed were still to be terribly difficult and costly.
The retreat of the German Wehrmacht and the advance of the Red Army laid waste the land, destroyed the cities, and drove the population into ever greater misery. The demands on the rural population grew greater from day to day.
At the end of 1943 they came again into the rural districts and into the collective farms of Orenburg as well. This time the bitter lot fell to the fifteen- and sixteen-year-old boys.
Peter, the fourth son of Mutter Siebert, had to report for duty. He was taken just as suddenly and swiftly as his brothers before him. How was he to survive in this dangerous and vicious world? He had only just outgrown childhood. Work — yes, but what could he really do? With an almost broken heart Mutter Siebert accompanied him once more to the road, and there she had to give him up to the waiting trucks.
Peter, too, came to the railway station of Orenburg. For him, too, the red freight cars waited with their great doors wide open. They climbed in, into these cattle cars, and the doors were locked. Without long delay the wheels began to roll and clattered on and on along the rails.
This time the railcars laden with human beings rolled straight into the north, farther, ever farther. Only after roughly five hundred kilometers of rail travel did the train stop. This time too, the young Trudarmee men did not know their final destination. When they left the railcars, they learned that they had arrived in the city of Perm (Molotov).
They were in the taiga with its endlessly extended forest lands. Here workers were needed for the factories and as lumberjacks. For that, it was said, no special knowledge was required, only strong arms — and the half-grown lads from the German colonies would manage the work well enough. The camp was located outside the city. For lack of guard personnel, and for economic reasons as well, the camp had been laid out in the middle of the forest.
The region around Perm was only very thinly settled. One found nothing but forest, swamps, and lakes. Only one rail line led to Perm from the south, and two farther on into the north. One road connected Perm with the city of Kungur to the southwest. Between these connecting routes lay, in summer, impassable swamps, and in winter impenetrable, snowbound forests, in which "the wolves and other beasts bid each other good night." Perm and the region around Perm were ideally suited for the confinement of forced laborers. Only the few approaches and exits around the city were guarded; nature took care of the rest. In summer the swamps stood watch, and in winter the forest kept guard around the camps. Whoever once landed in Perm did not get back to freedom without a permit. If he took refuge in the railway, he was arrested at one of the few stations and brought back to the camp. If one fled in summer, believing one could get through the swampland, one was deceived, for the entire region was impassable in the hot summer season: the mire and the myriads of vermin held their victims fast. If one decided on flight in winter, the snow and the bear-like cold did their sentry duty. One found no food and still more rarely a shelter. If a stranger ever came into one of the far-scattered villages, it was known at once that he was a fugitive, and he was handed over to the militia without delay — for who here was willing to give his life for another?
The inmates of the camp came from all regions of the Soviet Union. The work here was more agreeable than in the mines at Korkino. Here one was in the fresh air, and one did not need to fear so greatly for the loss of one's health.
Peter was attached to a forest brigade, in which, as one of the weakest, he had to drag the logs out of the forest with horses and cut them into specified lengths. The stacking of the logs he did together with other Trudarmee men. In summer this work had yet another advantage: one gathered all kinds of berries and mushrooms with which one could improve the meager fare. Since Peter had a command of German, there was another task for him as well.
In a camp next to the camp for civilians there were German prisoners of war. Whenever there was new work for them, Peter was called, and he was then employed for certain periods as an interpreter. This activity spared his young strength and gave the monotonous life in the civilian camp a welcome change.
This encounter with the enemy soldiers let Peter recognize that there was another side to the war. The German soldiers were, first of all, exactly the same kind of human beings as the peoples of the Soviet Union. The Germans had exactly the same feelings of fear, of concern for their own lives and for those of their loved ones somewhere in Germany. They had not come into the Soviet Union of their own will; they came because there was a government in their country that had resolved upon the destruction of the Soviet Union. They, the German soldiers, would much rather have stayed at their work on their farms than bring death and ruin to Russia and find death themselves. Peter found that the German prisoners looked out for the end of the war with exactly the same longing as he and the other Trudarmee men. He regretted only that this other side of the war was not known in the Soviet Union — for if the enemies knew each other better, they would understand each other far better, and peace among the peoples would not be an unattainable utopia but a graspable reality. What could Peter, here in the forest, do for peace?
Mutter Siebert Takes Her Leave
A few weeks after Peter's departure, at the end of 1943, another piece of Job's news came into the land. More people, far more working hands, were needed. The males had now all been taken. Only children remained. Now the turn had come to the women. Now they were to fulfill their absolute duty. All women between the ages of fifteen and fifty were to make themselves ready for deployment in the enterprises. The only exception was made for those who still had small children at home.
Mutter Siebert also received her call-up order, as her four sons had received theirs before her. Four sons she had given up for the defense of the country. Was the measure of sacrifice still not full? Had she been alone, she would have accepted the order without a murmur — but there was still Tina, her daughter of eleven years. She had to stay at home. How was that to work? At eleven, all alone in the house? Who would care for her? Who would raise and counsel her? In those days Mutter Siebert prayed more fervently
than ever for her children. More ardently than usual she pleaded for support for her sons, for her daughter, and for herself.
Only once had she broken down, and that was when her husband died in 1933. Everything then was so dark, so hopeless. . .
With the move from Dolinowka to the village of Kubanka, Mutter Siebert had been fairly uprooted. Her friends and acquaintances had remained behind in Dolinowka. In Kubanka she was the stranger who had, so to speak, no ties to the others. Bitter want moved into her house. The only breadwinners were the children Heinz, Hans, and Gerhard, of whom Heinz, at barely twelve years, was the eldest.
Through the year they were in school. Only in the summer holidays did they have the opportunity to work, so as to earn at least a few workday credits in the year. The mother succeeded in persuading the chairman of the kolkhoz to take on her three sons as calf-herders for the summer. This work was constant, every day, on workdays and on Sundays. That would surely bring in a few labor units!
The working day began early in the morning, shortly after sunrise, right after the full-grown cattle had been driven to pasture. At sundown the calf herd came back into the village. It was a long working day for the children. What tears the three brothers shed in those days, in 1933!
Worst of all was the calf-herding on the hot August days. The great biting flies settled on the calves' backs and tormented the beasts to the very best of their ability. Then one sensed the gathering of the storm over the calf herd, when one of the eighty calves stuck its long tail straight up. That was the surest warning sign of a wild stampede. The calf struck out in some direction or other and ran for all it was worth. The other calves fell in and ran off in other directions. And the three herders with their whips tried to bring the creatures back. But in vain — their legs were too short, and their strength, owing to the meager fare, far too small to win the race with the calves.
By evening all the calves were together again, and all moved peacefully along the village street toward their stalls. Not a single animal was allowed to be missing.
That summer, too, came to an end, and by winter Mutter Siebert had sold her half of the house and acquired half a house in Dolinowka. The family could now move back to their earlier home. But the cares and the sorrow came along to Dolinowka, and they held Mutter Siebert tightly in their embrace.
Since Peter and Tina were still at home and needed their mother's constant supervision, Mutter Siebert could take on work only when the three older ones came home from school. One such job was the post of night watchman in the cow barn. Day after day, the whole year round, Mutter Siebert performed this duty in the barn. By turns she took her boys along, so that she would not have to be so alone with the fear and the monotony. Her songs — she loved to sing — shortened the long, cold winter nights for her.
Today, however, there seemed to be even less hope than back then, ten years ago. Everyone was thrown upon his own resources, and humanly speaking, she and her family were at an end. The family was dissolving and threatened to disappear. The only representative still at home now was Tina, an eleven-year-old girl, without protection and without help. True, there were relatives and acquaintances in the other villages who would gladly have taken Tina in. But someone had to remain in the house; someone had to look after the little homestead, small as it was. Someone might soon come home, and then someone would have to be at home. Someone had to hold the dwelling and the household goods together. There was only this one way out.
With a heavy heart Mutter Siebert went to her neighbor, who shared the house with the Sieberts. Helene Wiebe had been helpful and kind through all these years. She had an infant to care for and would be staying at home. Would she take Tina under her wing? Mutter Siebert could hardly bring her difficult request across her lips.
"Of course I will stand by your daughter with word and deed. We shall see to it that we survive the war here at home. The much greater question is whether you and your boys will stay alive. Tina and I, we will pray for you and yours. Will you do the same for us?"
"Helene, you have no idea what a great stone you are lifting from my heart. I could not leave Tina alone. May God repay you for your love and readiness to help. I remain forever in your debt!"
With a lightened heart Mutter Siebert went home to prepare herself for her journey to an unknown destination. No one had any idea where the women and girls would be shipped.
"Tina, are you still sitting here? Take comfort. You and Helene Wiebe — a solution has been found for you. Aunt Wiebe will take you under her wing and help you
and counsel you. You must, of course, listen to her advice and do what she tells you. Look, from tomorrow on you are the only one of our family left, to look after our house, the cow, the hens, and whatever else there is to do. You must see to it that we still have a place to stay when your brothers and I one day come home. We surely cannot end up somewhere on the street. Can you understand that?" Mutter Siebert sat down beside her daughter.
"I know it will be hard, but all of this the war lays upon us, and we — I and you, your brothers and I as well — we must bite into this bitter apple. You are staying alone. Can you look after yourself, too? It is not only you who are afraid; I fear for you almost more than for myself and the others. But one thing you must never forget: I am praying for you, and God will surely hear my prayers."
Tina still sat motionless in her place. Wearily she raised her tear-reddened eyes to her mother and said with a trembling voice: "I don't know, Mama, how I can do all that, but I will try. How good that Aunt Wiebe is staying here and that I may stay with her. You will come back soon anyway, Mama, won't you?"
The next morning the leave-taking began in the many houses. Without weeping, Mutter Siebert sat and waited for the wagon that was to fetch her. Tina had rarely seen tears in her mother. Later Tina believed it would have been easier for her mother if she had wept.
The wagon drove up. The mother did not know how she should say goodbye to her daughter. She took Tina by the arm and said in her soft voice:
"Come, sit on my lap a while longer."
Then the mother was called, and the wagon took her away.
On many a farmstead the decay was beginning, or had long since begun. Without the least resistance, without so much as a murmur, the women of the Trudarmee came to the road, climbed weeping into the vehicles, and the journey into the unknown began. In Orenburg the usual speeches about duty and guilt were held once more. The women were reminded that it was the German Wehrmacht that had attacked the Soviet Union, and that they, as Germans, now had the opportunity through their contribution to prove their loyalty to the homeland.
A whistling locomotive pushed up the usual cattle cars, and the loading could begin. The women, especially the older ones, had difficulty climbing into the railcars. Each one settled in as best she could. They sat shoulder to shoulder. All private life
now ceased; every freedom had been taken from them. The only thing still left to them as freedom were their thoughts, which no one could divine or enslave.
Mutter Siebert sat on the floor of the railcar and pursued her thoughts. She asked herself where God might now be leading her. Involuntarily she thought of the words she had recently read in the Bible: ". . . and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not." [John 21:18]
When she was still young, back then in school, she had thought of going east as a missionary — to India, to China. But then came the First World War, and her plans were shattered. Now, however, she sat in the train, rolling toward the east, into a region where Christianity was still unknown, into a world in which the "Our Father" was not yet prayed. How very differently Mutter Siebert had once imagined her journey to the east.
After barely a day's journey the train stopped. Might this be the final station of their trip? Sure enough, the door was shoved aside and the command rang into the railcar: All out! The row of railcars was long this time. The first women came out of the cars with stiff limbs, dragging their bundles behind them.
Orsk
"Where are we? Has anyone read the name of the town yet?"
"Orsk — Orsk is the name of the town."
The city of Orsk lies right on the border between the Orenburg region and the Kazakh Socialist Soviet Republic. Here began Kazakhstan with its great deserts and its extremely continental climate. Before the October Revolution, Kazakhstan was settled by nomadic peoples, chiefly Kazakhs. The Kazakhs mostly raised sheep. Their great flocks of sheep were also the cause of their nomadic life, for the climate produced only meager pastures, and so they simply moved from grazing ground to grazing ground.
Orsk is an industrial city whose foundation was formed by the many raw materials of the Ural Mountains. The importance of this city grew considerably during the war, for its entire industry was converted to war production. The women who had arrived were to fill out and reinforce the workforce in the plants.
Factory work was unknown to Mutter Siebert. Here too, in accordance with the war law, one worked ten hours a day. There were hardly any free days, for the war, after all, raged day and night, every day, on workdays
and Sundays alike. Slowly the days dragged on through the years 1943 and 1944. Mechanically Mutter Siebert rose in the morning, and mechanically she walked the road to the factory and performed her work there. As long as she was healthy and fulfilled the daily quota, all went well. She received her full wage and the full food allocations as well. It was not much, but if with the wage one could buy a little extra on the black market, it sufficed tolerably to maintain one's strength. Quietly and submissively Mutter Siebert went her way. Only now and then, when she thought of her children, could one see life and stirring in her careworn face. From her sons no news came, and from Tina only very rarely.
In the late summer of 1944 Mutter Siebert grew weaker, and after some time the glandular consumption took its toll and she could no longer manage the work load. She received a lower wage, and the food ration was cut. This measure worsened her condition still further.
To this frail state of health was added the constant worry about her five children, who were now living entirely on their own in the world. She worried especially about Tina. How would she manage everything in these times of want? Without earnings, without money, dependent solely on the allocation from the kolkhoz — that was how the child was now supposed to live. Mutter Siebert could scarcely imagine the situation her daughter was in. Tired, hungry, and ill, she dragged herself to work in the morning and to her lodging in the evening.
For several days now, Mutter Siebert had been passing a small garden in front of a house. A dense paling fence separated the garden and what was in it from the street. Right by the fence grew a few sugar beets. Some of the leaves of the beets had pushed their way between the palings and were merrily growing on, on the street side. Mutter Siebert had noticed the leaves for some days already. If one could put these leaves into the thin evening millet soup, the supper would be richer and would taste better too. But they did not belong to her — and simply to pick them and take them along? No, that would be stealing, in any case a laying of hands on another's property. And that Mutter Siebert did not want on her conscience.
Daily Mutter Siebert walked past these beet leaves. Hunger spoke ever more insistently: "Pick the leaves. Put them in your bag and you will have a better soup. The leaves will soon be trampled anyway, and then it will be too late. The beet will grow even without those three leaves. Go ahead and take them."
Today Mutter Siebert could still master herself, and she walked past the beet leaves. They did not belong to her; they were the
property of the married couple who lived in the house behind the fence.
The next evening Mutter Siebert succumbed to the temptation to pick the beet leaves and take them with her; she could resist no longer. As she stood by the leaves and was in the act of taking a few of the loose ones, a woman's voice screamed from the garden:
"Stepan, Stepan, come quickly, this damned German woman is ruining our garden. She was just about to steal the leaves. Look, she still has the leaves in her hand!"
As if Stepan had been waiting only for his wife's call, he came along the path, and a wheezing voice was heard across the whole street:
"What a crime — these fascist women shall see what can be done with them. Hand over the leaves! And here is the wage for your thievery!" With full force the householder's fist struck Mutter Siebert. She swayed and fell into the street. People came running together. The bystanders saw what the matter was, shook their heads, and went on their way again. From pain, shame, and humiliation, thick tears ran down Mutter Siebert's dusty face. She rose, shook the dust from her dress, and walked toward her lodging. She could not quite grasp it, so quickly had it all happened. Arrived at home, she threw herself onto her bed, and after a long while she gave her tears free rein.
Despondent and Despairing
The incident with the beet leaves had made another person of Mutter Siebert. Her hope for an improvement of her situation was gone. But where could she go? There was only one place where she belonged, and that was home. Yes, there she wanted to go.
On the following day she set out for work as always, but instead of going to the factory, she took the street to the railway station. She managed to buy a ticket, and soon she was sitting in the Orsk–Orenburg train. Trudarmee members all had an identity card, which they were permitted to use at their permanent place of residence. For longer journeys one needed a proper passport and a certificate of travel permission. Mutter Siebert was traveling today without permission, and this fact made her a deserter. Her only salvation was that no identity check took place that day. She had been lucky: no
one asked this worn-out woman, sitting there in the poorest of clothing, for her papers.
Unmolested, she arrived in Orenburg.
Here she knew her way about. Along a dusty road she walked to the outskirts of town. The people from the collective farms put up here when they came into the city. Here one could spend the night, get a bite to eat, and the best assurance was that today, once again, someone from her village — or at least from the surrounding villages — would have come into town. That would then be the best opportunity to get home. From afar she already saw the house in which she had stayed overnight before. Several vehicles, too, stood in the yard. So someone was there. Perhaps she might even be allowed to ride home this very day.
As she entered the yard, she recognized the driver from the neighboring collective, who was glad to do her a favor — and besides, he earned a few rubles on the side that way. He wanted to be home before evening.
The drive along the pot-holed road went only slowly. Long before the war, construction had begun on this road from the settlements to Orenburg. Every summer the collective farms had to detach brigades of workers for the road building. With small hand-barrows, without boxes, they heaped sand onto the roadbed. As long as it was dry, one was allowed to drive on this embankment. In damp, wet weather one drove alongside the embankment, so as not to churn up the soft surface of the road.
The driver lived in a nearby village, about three kilometers from Dolinowka. She climbed down from the truck. Since the driver had been traveling alone, she had had the great privilege of sitting beside him in the cab. Passengers ordinarily sat in the back, on the floor of the box. She had never traveled so well.
In an hour she would be home. The evening was not so cold, and bravely she continued [her way] along the narrow road into the ravine. Behind the hill lay Dolinowka.
With every step that brought her closer to her goal, her heart began to beat more strongly. Full of anxiety, she tried to picture Tina to herself. How would the child have come through these two years? Was she healthy? What might the house look like in which the eleven-year-old girl had dwelt alone? There was always something to repair — here something had to be fixed, there something had to be replaced. Tina could hardly do anything on the house.
But all of that was now to change. She meant to put everything back in order as soon as she was home. At this thought she quickened her step, for there was no time to lose. Now Mutter Siebert was at the end of the village street. She had forgotten that she had left Orsk without permission, that she had no right to be walking home here on this street. She had forgotten that with her flight from Orsk she had made herself liable to punishment. She had acted against the laws of war. Her absence damaged the defensive strength of the Soviet Union.
Her longing, and the thought of soon being with her child, of being able to rest in peace and quiet within her own four walls, made all dangers vanish. Just once more to be home — as quickly as possible, home.
The dark of evening wrapped the houses in the shadows of night. Only here and there did one see a dimly lit window. People had become frugal. Now Mutter Siebert had arrived [at the end] of the village street; only two farmyards farther and she was home. How glad one is to be in one's homeland, far away from all strange and bitter people, from all the quarreling and hounding in the factory! No, here she would find rest and peace.
Her house — that is, the half of the house she shared with Helene Wiebe — lay dark before her. Cautiously she walked into the yard. Nothing stirred. She pressed the latch on the door and opened it very quietly. "Is anyone at home here?" she asked in the Frisian Low German that was always spoken at home. When nothing stirred, she asked in loud Russian whether anyone was there. No one
answered. Gingerly, as if she were coming to strangers, she stepped across the threshold of her own house. No one was here. Tears were already standing in her eyes when she noticed the door in the middle wall that had not been there before. A thin ray of light shone through the crack of the door. She knocked at this door, and Helene bade her enter.
"Why, my goodness, Katharina, where have you suddenly come from — and at such a late hour too?"
"Mama, it's you! Do come in!" And already Tina had embraced her mother and was pulling her into the room.
"How we have waited for you! I knew that one day you would come back. Are you staying home now, or must you go away again?" Tina wanted to know.
"Whether I may stay home? That I don't know yet. But now I am here, and that is enough for today. I am so tired from the long journey, and I have surely never in my life been so dirty."
After Mutter Siebert had eaten something, she went with Tina into their own quarters. While water was being warmed for a bath, Tina and Mutter Siebert sat by a low-burning kerosene lamp, arms tightly around each other, and told one another of their experiences in the past year and a half.
Tina had worked in the kolkhoz in autumn and summer. All schoolchildren had to help with the work. In winter, when there was nothing to do outside, she went to school. Food had been scarce, very scarce, but Helene Wiebe knew how to keep house with the little there was. In a makeshift way they had always managed to eat their fill.
And then Mutter Siebert began to tell of what she had seen and lived through in Orsk.
"Yes, my child, what we had to endure there in cold Orsk! At first the women lived in ramshackle wooden barracks. The roof and walls consisted of thin boards. In winter the walls and roof were covered with a thick layer of ice. Cold and wet it was in the overcrowded quarters.
"One day came the order to vacate the barracks. The premises were needed as storage space for spare parts. The women were to see to their own shelter. They were assigned a building plot, and there great holes were dug into the earth. In the middle the hole was somewhat deeper, so that one could stand upright in it, and along both sides lay the women, one beside the other. There was no water for washing. We were lice-ridden and filthy. We
were meant to perish here.
"In the morning the women got up when the alarm clock — a meter-long piece of railway rail — announced the sixth hour. The getting up of these despondent and weary women was not at all simple. Wet, the women went to work, and in still damper clothing they came back in the evening. Hard was the ground in summer, and frozen it was in winter.
"In winter it happened several times that whole brigades of women sat down in the shelter of the trench to rest, and fell asleep. Their blood thickened and they never woke again. They had fulfilled their 'norm'; the day's task was done. My story, my child, sounds hard and rough. But so were those days back then. God preserve us from a repetition.
"Thank God that we are together again, Tina. I have always prayed for you and for the boys. Prayer has carried me through the days of want, of fear, and of the pain over the loss of our family. Let us continue to place our confidence in God. He will certainly not forsake us. And now let us sleep. Good night, my child. Tomorrow we will tell each other more."
"Mother, why is there war?" asked Tina.
"Because people are wicked and do not obey God. War is a punishment of mankind for its disobedience," the mother explained.
"Will it last much longer?" Tina wanted to know.
"I wish it had never begun. Who knows how long this murdering and destroying will yet continue. People are already so weary of the war. It cannot go on like this much longer. Good night."
For a long time they lay side by side, as in the days when Tina was still small, and thought over what had happened that day.
Mutter Siebert before the People's Court
Only when Mutter Siebert heard Tina sleeping peacefully did it become clear to her that she was actually supposed to be in Orsk. She had left her place in the factory without permission; she had run away and was now considered a wrecker of the people. That is what people were called whom one accused of some offense or other. Soon they would be looking for her, and would quickly
have found her. There could, after all, be only one place to which a mother would flee: home, to her child. They would soon come to take her away again, for she was required to register with the militia at home. All of that had to be done at the militia office within three days. But today she was too tired. There was until tomorrow and the day after [time to] think. Mutter Siebert closed her eyes and slept in her own bed.
The next morning Mutter Siebert betook herself to the kolkhoz administration. She knew the men and women who had been kept at home as indispensable, as loyal Party members. In most cases they were younger men and women who had been schooled and brought up already during the era of communist brainwashing. Most of these people were Germans, bore German names, and spoke the unadulterated Low German that until now had still served as the everyday language.
"Good day, Kornelius!" said Mutter Siebert shyly. Kornelius Pätkau, the chairman of the kolkhoz, sat at his work and did not trust his eyes. Surely this was no ghost? No, it was Katharina Siebert, who had been sent into the Trudarmee a year and a half ago. She is here.
"Tante — Auntie — you are here?" asked Pätkau in his astonishment.
Yes, "Tante" was the right form of address. "Comrade" did not suit Mutter Siebert. "Tante" was more venerable than the so lightly used "Comrade."
