A Day in Mariawohl - July 11, 2009

Well here it is Saturday morning , July 11 in Zaporozhia, home of the Intourist Hotel where we are staying for 7 nights. (It is wonderful that we won’t need to pack/unpack each day). I stayed here with Herta, Werner, & my folks in 1978, but the part that has been remodeled is unrecognizable from then - lots of glass, beautiful shiny lobby with large bright red comfortable furniture, and our rooms are in the renovated section. The part we are in is wonderful. But the elevators are small. From the outside, the original part looks very old, as it is. We have our regular buffet breakfast (boiled eggs, scrambled eggs, cheese, cold ham, hot mini-frankfurters, oranges, juices, yogurt, a variety of breads which can be toasted, coffee, tea). We have already had 4 full days of touring, and one does get abit saturated, especially since it has been hot all week (as it also was in Germany). Our Hotel rooms are air-conditioned, and so is the large, spacious bus (for the 13 of us plus the driver and the Intourist guide), but we spend lots of time walking through villages looking for places that the Mennonites built when they settled in this area between 1789 and 1863, and until they left here in the early 1940's. The bus ride from Zaporozhia to the Molotschna Colony is about 2 hours, so the days start early (leave at 8 am) and return about 7 pm. Imagine being on a bus filled with 40 people who all have different villages they want to see - then you spend very little time in any one village and you eventually get totally saturated looking for “Mennonite buildings” and after awhile they all look the same, since you have seen maybe 20 villages in one day. And the next day, you may go again to another set of villages with 40 other people. We were fortunate to be from one family, all wanting to see the same Molotschna villages in two days; and then we spent another four days doing Chortitza villages and more general and also relaxing things, like a Cossack Museum, Cossack Equestrian show, a museum in Zaporozhia which has a Mennonite section, and a two-hour boat ride on the Dnieper around the island of Chortitza (we have the boat to ourselves). And then on Sunday six of us drive to Gnadenthal & Gruenfeld to see where Fred’s Peters grandparents lived before they emigrated to Canada. And to see the church where they were baptized, which is also the church where Martha Rempel Fransen’s father, Aeltester Jakob A Rempel was the last Mennonite bishop. It is now an active Ukrainian Orthodox church. That is another hot day, but it ends with Johann Dueck, our new-found 2nd cousin taking all of us to a wonderful Cossack restaurant on the Island of Chortitza.

So join us now as we are enroute to Mariawohl...full of anticipation. Whoops, I must tell you about our Intourist guide for the Molotschna trips. It is Olga Shmakin, a senior guide with Intourist, the Ukrainian travel agency (under Communism, it was state-run, now it is privately owned. Olga has been an Intourist tour guide for a long time, and knows the Mennonite history, places of interest and stories very well. After the death of her husband, she married Dr Paul Toews in Zaporozhia in 2005. He is Professor of History, Fresno Pacific University and also Director of the Center for Mennonite Brethren Studies, Mennonite Brethren Biblical Seminary and Fresno Pacific University. He is the author of many articles and books on diverse aspects of Mennonite History. He is involved in archival research projects in Ukraine and Russia and is currently leader of the international team which is creating the new Siberia Mennonite Archive and will supervise a major international scholarly symposium in Siberia in 2010, in association with the Russian Academy of Sciences. He has spent a year in Ukraine as a Fullbright exchange scholar. He is one of the founders of and a resource person on the Mennonite Heritage Cruise every year, and the son of a well-known Mennonite Brethren leader, Johann B Toews (1906-1998) (former President of the MB Seminary in Fresno, Calif), and a brother to John Toews who was President of Conrad Grebel College at one time. Paul & Olga live in Fresno half the year and the rest in Zap. Because Herb had been on the Mennonite Heritage Cruise in 2007, he knew both Paul & Olga somewhat. He arranged that Paul Toews would present two lectures to our group, and we invited them to our first dinner at the Hotel. Paul volunteered to accompany us to Molotschna on the two days when Olga would be the guide. Plus we had several other meals with them, and they invited us to see their apartment in Zap (very nice on the inside, but in a very old building).

