RR3 FRANSEN

THE TREK THAT WASN'T

After two years of German occupation of Ukraine (1941-1943) catastrophe again was inflicted on our people in their villages. They had lived reasonably well for a two year period (of course without the presence of their men who had been removed by Stalin earlier) when they were suddenly uprooted and with the help of retreating German military, led on a Trek that would eventually lead them westward to Poland.

An episode that is less well known was an attempt two years earlier by the Soviets in October 1941 to move these Ukrainian Germans, including Mennonites eastward to Kazakhstan or Siberia in the wake of the approaching German military that was racing east on their way to Stalingrad and ultimate defeat there.

Because this episode in 1941, just as the episode described above in 1943 included many of our relatives whom we met in Rehe, Germany at the "Fransentreffen" this year, it is of some interest to recount this "Trek that Wasn't".

On October 2, 1941 with two hours notice, many of the people living in the Molotschna villages were loaded onto wagons by the Russian military and transported to the railroad station at Stulnevo. This is the railroad station just northeast of the village of Waldheim, a place that we visited in July on our visit to Ukraine. It is also the railroad station from which the N. Fransen family left for Canada in 1926. The people from the entire village of Mariawohl along with many other villages were unloaded in and about the railroad station, awaiting railroad cars to transport them eastward, ostensibly to avoid them from staying in their villages and beginning their lives under German occupation. The plan was for these German Ukrainians to be sent to slave labour camps in support of the Soviet military and economic effort. They were in essence "enemies of the state."

Approximately six thousand people were "camped out" under the open sky around the Stulnevo station for the next six days and nights awaiting their transfer into the unknown.

During this time gunfire and cannon thunder with airplanes engaging in battle in the skies were part of their frightening experience in addition to problems with sanitation, food and any comforts of existence there in the open fields.

It became known to our people that many other villages from the Molotschna had been evacuated earlier and some of those people were known to have passed through the railway station at Stulnevo several days earlier. The uncertainty of what had happened to some of their relatives living in those other villages was paramount in their minds. This in addition to their ongoing concern regarding the fate of their husbands and sons who had been taken by the Soviets in prior years. After waiting for six days and nights it gradually became evident that the soviet guards in the camp had disappeared. Before long local Ukrainians from some of the villages approached our people and told them that indeed the German military had arrived, were in charge of their villages and encouraged them to return home. To their dismay on arriving at home, they discovered that during their six day absence local Ukrainian villagers had plundered their homes and many of their possessions had disappeared.

Such was the situation in October 1941 and for our Mennonite people the beginning of two years of relative calm under German occupation.

Then on September 12, 1943 The Trek westward commenced, a Trek that will live on in history especially for the descendants that survived that daring escape.

Herb Fransen