"Yes, Kornelius, I am here, and I would like to report, so that I can be registered again."
"Do you have your leave certificate with you — that is, a certificate of your release from the Trudarmee?" asked Pätkau.
"Unfortunately I have no certificate. I left entirely without permission. What can one do about it?" Mutter Siebert looked around for a chair.
"That looks bad indeed, Tante Siebert. The war is still on. You may not leave your workplace just like that. I can do nothing for you. It is good that you reported voluntarily. Had you hidden yourself, the matter would have been much worse. I must report your presence to the militia at once. What happens then, I do not know. I would gladly have done something for you, but with the best will in the world I can do nothing for you." With that the conversation with Kornelius Pätkau was at an end. Mutter Siebert had done her duty.
She went home again.
The first week after her homecoming passed quietly and without disturbance. In the second week Katharina Siebert was summoned to the village soviet. The chairman, Daniel Esau, looked the woman — whom he had once known well — up and down. Mutter Siebert looked so different now from those days when he, Daniel, had worked for the Sieberts as a hired man. The last decades had turned everything upside down. Here stood his former mistress before him, in her one threadbare dress. He sat behind a large desk; Mutter Siebert recognized her husband's marble writing set. She had not been able to pay her income tax, and so Esau had confiscated the writing set and remitted the tax in exchange. Since that time the writing set had stood on his desk, and he was proud of it.
"Comrade Esau, you sent for me?" said Katharina Siebert quietly.
"Yes. You fled from Orsk without permission. How do you come to simply up and run off like that? Do you not know that we stand in a war against the German fascists? It is a matter of life and death. Our Soviet homeland is bleeding at every extremity. Thousands of Soviet citizens die daily for the homeland and for their beloved leader Stalin — and you, you simply travel home. You leave your work lying, although the products of your labor are needed. As a wrecker of the people and a shirker, you support the enemy with your flight. For this you will come before the People's Court, which will punish you fittingly for your crimes." Daniel Esau looked at the woman standing before him reproachfully with his gray eyes and shook his head. That Mutter Siebert had had the courage to flee from Orsk and then to report voluntarily to the authorities — that he would never have credited her with. What a person will not accomplish in distress! — "Look, Daniel," — Mutter Siebert dispensed with the official form of address — "I was ill and tired. I so wanted to see my child again. I meant no harm by it."
"That may all be true, Citizen Siebert, but I must inform you that as early as next week you will come before the People's Court of our raion. On Friday a week from now the session of the court takes place. Here is the summons. Do not fail to be there in good time!" said Esau sternly.
Mutter Siebert was dismissed.
The week in freedom passed quickly,
and the court hearing drew nearer. No investigation took place. Everything seemed to be clear. It was a kind of drumhead court-martial.
On Friday at nine in the morning Katharina Siebert arrived at the [place] where the People's Court usually sat. During the war the court sat regularly; there was always someone who had committed some offense. The penalties were severe, and the sentences were carried out at once.
The court always consisted of three persons — a judge and two assessors. The assessors were simple laymen from the kolkhoz, and they embodied the democratic character of the court. In essence they sat at the red-cloth-covered table only for form's sake. They could say nothing at the hearing; the "people's judge" had quickly reminded them of their duty as assessors and never let them get a word in.
A militiaman led the accused Katharina Siebert into the room, and she was directed to take her seat on the defendant's bench. The judge surveyed Mutter Siebert with a stern gaze and declared the session of the People's Court opened.
"What is your name, accused?"
"Katharina Siebert."
"Where and when were you born?"
"In Ukraine, Dnepropetrovsk region. 1897."
"Your nationality?"
"German."
"Well, well — that already explains a great deal," said the judge, looking at the two assessors.
"You were in the Trudarmee in the city of Orsk?"
"Yes."
"How long were you there, accused?"
"A year and a half," answered Mutter Siebert.
"When did you come home?"
"Barely two weeks ago."
"Did you have permission to leave your workplace in the plant?"
"No."
"So you fled, then, from your so important service in the factory?"
Mutter Siebert said nothing to this question.
"I asked you whether you fled from Orsk. Yes or no?" the judge shouted.
"Yes, I left Orsk without permission," said Mutter Siebert, barely audibly.
"For what reason did you flee?"
"I was ill and could no longer work. My wage grew smaller and smaller and did not suffice to buy even the barest necessities of food. I grew weaker with every day and would in a short time have become completely unfit for work. I thought that at home I could recover much more quickly. My little daughter would surely nurse me back to health. I beg you, Comrade Judge, have forbearance with me, for I only wanted to become healthy again."
"Accused Siebert, by your unauthorized abandonment of your workplace you have damaged the defensive strength of our country. The production of your labor in the factory would have given our Soviet Army the weapons to strike the enemy more effectively. By your conduct you have considerably disrupted the work morale in the factory and at home as well. You have supported the enemy in the destruction of our country. On the basis of these grave crimes I must sentence you to a punishment that corresponds to your crimes and that [will be] a good lesson to all those who carry similar thoughts of collaboration with the enemy in their hearts. Rise, accused Siebert!"
Mutter Siebert rose and looked around the hall anxiously. There were only a few people present, apart from some militiamen who kept guard in the building. No, here there was no comfort; here there was no pity for people like her. The judge wrote something into the file of the accused. He rose and read out the brief but fateful verdict:
"In the case of the accused Katharina Siebert we are dealing with a gross and grave violation of Soviet law. This transgression is all the more serious in that it concerns the weakening of our defensive strength against the German fascist conquerors. The accused, as a German, shows sympathies with the Germans who have attacked our homeland. This crime is punished most severely under Soviet law. Before I read out the sentence, I ask you, accused Siebert, whether you wish to cite any mitigating circumstances?"
"Comrade Judge, I beg you to take into consideration that four of my sons stand in service for the good of our country. My eldest son has fought on the western front since the beginning of the war. Unfortunately I am without any news of him. The other three sons stand in the service of the Trudarmee and do their duty. I myself have done my
utmost in the past year and a half. I beg you, Comrade Judge, to take these positive circumstances into account."
The judge rose again and read out the following sentence:
"Accused Siebert: because you left your workplace in the war industry in Orsk without permission, and because you thereby undermined the morale of our people and stirred up panic among the people, and on account of sympathy with the enemy, I sentence you to eight months of labor camp in Orsk. You will be taken back to Orsk under escort tomorrow. Today you may still go home to pack the essentials. You may go now. Tomorrow morning at seven you will be at the village soviet. You will be expected there."
A Convict in Orsk
Shortly before the November festivities of 1944, Mutter Siebert was back in Orsk. This second stay in Orsk became especially hard for Mutter Siebert. The housing — that is, the so-called barracks — consisted of enormous holes in the earth, one meter deep and five meters wide. Over them a roof was set, under which one could stand with bowed head. The barracks, or earth-rooms, were wet and dark. The only lighting came from kerosene lanterns, which smoked terribly. The heating was wretched — a makeshift stove, fired with wood or coal.
The bedsteads consisted simply of boards nailed down about fifty centimeters above the ground like a road of planks. Here the women lay, one beside the other. They were careworn and bitter, hungry and ill. The sick women were put into tents, which did allow somewhat more private life, but in winter they were cold — icy cold!
The community in the camp was rough and unfriendly. There was constant bickering and quarreling. All private life ceased here in the camp. One slept in a common room; one washed and cleaned oneself in the presence and before the eyes of the others; one bathed together with others. One had given up one's personhood.
When people are forced to live in the closest quarters, or even merely in the same house or the same dwelling, one very soon notices how strong the effects of one person upon another are. The smallest offense, often the slightest remark or movement, can provoke the other to quarrel and strife, without reason and without cause. A mere glance can drive another to outbursts of rage and lead to ugly scenes.
To these circumstances the women were exposed, and they had to
resign themselves to this fate without being able to defend themselves against it. Nothing remained for them but to turn inward, to seal themselves off against the hatred and the strife, and to keep everything to themselves — or simply to shake it off.
The loss of private life was especially hard for Mutter Siebert. Only slowly did she grow accustomed to using the communal toilet with the other women. Quietly and almost unnoticed she lived out her days. She was one of the oldest women in the camp. The work was hard for her. She had to keep the earth huts of the other prisoners clean. Filthy, without any medical help whatsoever, the women vegetated along. The day began with insults and harassment of the coarsest kind, and ended the same way.
The Trudarmee women had a very important job. Summer and winter, they had to dig deep holes. The quota was high and could never be fulfilled. When the holes were dug, other women came and filled the holes in again. And so it went, day in — day out!
The months crept slowly by. One worked, rested when one could, worried about one's daily bread, trembled for the family scattered to all the winds.
Then one day — it was at the beginning of the year 1945 — a hard blow struck the Siebert family, and Mutter Siebert especially. News from Heinz was entirely lacking. He had written once from the field, and since then he had been silent. Either he had fallen, or he might have been taken prisoner. There was, after all, still the possibility that Heinz was living somewhere underground with the partisans. The Soviet press wrote so much about the heroic deeds of the resistance fighters. Mutter Siebert could not grasp that her eldest should no longer be alive. She had that peculiar feeling that only mothers possess, and the feeling told her that her son Heinz was still alive.
From Gerhard, Hans, and Peter, letters came from time to time. They were those letters that were sent off without an envelope. One wrote on one side of the sheet and folded it into a triangle in such a way that the open side of the letter could be sealed by means of a postage stamp. The three did not have much to report, but every letter was a sign of life, and that was always the most important thing.
From Hans, no mail had arrived for several weeks since New Year 1945. Why might he not be letting anything be heard from him? Gerhard, too, remained stubbornly silent. Could something have happened to them?
At last a letter came from Hans in Korkino. Mutter Siebert opened the letter joyfully, but already after the first lines her
gaze grew anxious and the skin of her face went pale. She laid the letter, unread, in her lap, as though it weighed a hundredweight. After a long while she took the sheet into her hands again and hesitantly began to read:
Dear Mother!
Greetings to you! And I wish you good health and otherwise a bearable life. First I want to apologize to you for the long silence. I know I should have written to you long ago, but I simply could not summon the strength to tell you what I am telling you now. In recent weeks Gerhard had difficulties at work. He could no longer fulfill his work quota. Not that they gave him less bread now — rather, they summoned him ever more frequently to the NKVD for interrogation. They accused him of sabotage, of shirking, and of sympathy with the enemy. You know that Gerhard is a decent, industrious citizen.
When I came to his barrack a few weeks ago to visit him, he was no longer there. I was told he had gone to work in the morning as always, and in the evening he did not come home again. Since that time I have been waiting for his return. He has not come back. I go on waiting. I know that you too will wait for him. Do that, dear Mother, but do not forget that you have other children who need you.
Stay healthy and do not lose hope.
With love, your Hans.
With the arrival of this piece of Job's news, the time of sacrifice began for Mutter Siebert in earnest. Two of her sons were now gone; the war had taken them, and no one knew whether it would give them back.
But now it was necessary to be doubly strong, for it would be hard for her to be a support to the other children. First of all it was necessary to serve out the sentence and to escape from this camp whole and healthy. With great effort she wrote a short letter to Hans, asking him to keep a lookout for Gerhard, for there was still always the possibility that he might turn up again.
Gerhard Disappears
Hans, however, had not written his mother the whole story of Gerhard's disappearance. On the evening before the day when Gerhard failed to return, Hans had been with Gerhard in his barrack, and they had talked at length about Gerhard's plans of escape. Gerhard had once again, as so often, been called after work to the NKVD officer of the camp for questioning. They sought various pretexts to make Gerhard's life hard and to accuse him of various things. Lately they had beaten him several times, and now his strength was exhausted; his nerves were shattered and weary. He believed he could not endure it any longer.
"Hans, I must get away from here; I cannot stand it any longer. I have always believed in justice, and again and again my faith in this social justice has been put to shame. Here in Korkino my eyes were first truly opened to the great injustice that is being perpetrated on the people of our country. Every day hundreds of men die in our pits. In a camp near here, out of seven thousand men, more than half the workforce died in the course of last winter. Hans, they died of hunger, exhaustion, and grief. Without doctors and without medical care.
"And the dying did not begin only during the war. It began back in 1917 and never stopped. It was said the dying was necessary in order to build up a socialist state. Can one justify these millions of victims by saying one wanted to build a socialist social system? No — the price is too high, much too high.
"And how cruel and heartless they are about it! Only yesterday I saw how they fetched the corpses from the bunks in the morning. They had died in the night, alone, utterly forsaken. Perhaps with a quiet prayer on their lips? — Who knows? — Very often, in such camps, it is too late for praying. Their strength has left them. The corpses are not buried, for the earth is frozen several meters deep. The dead are thrown onto a sledge and driven into the forest. There the sledge is tipped over and the corpses fall into the snow. Nature and the animals take care of them.
"Dear Hans, I cannot bear this life any longer. Come what may, I am not coming back to the camp tomorrow."
"But Gerhard, it is winter now; it is cruelly cold and the snow lies deep. How do you mean to travel? You won't get anywhere.
You are weak, too. Do have patience a while longer. The war must be over soon, and then we all go home again."
"Look — they beat me again today. They bellowed at me because I could no longer bring the coal to the cart as fast as before. Are we machines, then? I am only a human being after all. Yes, and then these harassments that one has to endure as a German."
"Gerhard, there is only one railway line leading south, and only one highway. Both are strictly guarded. If you leave these links with the outside world and go into the forest, you are lost just the same. You grow tired, you lie down, you fall asleep, and you never wake again," Hans tried to persuade his brother.
"All of that I have considered a hundred times. I know the risk of such an escape, but even so: sometimes one man or another succeeds. We have here in our brigade a man who in 1935 was taken from his house in the region of Pskov together with his family — father and mother and his two younger sisters. They were allowed to take along only what they could carry. They were put into the freight cars and traveled with other families by rail from Pskov via Novgorod and Vologda all the way to Konosha, ever deeper into the north. At kilometer-stone number 29 the train stopped. The people from one railcar were made to get out with their families, and then the train went on to the next kilometer. Again a railcar was unloaded, and so it went on until the train was empty. From Pskov came three trains. The starshina of the guard company declared: 'Citizens, here you will build a new homeland. As kulaks you had brought yourselves to considerable prosperity. Now we shall see whether you can do the same in the endless forests of the taiga. The tools for building up your new existence you have brought with you. Every adult strong enough to hold an axe and a saw shall have them. Since you must be finished building a shelter for the night before evening, I advise you to begin construction at once.' After these words he went into the train, and off it went to the next stop.
"The father," Gerhard went on, "and his brother-in-law began to build. They built the frame of the shanty and covered the ends and sides with fir branches. The snow was cleared away, and fir branches were laid on the frozen floor of the hut. In the middle of the hut a fire was kindled, and the family moved in. Can you imagine how those poor people must have felt? Left entirely to themselves! Far and wide no house — only forest, forest and snow, blinding white snow.
"It was not long before the people lost heart and were at their wits' end. In their despair the people began to commit suicide. They hanged themselves from the trees, or they ran into the forest and did not come back. Whether they escaped with their lives is uncertain; but they had at least been in freedom for a short time, or they died as free human beings.
"The man who told me this story came through. He went to Ukraine and worked in a kolkhoz. When he was asked for identity papers, he claimed to have lost them. After three years he even traveled back to kilometer 29 near the little town of Konosha and visited his parents and sisters. Back then, at the beginning of the settlement, the people had not been counted, for the life of a kulak and his family was not worth the counting. Only after the first two years did they begin to count the people. Too many had died. Dear Hans, I tell you this story to show you that I have a very slight hope of coming through as well. As things now stand, I have no hope of getting out of this Korkino."
"I shall stay here," said Hans.
"That gladdens me — for whichever of us survives, if one survives, can then tell of the other later. Hans, you must not speak of my plan. To no one. Accessories to an escape are punished exactly like the fugitive. When you write to Mother, tell her only that I am no longer there. Do you understand? That is our secret."
"So it shall remain, brother. I have saved up my bread ration. Let me quickly fetch it for you. Then you will have something to eat a little longer," said Hans, when he recognized that Gerhard's decision was final. After a while Hans came with his piece of bread, which Gerhard laid beside his own:
"I thank you, dear brother," and he embraced Hans and wished him a safe homecoming. They took leave of each other, and Hans walked with quick steps into the darkness toward his barrack. Gerhard climbed onto his bunk and tried to fall asleep.
The next day began like all the other days. "Breakfast! Fall in! March to work!" No one noticed anything unusual about Gerhard. He marched as always beside his friend Friesen, without speaking a word.
The workday was at an end. In this season it lasted from twilight to twilight. It was already dark when the work columns came into the camp.
The ranks were counted, and in the counting they came upon the missing
man. The guard detail ran about in confusion, and only after repeated counting was it established that Gerhard Siebert had not returned with the work column.
At first they reassured themselves with the thought that Siebert had probably remained somewhere in the mine. He might have grown [tired] and would likely have fallen asleep in one of the galleries. If that were so, he would be found by the closing shift and would turn up by tomorrow. This assumption worked to the advantage of Gerhard's escape. They would begin searching for him intensively only on the morrow. The time thus gained gave him a good head start — if there was any way out of this situation at all.
Hans Siebert waited, full of fear. The people from the work brigade in which Gerhard had worked the day before knew nothing of Gerhard, [of where he might be]. It was almost a relief for Hans that Gerhard had gotten away. What would the poor fellow have had to endure, had he been brought back to the camp as a deserter! As punishment he would have been put on display before the assembled camp. He would have gone into the punishment cell. The many interrogations, with all their brutalities and invented accusations, would have ruined Gerhard. That degradation he was spared.
On the other hand, Hans also did not know what else might have befallen him. The guard details on the railway and at the stations often made very short work of fugitives. Reports that someone had been shot while escaping arrived frequently in the camp. Often the victim had never been escaping at all. It was a cause of death like the many deaths from pneumonia, in which the [victims] died from malnutrition and heart disease. The corpses were examined, and the doctor signed a declaration that citizen "X" had died of pneumonia — a natural death. Gerhard might have been shot while fleeing, somewhere along the railway embankment.
But Hans thought also of the possibility that Gerhard had actually succeeded in breaking out of the ring of guards around Korkino. Then he would be dragging himself through the forest toward the frozen lakes and swamps. His power of endurance was slight because of the poor nourishment. Where would he direct his steps? Given the incited state of the population, there was hardly any reckoning on his being able to expect help from the widely scattered human dwellings.
How easy it was, in the vast silent forests, to grow weary and to die the easiest and most painless of deaths! Gerhard would not long endure the aimless wandering through the taiga.
Hans waited every day for news from or about Gerhard, but nothing came. He had gone into the forest and never returned. After several weeks Hans brought himself to write the sad news of Gerhard's disappearance to his mother. He wrote her the short letter — so brief, and yet for Mutter Siebert so heavy with meaning.
After Gerhard's disappearance, Hans was summoned several times to the NKVD for questioning and was interrogated insistently. Fortunately he was able to convince the officers that he had rendered no assistance to the escape and had had no inkling of the flight — Gerhard's solitary undertaking. Later they left Hans in peace. But Gerhard remained vanished, without leaving behind even the faintest trace. Had Hans not happened to be together with Gerhard, Mutter Siebert would never have learned anything of Gerhard's fate, for no authority ever issued any statement in the matter of Gerhard Siebert. He was, and remained, missing.
Part Three: The War Is Over
Stalin's Revenge
Since Stalingrad, and later since the invasion of the English and American troops, the German Wehrmacht had been pressed back farther and farther toward the German borders. The end of this cruel struggle of the peoples was already in sight. In January 1945 the Soviet troops launched the great offensive, after the entire front had lain for forty-eight hours under uninterrupted artillery fire. The advance of the Soviet and Allied troops now moved unstoppably on Berlin, and on May 9, 1945 the six-year slaughter came to an end.
An indescribable joy filled the peoples on that 9th of May, 1945 — peoples who had now lived for six years in the midst of, or even merely on the edge of, this great dying. At last the weapons were silent.
With the end of the war, the dismantling of the camps occupied by civilians began at once in the Soviet Union, for there was now another group of people who had to take the place of the Trudarmee members: this group was made up of the many suspects from the occupied territories, of Soviet citizens whom the Germans had forcibly carried off to Western Europe, and of people who had been overtaken by the advancing Soviet troops or had been handed over to the Soviet Union by the Allies.
The Russian Germans, including the Mennonites, stood on the day the war ended at the beginning of a long period of unspeakable hardships — long punishments that they had most decidedly not deserved, but that fate had simply laid at their feet. They bore the burden of this cruel misery calmly and without resistance. Since they had been taken completely unawares by the after-pangs of the great struggle of nations, this unresisting surrender to their fate was perhaps also the wisest course these powerless women, children, and old men could take. Had they resisted then, they would without doubt have been crushed by the machinery of war.
Every German was regarded in those days after the war as a fascist war criminal, or at least suspected of being one. The concept of collective guilt was firmly hammered into the minds of the victorious powers. Since this collective guilt now encompassed all the Russian Germans, they fell quite automatically under the operation of collective punishment. The mere notation "German" was cause and reason enough to be merci-
lessly shot down by embittered Poles, or to be treated by vengeful Czechs as slave-like forced laborers.
The refugee treks overrun by the Soviet Army were brought into large collection camps. Here they often remained for months until their transport away. Generous promises for the future were made to them. All of them, the women and children were told, would come back to their former homeland, and there they would also meet their husbands and fathers, if these had survived the war. Many believed the promises and waited full of impatience for the transport to Russia.
The German authorities in those days after the total collapse did not exactly have the most merciful attitude toward the refugees either. For one thing, the authorities were intent on obeying the orders of the occupying powers. Secondly, they were glad to have a few hungry mouths fewer. Very often, too, people were unfriendly toward the "eastern Germans," simply because they were [different] from the Germans of the former Reich territory.
As late as October 1945, five months after the end of the war, the packed freight cars with their precious human cargo were rolling toward the east. On and on went the journey. For many, the railway ended only in Magadan, that city near Alaska. To the former homeland came no one.
Stalin's settlement policy was quite simple: the German ethnic group was to be absorbed into the great mass of the other peoples and disappear. But this disappearance, or process of fusion, was also intended as punishment. The punishment was to be imposed on the German ethnic group — which on the whole had committed no deliberate offenses — simply because it had been caught up in the maelstrom of the events of the war. True, some members of the German ethnic group let themselves be swept along by the occupying troops and made themselves guilty of collaboration with the enemy — but where does that not happen? The men who could have been accused of this offense were, after all, mostly not among those returning. These trains of repatriates carried women, children, and old men. They were now to answer for what others had brewed for them. Fate laid hold of them harshly and demanded sacrifices without parallel.
The war and the flight of 1943 had cast the Wiens family toward the Czech border. Here the collapse caught up with them — not only the collapse of the German Reich; everything around them fell in like a house of cards. As Germans they came into a camp guarded by Czech soldiers. These
believed that the hour of revenge had come for them at last. In the blindness of their hatred toward the German people, they simply failed to notice that people had fallen into their hands who could have changed nothing about their misfortune — people upon whose brows years of persecution and a long flight were themselves written. No, the Russian Germans bore not the slightest guilt for the suffering of the Czech and Slovak population. But who in those days asked about right and wrong, guilt and innocence? "Nemets" — that sufficed in those days, as earlier it had sufficed to have "Jew" on one's jacket.