Back to Mariawohl....Enroute to Molotschna colony we pass many large fields of sunflowers and winter wheat in the process of being harvested. Our on-the-bus farm expert (Harold Regier) says some of the crops look excellent, while others obviously did not receive the care and inputs required for good yields. All of a sudden we turn a corner, and the bus stops...we are at the east end of Mariawohl and have stopped in front of the Kutzenko yard! We walk into the yard, and immediately a car follows us, and out steps Kutz and his wife Tamara, and great grand-daughter Viktoria who lives somewhere else but is visiting them for awhile. He tells Olga that he was expecting us yesterday. Herb had asked the Intourist office to notify Kutz in June when they were in the area, that we were coming on July 11. He had also asked that he be told that our group would not include any of his relatives, but people that knew his relatives (Eva Andres). Herb and his family had met Kutz in Mariawohl in 2007, as had Ted Fransen & Gordon Epp-Fransen and their families. Those of us that were in Mariawohl in 1978 also met him and his mother. One of the first things he asks Olga is if I am Uncle Jakob’s daughter! Let me clarify his name. He gives his correct name to Olga who writes it down as Anatoliy Ivanovich Emtsev, born 1936. Address: Zeleniyi Yar (the Ukrainian name of the former Mariawohl village), Bognanovka Village Council, Chernigovka district, Zaporizhia region, Ukraine, phone +38-066-4475645. Jakob Kutz (Anatoliy’s Uncle) in his book, My Life in the Ukraine and Canada as I remember it (1996) says that his sister Manja (Marusja) Kutz (born & died in Mariawohl, 1912-1989) was married to ? Yemzev. I explain the discrepancy in surnames as a different interpretation of the Ukrainian characters. Just a thought. So I will call the man we walk through Mariawohl with, Anatoliy, but still he will probably always be “Kutz” to us. He invites us into his yard, and it is a bright sunny, even hot day. Herb gives Anatoliy various pictures we brought along of his Uncle Jacob Kutz and one of Eva and Bill Andres. There is an open area in the yard, surrounded by several small buildings, one of which at the back is the original Kutz house. One building is called the Summer-kitchen, but it looks more like the outside area is the kitchen, with a table, pots and pans and pails, towels on a line, etc. There are benches in front of some of the buildings and Herb sits down with Anatoliy and Tamara as they discuss matters of interest with the help of Olga and Johann Dueck. Anatoliy takes us to their vegetable garden behind the yard, beyond which the grain fields can be seen. Anatoliy invites us into the house - it is very small. He says that currently 86 people live in Mariawohl and only three of these are employed. Two of these are his sons who operate John Deere combines.
Then Herb & Anatoliy & Olga begin developing a strategy for finding some of the places we are interested in. We ask if he and Tamara can accompany us as we walk down the road through Mariawohl, but she needs to stay to milk the cows. Hannah & Kate have brought some stuffed animals and give these to Viktoria. There is conversation about who set the village of Mariawohl on fire, and it appears that it was the Germany military before they retreated eastwards when the Russian army was invading the colonies in 1943. They also took Mr Sobetzki, the local blacksmith with them, as he would be of great help to them in case of any difficulties.
Some of our group have already left the yard and gone in search of the remains of the Mennonite cemetery. The rest of our group begin walking westwards down the only road (paved) of Mariawohl. The bus follows us. Soon we pass a herder with two cows and Anatoliy tells us these are his cows being brought home for milking. The trees along the road have grown a lot since I was in Mariawohl in 1978; also the yards are no longer the same size as in the time of our Fransen’s life here, and so it is not possible to simply follow the map we have. Actually we have several maps of Mariawohl representing different eras in Mariawohl (1914, 1925, 1940), and we try to make some sense of where the places significant to the Fransens are. It is somewhat frustrating, as places do not look quite like Herb & I remember them from previous visits. Herb was here in 1971 (with our father) and in 2007 with his wife Mary, Charlotte, Steve & Cindy, but their actual time allotted in Mariawohl