by Hans Werner
Few of us remember anything before our fourth birthday. Childhood amnesia is a perplexing aspect of human memory. Although a three-year-old’s memory is astoundingly sharp, it is either inaccessible or lost after the child reaches about four years of age. The cholera epidemic that wiped out much of the Werner family occurred when my father was three years and eight months old, and he had no direct recollection of these events even though they would have been traumatic and memorable. It seems we have no long-term memories until we have acquired a certain level of language. Geoffrey Cubitt notes that we learn how to remember from adults, who assist our “participation in conversations.” Our parents foster our early memories and provide “most of the structure and…initial content of the narrative” we are “encouraged to form and regard as…our own.”6 What is known about the consequences of the deaths of my grandfather and the rest of the men in the Werner family is mostly conjecture and a few fragments of what my father remembered being told. Perhaps there was no context in which my grandmother felt safe enough to provide the narrative structures that would have allowed the young boy to acquire memories of his father’s and grandfather’s lives and deaths. Although my father’s early years were troubled, the challenges presented by the death of his father and remarriages of his mother were mostly borne by her and really did not influence or form significant memories for my father. Children are resilient, and though his stuttering might have been stimulated or aggravated by the abuse suffered at the hands of his first stepfather he would survive much more than he could have imagined. The difficult years were not behind him, and as he grew up he would have many more vivid memories of difficult times.
2
Difficult Years
My father rarely told stories that offered a window into his mother’s difficult life. One story, together with surviving fragments of letters from his mother, offers such a window. Sometime in 1925 Aaron Janzen decided suddenly to emigrate to Canada. Mennonites from Ukraine had been actively seeking ways to leave the Soviet Union ever since the Bolsheviks had gained control of the country during the civil war. In the early 1920s, this finally became possible, but relatively few families from Siberia availed themselves of this tenuous opportunity to escape. Although emigration fever also gripped the Mennonites in Siberia after the revolution, it seems the NEP period tempered this desire to the extent that the complications of emigration from Siberia were enough to result in few actual migrants. Historian Manfred Klaube notes that only thirty-seven families from the Slavgorod region left for Canada between 1920 and 1928.1
Exactly why Aaron decided to leave Siberia so quickly was the subject of some speculation among the family members who stayed behind, but because of the circumstances my grandmother tended to believe the worst. Aaron had the nickname “Trader Janzen”2 because he was a horse trader during the NEP years, and it was believed a deal had gone sour, so emigrating was a way of escaping the consequences. In any event, when the Aaron Janzen family emigrated to Canada, they took Aganetha with them. According to immigration records, the family left Slavgorod in October 1925 to settle in Steinbach, Manitoba. The record of the Canadian Mennonite Board of Colonization, the agency created by Canadian Mennonites to assist immigration, simply lists Aganetha as one of the Janzen children. A later note in the record clarifies that she was actually Aganetha Werner.3
The stories the various actors told to explain these events bear the marks of their desire to reconcile their own autobiographies with what seems to have been a tragic and deplorable action by Aaron. A number of aspects of the story are consistent in the various accounts. Several sources agree he consulted with Aganetha, painted a glowing picture for her of what awaited them in Canada, and gained her consent. My grandmother’s letters to her daughter seem to substantiate that Aaron allowed Aganetha to choose. Anna wrote, “It appears that you are a child who has a mother with a stone heart, that I allowed you to go along. I wrote letters to you in [village] Eighty-Six, to you and Sara. You went along, and Sara stayed here. The flowers that Uncle Aaron painted for you must have often become bitter. Not everything that glitters will be gold there either.”4
My father’s sister Martha, born after these events, also suggests that her “uncle promised” Aganetha “a lot, until she finally agreed.”5 Aganetha’s 1989 obituary notes the strong bond that must have developed between her and the Aaron Janzen family that resulted in her making the “difficult decision in 1925 to emigrate with them to Canada.”6 In the one conversation on the subject I was able to have with Aganetha, by then in her seventies, she suggested that, as an eleven-year-old girl who had lived with the Aaron Janzen family for five years, sometimes together with her mother but often by herself, and who was unsure whether she would ever rejoin her family, the decision to emigrate with the Janzen family seemed the only reasonable one.