The Wiens family spent the months after the war's end in that camp, until October 1945. Every day the able-bodied men and women were taken out to work, and that without pay. One was glad if there was something to eat. Then one day it was announced that the journey home was beginning. In a long column the tired and dispirited refugees trudged to the railway station. Eighty people to a freight car, always. The baggage, if there was any, was stowed at one end of the car, and the people crowded together like herrings at the other end. The cars were unheated, but with the overcrowding it was hot even without heating, and the air stinking and stale. Since there were scarcely any provisions, each had to see how he might feed his family. One had a little flour or groats that could be cooked when the train stopped. Quickly, after the train halted, a fire was made, in the hope that the train would stand long enough for the porridge to cook. Sometimes one family or another succeeded in preparing the meal, but just as often the train pulled out without warning, and one had to drop everything where it stood and lay if one did not want to lose one's family.
Completely exhausted and tormented by hunger, the Wiens family and their remaining companions in suffering arrived in the region of the city of Kirov. What would be done with them here? How would their life take shape? The train stopped, like so many transport trains in those days, somewhere in the forest. Here the forest was to be felled, and here the new settlement of the returned Russian Germans would arise. With the last jolt of the locomotive before it came to rest, it was plain as day that very many of the new arrivals would not last long in their new settlement. The cold, the hunger, the many diseases, and the lack of shelter did their part. The crosses of plain birchwood visibly enlarged the newly laid-out cemetery.
Here, far removed from civilization and still farther removed
from any merciful human heart, these people atoned for something they had never done, over which they had had no influence. They had simply been caught in the gears of the wheels of world events, without really noticing it. Their punishment continued, and no one knew the end of this suffering.
Hans Comes Back
Immediately after the close of the war, many from Orenburg were permitted to return to their home villages. They came in groups, they came singly; they came from the Ural Mountains, from the taiga; they came from Central Asia and from the far north. Those who were still alive mostly found the long way home very soon and took up their place in the family and in society again. The war with its many side-effects had changed them all. They had grown older, and the Trudarmee had taken their natural cheerfulness from them. The ranks of the men had been thinned; the women had more often come through the hardships. The result was that the ages of marriage partners shifted. The girls frequently married men three or four years younger. At first the age difference was not so serious, but in later years the age of the wives played an ever more significant role.
Hans Siebert was the first of his family to come home. He traveled from Korkino again by rail to Orenburg, and from the city he rode a truck to his home village. The last stretch, from Kitschkass home, he went on foot. Two years he had been away. As always, one walked a stretch along level road. Then came the three well-known hills. Climbing the first, one used to see, before the war, the tips of the tall poplars. When one came out of the valley between the first hill and onto the second, one saw only the chimneys of the houses, and only when one stood on the ridge of the third hill could one see the village lying immediately before one. Then one was home.
Hans could not see the tips of the poplars. He missed them. Only when he stood on the third hill did he recognize why he had not seen the poplars. There, where trees had once stood, today there was nothing; even the fence along the road had been broken away, and the trees had been felled. Hans came to the open house door, for in those days one did not lock doors. It was not necessary. He stepped in and greeted, deliberately loud and audible. No one answered. At Helene Wiebe's, too, everything remained quiet and still. Hans sat down on the doorstep, as
he had always done in earlier days when Mutter Siebert came home late from work. Tina would surely come soon, and then Hans would also learn something of the others. The sun was already sinking behind the hills when Tina came from the field. The spring sowing was in full swing, and Tina had been planting potatoes.
"Hans, our Hans! Where have you come from? Let me have a look at you." Tina even made her brother stand up, turned him once around in a circle, and found everything about him in order; he had come home whole and healthy.
"Where is Peter? Where is Mother?" Tina, who was now nearly fourteen, wanted to know.
"Of them I have heard nothing new so far. Heinz and Gerhard are still missing. Will they ever come back, I wonder?"
The two went into the kitchen and discovered that there was nothing in their kitchen with which to make a supper. Today they would once more stop in at Helene Wiebe's for supper, and from tomorrow on they meant to feed themselves, as well as could be managed.
Within the next few days Hans began work in the kolkhoz, for one had to earn something, after all. In the Trudarmee one had worked for nothing, or only for an outright starvation wage. Tina had earned hardly anything. In those days earnings in the kolkhoz did not amount to much. For every task performed, a unit — or even a fraction of a unit — was credited. At the end of the year, the units credited to one were added up. After the harvest had been distributed — that is, after the state had received its share for the everlasting free usufruct
of the soil, after the machine-tractor stations had collected their share for the machines made available, and after the seed for the next year had been stored — the remainder, if there was one, was distributed to all the kolkhoz workers according to what they had earned.
What came out of this calculation was the annual wage of the kolkhoz workers. Cash there was hardly any, unless one could sell leftover milk from the one cow a family was permitted to keep. Perhaps one could bring eggs to market, or one had a rabbit or several to sell. If the harvest was good, one had bread for oneself and the family, and fodder for the livestock one was allowed to keep in private ownership.
Tina and Hans waited longingly for the homecoming of their dear mother, who by now had almost served out her months of punishment.
Mutter Siebert Comes Home
While it was still early summer 1945, Mutter Siebert was released from the camp. In the weeks before her release she grew weaker from day to day. Finally the doctor took pity and arranged a medical examination for her. On the basis of this examination she was released as a complete invalid. For her, too, the war now had an end. The years had been long and rich in privations. She had worn herself out, and her head — although she was barely forty-eight years old — had turned gray in these years. She came home unexpectedly, without prior notice.
Home! What was still left at home? The house stood. The garden had not been worked [and] was overgrown with tall weeds. From it there would be nothing for this winter of 1945–1946. Grown older, weakened and disheartened, she stood at the entrance to her farmyard.
Joyfully she learned that Hans and Tina were at home. Of her other three sons there was still no news. Peter, her youngest — yes, he was in Perm, and he would surely come one day; but her two eldest sons still let nothing be heard from them. Would the two of them ever return? A fearful feeling that she might have lost Heinz and Gerhard forever came over her more and more often.
In the evening Hans and Tina sat with their mother in the kitchen. After a long time, the three of them were at the table together for supper. What a joy that was — and yet also a
sorrow over the other three, who still had to dwell far away in foreign parts!
"Children, let us give thanks together for what God has done for us."
Hans and Tina, in the years they had been separated from their mother and under the corrupting influence of atheist propaganda, had, so to speak, lost the habit of prayer and their faith in God. Now they looked at their mother, who [had] already folded her hands in prayer. Quietly, but full of earnestness and deep conviction, Mutter Siebert spoke the prayer for herself and for her children who sat with her at the table, and also for those who were still somewhere in foreign parts:
"Savior, Lord Jesus, [your ways] we have not always understood, and at times they [seemed] so hard to us. But in all these years of war, of fear and worry, in the times of separation and of being alone, you have always been with us. When there seemed to be no way out any longer, then you came and helped us to carry our cross. Your strong arm and your loving comfort [were] with us in these fateful years. You have carried us to this hour.
"Even if we did not always comprehend you and the ways you went with us, we know nevertheless that you meant well with us, for you love us. You make no mistakes with us, not even when we are led through the deepest depths.
"You have brought me to Tina and Hans; we may be together again and may begin a wholly new life. We praise you in your love for us and for your care over us. We thank you for your grace to this hour.
"Lord, we come to you also in great concern for Heinz, Gerhard, and Peter. They are still in foreign parts and on their way. We do not know their paths, but you know the way of my children. You can help them and preserve them. You know why and to what end they must walk such hard roads. Only in your keeping can they be preserved. Give them the grace to see you and to follow you. You can accomplish this; you alone have the power for it. We trust in you and in your goodness.
"Great God, we beseech you, preserve for us the peace in our world and in our land. Bless us in the new beginning of our
life. Preserve our health and bless the work of our hands. Loving Father, come to our table, be our guest, and bless for us this food, which after so long a time we now for the first time wish to take together. Amen."
"Amen! Amen!" repeated Hans and Tina, and both were glad that, thanks to their mother, through her firm faith, they had come into the nearness of God, even though they had not been able to manage it alone, of themselves.
Over the Mennonite villages a kind of "calm after the storm" had come. Those who had survived the war gradually returned to their families, and those who came no more were declared fallen, starved, or dead for some other reason. Pain and mourning still lay like a dark cloud over the families. But that too would change with time, for time heals many a wound. The scars of remembrance and of memory, however, remain preserved in the hearts.
Peter Makes Contact Again
In high summer, Mutter Siebert and her children experienced, after a long time, a magnificent joy once more. The mail carrier stopped in at the Sieberts' only rarely. But today it was different. The letter carrier, Netti Wiebe, a good friend of Mutter Siebert, called out from the street:
"Mutter Siebert, Mutter Siebert! Today I finally have mail for you!"
Mutter Siebert was just at some work in the garden when she heard her friend's call. Drying her hands on her apron, Mutter Siebert ran to meet the letter carrier. She had quickly recognized that it was a letter from Peter in Perm. She knew the handwriting of her children too well. Nevertheless she made sure of her assumption and examined the sender's address closely. Peter had written. So the youngest was indeed still in the city of Perm. For a long time he had written nothing.
How might he look now? He had only just turned eighteen. The family circle would do him so much good. She was still staring at the triangular letter with the awkward handwriting on it.
"Well, why don't we open the letter? What might Peter write?" said Mutter Siebert, astonished at herself. The letter carrier had already left Mutter Siebert when she began to read:
Dear Mama!
Well, with us the war has long been "kaputt," as the prisoners of war and the Russians always used to say. Here we were quite beside ourselves with joy when we learned that the killing now has an end. I am healthy, more or less, and things are not going badly for me here. I still work as a lumberjack, and my earnings suffice for the modest life one leads here.
Many of my friends and acquaintances have already traveled back to the homeland.
I too could already be home, but for various reasons I am not drawn homeward. The last years before the war were so gloomy and sad that I feel no particular pull toward home.
Of course, I would gladly be with my brothers and sister once they are home. Or are the brothers all home already? Do not be cross with me if I keep you waiting. If and when I come home, I do not yet know. I will write again. Greet my brothers and sister from me, if they are at home. Tina should write me sometime.
How are you, dear Mother? Warm greetings to you from your son Peter.
Long had Mutter Siebert waited for a letter from Peter. She was glad that Peter was alive and that [he] had survived the hard years. That he did not intend to come home, but meant to remain in the north of the country, made her sad. That Peter wanted to marry there she could [not] understand, for among [the Sieberts] mixed marriages had never yet occurred in their extended family. Would Peter be the first to break with the inherited custom? She resolved to write Peter a long letter and to beg him to come home after all.
Mutter Siebert set herself against a marriage between Peter and his girlfriend. She even undertook the arduous journey to Perm to fetch Peter home. With all her powers of persuasion, with the application
of her love, her effort was in vain. Peter did not come home. He and Valentina remained in Perm.
Only nine years after his conscription into the Trudarmee did Peter come back to his home village. Mutter Siebert, Hans, and Tina rejoiced at Peter's homecoming, but Peter had left Valentina, and a son whom Valentina kept with her, behind in Perm. That made them all sad, for one could not simply found a family just like that and then, without making any particular ceremony of it, leave it again. Such a thing would have been unheard of in the times before the war.
How very different, how much looser morals were than had been the case in the prewar years. In order to have better control over the people in the areas of banishment, the government was not interested in a firm marriage bond between man and wife. People moved together into a dwelling, if there was a dwelling; they lived together, begot children, without bearing any particular responsibility toward one another. It was even decreed that women, when they entered into a marital relationship with a man, should continue to keep their maiden names. In that way the militia could more easily stay on the track of the women. How easily, so it was argued, might the women hide behind the husband's name and simply disappear into the crowd.
With these burdens Peter came home after more than nine years. It was no easy matter for him to find his way in the life of the village community. When Peter returned to his homeland, the boy who had once been conscripted into the Trudarmee had become a full-grown man. The long years in foreign parts and in a hostile environment had made Peter taciturn. All his cares he carried within himself. No one learned how things really looked in his inner life. He had unlearned cheerfulness and laughter. Only now and then did one see a smile flit across his aged face. Then his features betrayed that his spirit was nevertheless alive. Only slowly did he find his way back into the family.
Right after his homecoming it struck Mutter Siebert that Peter often went out and very often came home tipsy. This discovery about the life of her youngest disturbed her deeply, for drunkenness was far and wide the most widespread vice in the whole country: vodka was drunk in great quantities wherever men came together. Both the lowly placed and the highly placed drank. Reasons for a drinking bout there were plenty. Mostly one drank in the evening, on state holidays, and at weddings. One drank for fun and without measure. Very often someone was singled out from the company
or from the group of guests, someone to whom one wished to teach a lesson or with whom one had a bone to pick. Then the guest was pressed to drink until he was thoroughly drunk and thereby became the laughingstock of those present, or even sank to the disgrace of his whole family. That was still a mild form of humiliation. The drinking bout ended quite differently when the drunkenness was given a political interpretation. Then it could happen that the person concerned lost his job or was black-marked with the NKVD. The dark stains in a drinker's file were not soon gotten rid of. This entry in the files was used again and again as blackmail on various occasions.
Drunkenness ruined the human being. It reduced productivity and destroyed family life; it drove the poor only into greater poverty. Against this vice, state and society alike stood helpless and without counsel. Now Mutter Siebert had to cope with this as well.
Mutter Siebert suffered severely under this phenomenon, as all the other mothers suffered who had to look on helplessly at this self-destruction of the young people, their own children. Again and again they pleaded in their prayers for help, but apparently the time of testing was not yet over for her and the other mothers. Only much later was Mutter Siebert's prayer heard. The sons became free of drunkenness and gave God the honor for the strength they [received]. Again and again they said in their conversations: "What a pity that our dear mother did not live to see that we can live without alcohol too. Her joy would have been overwhelming."
Memories
Gradually order returned to the life of the Siebert family. They had settled in again, as well as could be done in those years,
although with the scanty means not much could be undertaken. One was glad to have a roof over one's head and bread. For the other German settlements from Ukraine and the Russian regions west of the Urals, the situation was considerably worse. They had been scattered across the north of Russia, across all of Siberia and Central Asia, sent into banishment. Only after Stalin's death did their situation become bearable, and gradually they gathered together in the cities and regions of Central Asia and once more formed compact settlements.
The Orenburg settlement was one of the few German settlements that had come through the war intact, without having forfeited its composition and traditional organization. People lived in the same villages, worked the same land, still spoke the Frisian Low German in its old form. Only rarely were there mixed marriages with other peoples in the villages. Only in the following years did it come about that mixed marriages occurred. But since the whole environment was German, the marriage partners originating from other peoples were quickly absorbed.
Since March 1933 Mutter Siebert had been a widow, and she had raised her family with comparatively good success. In the years after her husband's death she had known no good fortune and only rarely a brief joy. Full of wistfulness and longing she remembered the fifteen years of marriage with Abram Siebert. They had had great plans for the future when they married in 1918, after the war. Life, full of promises, lay before them then.
Her husband, Abram Siebert, wanted to remain a teacher, and he hoped for so much from this profession. His wife, Mutter Siebert, looked forward to getting out of the narrowness of the family home and leading a peaceful and free life with her husband.
God's plans must have looked quite different, for Abram Siebert was not permitted to remain a teacher unless he was willing to deny his faith in God and in Jesus Christ. He decided for the following of Jesus and became a merchant in the cooperative. That was, for the people in Orenburg around 1926, a choice that many found high-flown and unbecoming to a Mennonite. After some time Abram Siebert gave up the position as buyer, bought himself a piece of land, and meant now to return after all to his father's occupation. He sensed that it might be to his advantage not to draw attention to himself. He had bought himself a large house. When the farmstead of Elder Krahn burned down, he traded his large farmyard to Isaak Krahn for the ruins of Krahn's house,
fixed up this much smaller house, and now tried to till the soil.
Mutter Siebert wanted to work as a farm wife too. She had, after all, imagined it all quite differently with Abram Siebert.
About that time, Jacob Siebert, the brother of Abram Siebert, wrote to his sister in Saskatchewan:
Our sister-in-law still has such lofty ideas, just like our brother. They aim high and hope they can attain their expectations. But everything is going downhill. Our brother had to scale back his large, beautiful house. He has fixed himself up a small house, so as not to attract notice with the authorities as a rich man. His large, beautiful house is gone. His wife, my sister-in-law, our Tinchen, does not see the point of much of this, but it will not be long now, and she too will be brought low. And it serves her quite right — for why should one person have more than another? I do not wish to appear envious, but pity for them I do not have either.
The years after Abram Siebert's death, the hunger years since the beginning of collectivization — or the era of the socialization of all property — the [years of expectation] and the lean postwar years had planed everyone down alike. All of them had sunk to the zero point. No one needed to envy another anymore, or look down on his neighbor in ill will. They were all equal. Jacob Siebert had been proved right. His sister-in-law Tinchen had been brought low, in that she passed through times of greatest need and indescribable [want] and unspeakable humiliation. God taught her to be humble.
When her husband died, she had been thirty-five years old. Long before his death, Abram Siebert had been marked for death by stomach cancer. The last three years he spent as an invalid, in bed at home and in the hospital in the city of Orenburg. His strength ebbed steadily away.
Even before his illness, Mutter Siebert had had little of her husband. He was constantly traveling, and the mother, with the help of a hired man and a housekeeper, looked after things at home. The raising of her four sons rested almost exclusively on her shoulders. The weekdays and the holidays — as long as there still were [any] — the family spent together.
In order to throw the ordered conditions of society into complete confusion, and then, according to the slogan "The old we destroy, and on the ruins of the old we then build something new," to erect a new form of society, the "five-day week" was introduced in the 1930s. Now the names of the days — [the] "Resurrection Day" — were no longer acceptable; in place of the days with their time-honored names [came] mere numbers — first, second, third, and fourth day. The fifth day was now called the "Ausgetag" ["Ausgehtag"? — to be verified] — the "going-out day." This arrangement did not last long, however, [and] since [there was] a good reason to give for it, after a few years the seven-day week returned, with the "Resurrection Day" and the "Sabbath."
But the return of the seven-day week had only a slight influence on religious institutions. Productivity was anything but satisfactory, and one had to work on Sunday as on every other day of the week. So that the Sunday work would be legal, the government declared Sunday ever more frequently a "subbotnik" — that is, a sabbath on which one presented oneself for work voluntarily [and] without pay. The economy was thereby to recover. It was forgotten in the process that on Monday the human being began the new work week worn out, surly, and without joy. Work morale sank to an ever lower level and made work into a veritable punishment for the human being.
Faith Is Destroyed
A particularly great devastation was suffered by Mennonite society through the antireligious measures, which from 1927 on were carried out with special severity.
Inspectors appeared in the schools and forbade all religious instruction. Teachers who held fast to their faith were dismissed from the school service and replaced by atheists and supposed atheists. Parents likewise were forbidden to give their children religious instruction.
Church services could from now on no longer be held in private houses, but only in the houses of worship. At first glance that seems quite in order, for the houses of worship were indeed intended for that purpose. But with this regulation, [which] seemed so fair and logical, something quite different was intended.
For one thing, the church service could be better controlled, and the churchgoers could be watched and counted. In the repressions of the following 1930s that was very important for the militia and NKVD.
Because by no means all villages had houses of worship, one absolutely needed vehicles to get to the services in the distant churches. This means of transport was now lacking everywhere. To reach the service on foot — for that, amid the strenuous labor, both strength and time were lacking. As a consequence, the people who lived in villages without houses of worship had to remain without the ministry of worship.
Particular difficulties were caused by this decree at funerals, which in Mennonite congregations had always been held in private houses. That was now forbidden. One was compelled in those days to bury the dead without a service, without hymn and prayer. In villages where there was a house of worship, funerals were now held in the churches, insofar as these were not being used for other purposes such as granaries, schools, clubhouses, and so on.
The prohibition against holding worship gatherings outside the house of worship also destroyed the weekly Bible and prayer hours. These weekly gatherings had found their way into the Mennonite villages only a few years before, and now they were to be discontinued so very quickly.
The same applied to the Sunday school for the children. These lessons took place on Sunday afternoons in private houses. Now this so valuable institution, too, had been smashed under the blow of the authorities' antireligious stance.
Particular attention fell upon the preachers, elders, and deacons of the congregations. Here no exception was made among the various confessions. It played no role whether one belonged to the Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran, or Mennonite congregation. [They] burdened these persons with excessive obligations in cash, or demanded of them impossible grain [levies]. If the clergymen concerned did not meet these demands, they were accused of sabotage and arrested. Only a few of these unfortunates ever returned to freedom. They perished in the prisons, in the camps, and in the various regions of banishment, quietly and scarcely seen by the public. In those days, as also later in the 1930s, the public martyrdom of believers was a thorn in the eyes of the authorities. The public witness to faith in God and in
the redemption of mankind through Jesus Christ was dangerous, and it spurred people on to stronger faith and courage in witnessing. Therefore means and ways were devised to charge the preachers, deacons, and believers with various so-called crimes of every kind, as wreckers of the people. They were arrested by night and fog, secretly sentenced, and banished. The public never heard of them again. Only long after the war, after 1956, were they rehabilitated, and the relatives — if these were still alive — were given the information that the person they sought had perished innocent. In those days of terror, 1936, 1937, and 1938, those still living in freedom were in constant fear for their own freedom and for the fate of their loved ones in the prisons and in the regions of banishment.
The youth of those days often had no idea what was happening around them. They did not know why their fathers, brothers, uncles, and other relatives and acquaintances were suddenly no longer there. They had simply vanished, as if wiped from the face of the earth the way one wipes the table at home. The most plausible answer was then that the dear father, the good brother, the friendly uncle or neighbor had simply become an "enemy of the people." What else could it have been? Stolen and murdered they had not. Nor had they uttered any wicked speeches against the state. They had always gone about their work quietly and diligently and had otherwise done their duty. There must then have been some other reason that justified the imprisonment of these many good people. The youth, in their naivety and their youthful zeal, could not grasp that thousands upon thousands of innocent people would be driven from their beds in the dark of night and torn forever from their families. To be taken forever from wife and child without a compelling reason? Surely that could not be! No human being could be so evil! The youth searched for the reason why their mother had become a widow and her children orphans. They did not know it. But the old — they knew it, yet were not permitted to say it.
One day — Abram Siebert had been dead almost four years — Mutter Siebert said to her children as they were all gathered around the table:
"Children, I am so glad that your father is dead." Silence reigned in the room. All four pairs of her sons' eyes were fixed on their mother. Had they missed something in their parents' life? They knew that their father loved their mother dearly. Their mother had never said even a single unkind word about their father. And
now she was suddenly glad that Father was no longer alive. How was that possible?
Only much later did the children learn what their mother had meant by this remark. Through all those years she had dreaded that one day her husband would not come home anymore, or that he would be wakened by a heartless knocking at the door and ordered to dress, pack his bundle, and come along, without taking leave of his children. He would then, like many before him and after him, come before an unscrupulous court, after which he would be sent into banishment, where he would have to vegetate out his life until death in inhuman conditions. No — it was a thousand times better that he died at home in his bed. He rested, as it said on the ribbons over the coffin, gently. Mother knew where he was. And that was her comfort. Mutter Siebert had even then learned to recognize the will of God and to submit to it. She let His grace be sufficient for her.
Mutter Siebert Marries
The life of Mutter Siebert had run its course, hard and monotonous, through all the years, until in 1947 quite suddenly a change was to occur. Peter Pries, a widower from the neighboring village, made Mutter Siebert an offer of marriage. He was considerably older than Mutter Siebert and had a large family. Most of the children of his family [were] still at home.