was brief (half hour at most???), since they were part of a large tour group. You can imagine it is next to impossible to get a sense of a place in such a short time. When I was here in 1978, we had as much time as we wanted and probably stayed a couple of hours or more, visiting with Manja Kutz, eating our Intourist Hotel-packed box lunch beside the hay-stack in the back-yard of the Mariawohl school, looking for the Mennonite cemetery, walking up and down the road and checking out the possible sites of Klaas & Elisabeth Fransen, and Nicholas & Maria (Wichert) Fransen, and seeing a portion of the original fence. I have some pictures of that visit with me, and show them to Anatoliy; he identifies himself as being on the picture!
Anatoliy remembers where Franz Fransen (youngest son of my great Grandparents Klaas & Elisabeth Fransen) lived and points it out to us. We know that this is the spot where Klaas & Elisabeth Fransen lived in the time of my father’s life in Mariawohl. This is also the place where the ancestors of the Fransens that we met at the Fransen Treffen in Rehe lived. We look past the blue steel gate on the North side of the road, past the small buildings to the ripening fields of wheat.
The road through Mariawohl is much longer than Herb and I had remembered. We know that the School building is now a pile of bricks, and when we come to such a pile on the South side of the road, we think that is it. But we check with other local residents and are informed the School was further down the road. Sure enough we soon come to another pile of rubble, up on a hill and overgrown with weeds. It can be accessed from two sides and so we climb on the rocks and bricks for pictures. This is the spot where many of the Fransens began their formal education. Little remains except our memories of stories told so often.
The men of our group have been checking the fields and the meadows behind the site of the school and behind the vegetable gardens to see if there are any remnants of headstones from the former Mennonite cemetery. Nothing is to be found. We are often told that when the Ukrainians were told they could settle in the former Mennonite villages, they used the headstones for building materials. Our group of thirteen (including Johann Dueck of Germany) plus Anatoliy and his great grand-daughter Viktoria, stand silently close to the path to the former Mennonite cemetery and remember the many Fransens who lived and died in Mariawohl. It is a holy moment. We also think of those of our Fransen clan who did not emigrate to Canada when our Grandmother and her children did (1926), but continued to live here until the 1940's, and eventually spent years in forced labour or were exiled and never seen again. Had our Grandfather Fransen not died in 1922, resulting in Grandmother emigrating to Canada with her Wichert brothers, our father and aunts and uncles might have been among those.

As we proceed further down the only road in Mariawohl (then and now), we check out various houses in various states of disrepair, several are no longer in use, and are falling down. The houses are numbered but we are told those numbers do not coincide with the original house numbers. We are looking for the place where the house of my grandparents, Nicholas Fransen & Maria Wichert who were married in Mariawohl in 1905 stood. We know that when our widowed Grandmother emigrated to Canada with her eight children in 1926, their house was bought by Jakob Fransen, brother to my deceased Grandfather, and that the site also became the place of a church. Anatoliy points us to the place where the church was; all that remains is the foundation of the basement of a house. Various people confirm that this is an original Mennonite house, as the Ukrainians did not build basements. After much discussion, it is assumed that this could well be the site of the house of our Grandparents, Nicholas & Maria (Wichert) Fransen.
Next to the Fransen place is a section of the original Fence made of bricks and tiles that characterized Mariawohl (maybe other villages too).

We have spent about three hours walking through Mariawohl; it is hot and we are hungry. We bid our friends, Anatoliy and Viktoria farewell, and travel on to our lunch stop in a nice café on the highway.

It might have been good to spend another hour in Mariawohl to consolidate what we learned. Anyone for another trip?

I hope others will comment about their interpretation of our findings in Mariawohl.