Revisiting the Soviet Union (Fred's Church Newsletter article)

Without realizing it, our family had a rare opportunity to relive the 20th century in the shoes of my grandparents this summer. The occasion started with a reunion of all the members of my great, great paternal grandfather and grandmother. In the 1920s, my great grandmother was a widow and took my grandfather and his siblings to Canada, fleeing the imposition of communism in the Soviet Union. My great grandfather’s brothers made the fateful decision to stay, and Stalin killed them all, one way or another. Our reunion involved close to 200 of my murdered great great uncles’ descendents who had finally been able to escape the Soviet Union, mostly in the 1980s. About a dozen “Canadians” – ourselves included – joined them.

As one of the few North Americans who spoke German, I often found myself acting as a translator. I’d grab a cousin, seek out an older woman, and ask her to tell her story. There were only two stories, horrifically repeated with differences only in detail. In each case, there was a decision not to emigrate from the Ukraine. A midnight knock on the door. Then grandpa, then papa, sometimes an uncle or older brother was gone. Famine, and eating fieldmice. A few hints that these manless times had also been punctuated by rapes.

In 1943, the stories diverged. The Soviet army came to their doors, announced that the Germans were coming, and gave them two hours to pack. Most were shipped to Kazakhstan in cattle cars. One third died along the way. The rest were dumped on the steppes, left to build sod houses in a frigid climate, with little food and awful conditions, a horror that improved over the years, but only ended forty years later with immigration to Germany.

The other story is even worse. A couple years of peace and security under the German occupation, then orders to join mostly on foot the long retreat with the German army. They were told to fill their houses with straw before they left, so the soldiers could burn them, leaving nothing behind. At least a third died along this route, as well. Imagine old people and women and children walking alongside a fleeing army more than 1,000 miles.

They had hardly arrived in Germany, when the Red Army overtook some of them, and according to the Yalta agreement, the Allies handed the rest back to Stalin. More cattle cars, but this time the destination was Siberia and ten years hard labor, rather than Central Asia. The labor involved cutting trees year round. In winter that meant first removing three meters of snow before starting to saw. They were giving 1600 calories a day to live on, and many starved. To get by, these children and widows sold their possessions and often whatever else they could. A number of my relatives have decidedly Russian and Asian features.

After ten years, the stories reconnect. The Siberian prisoners could leave their forest exiles. Most rejoined other Mennonites in Central Asia, and began the long wait to get out.

The suffering they experienced is one of the things that distinguished the German Fransens from the “Canadian” ones. But there were many more. They had a perfect trifecta of grounds for communist persecution: they were German (although technically and historically they were Dutch); they were Christian, and they were economically successful. The Soviets did their best to exterminate anyone with one of these traits; to survive being all three was a miracle.

And that’s how they saw it, as well. The Soviet Union tried to prohibit their language, didn’t allow them to get higher education, and discriminated against them however they could. But despite the fact that the Mennonite Church was never recognized, Mennonites there persevered, survived, and gave God credit for it. For the most part they joined evangelical Baptist churches, and over the course of our reunion, expressed a faith in, and gratitude toward God that is hard for us to appreciate. Their faith and determination are humbling, just as their current views on many issues seem primitive and simplistic. They have no doubt God provided for their survival due to their faith.

After the reunion, the “Canadians” flew on to the Ukraine. We spent a week visiting the villages where our and their grandparents had flourished until the twenties. It was hot, dusty, and the roads in this “Second World” country were more Third World than First. The time spent with our cousins had put us very much into the spirit of the 1940s. The villages were depressing. Mennonite graveyards had been robbed (recently). People still used open wells and outhouses. Poverty was extreme, and little was left. One did see, however, the ruins of what had once been an orderly, thriving, Mennonite community. The streets were overgrown, but one could imagine them clean-swept and bounded by whitewashed pickets or stone walls. The fields were filled with weeds, the orchards were unpruned, and litter abounded, but one could imagine clean fields, heavily laden branches, and Germanic order. I had no trouble transposing Gnadenthal in Manitoba back to Gnadenthal in Ukraine. My Peters grandfather would have gone right to work with a paintbrush and broom, and in no time cleaned the place up. We found and brought back a floor tile in the ruins of my Fransen grandfather’s home, a roof tile from the church where a grandmother was baptized. We smuggled seeds from a few gardens, and took pictures in front of my great great grandfather’s tombstone.

We left Ukraine shaken, troubled, and with echoes of the horrors of the past still ringing in our ears. We then began the journey of hope and promise followed by my family. We traveled by train to England. Boarded a ship in Southampton, and crossed the Atlantic. Our accommodations were different than theirs, and we were returning to, rather than fleeing from our homes. Still, for me at least, I continued to feel their presence. They landed in Nova Scotia, we in New York. A day at Ellis Island, however, must have been much like a day in Halifax.

What conclusions do I take from all this? In seeing the fate of my relatives – only the survivors, mind you – I could not help repeating: “There but for the grace of God go I.” I owe who I am to the wisdom of my widowed great grandmother Fransen who took a big family across the Atlantic in hope of a better life. And, second, we must never forget that the twentieth century’s unprecedented human suffering was overwhelmingly caused by governments destroying lives, liberties, and property in the name of “humanity.”

Fred Fransen