Despite the fact that Mutter Siebert had long lived in widowhood, the decision in this matter did not come easily to her. After long deliberation she consented to become the wife of Peter Pries. She saw the difficulties that might arise with the taking on of so large a family, but she hoped nevertheless to have something of family happiness yet. She believed she would find rest and peace in the circle of the Pries family.
With a small devotional service the marriage was concluded. The marriage was registered at the village soviet, and with that the marital bond was valid. The very next day the few belongings were carted over to the house of the Pries family, and for Mutter Siebert and her daughter Tina a wholly new and strange chapter of life began.
The house in which Mutter Siebert, Tina, and Hans had lived until now was taken over by Hans, who by now had also reached
marriageable age. In Tina Neufeld he found his life's companion, who, like so many women in that time, was four years older than her husband.
Life ran on with giant strides. Mutter Siebert lived and worked in the household of her new family. Tina attended school and intended to learn the profession of a nurse. Then one day came the great surprise for Mutter Siebert, when Tina informed her that she wished to marry the son of Peter Pries — that is, her stepson [sic]. Mutter Siebert wanted to resist this, but was powerless to take any serious step against her daughter's wish. She married the stepbrother Willi when she was seventeen years old. The young couple did leave the parental house, but for Mutter Siebert the worry over her young daughter remained behind.
Through the marriage with Peter Pries, Mutter Siebert's circumstances of life had changed drastically. She suddenly had nothing of her own anymore. When she left her house, she took along the cow and a few small things such as clothes and the like. True, she no longer needed to worry about earning a livelihood, but in exchange she had the responsibility for the large family, which consisted mainly of grown female persons. The family had been without a mother for several years, and the daughters of the house had unlearned submitting to a mother's directions. Mutter Siebert had not chosen an easy lot with her marriage.
It was especially hard in the family when the frequent quarrels broke out between the children and their father. The insults and the shouting seemed as if they would never end. And in the midst of this strife now stood Mutter Siebert. She had hoped, in her second marriage, after all the years of loneliness, privation, and insecurity, to find love, sufficiency, and security. Precisely the opposite had come about. What she had never thought possible, she now had to endure day after day. All her strength and patience were needed to keep herself out of the running quarrels and to bear the atmosphere of spitefulness.
More and more often she compared her condition with the circumstances of her marriage to Abram Siebert and with the circumstances of her parental home. Then a real longing for home came over her. But where was this "home"? It no longer existed at all. It had been extinguished back then, more than twenty years ago, when her parents, with their five unmarried children, sold everything and emigrated to Canada — or, as it was generally called, to America. It was now already twenty-one years that she
had not seen her parents and her brothers and sisters, and yet it was as clear to her as on that cold February day in the year 1926 when her parents loaded their baggage onto several sledges and took leave of the children and grandchildren who were staying behind. They would see each other again soon, very soon. Now more than twenty years had passed over the land. They had still not seen each other again.
The Emigration
Mutter Siebert sat in her room knitting, as she always did in her free time. In this way she could pursue her thoughts quite undisturbed and find in the past the key to the present.
The beginning of this separation — Mutter Siebert still remembered it exactly — began already with the outbreak of the Revolution in 1917. Already in August 1914, with the outbreak of the First World War, the Germans in Russia had begun to feel that despite all their efforts they had remained strangers in the great land. This feeling only grew greater when the tsarist government — the very government that had called the Germans into the country — issued the far-reaching liquidation laws. These laws demanded the abolition of the greater part of German landholding and of German enterprises.
The execution of the liquidation laws never came about, because the Revolution of February 1917 and the October Revolution that followed prevented it. Had the Revolution of 1917 not come, the Germans — and with them the Mennonites — would have become poor overnight, without their landholdings and without their factories.
The great chaos in Russia, caused by revolution, by the complete collapse of the front against Germany, and by the civil war that followed, came to a standstill at the beginning of 1920. Only now could the losses and destruction be properly assessed. The result was shattering. So many men had remained on the battlefields, and so many human lives had the civil war demanded. These losses made themselves felt especially in agriculture and in the provisioning of the country with the necessary foodstuffs.
Bread had always been scarce since the war raged. The revolutionary supply committees had forcibly confiscated all the grain there was, so that even the rural population was gnawing at the edge of starvation. In 1921 the famine, which had clasped city and countryside in the vast Russia with unrelenting harshness,
became palpable in its full extent. Thousands upon thousands of people died of hunger at home, in the streets of the cities, and in the ditches of the country roads. Everything seemed to be approaching its end.
The Germans had until then never suffered hunger, but the year 1921 emptied the storerooms even of the otherwise so prosperous and thrifty farmers. This fact was striking proof that the famine was a hard and undeniable reality.
Into this time also fell the founding of the Mennonite Central Committee in the United States of America. The Mennonites in the United States sent their help to Russia. In the main, this help consisted of foodstuffs, seed grain, and later also of agricultural machines, such as the small gray Fordson tractors.
Mutter Siebert still remembered so exactly the cans of milk that were distributed in those days to the starving population. To this very day she keeps a so-called Hoeppner bottle, in which the American sunflower oil had been brought. The bottle had its name from the bearer of the food donation, D.R. Hoeppner. Mutter Siebert still asked herself even now what would have become of the many starving children — and adults too — had the American and Canadian Mennonites not stretched out their helping hands to their suffering brothers and sisters in Ukraine, on the Trakt, in the Caucasus, indeed as far as Barnaul and Slavgorod.
Mutter Siebert — and surely many others of her generation as well — had not forgotten the love that was shown them in those days of great need. Although the Mennonite Central Committee was a great support for the Mennonites, it could not eliminate the population's distress for any length of time. The land was too vast, the destruction of the entire economy too comprehensive.
To this economic low point was added the loss of trust in the new intentions of the government in Moscow. True, the liquidation of German property had not come to pass, but in its place the expropriation and nationalization of all property by the Bolshevik government still lay ahead. Through it the Germans — indeed all the farmers of Russia — would lose their land, if they had possessed any. The mere possibility of this land reform was frightening enough for the Mennonites to make them search for a way out of this threatening situation. The Mennonites also saw a great
danger for the continued existence of their faith and their culture under the ever stronger influence of the communist worldview.
All these reasons finally led the Mennonites of Russia to found a Study Commission, which was to occupy itself with the possibility of an emigration to North America. The members of this commission traveled to the United States and investigated possibilities for settling the Mennonites in Germany and even in the United States, Mexico, and the old colonies in Africa. Then came the year 1923. The first group of Mennonites from Russia had arrived in Canada after a long journey and was to be settled near Rosthern, Saskatchewan. Foreign to them was the land, foreign the languages of the inhabitants, and foreign the people of the country. Added to this was the complete destitution of these immigrants. But in return they were free of every oppression. In the first period after arrival in Canada, some could find temporary lodging with relatives who had come to Canada in the years 1874, 1875, 1876. The overwhelming majority of the immigrants began to settle into the new conditions and among strange people — by no means an easy task. They needed money for their own upkeep, for the purchase of land and livestock, and for paying off the travel debt to the Canadian Pacific Railroad Company. It was almost impossible for many, in those days, to keep a clear view of how things were developing.
The first group was followed by others. The Canadian prairie received them without treating them gently. And the Russian steppe of Ukraine, of the Urals, and of Siberia gave them up, one transport after another.
In order to restore the shattered economy of the country and get it moving again, Lenin decided in 1922 to proclaim the New Economic Policy, which once again permitted private property and private initiative. The farmers were allowed to till the soil unhindered, at their own discretion. The factory owners — if they were still alive and in the country — were permitted to resume production. Everything seemed to be getting better again, and the future looked rosier than before.
These improved conditions also lessened interest in emigration to Canada. The stream of emigrants shrank considerably in the years 1927 and 1928 and threatened even to dry up — until Stalin abolished the New Economic Policy and in the twinkling of an eye nationalized the enterprises, social-
ized the farms, and introduced the collective farms, or kolkhozes. The credulous entrepreneurs and farmers had been taken in by the government. With the introduction of the first Five-Year Plan they had now lost everything that they had built up with the greatest exertion over the previous five years.
Once more people set to work preparing for emigration. Now the Siebert family, too, wanted to emigrate to the relatives in Canada. Mutter Siebert still remembered exactly the letter her husband had written on January 27, 1927 to his sister in Saskatchewan:
. . . We greet you warmly in far-off America. It does seem fabulous that only recently you were still here in poor Orenburg and now you live in Canada. We are glad that you are there, for you must not be pitied here for anything. . . . The long winter evenings are used to read your letters from America again and again and to discuss them. They are retold word for word. There are whole stories about your life there. Many who back then would not hear of emigrating are today willing to go, if it were only possible. But it looks very much as though nothing will come of the journeys to your country, for no more passports are being issued. A group from here has been waiting for passports since October of last year. They are put off from one week to the next. Jakob Wolf, who worked for the issuing of the passports, has been arrested in Moscow. He sits there in prison. There is much talk that America wants to take in many emigrants, but if things do not change here, the number of emigrants will be small. We too want to emigrate, if it should be at all possible, in spring or autumn. We would therefore have liked to learn how you see it on the spot. Please do write us how you have found things there. Do you like it? It is, after all, a wholly foreign world for us, with other manners and other customs. Recently we read a letter from Peter Redekopp. He described the good sides and the bad as well. From that one can at least form a picture of Canada. . . . From Peter Thiessen we hear nothing either. They are certainly glad to be away from here and think no more of us poor Russländer. Would have so much more to tell you, but unfortunately that is no longer advisable.
With heartfelt greetings and with the best wishes for you in your new homeland, we remain your brother and sister, Abram and Katharina Siebert.
. . . Earlier, yes, back then one could still dare to write someone everything that weighed on the soul. Mutter Siebert remembered a letter of March 25, 1928, which she had written to her husband's sister, Cornelia Block, in Saskatchewan. In the 1930s such a letter would have been regarded as a great cardinal crime.
Dear brother and sister!
Will quickly try to give a sign of life from us. Before I write further, I wish all of you there good well-being in body and soul. We too are all, thank God, in good health. We apologize heartily for the long silence, but we read your letters gladly and with great [sic] interest . . .
My parents and my brothers and sisters were living in Saskatchewan. There the wheat froze on two hundred acres. Apparently they could not make the payments, and so they simply abandoned the farm and moved to the north of Ontario. There is nothing there but forest, forest and more forest. Their little house stands right by the railway line. Debts they now have none. The land they bought for fifty [sic] cents an acre. Otherwise they have, so to speak, nothing at all. Their stock of animals and poultry consists of two hens and a rooster. Cows, so my parents write, are a rarity there. For the family of seven they have only a tiny little house with one window and one door. My mother writes that the little house is built of nothing but Christmas trees, and the cracks between the trunks have been stuffed with moss.
When I read that, I am glad indeed that we stayed here. But then it makes almost no difference where one is. Here too it is now getting harder and harder. We must now think only of paying: pay, pay, and pay again. Our taxes we must pay in three installments. Now we may no longer buy anything for cash. For all textiles and leather goods we must pay in wheat, which unfortunately we do not possess. Now a government loan is being forcibly imposed on every family. We took only five rubles. More we could not afford. We have no money.
Abram recently told how one of his acquaintances was forced to subscribe [sic] a loan of a thousand rubles. He took the credit certificates, hung them on a string around his neck, and then hanged himself. Is that not sad?
Now money is borrowed from the bank. Seven hundred rubles fall to our village soviet; of that, three hundred rubles fall to our village. Where the money is to come from is a mystery to us all. It seems to be getting difficult for all of us, but everything will no doubt have to take its course, for here everything seems to be moving toward its end.
A few days ago a so-called inspector turned up here to visit the schools. Sunday school and religious instruction as well are forbidden effective immediately. And yet, despite the fact that they are so severe against everything religious and everything divine, very many people are being converted — first in the cities among the Russians, and from there great awakenings spread into the countryside. In Neusamara near Orenburg whole villages were converted to the Lord. In Fedorowka, Number 7, over a hundred persons were converted. Whole families have resolved to follow the Lord Jesus. From your village too, more and more people are coming to Jesus. Your brother and his family are among them. Anna, Jacob's wife, is so happy that your brother also has the desire to enter into the following of Jesus.
We wish you all a joyful Eastertide!
In closing, warm greetings from your Katharina Siebert.
On April 7, 1928 Abram Siebert also wrote a letter to his sister Kornelia in Oxbow, Saskatchewan:
. . . Well, it gladdens us that you are there. You may freely describe to us the shadow sides of Canada. We shall envy you all the same. Of emigration there is no longer any thinking here, for there are no more passports. But should it be possible to emigrate to Canada, we would rather set out today than tomorrow, even on foot. We are going through very unsettled times here. Must make very high payments on the imposed obligation, etc. We hoped that we had paid enough for this year, but who knows . . . We now have our own tractors, with which we mean to plow and sow. As you see, we are setting up the
farm American-style; only a pity that we are all supposed to enter the collectives — that is, we must plow, sow, and harvest together. For the time being, at least, we do not yet have to eat together out of one pot. Getting rich is something we Russländer have nearly all given up. People speak more and more often of how one might make one's farm smaller and safer, so as to have a better livelihood guaranteed. One must do so much here at present to protect oneself and one's family from ruin.
Dear Johann, do write sometime what is heard where you are about the emigration of the Mennonites from Russia to Canada. We here have now cut ourselves loose from everything that held us until now. Here the prospects are hopeless. Uncle Born has been waiting almost a year for the exit visa. Others have resigned themselves to having to stay in Russia and are arranging themselves accordingly. . . .
We no longer know what we should do, for everything here is so unstable. The way things are going now, it cannot go on much longer. Everything looks so dark, including our journey to America. We want so much to get out of Russia, but it is becoming ever clearer that it takes far more than the mere will.
One Last Attempt
With the ending of the New Economic Policy and with the introduction of forced collectivization, the Mennonites' interest in emigration to Canada rose very sharply, and in 1929 a veritable flight of the Mennonites to Moscow was underway, in the hope that despite all the public declarations about the prohibition on leaving the Soviet Union, one might obtain an exit permit. In Moscow and in the surroundings of Moscow there were at that time over thirteen thousand Mennonites. Most of them lived in the dachas around Moscow. Their money was in many cases running out. Life with the large families was very costly, and the people had soon used up their saved money, or the proceeds from the sale of their farmsteads — that is, without the land.
Quite unexpectedly, about five thousand Germans — and among them three thousand Mennonites — were permitted to emigrate to Germany, though with the condition that they would travel on to Canada and Paraguay.
These five thousand owed their success to the efforts of Dr. Benjamin Unruh and other members of the Study Commission.
The Soviet government now resorted to quite radical and ruthless measures to stop the stream of those eager to emigrate once and for all. First the leaders of the emigrants were arrested, and immediately thereafter the heads of families. The women and children were sent back to their home villages. Destitute and without shelter, they arrived at home. Most of the fathers never returned home again. Those who escaped from prison once more were later harassed again and again on account of their attempt to emigrate, until they were finally arrested after all and perished somewhere in banishment.
Mutter Siebert had two brothers-in-law who came to Moscow with her sisters and their children. Both men were taken to the White Sea, to the island of Solovki, and there they remained. With these rigorous measures, the emigration of the Germans of Russia had come to an abrupt end.
Those who had survived the flight abroad — that is, those whose flight had failed — never spoke in those days, if they could avoid it, of having intended to go abroad as well. It was even advisable to keep these plans secret. Everyone who had relatives abroad became, in the later years, suspected of espionage or regarded as hostile to the state, and was branded as such. It became so bad with this "dark spot" in the files of the relatives in Russia that people in many cases distanced themselves from their brothers and sisters and other close relatives by not responding to their correspondence, or by sending it back to the sender unopened.
When the relatives in Canada heard of the great famine of 1933 in Russia, they sent money and foodstuffs as well. Little as it was, the recipients rejoiced at the gifts of love from the relatives. One then had provisions for perhaps a scant week. For the Canadian money one was permitted to buy foodstuffs from the stocks of the Soviet Union in the specially established stores in Moscow. These "Torgsin stores" were a secure source of revenue for the government. And yet people were induced to renounce these gifts, in order to show that one wanted nothing to do with the relatives.
Mutter Siebert remembered so well the effort of self-conquest it cost her and her husband when she held the last package, with flour, rice, and sugar, in her hands. She had been called directly to the post office, and it was demanded that she refuse acceptance of the package.
With a heavy heart she asked a postal official to put the notation "Acceptance refused" on the package. With words of praise for her devotion to her Soviet homeland, Mutter Siebert was allowed to go home again to her hungry children. The meal that had been in prospect never came.
After this event, no more packages came. Money was still sent, with which one could buy foodstuffs in Moscow — millet groats, rice, and when these were no longer to be had, corn groats. To make these small purchases, one had to travel thirty-six hours by rail from Orenburg to Moscow and then just as long back again. That was arduous enough in good times, and in the time of this general famine these exertions were doubly hard.
How great the famine was is shown by the very fact that along the roadsides one found the corpses of starved Kazakhs and Kirghiz. Mutter Siebert observed in her school a so-called "hot breakfast," which consisted of a roll and a cup of "Prips" [a coffee substitute]. The substitute coffee the boys were allowed to drink. The roll was carefully preserved in the school satchel and carried home at the end of lessons. Mutter Siebert saw how the midday meal for the Siebert family contained nothing more than the three rolls cut into pieces. Of course one could not eat one's fill and stay healthy on that little bit of bread. [Her youngest] suffered most under the lack of nourishment. He lay during the day in front of a bench, too tired to play. His body was swollen thick, and Mutter Siebert feared for his life.
But the bread question became truly sorrowful only when the father died on March 24, 1933, in the year of the great famine in Russia. Since the full stores did not exist, want set in at once. Mutter Siebert saw herself compelled to slaughter the one cow that one was now again permitted to keep. There was no fodder for the cow,
and besides, the meat was needed as the only foodstuff. But with the slaughtering of the cow, the constant source of nourishment had been destroyed as well. Where was the milk to come from now? Where could one now get butter? Mutter Siebert — and with her the millions of other mothers — lived with her children from hand to mouth. One provided only for the present day. Worrying about tomorrow was pointless, for there was no solution to the overwhelming problems of those days. One lived then in a scarcely conceivable apathy, without grumbling or complaining. Everything else becomes so secondary in such times, indeed totally unimportant — one thinks only of the constant feeling of hunger. When the constant pain over the death of Vater Siebert had been pushed somewhat into the background, Mutter Siebert had to concern herself once more with the future of her children.
Shortly before her husband's death — that is, three days [before] he died — the family had moved to the village of Kubanka. Vater Siebert had by then lain in bed with stomach cancer for almost a year, and in his bed he was loaded onto the sledge and conveyed from one village to the other. It was a sad picture: the man marked by death striving to provide for his wife and children. After their house had been destroyed by fire, they were to live once more in a house of their own. True, it was in a place where Mutter Siebert was a stranger, but Vater Siebert could not suspect, when he bought the house, that God would take him from his family so soon.
In the spring of 1934 Mutter Siebert had sold her house in Kubanka and bought herself half a house in Dolinowka, where she was at home and where she knew so many people and the local circumstances. Because of her husband's long illness and because of the move, her family had been able to earn only a few workday credits, and so the bread question had become a constant worry for the children. How was she to fill the hungry mouths? Then a thought came into her mind — one she dreaded, one she had always resisted. Her children could help her with it.
"Heinz, go find two pails in the barn, and all four of you go into the valleys, where the fields have already dried off, and flush out the gophers. Enough snow-water is still coming down from the hills. Then you won't have to carry it so far. When you have ten of them, come straight home."
Heinz looked at [her] with wide eyes. He recognized that the situation must be very sad indeed. Silently he went into the barn, fetched two pails, and then called his brothers. They too said scarcely a
word. In earlier days they had also gone out hunting gophers, but usually it was about something else. Usually it was about the pelt, which could be sold for a few kopecks. But today it was about the meat of the animals, which after their long winter sleep were still in good flesh and fat.
First one looked for the water still coming down from the hills. Once the water was found, one looked for the animals' holes. It was a simple matter, for the inhabited burrows showed themselves by their openings. Beside such a hole there is always the little mound of earth that the gopher threw out while building its dwelling. Every gopher burrow always has two openings, one slanting into the earth. Once one opening has been found, one pours the water into it, and if the animal is in the hole, it comes out through one of the openings. If the boys were skillful, they sat by the hole, the hand held ready like a pair of tongs, to seize the animal as soon as it stretched its neck far enough out of the hole. Quickly one grabbed it and struck it against the ground, and the hunt was over.
The brothers had luck that morning. Their huntsman's fortune brought enough, and they soon came home with their catch. Even later, Mutter Siebert never spoke a word about this meal. Even later, that time was never mentioned — as if no one wanted to recall those days, to think even in retrospect of that humiliation. Too evil and too degrading had those times been.
In Canada, Too, There Were Difficulties
Like a bad dream, the twenty-one years since the emigration of her parents and her young brothers and sisters passed before Mutter Siebert's mind's eye. Since the last letter, from the year 1937, she had heard nothing more from them. The letters had become quite rare from the time she began to be afraid; again and again one was questioned about alleged relatives abroad, no matter how reliable and inconspicuous one [was] in every respect.
With the outbreak of war, all communication with foreign countries ceased. Although Canada belonged to the allies of the Soviet Union in the struggle against fascism, it was nevertheless an enemy country. It was, as was explained again and again, governed by capitalists, and this class of human society could not and would never be a sincere friend of the Soviets. For this reason Mutter Siebert refrained from any attempt to get in touch
with her mother. Between the two continents it was not only the Atlantic Ocean that stood as an insurmountable gulf; it was not [only that] a political border divided the continents — a border that not even the love of a mother for her children could cross. Mutter Siebert hoped for a reunion, if it should ever become possible to get in contact with her parents.
It had not been so easy for her parents and for her brothers and sisters to build a new existence in Canada. After a long sea voyage and a tiring railway journey from Halifax to Saskatoon, they finally arrived in the little town of Dundurn. Here they were to stay for the time being, until they could acquire a farm or even just a piece of land.
The parents had then also reported in exact detail about their beginnings. The days of settling in the prairie of Saskatchewan had not been pretty, but one was one's own master and could do or leave undone whatever one wished. One was free, and that, in the end, was more important than everything else.
After the journey from Halifax through half of Canada, the family of Gerhard Klassen was taken in by his brother Peter Klassen on a farm near Dundurn. Peter Klassen had arrived in Canada back in 1923, and he and his family counted as old-established immigrants who were [already] at home in the new country. They knew their way around.
After a three-month stay on his brother's farm, Gerhard Klassen moved with his family, which consisted of seven young people capable of work, onto his own farm. He also had a little money — the farm was loaded with debt [sic] — but it belonged to him. His hope was almost boundless, and truly rosy it was.
On a sowing area of over 640 acres stood the buildings, with a large dwelling house built of red brick. In the barn stood eight healthy workhorses, a row of milk cows, pigs, hens — even the dog was not lacking [sic]. What more could a Mennonite farmer from the steppes of Ukraine and from the Urals wish for? As long as there were land and fields on which he could grow wheat, oats, and rye, surely nothing could go wrong. No — he, Gerhard Klassen, meant to show how one stamps something out of nothing. He would surely make something of himself. He and his sons would in a short time attain a prosperity that would set the other immigrants — indeed even those who had not dared the journey across the great water — marveling.
Ah yes, the debt on the farm! A trifle! It was to be paid off with half
the harvest each year. What, after all, was fifty-two thousand dollars? Right in the first spring, 1927, Gerhard Klassen sowed two hundred acres of wheat on his farm. That would reduce the debt by a good bite. In a few years nothing more could happen to the family. He would see to that.