Regardless of how much justification for Aaron’s actions one might allow given the young girl’s consent, that Aaron did not obtain consent from her mother created lifelong pain for her and animosity and conflict between her and him. In her first letter to Aganetha, Anna wrote, “I will not forget my entire life what Aaron Janzen did, that he stole my child from me.” To aggravate the already difficult circumstances, when Aaron arrived in Canada he sent eleven-year-old Aganetha to work for a Steinbach family as a nanny and maid. In this letter, Anna wondered why Aganetha needed to work for wages. Aaron “took you along—for what? That is not clear to me. There are places here where you can also serve, to work as a babysitter. Is Uncle Aaron so poor that he cannot keep you? Does he not have enough to eat?”7 The Isaac F. Loewen family, who had hired Aganetha, gradually became aware that she was not Aaron’s daughter, and subsequent correspondence from Anna often went to the Loewens. Often a note for Aganetha was enclosed with these letters. In one of these notes, Anna suggests that, “even if you are called Loewen in school, the name Janzen you should not use, or you will be unhappy your entire life.”8 In my father’s recollection of these events, his mother was so upset at her brother Aaron that she eventually found a way to prevent him from collecting Aganetha’s earnings. Although it is hard to imagine that a Soviet document would have much influence in Canada, my father recalled the occasion when his mother went to the selsoviet, the Soviet local government office, to draw up documents that she signed and sealed with a wax seal that officially made the Loewens the guardians of Aganetha, ostensibly eliminating the possibility of Aaron collecting her wages.
For Anna, the relatively easier years that had coincided with her marriage to Johann Froese suddenly came to an end in 1928. That year Stalin, having outmanoeuvred his opponents, made a trip to Siberia, where he berated local authorities over slow grain acquisitions from the countryside. His visit also signalled the beginning of the forced collectivization and dekulakization campaign that would brutalize Soviet peasants of all ethnic origins but be particularly devastating for the peasants of the Kulunda Steppe. Collectivization meant that individual peasants were forced to give up all their land, cattle, and horses. The assets of an entire village were combined into one large collective farm known as a kolkhoz, and the former owners became the collective farm’s workers. In the process, a campaign ensued designed to root out opposition to collectivization specifically and the regime generally. Being branded a kulak meant the entire family was disenfranchised and resettled, often to nearby villages but occasionally to remote areas.
Forced collectivization began in earnest in the spring of 1929, but the Froese family was ready to leave the Soviet Union by the fall of 1928, when the forced collection of grain began. The repressive measures distressed Johann Froese, and soon he began to speak of nothing else but emigration. His wife’s longing to be reunited with her daughter matched and reinforced his dissatisfaction and united the family in their desire to leave everything and go to Canada. The panic that gripped the Froeses assisted their belief in even the wildest rumours of the possibility of escape. In a confusing note to her daughter in 1928, Anna wrote in glowing terms about po
ssible emigration to Paraguay. In her mind, Paraguay bordered on Canada, and she claimed it would become home to a “large settlement. Many people can move there. Fruit, lemons, oranges, etc., grow there.… Freedom from military duty and school instruction in the German language.”9 By February 1929, the focus had shifted to emigration to Canada, and she informed the Loewens in Steinbach about the costs of such an undertaking: “You might ask how much it would cost for us to cross the ocean, you may find it to be expensive, but there is no harm in writing it. There are five of us that need passports. And a passport costs twenty-five rubles, and then another two, that is, Hans and Sara, the small Sara; they were eleven years old in January. They will need half as much. We have two Saras. Travelling without fare, or on a ‘free’ card, that is not possible.… However, I still do not know if some will move in spring.”10
In German villages all over Siberia, similar stirrings signalled an attempt to leave in spite of no assurance from anyone in government that permission to leave would be granted nor indications from a possible receiving country that entry would be permitted. By midsummer of 1929, the desire to leave Siberia was transformed into action when word came that a group of seventy persons, who had left for Moscow while others had only been thinking about it, had been given permission to leave. This news coincided with escalating use of force by the regime to bring about collectivization, particularly in Siberia.11
Sometime in the summer of 1929, the Froese family and five or six other families from their village joined the mass flight of German, primarily Mennonite, peasants to Moscow. My father remembered a lot of travelling around by his parents to gather information and discuss plans. Finally it was time to make their move. They tried to sell as much as they could, and my father remembered a well-attended auction sale at which most of the household furnishings, the farm equipment, and the livestock were sold. His job was to catch the chickens so that they could be auctioned. The house, livestock feed, firewood, and some of the land were left to the oldest Froese boy to sell after they left. He was in love with a girl from a family not planning to emigrate, so he planned to stay. The auction sale caused a lot of excitement in the village because, in my father’s words, “everything was sold, and we were moving to America.”12 The family packed their clothes and seven bags of roasted zwieback (buns), the staple of Mennonite migrations, and boarded the train for Moscow. The train stations along the route were choked with people, and in Tatarsk young Hans was lifted into the train car through a window. The train had four berths per car with a long hallway along one side, and my father remembered the cars being very dirty. It took two days to reach the Ural Mountains. He recalled they spent three months in the city, indicating they arrived there in late August or early September.