Gerhard Klassen meant to prove to his younger brother that he stood on secure ground. That was not only because he was the elder, but also because in religious respects he stood on a different plane. Already back in Russia, before the family of Gerhard Klassen moved from Ukraine to the new Mennonite settlement in the Urals, the family had split into two different directions: into the Kirchliche congregation — the "church" Mennonites — and the Mennonite Brethren congregation. Gerhard Klassen was the only one who crossed over with his family to the new Mennonite Brethren congregation. Such crossings seldom proceeded peacefully and fairly. People accused one another of too little piety, of sanctimoniousness, and of many great and small transgressions of "Christian" laws.
Another matter kept the two brothers apart, and that was the form of baptism. Because they had been baptized according to different forms, each denied that the other was truly converted. In this way the family became divided, in many cases for the rest of their lives. Agathe Klassen, the wife of Gerhard Klassen, had never once met with her sister in the last forty years since the division of the congregation, although they lived not at all far from each other. Many a thing would have been lighter and simpler had the two brothers Gerhard and Peter been able to get along in brotherly fashion. The quarrel that had begun in Ukraine was continued here in the new country — a country where one might have made a new beginning in questions of faith as well. The devastating fruits were not slow to appear.
On a grand scale began the first sowing in the spring of 1927 on the new "brother-in-law farm" near Dundurn. To the two hundred acres of wheat were added eighty acres of rye. The weather conditions were good. The harvest stood magnificent and full of promise. Yes, Gerhard Klassen had every reason to be hopeful and content with himself and his work. It had been worth coming to Canada. The great costs of the long journey and the great losses in Russia would soon be forgotten. By mid-August everything was ready for the harvest. The horses were rested from the spring work, the machines overhauled. The grain grew lush from day to day. Only a few more days of good weather, and then it could begin. Gerhard Klassen already saw the harvest blessing flowing into his granaries. And then came the calamity with which no one could reckon. The
temperature fell very rapidly, in a single night, to –10 C. The fields were frozen stiff. The grain, promising as it had stood only yesterday, was rigid, and when it thawed in the afternoon, it fell black to the earth. Only the rye had survived the frost.
Gerhard Klassen was beaten. His hopes had sunk to the zero point. He believed he had no prospects left. He took the situation as a judgment of God, and he was ready to give up everything. The former owner of the "brother-in-law farm" tried to persuade him to stay on the farm after all. He could, after all, make this year's payment with the half harvest, whatever that might amount to. The eighty acres of rye yielded 50 bushels per acre. That was still something, after all. And then there was also the next year's harvest to come. It might well turn out very good again. But all these arguments passed Gerhard Klassen by in vain. He had lost his courage, and he was not in a condition to pull himself together again. He had made his decision: away from this farm, only away, as far as possible.
In this decision a coincidence came to his aid. The Canadian government was engaged in opening up the north of Ontario with its endless stands of forest. To make this undertaking palatable, land was being sold there, near the little town of Kapuskasing, at the price of fifty cents per acre. Every person eighteen years of age and older was permitted to buy a parcel of eighty acres. There was only one condition attached: the owner of the parcel had to have erected a building on the cleared land within one year, as a sign that he was in earnest about taking possession of the land.
Gerhard Klassen moved with his family into the wilderness of northern Ontario, into the region of Kapuskasing, and bought three parcels of land — one for himself, one for his wife, and one for his son Peter, who had now turned eighteen. The region around Kapuskasing was in those days the land of the lumberjacks. Truly settled people the region had but few. One earned one's livelihood by felling the timber and selling the wood. The earnings were good, and since there was almost no opportunity to spend the money, it was not long before Gerhard Klassen came into a good deal of money. The area was so thinly settled that not even a bank had been established. Monotonously the life of the few Mennonite families dragged on from one day to the next. And that became the family's undoing here.
In Germany, and later in Russia, the Mennonites lived in compact towns and villages, where each depended on the other,
where one watched the other, where one corrected the other. In a compact Mennonite settlement it had been comparatively easy to hold fast to manners, customs, and tradition. Especially in matters of faith one found support and help in one's neighbor. This mutual help made itself felt especially in the raising of the children. One associated with one's own kind, and one lived as the neighbor lived.
In Kapuskasing one was thrown upon oneself. Since Gerhard Klassen had always been strict and narrow in the raising of his children, there arose between him and his sons an ever-widening rift, which only widened faster as his children grew older. He noticed that his sons behaved more and more rebelliously toward him and that control over his children was slipping from his grasp.
His sons began to associate with settlers of other persuasions, and they spent their free time — which in the long winter evenings grew ever more extended — with card-playing, drinking, and smoking, all things that for Gerhard Klassen were outright sin and absolute taboo. In their protest against the father, the sons went so far as to agree among themselves to build the father a little house, where he — although he numbered only fifty-one years — could live out his years with the mother. They, the sons, would enter into their inheritance early, if there was anything at all to inherit. For the parents, these years, in which the welfare of their sons was at stake, were truly no easy time.
1929 was an especially rich year for the farmers in Saskatchewan and Alberta. The harvest promised to be exceedingly abundant. To bring in the harvest in time, workers were brought from Europe, from the eastern provinces of Canada, and from the U.S.A. The call reached even to Kapuskasing, to the Klassen family. It was decided that the three sons, Peter, David, and Hans, would travel west to try their luck there as harvest workers. The pay was said to be good, the journey cheap, and one finally got out of the range of the father's so unpleasant tutelage. Out there in the wide world things were bound to be better. Only to get away, once, from the narrowness of Kapuskasing.
Mutter Siebert remembered so well the letters of her mother, which were full of worry about her boys. She worried especially about Hans, who was only sixteen years old. How would he cope with everything, and how would he come back? Yes, the price that Gerhard and Agathe Klassen paid for free Canada was not at all so low as it seemed at first. Human life makes its
demands everywhere. But then came the letter with the news that David and Hans were back in Kapuskasing. Peter, however, had gone farther west, to Medicine Hat. He had bought himself a farm and meant to shape his life there independently. Only after about two years did Gerhard Klassen write to his daughter that Peter had gone bankrupt on the farm in Alberta and had come back to his father's house in Kapuskasing with entirely empty hands. The parable of the prodigal son, so Mutter Siebert's father wrote at the time, becomes reality again and again even today. Unfortunately, the brothers had learned nothing at all from this parable made real.
Conditions became truly bad when David's attention was drawn, through an advertisement, to the fact that in Toronto one could buy real revolvers by mail — polished and oiled, together with any desired quantity of ammunition — by post. Without hesitating, David ordered the pistol. Neatly packed, it arrived in Kapuskasing. Gerhard Klassen received the news of the pistol's arrival as though he could not trust his ears. He, a nonresistant Mennonite, to whom this distinctive principle mattered especially, had — so he believed — raised his sons in the spirit of nonresistance, and now look at this: his son brings a pistol into his house! Had it at least been a hunting rifle, he would have understood it. But what was a pistol for? Far and wide not an enemy soul, and here his son wears a pistol on his belt while felling trees. Gerhard Klassen knew that it was now high time to find a place where one could once more live among fellow believers, associate with them, and expect support from them.
Gerhard Klassen searched in Ontario, in Saskatchewan, and finally in Manitoba. In Steinbach the family of Gerhard Klassen seemed, after seven years, to have found at last a place where they could live in peace and quiet.
"My Son Is Alive!"
The year was 1947. More than two years had passed over the land since the Second World War was no longer being fought on the fronts in the north, the east, the west — depending entirely on where one happened to stand. The weapons of every kind were silent, but the consequences of the war raged on, even if not as conspicuously as in 1939–1945. The suffering of the soul was almost greater and deeper than on the battlefield. The suffering of the soul, coupled with the physical, far exceeded the earlier paths of suffering of mankind. Millions of prisoners, millions of refugees! Homeless and bereft of all hope, they led their sorrowful existence. One searched
for one's relatives, one searched for one's homeland, which for many had become so foreign; one searched for a new existence — indeed, often one searched for oneself, because in the boundless confusion one no longer [found one's bearings]. [For many, the word] love had long since become an empty concept; others clung to the remnant of their hope. They waited patiently for a reunion with their loved ones. But how often these waiting mothers, fathers, and wives had to keep [watch] at the railway stations for the sought-after face when the trains rolled in from the various points of the compass; or they held the pictures of their loved ones pressed in their hands, or held them out in pleading question: "Have you perhaps seen my son somewhere in the east? My husband was last in France. I am looking for him." Rarely — almost never — could anyone help with favorable news. One only shook one's head and went on one's way.
In this time an exciting event befell Mutter Siebert, one she had no longer counted on, although her heart still held high the ray of hope of a reunion with those two sons.
Today the letter carrier came down the street with hurried steps. She turned directly into the Sieberts' yard and was already waving a letter from the street.
"Mutter Siebert! Mutter Siebert! I have a letter for you! It comes from Canada!" With trembling hands Mutter Siebert took the letter, without saying a word. Yes, truly, it came from Canada and bore the handwriting she had last seen twenty-one years ago. The last letter from her had come more than sixteen years ago. She examined the letter front and back and read the address again and again. Truly, the letter was from her mother, and it was addressed to her. Only now did she find [the time] to thank the letter carrier for the letter.
Mutter Siebert went into the house and sat down there at the table. Carefully she opened the envelope and drew out the letter. As she did so, a photograph fell from her hand. She recognized — although she [was looking at] a picture unknown to her — that beside the woman [who sat] on a chair, a girl [stood]. She could not turn her eyes from the picture. Who might these people be, the woman and the girl? Then she read on the back of the photograph: "Dear Grandma, this is I, Ella Siebert, Heinz Siebert's wife, and our daughter Lilli." Beyond that, nothing stood on the back of the photo. Not a word about where Ella and Lilli lived, not a syllable about the whereabouts of Heinz.
Silently, as so often in the last seventeen years, the tears ran down Mutter Siebert's careworn and sunken face. In part they were tears of joy, for the letter would surely say something about Heinz and his family. On the other hand they were tears of sorrow and worry. If the letter came from abroad, then a reunion was scarcely to be thought of. A coming-home of Heinz and his family was out of the question.
Gingerly Mutter Siebert unfolded the letter. One could see from the writing that her mother had grown older. The letters, in the old Gothic script, had been guided by a trembling hand. [Time] had done its work on the people in Canada as well. In spirit she found her mother still at her old height — alert and sharp!
Dear Tina and children!
As a greeting from all of us here in Canada, I wish you there in Russia the peace of God. May he be near to you all with his love and mercy. We wish and believe that you in Orenburg are also all healthy and well.
Thank God that the horrible war came to an end two years ago. At last there is peace again. Here with us the war was not to be felt so directly as with you, but our young men too had to give their lives for the freedom of the peoples. We are so glad that no one from our family had to go to war. Your brothers were all needed on the farm, and therefore they are alive. Only your father has left us. He died quite suddenly in the year 1942 and was laid to rest in the cemetery in Steinbach. I miss your father very much. But otherwise I am provided with everything.
You will wonder at the enclosed picture. Rejoice, for the woman in the picture is your daughter-in-law, and the dear little girl is your granddaughter. Ella and Lilli have been living for some time in the village of Gaxel in Westphalia. Considering the circumstances, they are doing well in their refugee existence. They have a roof over their heads and have food to eat. They are safe. Heinz is not yet with them, but he is alive. The road to Gaxel was a long one, full of hardships and fears. But of that I will write you later. For this time it is enough. Let us thank and praise God, who led us all in these terrible times, that he has
not forgotten us: you there, us here in Canada, and your children in Germany. Greet our other children from us here. If it can be done, let them write too. I long for you so. With many greetings and good wishes I remain
your mother and grandmother, Agathe Klassen.
Mutter Siebert could scarcely grasp what she had read. Her son, for whom she had felt such great fear and for whom she had always prayed, was alive and was safe! What a grace of God! Softly she spoke to herself: "Let my grace be sufficient for you." The news of the existence of Heinz's family was already a wondrous touch for Mutter Siebert. Further details she was to learn in the course of the following years. Letters came from Canada and from the Soviet Union. Friends who had been together with him during the war made contact and reported about that time with astonishing exactness. In the end, Mutter Siebert was able to form a precise picture of the paths of Heinz and his family.
Part Four: Heinz Siebert
Where Does the Road Home Lead?
The wanderings of Heinz Siebert began immediately after the last words of Molotov had died away on June 22, 1941. The unit in which Heinz was then doing his service lay in an extensive forest in the region of Kremenchug in Ukraine. The news of the German Wehrmacht's attack on the Soviet Union had taken the Red Army, too, completely by surprise.
In haste the summer camp was struck, and within an hour the 102nd Infantry Division was ready to march. An immense multitude of human beings. The peacetime strength of a division was 26,000 soldiers and officers. Horses, weapons, and other war matériel moved along the roads in all directions, as though the whole region were already encircled by Germans. Only after a three-day march, which led the columns perpetually in circles, did they arrive at the railway station in Kremenchug. Hastily the loading now began, and after two strenuous days the train rolled westward toward an unknown fate. The division was placed under the command of the 2nd Army, under the supreme command of Marshal Timoshenko. Not one of the enlisted men had any front-line experience. One may therefore safely say that these young people thought, in wholly naive fashion, of a kind of pleasure outing as they neared the city of Mogilev. They would show the Germans what it meant to attack the Soviet Union. They would deal the fascists a fitting rebuff.
West of Mogilev came the division's first front-line engagement. What a sobering! What an annihilating disillusionment for the Red Army men and their officers! Within six weeks the 2nd Army was smashed, and the many thousands of men wandered leaderless through the forests of Belorussia, or they had been taken prisoner. The number of the fallen no one could determine in those days of headlong retreat.
The first weeks, months, and years of the war were for the Red Army a veritable cauldron of madness, for the word was always and only that one was to fall back, and the panic only magnified the catastrophe further. A human life was not worth a kopeck. It seemed as though there were an inexhaustible reservoir of human beings, whom one needed only to summon — and already they came. They ran against the modern war machinery of the Germans, until
they fell before the German lines "for Stalin and for the Soviet homeland." Heinz Siebert escaped, in the attempted breakout, into the black forest east of Mogilev. The whole forest was full of Red Army men — without weapons, without officers, and without food. After nine days the troops had withdrawn farther east, and the Red Army men swarmed out in all directions. For them, the war of 1941–42 seemed to be at an end. But that too was an illusion, for the Russian realm is vast, and the peoples of Russia are far stronger than the other peoples know or would like to admit.
The vastness of the Russian realm, its wealth, and the uncanny will to preserve its freedom brought the advancing German troops to a halt. The sacrifices on both sides were enormous.
Heinz Siebert and his Russian friend Mikhail Gorbunov decided to make their way to the south of Ukraine, to wait out the further course of the war with relatives in the Mennonite village of Konteniusfeld. The road to freedom led through Gomel, Rommy, Ramodan, Kiev, and Pyatikhatka to the Mennonite village of Alexandrowka. It was an arduous march in the rear of the German troops. Again and again they were arrested and guarded in pens like so many cattle. Provisions there were none. In those days one was glad to have water.
Fortunately, the Germans at the beginning of the war were quite generous and lenient in the guarding of prisoners of war. Where, after all, was one to put the millions of prisoners? They all had to be provided for, and where was the bread for them to come from? It was simply easier to leave them to themselves. The main thing was that they caused no unrest.
Heinz and Mikhail Gorbunov arrived in October 1941 — it was a warm, sunny day — on the last stage of their journey, in the Mennonite village of Alexandrowka. They reported to the mayor of the place, and he directed them to two families with whom they were to lodge, and from the next day on they were to hold themselves ready for work bringing in the harvest.
That was a welcome reassurance. After all the long wanderings and the constant going from door to door, calm and order were now to set in. One had a roof over one's head; one could converse. They spoke Ukrainian mixed with Russian, High German and Low German. Mikhail, unfortunately, had his difficulties with this language, for he spoke and understood only Russian.
The people in Alexandrowka had lived here since the end of the 19th
century on leased land. The hundred-year lease was annulled [sic] by the land reform of 1917, and since collectivization the land had been the property of the kolkhoz. With the entry of the German troops, the land was given back to the farmers.
In the village lived about thirty families. They had had their own school, which however was now closed, because for one thing there was no teacher, and because teaching and learning materials were simply lacking. When the people heard that Heinz Siebert was a teacher by profession, the mayor came to him and inquired whether Heinz might be willing to take over the teaching post in Alexandrowka. Joyfully Heinz agreed, and the very next morning he drove with the mayor into the city of Pyatikhatka. Here he was given a new suit from the depot at the railway station. The clothing — much too large, and a kind of blue uniform — was not the most suitable, but it was clean, warm, and, most important of all, it was free of lice. Lice! What a plague these six-legged beasts can be, only he can measure in full who has harbored them by the hundreds in his clothing and on his own body.
Heinz went home to his lodging and asked the landlady, Frau Maria Derksen, for an opportunity to bathe. The lice-ridden clothing was burned, together with all the lice! Washed clean (when had Heinz last bathed?), neatly combed, Heinz stood there again as a newborn man. Tomorrow, after a long time, he would once more stand before a class as a teacher. Already today he felt himself a human being who had a task to fulfill and whose life once more had meaning.
School life claimed Siebert completely and left him no time for the heavy problems of those days. Here in Alexandrowka there seemed to be deep peace. Only rarely did one see isolated troops of the German Wehrmacht passing through. Otherwise everything went its peaceful course.
In May 1942 a sudden change came into the life of the inhabitants of Alexandrowka: all the Germans of Alexandrowka were resettled to the Mennonite settlements of Steinfeld and Grünfeld.
Heinz came first to Grünfeld, where he taught until the end of the school year. Since Steinfeld had no teacher, he took over the direction of the school in Steinfeld with the beginning of the new school year.
But there was also another reason why Heinz wished to be transferred to Steinfeld. Very soon after his arrival in
Alexandrowka he had made the acquaintance there of Ella Penner. Out of their acquaintance grew a deep love. Now Heinz was no longer alone; he had found [someone] with whom he could share all his cares and troubles. In Ella he found understanding, and she gave his whole being both substance and support at once. Ella's influence on Siebert's doing and thinking made itself felt ever more strongly.
Together they attended the church service, sang in the congregation's choir, and when in 1943 the congregation in Steinfeld instituted baptismal instruction, both resolved to confess their faith in the forgiving grace of Jesus through the reception of believer's baptism. This decision changed the life of Ella and Heinz, and their attitude toward the various questions of life, drastically. Both were baptized at Pentecost 1943 in the Mennonite church in Grünfeld by Elder Johann Penner and received into the congregation. Both were firmly resolved to consecrate their lives to the Lord Jesus and to remain in his service as long as God could use them there.
Since the capitulation of the German troops at Stalingrad in February 1943, life in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union had grown restless. The apparent calm before the storm seemed to be coming to an end, and with that the German-occupied settlements in Ukraine were in great danger. Should the Germans have to give up Ukraine,
then the Germans who had now lived here for more than 150 years would also have to leave their homeland. Where to? Well — simply away, always only away, without destination and without hope.
But as yet calm and order still reigned. Then one day in September rumors went through the village that all the young men were to be conscripted into the Wehrmacht. The agitation was great. Ella and Heinz worried seriously about their future.
After long back and forth they came to the decision that they would marry before Heinz had to report to the Wehrmacht. Only young people can make decisions like this one. Only love, which is full of hope and trust, arrives at such a decision. Heinz and Ella wanted to marry, even if they would be together only a short time. On October 10, 1943 the wedding was to take place.
The engagement could last only a week, since the eastern front was being pushed ever farther westward at tremendous speed. At the wedding celebration, during the marriage ceremony itself, one could hear the thunder of the cannon quite distinctly. The wedding day, a sunny Sunday, was nevertheless for Ella and Heinz the high point of their lives.
The Great Retreat
On the very Monday following, Heinz was back in the classroom with his pupils. The wave of refugees had not yet reached Steinfeld. But it came closer with every day. Unstoppably it swept everything along with it. Everyone seemed intent only on saving his own life and that of his family. On October 21 came the order to the inhabitants of Steinfeld, Grünfeld, Gnadental, and Hochfeld to hold themselves ready for flight. In all haste the preparations were made, and they set themselves in motion toward an unknown destination. The desolation of this undertaking defies all description. Man and beast were put here to a test such as the world had never known. Cart upon cart, wagon upon wagon, the refugees strung along for seven weeks. People died; children were born! All on the wagon, on muddy roads, in snow and ice. Winter came. The trek, with a million people, passed the cities of Krivoi Rog, Pervomaisk, Uman, Vinnitsa, and halted at last in the town of Proskurov. Once more the trek was to spend the night and rest, if the circumstances of war would permit it.
Heinz and Ella Siebert, with their four-horse wagon,
had come through the first stage of the journey safely. Nothing out of the ordinary had happened. No wheel had broken, the axles had stayed whole, and the horses had always pulled the long wagon bravely, downhill and uphill. Even the Neufeld family, consisting of the mother and three children, had arrived safe and sound. Only once was Frau Neufeld missing, for a single day.
Since Heinz and Ella's wagon offered enough room, the mayor had given him the wagon and the horses on the condition that Heinz and Ella take along his sister-in-law and her children. Frau Neufeld's husband had been arrested in the 1930s and had never come home again.
Christmas 1943 the refugees from the Baratow settlement spent not far from the Polish border. Only at the end of January came the order to travel on. People were then busy fitting out their own conveyances for the spring, for the weather would make further travel by sledge impossible.
Ella and Heinz handed the wagon and two horses over to Frau Neufeld and kept two horses themselves, which they hitched to [a smaller wagon]. Fortunately the journey was only short. At the railway station the teams had to be left standing, and the order was given to travel on by rail.
The refugees climbed with their few things into the freight cars. Each found a little place for himself, and one settled in for the journey. Where to? No one had even the faintest idea. The only thing that was certain now was that the locomotive stood facing west. Heinz, Ella, Ella's parents, and Ella's sister had also boarded and awaited the things that were to come.
Without warning the locomotive jerked the many railcars into motion and set the train going. Silently, each in the train pursued his own thoughts. What was yet to become of all these people? What would they live on? Where were they to dwell? To these and many other questions there were, for the time being, no plausible answers. How glad Heinz and Ella were that they had each other for support. Desolate — yes, more desolate than now — their situation would have been had they not had one another.
After several days' travel the transport reached the city of Lodz (Litzmannstadt). Here the transport was divided up, and the journey
went on into small neighboring towns of the former Polish realm. Heinz, Ella, her parents, and her sister Anni came to a cloister in Freihaus (Zdunska Wola). Here in the cloister, in a great hall, the people were quartered: straw was spread out on the wooden floor, and the people were simply laid down in rows. In the cloister there was a communal kitchen, which dispensed to all the camp inmates the most meager meals imaginable. But for the time being one had arrived, healthy and whole, in the Warthegau, as the German-occupied part of Poland was called.
The advance of the Soviet troops had faltered somewhat, and so it was believed that now was the right time to begin the settlement of the Germans in the Warthegau. The people were taken out of the camp and placed into the houses of the expelled Poles. The injustice inflicted on the Poles in those days most decidedly deserves a monument of some kind. They were driven from farm and house with a small bundle of belongings that they could carry themselves.
Heinz and Ella were quartered in an empty school building. Here too Heinz began his teaching work. Once more he worked his way into a new and unfamiliar situation. But already at the end of May
1944 he received a call-up order for service in the German Wehrmacht. That, presumably, would mean the final end of the brief married happiness of Heinz and Ella.
On the day of the medical examination, the men from the refugee camps all assembled. The medical examination contented itself with questions about the eyes and the hearing, and whether one could use one's hands and feet properly. If these questions were answered to the doctors' satisfaction, then the question of body height decided into which branch of arms one was to be conscripted. The men were measured, and whoever that morning stood 168 cm tall remained in the hall; all shorter men were allowed to go home again. They would be called at a later date. Heinz was taller than the required measure of 168 cm and had to stay. An officer stepped before the men and explained to them in laconic fashion that they had this morning volunteered for the duration of the war for the Waffen SS. Not one of those present had ever been asked about volunteering for this branch of arms. All were dismayed at this manner of twisting the facts. But nothing could now be changed in the matter. It was merely announced that the men were to report again in three days, on June 4, in order then to be trained on one of the many troop training grounds for deployment at the front.
Quickly the three days passed. With anxious hearts, Heinz and Ella made their way to the railway station. Might this be their last walk together? In war, and especially as a soldier, everything was possible. The very first minutes of the first engagement could be the certain end for many. Silently, hand in hand, they walked toward an unknown fate.
Of the two, Heinz apparently had the easier path before him. Ella, however, was expecting her first child. How was all this to turn out? Who would look after her, and who would provide for her? Everything one could say is so banal and comfortless that it is best to be silent. And they were silent.
On their way to the station, Heinz and Ella were not alone. Many walked the same way that morning, sad and mute, each pursuing his own thoughts. Among the others were Ella's parents as well. They were accompanying their son Peter to the station. They were never to see him again.
When the station was reached, the train for the recruits already stood ready, and after a brief farewell the train set itself in motion. Most of the men never returned to their loved ones. The war and the terrible postwar years swallowed them
without leaving even the slightest trace. Soon the train with the dear ones had disappeared behind the houses of Freihaus. With heavy hearts, Ella and her parents, who lived in the little town of Schadeck, walked along the road toward their houses.
Ella now stood alone in the empty school, which lay apart from the other houses. Amid strangers and without help her life was now to take shape. Was there still any worth or meaning in fighting for life — for herself and for the new life she carried within her? She was surely far too weak for such hardship, and the situations coming toward her were surely far too overwhelming for her to be able to withstand them. And yet she did withstand those hard times, because God did not forsake her, because he provided for her and led her. Ella spent the summer with her sister in Freihaus, where their brother Jacob had found them a dwelling. Life in the school building would have been too dangerous and too solitary for Ella. From time to time she was able to visit her parents in Schadeck.
Then, on October 20, 1944, Lilli was born. Not in a hospital under the supervision of a doctor — no, Jacob fetched a midwife into the house, and she did what she could. Lilli was a healthy child from the beginning. Ella, however, fell ill and had to keep to her bed for a long time. Only fourteen days after Lilli's birth did Heinz manage to come home on two weeks' leave.
Great was the joy when Heinz stepped into the little house in Osmolin. Now they were together again. And not only he and Ella were united — no, Lilli, their joy, was there too. What happiness! Maria, Ella's sister, and her children were also with them; Jacob and Ella's parents and Anni, Ella's twin sister, were close by. Could one, in these war years, ask for more? But scarcely did one turn aside from this surface happiness than one saw the hideous face of the war grinning around the corner. It seemed as though the grimace wanted to say: "Look, you naive people — the leave will soon be over, and then the loneliness will be doubly heavy. Distress will then come over you in waves as high as houses, and then for many comes certain ruin, with its suffering and its indescribable misery. Rejoice while you still can! The weeping will last long, and the tears you will shed for a long time yet."
And the specter of war was right. Heinz had to pack his rucksack, and off it went into the Vistula bend, into the war of fixed positions. The trenches in those days stretched from Finland in the north down to the Black Sea in the south. They were densely manned
on either side with troops who fought each other with deadly doggedness. One asked oneself again and again how this would ever end.
Very soon after his return from leave, Heinz was moved farther toward the south of Europe, to Hungary. His letters still [reached] the post [sic], but more and more rarely did they reach their destination. Letters from Ella and Lilli scarcely arrived anymore. Everything was in such confusion that one hardly knew where the organization was breaking down. In the cauldron of Budapest everything now came to an end. With great losses the German troops fell back before the advancing Soviet troops. On February 3, 1945 the final catastrophe broke over the unit in which Heinz Siebert served. His brother-in-law Peter, not yet quite twenty-three years old, was shot dead. Heinz was taken prisoner [and] sent to Russia. With that began the time of uncertainty, of searching and waiting, which seemed as if it would never end.
The Flight Continues
Ella's and Lilli's life, like the life of millions of other people, ran comparatively calmly until January 18, 1945, [when] the great attack of the Soviet Army on the German lines began. The distance from Warsaw to Osmolin was small, and in a few days the front, with its all-destroying roller, would crush everything that came in its way.
For the Germans then living in the Warthegau there was only the choice: either one stayed where one was and risked one's life, or one abandoned everything and ran, and kept running, ahead of the attacking Soviet troops — without destination, without any support. How was this flight ever to end? Where were these millions of people finally to come to rest? God knew it. Human beings were not capable of imagining even approximately an end to this madness.
Quite by chance — if there is any such thing as "chance" at all — Ella decided to go with Lilli to visit her parents in Schadeck. Since this stretch had to be covered on foot, she dressed only very lightly for the winter. For Lilli, too, she had taken along only the barest necessities.
The cannonade of more than nine thousand barrels of the Soviet Army on January 18, which lasted forty-eight hours, surprised Ella and Lilli in Schadeck. All who could somehow walk or drive, or who at the last minute still had hope of a little place
on a train, equipped themselves in all haste for flight and set themselves in motion. All the streets of the town were choked with pedestrians, horse-drawn wagons, and motorcars. The darkness of the night only magnified the confusion further. Suddenly there was no more order, no more authority, and no more government. Everyone was suddenly thrown upon himself.
Evening came on that fateful day when Herr Riehn — a mill owner in Schadeck, for whom Ella's father had worked for a considerable time — came to Ella's parents and held a long, quiet conversation with the father. The two agreed that Ella's father would drive the second team with the Polish hired man. Herr Riehn himself would drive the motorcar in the daytime [sic]. At night the car could travel in the earliest hours — it was still pitch dark — indeed, [where] one always had to drive without lights.
Ella, with her infant just barely three months old, sat on the wagon her father drove. The clock struck two as the Riehn group set itself in motion, quietly and quite inconspicuously. The Polish population was to notice nothing of the Germans' flight. The strong horses drew the wagon at an easy pace through the pitch-dark streets of the town of Schadeck. Already in the distance one saw the sky lit up by fires and battles. But one could not see clearly where the west lay and where the east lay — and one strove toward the west.
The whole company consisted of Herr Riehn, his wife and their son, the Polish hired man, Ella's parents, and Anni, and Ella with Lilli. God must have laid his hand upon Ella and Lilli and their fate, for had she not been in Schadeck, she would have been carried off to Russia with Maria, her sister, and her children, and would have perished there, as they did.
The departure took place in great haste, for the front of the attacking Soviet Army was drawing rapidly nearer. The German eastern front was collapsing. One had to get across the Oder as soon as possible, for the few bridges would soon be destroyed by the Germans or by the Soviet troops. They drove three days and three nights without rest. Riehn and his people crossed the river, and on the following day the bridge behind them was blown up. Whoever was still east of the Oder now, stayed in the east.
Now the little column, traveling mostly on side roads, moved somewhat more slowly.
On the long journey there were, alongside the uglinesses of the war,
again and again gentle and kindly hands as well. Only one evening did the members of the Riehn traveling party have to remain under the open sky. On the other days of the journey they were taken into the houses of people who had not yet fled, or night quarters were made in abandoned dwellings, factories, and manor houses.
When Ella came into a house with her child, she usually found compassionate hearts. Then she was allowed to bathe her child and [give] it the pap of softened rusks and bread. Lilli had learned to keep almost healthy [on such nourishment] through the whole journey, and scarcely cried. Ella had even learned how to dry wet diapers — of which she possessed six in all [sic] — on her own body; she simply wrapped the wet diapers around her waist and waited patiently until they were dry.
After two months, thanks to the attentiveness and circumspection of Herr Riehn, the travelers had come unhindered and unharmed into the region of Hanover. Here it was by now clear that the Soviet occupation troops would not push farther into the west. The Riehn group decided to move into the Hanover area. They chose a village, Ehmen, in the district of Gifhorn, about twenty kilometers from the KdF city of Wolfsburg. Refugees from all the eastern territories of Europe had come into this region and were here awaiting the end of the war.
That end had by April already come quite near. No one had even the faintest idea what it would look like. The end came very quickly when, on May 9, the German troops laid down their arms on all fronts. The war was over.
Betrayed
When the great offensive of the Russians began on January 18, 1945, all the Russian Germans — designated by the German authorities as Black Sea Germans, SMD — were still in the Warthegau or in the eastern territories of Germany. Although plans for the evacuation of the German population had already been drawn up in the district commissariat in the autumn of 1944, these unfortunately never came to execution, for the Soviet tanks were there faster than the ethnic-German [authorities] had assumed. Everyone who still had time for it set out on the hopeless flight. If the flight of 1943 from Russia to Poland had brought with it superhuman exertions and privations, unspeakable terrors, dangers, and want, the flight from Poland through heavily bombed-out western Germany far exceeded the former.
The immense stream of refugees became entangled in the columns of the withdrawing German troops, which only magnified the misery. In the end the weary refugees were traveling alone once more — the troops had overtaken them — soon before the very muzzles of the Soviet artillery. Mercilessly the great tanks drove into the mass of people and crushed everything that came under their heavy tracks.
One part of the Russian Germans moved on westward in the midst of the frightful fury of war. The greater part was overtaken and stopped by the storming Russians. For these people, the long road of flight from Russia's wide fields to Germany had suddenly come to an end. But this end was not yet the end of their road of misery, for that was only now truly to begin.
Those who had reached Germany were herded together in camps and had here to await further developments. According to the agreements of Yalta, Soviet citizens were to be returned to the Soviet Union. Many of these people had given up all hope of any possibility of existence in the western occupation zones of Europe and reported to the reception camps that the Soviet Union had set up in the western occupation zones. Here the people were promised, in the friendliest of tones, that they would in no way be blamed for having left their homeland. They would be allowed to live free and undisturbed. They should come back. And they came. Most of the so-called "Black Sea Germans" had by now been on the roads of flight for years [sic]. They believed the promises because they had grown weary, because they only [wanted] to go home and live in peace. Nor had they done anything wrong. No, they had committed no crime. Their only guilt consisted in being Germans whose forefathers had come to Ukraine more than 150 years before to till the soil there — and that at the invitation of the Russian Tsarina Catherine II. No — why, indeed, should they not go home? Then hunger, that painful feeling, would be taken from them as well. Everything was to be well again. Indeed, they were told that their missing relatives were already at home, waiting for their speedy return. What glorious prospects! — Thousands had survived the flight into the western occupation zones. Now, however, it was to be homeward.
In Wolfsburg there was a large assembly camp for Soviet citizens who had fled or been carried off by the Germans. There the journey to the homeland was to begin.
All summer long the people came into this camp. Out of sheer boredom they laid out flower beds, in the middle of which a Soviet star, set out in white shards, gleamed. To make the thing properly patriotic, they sang, as a pastime, the Internationale, which begins with the following words:
Arise, ye damned of this earth, whom hunger still compels. . . .
A mockery without parallel: with these words they were singing, as it were, their own death-song to themselves. Indeed, the people were so far removed from reality that they no longer even knew that the Internationale had long since ceased to be the national anthem of the Soviets.
The assembly camps did stand under Soviet supervision, but entry and exit were free to everyone — [until] then, with the word "homeland," [the departure] came. At the railway station the doors of the freight cars fell [shut], and with a lock — and with freedom it was from now on at an end. Not one of the unfortunates ever reached his old home. No one came into freedom.
The trains dragged slowly through Ukraine and from there onward through vast Russia. Into the Siberian forests and into the Kirghiz desert these people were brought, where they endured again and again the same dangers, plus the heavy bodily labor in the mines and forests. Only a few brought any tidings of the fate of these poorest of the poor. No human being could render them help; only almighty God, the Creator of heaven and earth, saw and knew of the hard lot of these people. Did one [not] know that he is the friend of all the enslaved, one would truly have to despair at so much misery and want!
Vreden
Ella, her brothers and sisters, and her parents decided not to seek out the Soviet assembly camps, but to stay in the West. Now it was a matter of finding one's way out of the great chaos of that confusion and making a new beginning. Where was one to begin? Where could refugees be newly registered? Where was one to find the vanished members of the family? Questions upon questions, to which there was scarcely an answer. . . .
In the summer of 1946 the work of the Mennonite Central Committee in Europe began. The American Mennonites, in association with
the Mennonites of Canada, began to assist the refugees in Europe in their search for a new place of settlement. Quite inconspicuously they began to gather the Mennonites in the British occupation zone, in order to help them with foodstuffs and other means. In Gronau a Mennonite refugee camp was even founded. Here gathered the Mennonites who preferred not to return to Russia. For them there was still the hope of perhaps [reaching their relatives] in the USA and in Canada. And indeed, most had relatives in those countries. Perhaps. . . .
Ella and her parents learned of the resettlement of the refugees in the summer of 1946. This operation still had to be kept secret at that time, so as not to arouse the suspicion of the Soviet occupying power, for according to Yalta all its citizens were to be returned into its hands [sic].
One day the moment came. Ella and her parents, and Anni as well, traveled by rail into the West. The stated destination was the hamlet of Gaxel near the small town of Vreden in Westphalia. The crossing of the border between Holland and Germany went easily and without difficulties. The travelers were, after all, still traveling without baggage, for their bundles of possessions had in the past year [not] grown any larger [sic]. There was nothing to buy, and added to that was the complete lack of money. In those days barter flourished. But the refugees as a rule had nothing to barter and were dependent simply on what [someone] gave them out of pure compassion.
The train brought Ella and Lilli, with many others, to the railway station of Ahaus. Everyone out! Then one took up the few belongings again and walked with weary steps — where, after all, was there to hurry to? — to the market square. Since most of the arrivals in Ehmen had been housed on farms, here too shelter, work, and board for the refugees were to be [sought] in the countryside. For this reason the farmers from the surrounding farms had been summoned to the market square, to be present at the allotment of the by no means welcome billeting.
About forty refugees stood around in little circles; some sat on their travel bundles and awaited the things that were to
come. Just as many years ago slaves were led to market, so the little clusters were inspected and appraised by the farmers. If one had to take someone in, then one preferred to take sturdy arms that could pitch in with the work on the farm. Slowly the groups grew smaller. Left over were the older people and families with small children. Ella, who had only Lilli on her arm, still remained on the market square, even as evening gradually came on. Was the wife of a teacher, of all people, [not] to be taken along by anyone? Since she could not spend the night on the market square, the mayor ordered a farmer to take Ella and the child with him.
"Come along, then! We shall surely find a corner on the farm for you and your child."
Across meadows and fields they went to the farmer's. In barely half an hour they were at the large and well-appointed farmstead. Here, surely, one had to feel at home! But that was precisely the problem — one was not at home here; one was a stranger here, one was a refugee. Here in Westphalia one felt, so to speak, somehow as in vast Russia [sic] — strangers, nothing but strangers. One felt like an intruder who disturbed the people who had lived here for centuries — especially if one perhaps even expected to be given a piece of bread and a glass of water. These refugees should have stayed where they came from! But at least now, since the war was over, they ought to go home again. They only made life uncomfortable for the farmers.
These people, too, wanted to be understood. They also had had to make sacrifices for years. Their young men had fallen, or come home from the war captive or maimed. They too had grown weary and longed, like everyone else, for rest
and peace. And the refugees brought them only the opposite of what they longed for.
The next morning the farmer's wife came into the barn with the maids to milk the cows. Ella came to the farmer's wife and offered her help with the milking.
"What, you can milk? I thought you were a teacher's wife — such women don't milk for us." Ella replied: "Oh yes, I can milk. I grew up on a farm."
The farmer's wife handed her the pail and the milking stool and watched with an attentive face as Ella milked the cow. A woman like that she could certainly use. Refugees of this kind one ought to have more of.
Toward noon the mayor came to the farm to fetch Ella and Lilli. He had chosen another farm for them, where they would be gladly received. He said to the farmer's wife:
"I should like to take Ella Siebert and her child along. I have found another farm for them."
"How so?" said the farmer's wife. "I should like to keep the woman. I can use her very well."
"I am sorry," said the mayor. "It is too late now. The other farmer is already on his way."
And indeed, there came the farmer already, with a wheelbarrow such as one has on the farms. He laid the bundle on the barrow, and Ella and Lilli moved. How often they had moved in these last years, from one place to another! Scarcely had one settled in a little, scarcely had one come to know the people somewhat, and already one tied up the bundle again and moved on. Where to? Did that still matter at all? A stranger one was here, and a stranger there. In the last years they had so often been unwelcome guests. No — through no doing of their own they had gotten in other people's way, and thereby threatened the peace and the relative security of the others.
How surprised Ella was when she came to the new farm and was greeted and received so kindly by the mistress of the house and her daughters. What a difference from yesterday! Lilli, who mostly looked out into the world cheerful and contented, at once drew everyone's attention to herself. Their distress was now to come to an end.
The farmer's wife had understanding for Ella's task as a mother and gave her work in the house, so that Lilli would also be under supervision. The
child grew accustomed to the ordered circumstances and quickly grew into a healthy child.
After some time still more eastern refugees, from Silesia, came to Westphalia, and the earlier refugees had to be quartered more closely together to accommodate the new ones. Ella's parents and her sister Anni were living with a farmer quite near the farm where Ella and Lilli were housed. It would have been to the advantage of all concerned if Ella were housed on the farm where the parents lived. The farmer would have had one more good worker, Ella would have had a safe place for Lilli with the grandmother, and Ella would be together with her own people. The agreement between the two farmers and the move that followed were simple. Once more the belongings were gathered up, and one was on the way to the new quarters.
The Hubbeling farm was a well-appointed enterprise. For several centuries already the Hubbelings had lived on this farm. Everything here went according to old tradition and old customs. Everyone here knew his place. The four grown sons had come home from the war. Hein, the eldest son and heir of the farm, had lost both legs above the knees; but otherwise they were all sound and capable at their work. On the previous farm there had been only daughters; at the Hubbelings' there were only men. Anni, and Ella with Lilli, therefore occupied a special position.
The reception here was friendly and benevolent. The house was large, but the family, a few maids, Ella's parents, and Anni had long since taken up the rooms. What was to be done for Ella and Lilli?
A solution was found. Right next to the threshing floor there was a harness room, in which the horses' tack had been kept until then. This room, scarcely larger than three meters by three meters, was cleared out and fitted up as a room. A small stove was put in, a bench built of bricks and a plank, and a small table. That was the entire furniture of Ella's and Lilli's room. It was very poor, but it was now their home. Here they were at last alone for once. Here, at the end of the day, one could rest and talk with one another. Here they would live for the time being and wait to see what fate might have in store for them.
Heinz Is in Russia
The war had now been over for almost a year and a half, but for the refugees there was still no peace, and their problems were still unsolved. As for the question of whether Heinz was alive — and if so, where might he be now, and when would he return to her and Lilli? These questions never left her.
She searched everywhere, but without success. Sluggishly the autumn days of October 1946 moved over the land. The harvest was in, and the winter grain was in the ground. Ella helped with the work everywhere — in the house, in the barn, and in the field. Wages one received none in those days for the work, but shelter and food were worth much then. Ella's parents, Anni, and Ella were [once more part] of the large Hubbeling family. It was the end of October 1946. One evening the parents were just preparing to retire for the night when, at that late hour, someone knocked violently at the window.
"Ella, Ella, open up! I am bringing you a Red Cross card from Heinz! Your Heinz is alive!"
Ella recognized the voice of her cousin at once and let her in. Soaked through by the rain and trembling with cold, Eva stepped into the room.
Silently Ella read the card with its twenty-five words: "Dear Ella, dear Lilli! At last I can tell you that I am alive and healthy. I am in Soviet captivity. Kisses to you both, your Heinz."
Ella stared at the yellowish card with the red cross and the
red crescent, the symbol of the Soviet Red Cross.
"But Eva, where did you get the card? And how do you come to be here at such a late hour?"
"Well, it was like this. We had our weekend meeting in Gronau. At the end of the gathering the mail that had not yet been collected was read out. In doing so they came to your name as well. They asked whether anyone knew Ella Siebert. I shouted as loud as I could that I was your cousin and that you and Lilli live in Gaxel. I took the card and ran to the station — and I found you, and I rejoice with you and your child."
"Come, first drink a cup of hot tea, and then we will talk further."
Ella's father and mother came out of their room to where the two women were.
"Father, Heinz is alive! Here, see for yourself!" said Ella. For a long time the father looked at the card.
"But children, do you not see where Heinz is? He is in Russia, and the way from there to here is so difficult and long. Do not rejoice too much. Let us rather give thanks that Heinz is alive, and let us ask God that he — if it should be his will — lead him back to us again."
For a long time still, the two women could be heard talking. From sheer excitement they could hardly settle down. Only early in the morning did they finally fall asleep. It was a true miracle that Heinz's card reached Ella in Gaxel.
Long had Heinz searched, but his wife and daughter he did not find. Even from the residents' registration office in Berlin he was informed that there were twenty-six families by the name of Siebert, but Ella Siebert was not among them. He no [longer] knew to whom he should turn next. Finally the address of Prof. Dr. Benjamin Unruh came to his mind. It was the same Unruh who in 1921 had been elected to the Mennonite Study Commission and had worked so vigorously for the emigration of the Mennonites to Canada. Dr. Unruh remained in Germany, and now he devoted himself once more to his family and relatives. To be of help to them, he set up a tracing card-index. Those who were missing someone reported to him, and [he] then tried to bring the searchers together. For Heinz it seemed the last possibility of finding his wife and child.
Quite haphazardly, Heinz wrote to Dr. Unruh's address. He had no knowledge of the tracing card-index, and even the address had remained
very imperfectly fixed in his memory. In his effort to find Ella and Lilli, in case they had remained in the West, Heinz left no possibility untried. He wrote to Dr. Benjamin Unruh in Karlsruhe. And indeed, Dr. Unruh had come through the war healthy and whole and was even living in the same house as before.
At a mail distribution in the camp in mid-1946 there was also a card from Dr. Unruh for Heinz Siebert. Brief and plain, it brought Heinz the joyful news: "Dear Herr Siebert, your wife and daughter are living at Ehmen 18, near Fallersleben, district of Gifhorn. God keep you! Your B. Unruh."
They are alive! What a joy and grace of God! Heinz folded his hands and thanked God for his help. Yes, all three of them were alive — but so far separated from one another. How many difficulties still lay between them! How many dangers were yet to be endured before they could ever be together again?!
Amid his thoughts about the future, the words of their wedding text came to Heinz's mind: "To them that love God, all things must work together for good." Then this separation across thousands of kilometers, then this perilous time too, must serve for the best — for both of them, Ella and he, loved God, who had led them so graciously until now. And once again Heinz's eyes fell on Dr. Unruh's handwriting: "God keep you!" On that everything would now depend: to remain in the protection of God. The hope of a reunion with Ella and Lilli, and the constant longing for them, were from now on to be his source of strength for the years to come.