A photograph of the Werner-Froese family taken in Moscow in 1929 and referred to as a passport photo. Standing in the back are ‘Big’ Sara Werner and Herman Froese. Seated are Johann Froese and Anna (Werner) Froese with ‘Little’ Sara Froese to the left of Anna and my father Hans between Anna and Johann. Katya (Jonas) is the little girl in the front.
The Froese family lived in the dachas on the edges of Moscow, the summer homes of Moscow residents. Their temporary home was in a village near the Perlovka train station, one of Moscow’s suburbs. The family seems to have been fortunate enough to obtain ration cards enabling them to buy bread—even if at exorbitant prices. The roasted buns were saved for the trip across the ocean. They were soon joined by swelling numbers of Mennonites and then other German peasants. A report of 18 September 1929 indicated there were 250 families in the areas surrounding Moscow.13 By 11 October, Otto Auhagen, an expert on Germans in the east who was in Moscow, noted there were 800 Mennonite families totalling 4,500 “souls” on the edges of Moscow. In addition, there were some 100 Lutheran and Catholic families. By 26 October, the number of Mennonite families had risen to 1,030, and the number of Lutheran and Catholic families had doubled, with more arriving every day.14 It is estimated that in total some 18,000 Germans congregated in Moscow in the fall of 1929.15
A preoccupation of the refugees was obtaining the necessary passports for emigration. By late October, the Soviet regime had increased the cost of obtaining passports to 200 rubles, with an additional twenty rubles for the Red Cross. In a letter describing their experience, Anna noted they paid 220 rubles for passports, a much larger amount than the twenty-five rubles she had anticipated in her letter of February 1929.16
The flight to Moscow touched off an international incident involving Germany, Canada, and the Soviet Union. The arrival in Moscow of thousands of German peasants determined to flee the Soviet paradise made news around the world. It forced difficult choices on all the governments involved, none of which, sadly, had any real concern for the human tragedy unfolding, even though their officials were strident in their efforts to find a solution to the international incident it was creating. The Soviet Union was caught off guard by the sudden arrival of refugees and the immediate press reaction to their plight. It was afraid of being isolated diplomatically, and relations with Germany factored importantly in its reluctance to take hurried or drastic measures. Germans had the most sympathy for the plight of the refugees from an ethnic and national point of view and offered to provide them with German passports to facilitate their entry to another country as German citizens. Germany, however, could not see its way to actually allowing them to stay in that country because of budget considerations. Canada, the preferred destination, was in the throes of an election campaign, and its evolving approach to immigration policy required greater consultation with the provinces. Saskatchewan’s J.T.M. Anderson, an earlier critic of Mennonite separateness, was the most intransigent of the premiers who resisted the enticements Mackenzie King’s government was prepared to offer to facilitate further Mennonite immigration.17 All of this, however, was not part of most of the refugees’ knowledge or understanding.