With the very next mail dispatch, the card went off to Ella. Unfortunately the card no longer reached Ella in Ehmen; rather, it came by way of Gronau, at night, to Ella and Lilli in Gaxel. The finding of one another by Ella, Lilli, and Heinz is in their eyes an abiding great miracle, for just as Heinz did, Ella too wrote to Dr. Unruh. She also had only fragments of his address in her memory, but her letter reached him, and her letter crossed with the letter from Heinz. They now knew of each other that they were alive. When, how, and where would they meet again? That lay entirely in God's hand, and in him they trusted.
It was in the autumn of 1947 that once again a transport traveled home from Poltava. Among the returnees was also a good friend of Heinz, who offered to take a letter along to Ella. In this letter Heinz spoke from his heart much of what weighed on him, and from it Ella could recognize how things stood with Heinz's thinking and with his spirit.
Heinz sat long at his table in the primitive office and wrote his long letter, which spoke of longing for freedom and expressed his homesickness for wife and child. The pain of the years-long separation grew from day to day and threatened at some point to tear everything apart and dash it to the ground. No one could be certain of his own patience and endurance. The only hope was the early release that was held out to the prisoners again and again. On this hope the prisoners of war lived through the sad postwar years. To this hope the prisoners' many conversations bore witness, and their letters to their loved ones at home as well.
Heinz's letter spoke on the one hand of the great hope of an early reunion, and on the other hand it was a kind of farewell letter, in case a homecoming should never come to pass. Even if the prisoners were promised release again and again, that in no way meant that it would also become reality.
The author of this book in the camp office in Kharkov, which had been set up in the elevator shaft of the threshing-machine factory "Serp i Molot."
In order to tell Ella all that he would gladly have told her after his release, Heinz wrote this letter, which he sent along with an ailing comrade:
November 13, 1947
Dear Ella and dear Lilli!
My most heartfelt greetings I send to you all by this means. I wish this letter to find you in the best of health, as it leaves me here. That I am truly healthy, dear Ella, the gentleman who brings you this letter will be able to confirm. Nor am I doing badly — I mean in material respects — for my knowledge of Russian, which I was able to acquire during my student days in Königsberg, has rendered me great services. How glad I always am when I succeed in helping someone. And precisely through this I have had it easier; precisely through this I have had many friends who helped me, who felt with me and lived with me. I have made it my principle for the future always to step in and help wherever it is necessary and simply possible. Do you not find that exaggerated, dear Ella? You must not think that you will be neglected because of it. No — on the contrary, I assume that you will stand faithfully at my side in this matter. How much I could tell you about it! How I rejoice when I think that you will share my views!
Before I write further, I want to wish you and Lilli from my heart the blessing and support of the Lord. May he be with you as he was, is, and will be with me. Nothing is so true as: "He who trusts in the Lord has not built upon sand." How often has this proved true in the last four years!? God wants to give us everything — only it must be asked for. His grace, dear Ella, is so great. Through it we can always be helped. And I am of the conviction that both of us have been helped only through grace, not through our merits. Read on this Romans 11:6. I have often been edified by these words. However comfortless everything may often appear, be of good cheer — all will be well again. Therefore let everything go for us as it is appointed for us. In the end we recognize the good once more. My prayer through the whole hard time was always only this: May God bring us together once more; once more may he grant us this petition — and then I have no more petitions, then I want only to thank him. There-
after may he determine and lead us as he wills. Gladly he hears our petitions, even if not always at once; but it is accomplished — one need only trust him. And through faith in him I have until now been preserved and strengthened. How beautiful it will one day be when we both, dear Ella, will one day be able to give thanks for everything. Are you not of the same opinion? As far as I still know you, I do not doubt it. As for Lilli in this regard, I wish only that she be raised in this spirit.
Now you will surely be interested in how, where, and when I came into captivity. I told you all this once before in a letter, which however never reached you. After I came into action at the beginning of December 1944 north of Warsaw, the pressure lasted until shortly before Christmas, and I was then transferred to Hungary, to salvage there a cause already completely lost. The whole affair was hopeless from the start, but I supposedly had to be there. For four weeks we lay at Lake Balaton, until at the beginning of February 1945 we had to begin our retreat. On February 3, of the 183 men of our company, 17 men remained. Toward ten in the morning Peter was then wounded twice in the lower leg. We laid him on a sledge and so moved on. Gerhard Wiebe was with us too. In the engagement that followed, Peter was wounded once more. A shot struck him in the chest. I alone, kept whole as if by a miracle, went into captivity. Peter and Gerhard both went blessed into eternity to the Lord, for shortly before my capture they said to me: "Heinz, come, pray with us. You can do it best!" They died in God's will. For them a prayer was devoutly spoken, and therefore rightly so. Ella, of Gerhard I actually did not want to write, but I have considered it well. Tell his sister Liese gently. As already said, at 5:30 in the afternoon I went into Soviet captivity, which I have now, I hope, soon happily behind me. The captivity is moving with rapid steps toward its end. I reckon strongly on being home by March–April of the coming year. How beautiful that will be! Is that not a proof of the great grace of God?! It — grace — is
great, dear Ella, very great! Until then I shall be preserved. And you — keep well and good!
Now that winter has come into the land again, I am dressed nice and warm, need not freeze nor go hungry. Do not worry on this account. Only the longing for you, for Lilli, and for everything freedom offers is so great, and makes this time enormously hard. Everything has an end sometime, and so too the captivity. And one day I shall be with you again. But then for good! We shall then belong to each other, only to ourselves — if only because we shall then do everything together. Arm in arm we shall go through life, however hard it may yet be. We never had it easy, and nevertheless we mastered life. I can work, of that I am convinced, for my profession is dearer to me today than ever before. Just imagine — I stand once more in the midst of a merry crowd of children. They are, after all, so entirely different from grown people: sincere and honest, grateful and open. They will fill my work completely. It may be that after this long interruption I must learn something anew, but that is not the worst. Frankly said, I would even do it gladly, for only now, dear Ella, have I recognized how much I still want to know and ought to know. To fill these gaps I must work hard. But that will give me joy. I look forward to it, for I know that you, dear Ella, understand me — and will understand even if I have changed in some respects. After this long separation we shall quickly have found our way to each other again, since love is the strongest bridge from person to person. Will you grant me this point, Ella?
Through all of this we learned to be modest, and precisely this circumstance will make life much easier for us. What earlier was far from good enough, we find wonderful today. As you see, even this hard time can be profitable. Everything leads to the good. Even if we have lost everything, it is all only half as bad. Despite everything: our Savior has ordered all things well. Let us be thankful to him for it, Ella.
How often I have asked myself what might have become of you. I searched for you everywhere, until then
one day I received the joyful message that you are alive and healthy. I never asked after the "how"; decisive for me was only that you are alive at all. Therefore no such question today either. We shall make up for what was missed later, once I am there. Agreed? And besides, we are still young; life lies before us. There is therefore no reason to lose courage. If only for Lilli's sake, we owe it to her to live and to preserve ourselves as best we can.
How might Lilli be? Does she correspond to my wishes and imaginings? You know, Ella, I try so often to picture Lilli to myself — it never succeeds, for I hardly know what a three-year-old girl looks like. Frankly confessed, Ella, I set very great hopes on our Lilli. My greatest care will be to spare Lilli what was laid upon us. I believe that we two have also carried Lilli's share of the hardship. She shall spend her youth cheerful and carefree, quite differently from us. Her upbringing, dear Ella, lies especially close to my heart. Above all she shall be decent and modest, to a certain degree proud and yet humble. She shall savor to the full what is beautiful in life. On the other hand she must also know that everything is won through hard work, that work makes one happy and content. In faith I would like to raise Lilli to be as we are today.
But now something else. I rejoice extraordinarily over the correspondence. That the correspondence was forwarded from there is the less pleasing part. You should not have written me that. Did you ask Jacob for advice? In a card I asked him to help you with good counsel. I would hereby like to have asked him once more. To Hans and Tina I will write as soon as I am free again. You must
not be cross if I grumble a little. But it is not so tragic. Ella, did you take my identity papers along? If they have been lost, you need not trouble yourself. I will see to them once I am with you again. In your letters write me much about yourself, about Lilli, the parents, and about your brothers and sisters. Everything else is for the present unimportant.
And now, dear Ella, I come to the close. So much — we will tell each other by word of mouth. I wish only that God hear our petitions, and that he will also do in the future. Ella, the man who brings this letter was a good comrade to me. Receive him as such. He can tell you much in detail about me.
Should other comrades write to you, thank them — say that I am coming, and then I will settle everything in person. And now, my dear Ella and little Lilli, many kisses to you both until a speedy reunion, from your Heinz Siebert.
The Great Reunion
Heinz Siebert had now been living in captivity for over four years. Time sometimes passed quickly, frighteningly quickly. The prisoners were so often so anxious that they could not keep pace with the times. Things often took on other forms and shapes so surprisingly fast that one could scarcely form a coherent picture. But then the years dragged by again so haltingly slow, as though this evil time would last from everlasting to everlasting.
The trains with released prisoners of war from the Soviet Union only properly got underway in 1947. At first it was only sick and undernourished men. Of these there were so many in the many camps of the Soviet Union. Swollen, with a yellowish-gray color in their faces, the men made their way back to their homeland. What a difference between the march out to the front and the return from the east!
Back then, cleanly dressed, in well-fitting uniform, the military cap set jauntily on the head, most of the men had been a splendid sight. Now, after four and five years of captivity, they came back. Weary and sick was their step, their limbs in many cases swollen from hunger. Their gaze was dull and their spirit sad. Often the returnees walked with a cane, or they leaned on the arm of a comrade who likewise could no longer walk alone.
Their clothing was ragged. On the sleeves one saw the white patch bearing the initials "W.P." — prisoner of war. On their heads most wore a typical Russian cap with ear-flaps. In winter it was very fitting, but in summer so thick and too warm. Thus the shabby remnants of the beaten German Wehrmacht came home — if a home still existed at all. Many of these men never found their home again. It might lie buried under the rubble, somewhere in the destroyed regions. The home might also simply have vanished. It had ceased to exist. In these cases the men stood at the railway station and waited in vain for someone to come and fetch them. In the end they landed, after all, in one of the many reception camps. It usually took a long time before these outcasts of fate could rouse themselves to a new beginning.
On August 26, 1949, Siebert was brought the news that he too was permitted to travel home. In the camp, twenty-eight prisoners were released. Among them were four Austrians, who were not released on that day. For those four, this day must have been the most desolate of all. Of the original eighteen thousand prisoners in Kharkov, these four alone remained. They were locked into the punishment cell — a hole one meter wide, one meter high, and four meters long. Heinz Siebert and twenty-three other Germans were allowed to travel home that day. It was Heinz's 28th birthday.
What a surprise it would be when, in a few days, after almost five years, he would stand before Ella and Lilli! What a joy! They had not seen each other for so long. In the time of separation they had grown older and more mature; their convictions had become firmer and their natures had changed. What had not changed was their love for one another. Here their love had remained genuine and pure, as it had been six years before on their wedding day. That they both knew, too, from the cards they had written to each other as regularly as possible.
Heinz Siebert was now, at any rate, on the way home. What was his home to be? Where would it be? What kind of people would Ella and Lilli be to him now? All questions that no one could answer for him. The train with the homeward-bound prisoners grew longer and longer. In the autumn of 1949 there were still many prisoners in Soviet camps.
In Brest-Litovsk the transport was transferred from broad gauge to European standard gauge. Now nearly all obstacles
were overcome. The wheels of the long train, which carried about sixteen hundred prisoners, rolled through Poland to Frankfurt an der Oder and from there through the eastern zone to Heiligenstadt. Farther the train did not go. The prisoners, still under guard, received their discharge papers, and on the following day they marched toward the barrier at the border near Friedland. A few more steps and one was in freedom. The captivity, with its fear and uncertainty, with the constant worry about health, about daily bread, and about the loved ones at home, now came to an end as one walked through the gate of the transit camp Friedland.
The way to Gaxel near Vreden led through Hamm, Dortmund, Münster, and Ahaus. From Ahaus to Vreden one went by bus. Vreden was the final stop. Already from afar Heinz recognized the name, which was known to him, to be sure, only from the cards. The little town lay very close to the German-Dutch border. And in this place lived Ella and Lilli, for Gaxel lay right on the edge of Vreden. When the bus stopped in Vreden, Heinz saw a black carriage by the roadside. By the horses stood two men, and a little apart from them a woman and a small blond girl. Why, that was Ella — and the child beside her was Lilli! Truly, it was they, these two human beings who through all the long years had spurred him on to survive, who had interceded for him with God. The longing for them had driven Heinz to prayer, and God had heard those prayers. Only a few steps still separated them. With faces streaming with tears they fell into each other's arms, scarcely grasping that the longed-for reunion was now reality. The two unfamiliar men were the sons of farmer Hubbeling, Clemenz and Jupp. The farmer had insisted on fetching Heinz from the station, as though he were a son of the family. Ella and Lilli did, after all, belong entirely to the family. Lost to the world, the three sat, arms tightly around one another, in the carriage, and drove toward the Hubbeling farmstead. The whole family was in front of the house, as though one of their own had come home after long years. For Heinz, Ella, and Lilli the long waiting now had an end. Thanks to God's grace they were reunited and could make a new beginning.
But where, and how, was the new beginning to be begun? Without means, without acquaintances, without a place to stay — only a room next to the kitchen in the house as a dwelling. That was all, and it did not belong to them. The people of the village had taken Ella and Lilli firmly to their hearts, and Heinz now belonged as well. The village had, alongside the Catholic school, a Protestant school too, and the teaching post at the Protestant school had been reserved for Heinz
for whenever he should come home. He could now enter the school service at any time. They truly meant well, these otherwise so stubborn Westphalians. But the cares of Heinz and Ella ranged much wider than merely housing and work. Their life in the future looked far more complicated than questions of work and bread alone.
Toward an Unknown Fate
Ella and Lilli had spent all these years on the Hubbelings' farm. They almost belonged to the family. But nevertheless they now wanted — now that Heinz had come to them — to emigrate as soon as possible and begin anew somewhere. Their relatives in Canada would gladly have invited them, but that would only have delayed the emigration, for no applications for immigration to Canada had been made on behalf of Heinz, Ella, and Lilli. Heinz was at that time still in captivity, and his homecoming was for many people a very doubtful matter. On this point people had been skeptical. There remained, then, only the quick and much cheaper way: to emigrate to Canada with the help of the IRO (International Refugee Organization) as sugar-beet workers.
The contract was signed with the help of Frieda Dyck, who at that time worked in refugee welfare on behalf of the Mennonite Central Committee, and the processing by the Canadian consulate could begin. The permission was soon at hand: Heinz, Ella, and Lilli
were to emigrate to a certain farmer Brandt in the region of Giroux near Steinbach in Manitoba. To remain one year on the farm — that was the agreement.
Where was Giroux? Who was the farmer John Brandt? Questions of this kind were secondary, and in those days one did not speak of them. The main thing was that one was in freedom, that one need not fear being molested by anyone, that one could live in peace and quiet with one's neighbor. That was well worth a year as a sugar-beet worker in Canada.
The preparations for the journey were simple. Once the desired approval had been received from the Canadian authorities, one needed only to pack the few belongings. The entire property of the family found room enough in one suitcase. One was now ready to travel.
At the end of October 1949 it was off to the great refugee camp of Gronau near Cuxhaven. In this camp thousands of refugees from every land under the sun lived at that time, penned together in the closest quarters. The administration of this camp lay for the most part in the hands of the refugees themselves, who had indeed come to the West by compulsion through the war, but who for various reasons were no longer willing to return to their home countries.
The preparations for the voyage across the ocean to Canada advanced only slowly. But finally the moment came. On November 18, 1949 they went on board the American ship "SS Samaria" together with fifteen hundred other homeless people. They were going toward an unknown fate, into a country they did not know, whose inhabitants were strangers to them, and the language these people spoke sounded melodious enough, but was for most a great riddle. The only comfort for these people lay in the hope of being free in the new land. More they did not need for the present.
The passage on the North Sea went without incident, and in barely two days the ship docked in the port of Le Havre. Although at this time of year the sea is usually stormy, this year it was comparatively calm, and the voyage would have been comfortable had not seasickness come over one so wretchedly. Exactly ten days, from the 21st to the 30th of November, the crossing had lasted. Without particular strain the ship ran into Halifax, and the emigrants went ashore.
Halifax! So this is the promised land America, to which Canada too was supposed to belong. During the whole voyage there had been music from many loudspeakers. It almost seemed to the travelers as though there were only two melodies in this America: the national anthem of the United States and the song "America, America!" Of Canada the travelers heard scarcely anything — until Heinrich Warkentin let them file past a table and welcomed each one in the name of the Mennonite immigration board in Canada. So Heinz, Ella, and Lilli came onto the landing pier and saw for the first time a piece of Canada.
And this Canada looked so unfriendly. It was cold. A thick blanket of snow covered everything. The people hurried and bustled here as everywhere in the world. There was talking and negotiating, of which the three understood nothing. They went ashore and came also to Warkentin's table. He was friendly, gave each one his hand, and wished the immigrants all the best in their new Canada.
So that no one should lack for anything, each received a gift of forty dollars and the train ticket from Halifax to the final destination. For the Sieberts the destination was Winnipeg. After a short stay in the immigration hall, the travelers — in whose passports the stamp "Landed Immigrant" now stood — were brought to the railway station, and the journey, through more than half of Canada, could begin. On the evening of December 3 the train pulled at last into the station of Winnipeg. Here the Siebert family was to be at home.
In Winnipeg the Sieberts had many relatives and acquaintances. Steinbach was only an hour's drive away. Ella's parents and her brothers and sisters had been in Winnipeg since 1948, and a number of other people whom one knew were at home in Winnipeg. Now everything was to be different, better.
It had grown dark when the train stopped in Winnipeg. Great snowflakes were falling to the earth. "Winnipeg!" called the conductor, and all who wanted Winnipeg pushed toward the exit. It was not long before Ella and Lilli had discovered Grandpa and Grandma Penner in the crowd. What a joy, to be among one's own and to feel safe!
Ella's parents were both at the station. They had remained healthy and strong and in the one year since their emigration to Canada had settled well into the new country. To be sure, they lived modestly in a small house, but they had everything one absolutely needed in those days.
Oma Klassen, Heinz's grandmother, had also come to the station.
She looked at him and said again and again: "That I should live to see this — to see Tina's son — I would never have believed. Good that you are here. For that I am truly glad and thankful!"
Ella and Heinz now stood before a great new beginning in their lives: without money, without the language, without a recognized profession. And yet they were confident and of good courage. God had led them this far; he would know their way in the future as well.
First they reported to John Brandt in Giroux. There, after all, they were to spend their first year in Canada. Herr Brandt received them kindly and said:
"There is your dwelling. My wife has provided for the winter. No one here will go hungry through the day [sic]. We will look after you through the year. Work I have none for you."
"First of all we want to thank you, Herr Brandt, for your kindness. It is so important for us that you take us in. Otherwise we would not have come from Germany to Canada so soon. That you have no work for us, we understand, for your sugar-beet fields now lie under deep snow. If it is agreeable to you, we will then travel back to Winnipeg. Should you need us in the course of the year, telephone us in Winnipeg. We would gladly meet our obligations as they were laid down in the contract. We thank you once more for your help," Heinz explained to the friendly farmer Brandt.
"We shall hardly telephone you. With the sponsorship we only wished to be of help to you, and we wish you once more God's blessing on your new beginning in Canada. We wish that you may be able to contribute your part to the relief of the distress in Europe," said Brandt in farewell.
Heinz, Ella, and Lilli traveled back to Winnipeg. Brandt never telephoned. When the year was at an end, Heinz reported once more to John Brandt, and both parties were satisfied with the fulfillment of the terms of the contract. Heinz can hear him say to this day: "Well, we are quits now."
Part Five: Mutter Siebert's Path of Suffering
The First Mail from Mother
In all the confusion of the postwar years, Mutter Siebert was still waiting for news of her eldest sons. She searched for her children everywhere — at the Red Cross, with the units in which they had served. Sometimes a noncommittal answer came; sometimes there was only silence. The war had taken them, and only a few did it give back. She waited and prayed and hoped still that at last a sign of life would appear. Sometimes it seemed to her as if she wanted to cry out: "Fate, stand still!"
Under normal circumstances Heinz should long since have written, but he was afraid. In those days it was a great danger — apt to bring difficulties upon the relatives of a "collaborator" with the enemy — to carry on correspondence with Russia. Much as he would have liked to know something from home, the danger seemed too great. Only at the end of 1953 did Heinz write the first letter to his mother, whom he addressed as "Aunt" and signed as her "nephew."
To this letter Mutter Siebert replied with a card greeting in the Russian language. Her joy was overwhelming, for she recognized her son at once as the writer of the letter. On November 29, 1953 her first letter followed:
Dear nephew and dear niece — ah, dear children!
Yesterday, to our joy and surprise, we received your dear letter. . . . How beautiful that we can remember one another in love, especially in the quiet chamber before our heavenly Father. For this fellowship I am always thankful, even though we are otherwise separated far from one another. I wish you for your whole life the peace and blessing of God. . . . Hans and Tina are married. Both have two children. For Peter we now wait longingly. He means to come home now for good. I visited him two years ago, and Hans was with him in the autumn. To Perm it is a long way. . . .
Write again soon. . .
Farewell! God be with you!
Katharina Pries
Not only Mutter Siebert had recognized her son at once as the writer
of the letter. The people of the NKVD soon caught on as well. With that, there was no longer any sense in continuing to play hide-and-seek in the matter.
It was in the year 1955, fourteen years after his last letter from the front sector of Minsk, that the first letter from the son — instead of from the nephew — "Heinz Siebert," arrived addressed directly to Mutter Siebert. What a joy that was! The long-guarded secret was now lifted. One could talk about everything, for in the years since the war's end much had happened. Direct communication between Heinz's family and his mother and his brothers and sister could now be taken up.
Mutter Siebert wrote her letters full of joy:
"My boy, I am so thankful and glad that you are alive and that you have a dear family. Even more thankful am I that you know your Savior." And then Mutter Siebert spoke about the sentence she had once uttered in a conversation about the father's death: "I am so thankful that you did not come home."
Sharply these words cut into Heinz's heart. Mutter Siebert wished for nothing more ardently than to have her children with her — and then came such a sentence, which seemed to express the stark opposite. No — that was the readiness for the greatest sacrifice of a mother who knew that her son's homecoming would bring only unspeakable suffering upon her child, and pain and grief upon the family. In Canada, far, far away from home — there was safety and peace for her son and his family.
Mutter Siebert even had the strength to write to her loved ones in Winnipeg, as a motto: "My boy, . . . let my grace be sufficient for you." And in that she was right, for God had drawn them all out of the turmoil of the war and brought them into a calm and peaceful land in which people were good to them.
For Mutter Siebert, as for many, many other mothers, the loss of her children was a great sacrifice — a sacrifice that only loving mothers were capable of bringing.
Heinz received mail regularly. The letters were written in his mother's neat hand, and at the end stood the
closing: "Your mother who loves you, Katharina Pries."
That was somewhat disconcerting, but it was, after all, the mother's good right to marry again after all the years of being alone.
Mutter Siebert had already once before had a marriage proposal from Peter Pries. It was in the time shortly before the war. Already then there was a great surplus of women, because the men were being sent into banishment or locked in prisons. Many a family would have been glad if the mother had had a husband again and the children a father again. The children of Mutter Siebert had, on this point, a different opinion. Uncle Peters, whose wife had died some time before, did not suit the boys as a stepfather and husband for their mother. No — they would rather have had someone else, someone more congenial to the boys.