On 19 October 1929, it appeared that the diplomatic negotiations between the various governments would be successful, and the Soviet government promised that all the refugees would be given permission to leave. They were organized into eleven groups, and preparations were made to entrain them. During the night of 27 October, the first train headed for Leningrad, the former St. Petersburg and Petrograd, and the border. On 30 October, news arrived that Canada was reluctant to accept any immigrants but might accept some in the spring if they had jobs. A second train already loaded with refugees was shunted to a siding, and the promise of escape came to an end.18
An intense period of negotiation between Germany and Canada, between Canada’s federal government and the provinces, and between Canadian Mennonites and the federal government ensued. For a three-week period, negotiations went on while refugees in Moscow waited and hoped without any knowledge of what was really happening. Canadian public opinion was increasingly opposed to admitting any more Eastern Europeans, and Canada would finally indicate formally on 26 November that further negotiations to allow admission of the Mennonites in Moscow would have to wait until the spring. By then, it was too late. In Germany, the tide of public opinion went the other way, but the various state organs could not agree on a plan of action. Finally, on 18 November, the German cabinet authorized funding for the rescue effort without approval of the Budgetary Committee of the German Reichstag. That decision also came too late as the Soviet regime’s patience had run out the previous evening. On the evening of 17 November, deportations of the German colonists back to Siberia began.19
The Froese family would not make it out of the Soviet Union. Back at home in the village of Grigorevka, Anna reported the sad news to her daughter in Canada.
We have been sent back. Everything was ready; we just had to board and travel to Leningrad. In the evening, it looked promising; we prepared so that if we got word during the night to go to the station—to wait for good news. Then it was completely different. During the same night, a vehicle came, we boarded, and went back to the railway. The children were happy; we were goin
g to America. I told them right away that we were going back; otherwise, they would not have come to get us. The first and second groups had to provide their own way to the station. After all, it was only three verst. I would have willingly, as difficult as it was, gone to the station by myself. That which we wanted to take along, bedding; we would have carried that. The two groups left at night.20
Her despair would have deepened had she known what transpired in Moscow a few days after they were sent back. Amid an outburst of diplomatic indignation by the German government, the Soviet regime relented and stopped the deportations on 25 November. There were still approximately 5,600 refugees left in the city, and all were allowed to emigrate. The German government granted them entry, while Mennonite agencies organized their resettlement in Brazil and Paraguay, where they created the Fernheim Colony. Quietly and without fanfare, approximately 1,300 joined their close relatives in Canada.21
But for young Hans and his family, the knock on the door and the trucks waiting outside to pick them up signalled the beginning of difficult times. Soldiers came to load the Froese family and other refugees onto the red train cars used to haul cattle. They were crowded together in dark and poorly heated railway cars, forty-two people per car. With the onset of winter, temperatures had begun to fall. People frantically tried to take along as many of their belongings as possible because they knew they would desperately need them. It took twelve days to reach Kulunda, the train station nearest to the village of Grigorevka. For Anna, it was particularly difficult because she was two months shy of her forty-fifth birthday and eight months pregnant. It is hard to imagine what the trip back must have been like for her. They set out for home from Kulunda by sleigh but were soon caught in a terrible snowstorm. They had to stop for the night in the Russian village of Zlatopolye, where a Russian family took them in. That night Anna gave birth to a daughter, whom they named Martha. Johann Froese and Anna with her new baby remained in Zlatopolye for a week, and the other children were taken to the “poor old homestead.”22 My father remembered it took three days to warm up the house. They took turns staying up to feed the central brick oven with straw until the house had sealed itself and retained the heat. Froese’s son Johann had managed to sell more of their belongings while they were away, but the money had been placed in the selsoviet to be forwarded to them in Moscow. Anna’s cryptic reference in a letter to her daughter in Canada that “when we came back the money was still in the soviet, but you can imagine,” suggested they never got it back. She went on: “There was a lot of stealing, poor nourishment, no cooking utensils, the house was empty. I wanted to have a little cloth to wrap the child, but there wasn’t enough.” They had no beds and had to sleep on the straw they had spread on the floor.23