When the mother told her children of Herr Peters's proposal, they rejected it. No — with Peter they wanted nothing to do from the outset [sic]. Hans even delivered a lengthy speech and said at the end:
"Mother, if you marry this Uncle Peters, then please give me the red calf, and with it I shall go away."
The mother looked at her children with wide eyes and submitted to their wishes. She remained, for the time being, alone.
Later the children often spoke of this demand on their mother. Had they had any right at all to deny their mother that little bit of happiness? Was the sacrifice they demanded of their mother not far too great? Who ever considered that Mutter Siebert might still have a wish for an ordered life of her own?
It may have been for these reasons that this time none of the children present had any objection to the marriage with Peter Pries. Perhaps they had also come to see that the true ground of the marriage seemed to be the economic side. The marriage bond was to make life easier for both — so they had thought. The opposite came to pass. Life became for Mutter Siebert a long, dark valley.
The Separation
Mutter Siebert hoped in her marriage with Peter Pries at least to find a peaceful evening of life. Then suddenly the letters followed signed Katharina 'Siebert' instead of 'Pries.' An explanation of this change the letters did not provide. The content of her letters grew ever sadder and heavier.
Heinz and Ella asked repeatedly after the cause of this change, but remained without an answer from Mutter Siebert. Only when Heinz asked his sister for clarification did the most difficult letter in
Mutter Siebert's life come, dated July 6, 1956:
Dear children and grandchildren!
Today I take up the pen with a heavy heart. I should have done it long ago, but I always lacked the courage and the strength. I am so glad that you keep asking me what has become of me and Peter Pries. With the marriage it was so, that I did not act according to the will of God, but wished to go my own way. This way was the wrong one, and I had to turn back, to return to the narrow and right way.
During the time I spent in the house of Peter Pries, I was compelled to do the hardest work on the farm. I bartered away everything, even my food. The children screamed at me and abused me and Tina as "spongers" and "do-nothings." Every day they picked out something else. In the beginning I had no protection even from my husband. Tina and I stood alone. Tina was no longer allowed to go to school. She was to earn her own bread.
Into this time falls also Tina's wedding with the son of Peter Pries. I was so much against this wedding, but I could not change it. They married. Willi is nice and kind to Tina and stands by her.
When they had exhausted every means of malice, they laid hands on my letters as well and accused me and my children of espionage. Thank God that they went no further with the threats. When I sometimes came home late in the evening and gave her something to eat, my husband and his children protested so violently that none of our children came to me anymore.
The quarrels between father and children were cruel to hear, and the brawls were an abomination to me. We had to call in the people from the village council for help. How far they had come! Strangers had to bring the family to calm and order. And I had hoped, before all this, for great happiness. Dear boy, it became truly terrible in the autumn of last year. The days were cold and it rained often. While digging pota-
toes I injured my thumb, and the whole hand was swollen. I had such great pain in my whole arm. To no one could I lament my suffering. My husband listened to the mockeries of his children and then said in his hot temper: "If you smash your thumb flat with the hammer, then perhaps you'll be healthy — that I tell you."
I became truly afraid of him. The day after, Hans came to me. When I had told him my grief, he decided on the spot: "Mother, leave everything standing and lying, and come home. Why should you live among these wicked people?" I went home and have never again crossed the threshold of Peter Pries's house.
I know it was a misstep. Not a day passes on which I do not pray for forgiveness. I hope and believe that Jesus forgives me this misstep too. I wanted only the good. Now I am with my sons, who provide for me and watch over me. I have renounced everything else in the world. Keep me in your love! May you all be commended to God: you, Heinz, Ella, Lilli, Lorie, and Marlies.
In love, your mother and grandmother.
After Mutter Siebert had left Peter Pries, she came to Hans, and later she lived with Peter. She had grown tired and weak. Life had demanded too much of her. She had no courage for living left. In a letter of September 19, 1956 she wrote:
I want to come quickly to visit you, because I love you all so much and long for you so. . .
. . . I am so thankful to you for encouraging me to forget the sad times. Such things one cannot forget. The wounds heal, but the scars remain. I have been able to find my way back to you.
Mother Sings
The hunger years since the beginning of collectivization, the years after Abram Siebert's death, the hard war years, the lean postwar years, and now the years with Peter Pries had left their mark. Mutter Siebert had been brought low, very low, in that she passed through times of greatest loneliness and indescribable want and unspeakable humiliation. God taught her to be humble.
How deep Mutter Siebert's humiliation was yet to go,
or how "small" she had to become, was shown by the meetings of Mutter Siebert with her niece Helene. They had wandered long stretches of their lives together. Even Orsk had been their shared experience.
Mutter Siebert sang a great deal, and by her songs Helene recognized the state of her soul. When she sang the hymn "Let hope be my pilgrim's staff," then her heart was anxious. She was literally singing courage to herself — courage she so urgently needed in that moment.
Helene also knew how it stood with Mutter Siebert's courage when she sang:
Have mercy, oh have mercy! See my misery, my need. Give in pity, oh, to me poor one, But a little piece of bread. Two days now without a morsel, Food has not passed my mouth. Stones have been my pillow And my bed the meadow ground.
This song told the story of a beggar child. The child went from door to door and sang this begging song. What must it have looked like in Mutter Siebert's heart when she sank to the level of this little beggar and made his thoughts and words her own?
Mutter Siebert's niece also knew exactly when Mutter Siebert was tormented by homesickness and longing for her children. Then she sang one of those boundlessly sad songs that can really only be sung in Russian.
Helene remembered also an incident that had a simple bread crust as its subject. Helene's mother received a visit from her sister, who was somewhat better off. Mutter Siebert had been given a piece of bread, of which she gave a part to her sister. Greedily, Helene's mother ate up the soft part of the bread at once. Greedily? No — that was hunger, biting hunger. The crust was left over, because the mother could not eat it with her ailing teeth. She wrapped the crust in a cloth and took it home for her hungry children. One crust of bread — and again hungry children!
"We all stood around the table," the hungry Helene relates, "as she divided up the crust. But how long that dividing took! I could hardly wait until I received my bite — more it was not."
Mutter Siebert had grown quieter, more withdrawn, and smaller. Hunger and want make people ever quieter and quieter. If the opposite were true, the songs of sorrowing people from Orsk, from Korkino, and from the villages of the Orenburg settlement would have carried their suffering out into the wide world, through the valleys, over hills and mountains. But as it was, it grew ever more silent around the hungry. No one reports of it. Only now and then has someone told of those days.
Mutter Siebert could sing a song about it.
The Worry Remained
True, the war out there in the wide world had long been over. But for Mutter Siebert, and for the many other people in the Soviet Union, the constant struggle for existence remained. For the people it was a matter of shelter, of bread, and of clothing — indeed, it was a matter of bodily peace and of the inner rest of their lives. Worry was, for most people, the constant companion on their way through life.
After the long absence during the war years, the houses in the villages were in the worst of condition. Because of the great shortage of materials it was almost impossible to build a new house or to repair the dilapidated one. One had to buy the materials on the black market for dear money, or otherwise obtain them through bribery. One could also simply steal them. This manner of procuring building materials was called, indeed, "the simple way."
Mutter Siebert knew the difficulty of house-building, and she worried about her children, who all had to build new houses. It took two, sometimes three years before a house stood ready to move into.
The building plot was there in the kolkhoz. One needed only the permit to build. Then first came the building of the foundation. Where was one to find the stones for it? Once the stones were found, they also had to be hauled to the building site. Who would make the truck or the tractor available? How many bottles of vodka might the whole thing cost?
Once the foundation was properly in place, one had to make the clay bricks. The manufacture was called "striking the clay bricks." That must have been learned from the Egyptians, for one struck the bricks as in Pharaoh's time. It was the heaviest work, done after the day's work or on Sunday. A long-drawn-out process!
Once the walls of the house stood, the woodwork came next. The
timber could be had only as round timber — that is, in logs — in the north of Orenburg. One bought trees as they stood in the forest. The hauling of the timber was bound up with many problems. Everything had to be bartered. One traded timber for butter or honey, nails for meat and fat. One could get money — but for money one could buy nothing [sic]. It often happened that one left the colony with a wagon on the wagon and came back with timber. One had to have a good head for business.
Just as carefully one searched for sheet metal or slate for the roof, and paint for the wood. Work and many worries there were, and much toil and vexation. But at last the house stood, and one moved in. Mutter Siebert, however, still carried the worry for the happiness of her children, whom she enfolded with all her love.
Peter's house in Dolinowka.
In earlier days, when her children were all still at home, it happened again and again that the whole family sat at the table forging plans for the future. These castles in the air were by no means extravagant; but still, they were of the kind in which want for daily bread and clothing no longer had any place in the thoughts of the future. All four brothers were agreed that Mother should live with [them], and Tina too would know no sorrow — her four brothers would see to that. Unfortunately, nothing came of these plans, for all the brothers and sister were led along ways that had never appeared at all in their plans for the future.
Mutter Siebert had here too a foreboding, which she expressed aloud; and again and again the question surfaced in her admonitions: "Boys, you make great plans — but what will you do if one day things turn out differently than you have imagined?"
The sons could not believe in those days that there might be any other way out of the misery than the one they had taken. Hans and Peter searched long for a way out of the want, but in vain. The longer they went along this way, the farther they came from their appointed goal. Mutter Siebert had to look on helplessly as her two youngest sons were thrown back again and again.
Especially alarming in this time was the occasion when Hans once failed to come home from a celebration in the clubhouse of the kolkhoz. It was a stormy winter day. The wind swept the snow through the valleys and over the hills. Nothing could be seen. Even the marking of the road had disappeared. The sunflower stalks that in winter show the course of the roads had been broken down by the wind, or the snow had covered them.
Tina, Hans's wife, grew worried in good time that Hans was not at home. He was searched for in the village, on the streets, in the houses, but without success. He was not there. Now the men set out and went looking for him. Toward morning the storm subsided, and Hans was found. He had come upon a straw pile outside the village. Utterly exhausted, he was crouching in the straw. In a very short time, had he not been found, he would have frozen to death.
But Mutter Siebert had her glad hours too, of which she wrote in her letters. It was in a letter from the year 1957 that she told of the sermons of Elder Heinrich Voth. The man was already over eighty years old and still made the long winter journey — out to the most distant settlements. Hans drove a caterpillar tractor that winter. Such a tractor was the only vehicle that could get through the deep snow. When no one else was willing to drive, Hans offered to take Elder Voth with his caterpillar tractor, in grim cold, to Perwolotzk to the railway station. There were, after all, still signs of goodness in the hearts of her sons. Mutter Siebert drew hope for the future again and again.
An important question in those years, for the people, was the problem of transportation. Mutter Siebert wrote in her letters of her journeys on the pillion seat or in the sidecar of the motorcycle. Adventurously she described the daring of such a ride on roads with
countless potholes and puddles of water. Peter brought Mutter Siebert on his motorcycle to a church festival and fetched her back on the next day — but he himself did not stay there. Was it indifference, or was it unbelief, or was it fear of the authorities?
In her day there were only a few passenger cars, and so the mother rode along on a motorcycle. Until Peter bought himself a car.
The acquisition of the car was an experience without parallel. As one of the best workers in the kolkhoz, Peter was rewarded with an opportunity to buy himself a new car. Under normal circumstances the purchase of a car is something quite simple. But not so in Dolinowka.
Peter had the necessary money for the car, which was to cost seven and a half thousand rubles. The difficulty, however, consisted in this: the car was not to be paid for with money, but only with meat — beef or pork. But Peter now had only one pig. Yet the required weight came to about 29 pigs. Nothing remained for him but to buy pigs, and at the black-market price at that — 7.00 rubles per kilo. The state, however, bought the meat from him for only 3.50 rubles. After long back and forth, Peter bought the car. He had scraped together enough receipts for sold meat. The car therefore cost over fifteen thousand rubles.
At that time they wrote from Orenburg: "Is it clear to you now why we have no time for letter-writing?"
The Reckoning
There were also times in Mutter Siebert's life when things grew quiet around her. Then the storm seemed to have abated. But that was only outward. In her heart the unrest, the fear, and the grief had remained. In these hours the longing for days long past came over her uncontrollably. Then she saw in spirit the large Siebert family — Heinrich, Hans, Franz, Jakob, Gerhard, Peter, and Katharina — the brothers and sister of her husband, before her. So many were gone! The storm of war had taken them. No house had been spared. It looked almost as though a forest fire had passed through the region. Mutter Siebert went in spirit to the village of Stepanowka and stopped in at her brother-in-law Heinrich Siebert's. He and his wife Maria had had seven children. His wife received for that the title "Mother-Heroine." And a heroine she was, for to raise those many children was truly a heroic deed. The family of Heinrich Siebert had been put to total deployment during the war. Heinrich and his children were all in the Trudarmee. He himself, the father, was
soon worked out, and as a wreck his daughter was permitted to bring him home. A short time after his homecoming he died a "natural" death. His eldest son was missing, but the others came home again.
As in earlier years, Mutter Siebert stopped in at Hans Siebert's. He had always been a bookkeeper. He was taken from captivity, and there he had soon [been] no more. His wife and children came home in winter. The end of this part of the Siebert family was especially sad, for it was reported that Hans Siebert, the uncle, had died in a state of drunkenness. He had succumbed to the burden of suffering.
Franz Siebert was arrested in 1941, and nothing was ever heard of him again. Before his arrest he had for years been good enough to manage the machine-tractor station. But one day he was made an enemy of the people. Such people, so Mutter Siebert wrote, died by a pistol shot. The family of Franz Siebert filled up the ranks of the Trudarmee.
Quite different was the case of the brother-in-law Gerhard Siebert. He did return from the Trudarmee soon after the war's end, but died of the consequences of the hard service.
Peter Siebert, the younger brother of her husband, fared especially badly. He and his son were conscripted into the Wehrmacht. The families knew that their men had been in captivity — but had they fallen? Did they go into captivity? Who knows their path?
Mutter Siebert went with her thoughts to the youngest sister of her husband. The two sisters-in-law had grown especially fond of each other of late, because they were both alone. Her sister-in-law's husband had been arrested at the very outbreak of the war. He was literally tortured to death in the Orenburg prison. The Siebert family had rendered its bloody contribution of victims. Humanly speaking, a full and shaken-down measure of sacrifice.
Mutter Siebert's thoughts carried her to Fjedorowka, where the Klassen family lived. Two sisters knew that their husbands had died on the island of Solovki in the White Sea, in ice and snow. One of them married once more, but she had to give up this husband as well.
Mutter Siebert thought of these many victims who had ruined her family. That was only one family! But such tragedies existed — everywhere! Yet there was such hope: that time dries the tears and heals the wounds [sic]. One day, so she hoped,
the pain too would be forgotten.
The Germans of Orenburg — indeed, in the whole Soviet Union — drew up the reckoning, and the result was shattering.
She Lived in Grace
But Mutter Siebert's path of suffering was not yet at an end. On October 10, 1956 she wrote about her possibilities of earning in the kolkhoz. She earned her livelihood with odd jobs as they arose. But really work she could no longer. She knitted and sewed. Many a bale of wool she spun into yarn in those years, and then knitted the yarn into stockings and jackets. Now she had been declared unfit for work. She was provided for in part out of the poor fund of the kolkhoz. She was given one kilogram of butter a month, and flour for bread as well. The rest of her needs the children supplied.
Mutter Siebert was content with her lot. She devoted herself entirely to her children and grandchildren and stood by them, as well as she could, with word and deed. She had her glad days and her not-so-glad ones. Just as she had earlier been the guiding star for her children, so she remained in the later years as well.
In the 1960s it had here and there proved possible to invite relatives from the Soviet Union to Canada. At first this idea was foreign to Mutter Siebert. She was also afraid to apply for an exit permit. How easily that could become her undoing! But then one day the moment came: she was willing to dare it, to come to Canada. With an anxious heart she was already looking forward to the possibility of seeing her loved ones. But her letter of September 18, 1965 sounded sad and resembled a letter of farewell:
Now I am almost seventy years old. That is a long time for me. Much have I seen and lived through. Many events I do not like to think back on. Along many a dark road the dear God has led me. But I can gladly confess to you that the Lord has never forsaken me. You too, let his grace be sufficient for you. I write you a few verses which speak so truly from my heart:
Many a mountain I have climbed, The climbing often bitter hard. My breath was almost taken from me, So that I thought: I can no more!
Often I was weary to despairing, Often my foot struck sore against the stone. Then spoke the Lord: "I will carry you." And strength from above set in.
Many a dark valley I have walked through, Gloomy and heavy as a night. From faintness of heart I often suffered, Forgot that above me an eye keeps watch.
Now I walk the road with comfort, Though steep the mountain, dark the vale. Am never alone and never forsaken, For God, my shield and shelter, is everywhere.
And when one day my last hour comes — For me, now old, no longer far — Then comes for me too the hour of grace: "Come, rest now with your Lord!"
Mutter Siebert must truly have sensed her last hour, for the letter with the poem was her last letter. She died shortly after her sixty-eighth birthday, quite suddenly. Quietly, as she had lived, so she went from the midst of her children. Today her mortal frame rests in the cemetery in Dolinowka. And over the grave one hears the plea of the children:
Speak with me, Mother! Long have you sung me no song, With bowed head at the cradle. In a bird's flight the time went by, And the thread to childhood tore.
Speak with me, Mother, About anything at all — speak, On into the midnight of the stars, Give me my childhood once again.
I am content with my fate, Regret nothing that has been, Only at times I am drawn away To you, into that cloudless distance.
Those fairy-tale times Remain in my heart forever. Nothing is dearer to me today Than your tender, gentle song.
Throughout her whole life Mutter Siebert had prayed without ceasing. At the last she had one wish: her children should take the way of the following of Jesus. In her lifetime this longing was not fulfilled for her. Only long after her death could Peter, her youngest, come to know the Lord. Her daughter Tina and her son Hans were baptized after several years and thereby confessed their Lord and Savior. God had heard the prayers of Mutter Siebert.
Afterword
The life story of Mutter Siebert is not a beautiful story. It is not an extraordinary story. For the time in which Mutter Siebert lived, it is almost normal; at least in many aspects it repeated itself again and again in the lives of countless mothers, even if in differing variations. The suffering and the sacrifices of the mothers became something entirely everyday, and thereby an accepted matter of course, which very often went unperceived or was deliberately overlooked. This book is dedicated to my dear mother, who in her life experienced happiness and joy only rarely, in fleeting passing. But the lot of my mother was borne in equal measure by thousands upon thousands of other mothers, whose children are no less grateful for the loving and self-denying devotion that was granted them.
To these mothers, too, this book is dedicated. It is meant to be an attempt to set them a small memorial — one that bears witness to their heroism, performed in all quietness and in all inconspicuousness, and that reminds posterity of their love. That is my wish. May the book do justice to this wish!
Karl Fast Winnipeg, Manitoba 1989
[Back Cover — Author Biography]
Karl Fast was born in 1921 in the Orenburg settlement, the son of Mennonite parents. Here he also received his basic education and an uncompleted professional training as a teacher of Russian and German.
Before the outbreak of the Second World War he began his work as a teacher. In 1940 he was conscripted for service in the Soviet Army. At the very outbreak of the war he saw action in Belorussia and then, as a straggler cut off from his unit, came to the settlement of Alexandrowka near Pyatikhatka, Ukraine. After two years' work in the school of the Baratow settlement near Krivoi Rog, he fled with his wife, together with many other refugees, to the Warthegau. Here he was conscripted for service in the German Wehrmacht. At the beginning of 1945 he fell into Soviet captivity in Hungary, from which he was released only in September 1949, to his wife and daughter in Westphalia.
In the same year the family emigrated to Canada and settled in Winnipeg. Fast resumed his studies at the University of Manitoba and completed them with a Bachelor of Arts.
In Canada he taught at Westgate Mennonite Collegiate, at Lowe Farm Collegiate, and at Steinbach Senior High School. For the last fourteen years of his professional life, Fast worked as a consultant for foreign-language instruction with the Manitoba Department of Education. His work in the field of promoting German instruction in Manitoba was recognized with the award of the Cross of Merit, First Class, of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Karl Fast's first book, Gebt der Wahrheit die Ehre, was first published as a three-part work in 1950, 1951, and 1952. The second edition appeared in 1989 with Canzona Publishing.
The book Laß dir an meiner Gnade genügen was written in the years 1987–1989.
Today Karl Fast lives in retirement in Winnipeg.
ISBN: 0-929130-01-4
Translator's Notes
English translation completed July 2026, from the verified German master transcription (Gesamtausgabe v13). Translated in eight batches and merged into this single master.
Conventions. Page markers of the 1989 Canzona edition are retained as `[S. XX]`; a marker indicates where that printed page begins, so sentences may run across markers exactly as they run across page turns in the original. `[sic]` flags printing or grammatical irregularities of the source, carried over from the German master; bracketed words in roman type (e.g., [someone], [before]) mark words supplied by the transcriber where the printed text is elliptical or defective. Photographs are represented by italic caption placeholders pending digitization.
Title and scripture. The title Laß dir an meiner Gnade genügen (2 Corinthians 12:9) is rendered "Let My Grace Be Sufficient for You," and the epigraph is translated to match Fast's Luther-text wording ("for my strength is made mighty in the weak") rather than substituted with a standard English Bible version. The phrase recurs at S. 69, S. 90, S. 125, and S. 135 and is rendered consistently.
Names and terms. Personal names are kept as printed (including variant spellings). Place names are anglicized (Moscow, Kiev, Kharkov, Chelyabinsk, Mogilev, Brest-Litovsk, etc.); Mennonite village names (Dolinowka, Kubanka, Alexandrowka, Steinfeld, Grünfeld, Konteniusfeld) keep their German-transcribed forms. Soviet-Russian and period terms are retained with a gloss at first use: Trudarmee (labor army), kolkhoz, NKVD, Komsomol, politruk, starshina, raion/oblast, subbotnik, Torgsin, "Nemets," "Skoreye! Davay!", Prips, kulak, Datscha, "Glückauf" (miner's greeting), Russländer (Mennonite self-designation for those from Russia). "Mutter Siebert" is kept in German throughout as the book's fixed epithet for Katharina.
Verse. The four verse passages (the beggar-child song, S. 129; the Internationale couplet, S. 104; Mutter Siebert's last-letter poem, S. 135–136; and the children's elegy "Speak with me, Mother," S. 136–137) are translated for sense and cadence, without imposing rhyme.
Items flagged for verification against the physical book: 1. Printed table of contents (S. vii) reads "Peter meldet sich"; the body chapter heading (S. 60) reads "Peter meldet sich wieder." The body heading was followed ("Peter Makes Contact Again"). 2. The table of contents lists a chapter "Im Warthegau" in Part Four with no corresponding heading in the transcribed body; the S. 97 photo caption suggests the content is present but unheaded. To be checked against the print copy. 3. The German master's open query at S. 66 („Ausgetag" [„Ausgehtag"?]) is carried over untranslated inside its bracketed note. 4. Passages the German master flags with [sic] for syntactically damaged print (notably S. 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106, 123, 126, 131, 134) are translated for evident sense with the flags retained; where the print is genuinely ambiguous the more conservative reading was chosen.
Sensitive-content note. As with the first book, several passages reflect period-typical framing (e.g., collective characterizations of peoples, wartime language). These are translated faithfully and are candidates for contextual footnotes before wider family sharing, per the project's standing practice; no alterations were made to the text itself.