The Constructed Mennonite - History, Memory, and the Second World War

by Hans Werner

  I never asked my father about the first marriage, but during other visits with my relatives in Germany and with my mother after his death some details emerged. Ivan married Anna Loewen, likely in 1938. My aunt Katya considered her an attractive woman, with “a beautiful face,” and Ivan had dated her for some time. The marriage ceremony reflected more difficult times than those of the mid-1930s. Katya recalled that she had canvassed the village for an appropriate shirt to borrow since Ivan had no dress shirt to wear to the ceremony. The wedding was a double ceremony with his friend Jakob Wiebe and fiancée Susanna, and it was a civic affair held in the selsoviet in the nearby village of Annanyevka. In hindsight, it was likely fortuitous, but possibly also surprising, that no pregnancy seems to have resulted from the three months the couple was married before Ivan was drafted into the Red Army.

  The ambitious five-year plans, collectivization, and the emphasis on modernizing Soviet society had been in part to prepare the Soviet Union militarily. People such as Ivan had been Stalin’s hope for the day when the Soviet Union would be a strong industrial and military force. The fateful notice to appear before the Soviet equivalent of a draft board likely came in the summer of 1938, a month or so after Ivan had married Anna. The notice required that he and three others from the village appear before the board in Klyuchi, the seat of local government. The three young men travelled together in a horse-drawn vehicle supplied by the kolkhoz. My father recalled being asked a seemingly simple question, whether or not he was willing to serve the motherland. Certainly by this time any notion of being a pacifist, or requesting military exemption on religious grounds, was not part of his awareness and would not, in any case, be comprehended under Stalinism. Ivan knew there could be only one answer, that he would be honoured to serve if deemed worthy. The process of being drafted included an examination by six or seven doctors and some questions to which the answers were already known, since it seemed a lot of documentation about him had already been collected. Two other young men from the village, his friend Abram Martens and a fellow he only remembered as having the last name Kroeker, were drafted at the same time. At the end of the process, they were pronounced to be healthy, told they had been drafted into the Red Army, and advised that a notice of when and where to appear would be sent to them in a couple of weeks.

  Ivan went home to continue the harvest, and a few weeks later the notice arrived that he was to appear at the train station at Kulunda on a certain day in October 1938. He worked at the harvest until the evening before he left, and early the next day he was on his way to be at the station by eight. There he met other draftees from neighbouring villages, and they all boarded the train for points and futures they could not have imagined. My father recalled that he had not been particularly concerned about the draft because the term of service was three years, and they all expected to return home after that. One of the few times he showed some emotion during our conversations was when he admitted that, once the train was under way and the initial excitement was over, “it struck you that you might never come back.”23

  The train made its way westward toward the Urals, picking up new recruits at many of the stations along the Trans-Siberian Railway. My father remembered it being a quiet trip—not much was said; some of the Russian recruits sang; Ivan, Martens, and Kroeker talked quietly. The train’s ultimate destination was a military base near the city of Kirov in European Russia. By the time the train reached Kirov, some 400 new recruits had been picked up. Once there, boot camp began. Ivan and the others were lined up in rows of four and marched into the barracks. That first day they were still civilians, but it would be the last day for some time.

  My father constructed his narratives of this period in his life in ways suggesting that it was in large part due to his efforts that the surviving remnant of the Werner family recovered from the disaster of the failed emigration of 1929 and the subsequent suicide of Johann Froese. Comparisons with my grandmother’s letters and later revelations point to how his stories became much more selective. Most apparent was the complete absence of references to his first marriage. The separation from his wife that resulted from the war must have been more than just a painful loss. My father must have felt considerable guilt about his role in that separation.

  His stories were also told in the context of Cold War Canada, where the Soviet Union was the embodiment of everything evil. It meant that my father had to balance his own story’s plot of successful participation in Soviet society with the reality of the evil represented by that society in the social context of his listeners. More careful examination of his stories suggests that, to a large extent, my father was not only Ivan in the world beyond his family. He had also come to terms personally with the Soviet system and had found ways to make it work for him. Although he was not a political person, he must have quietly shaken his head at the “old ways” of people such as his stepfather and uncles. Ivan could see that the new regime would survive and that continued resistance would only lead to further suffering and ruin. By the end of the 1930s, the faith of his Mennonite forebears seems to have been far from his mind. Ivan had become part of the Soviet system even though he did not believe in its ideology, and he had left behind the faith and sensibilities of his Mennonite past.

  4

  The Mist Clears

  Until the 1990s, it seemed that the inaccessibility of the Soviet Union and its records and the seeming impossibility of connecting with family that remained there meant that any further Werner history would never be recovered. My father had found ways to construct a narrative of the Werner family that was coherent with the fragments of memory of what he had been told. The collapse of communism in the early 1990s and the emigration of ethnic Germans in its wake raised new possibilities for competing narratives to emerge. In 1997, some sixty years after my father had left his family and Siberia behind, he received a call from a Heinrich Froese, a son of my father’s stepbrother who was travelling in Canada and wanted to pay him a visit. My father did not know Froese, who was part of the large migration of Soviet Germans that flooded into Germany and was now looking for his roots. Heinrich had never known his own father, who had died when Heinrich was young. In the course of the conversation with him, my father related the story about the visit to his grandmother and the Hinz family. Froese responded that he knew a Hinz family that had emigrated from the Soviet Union and promised to connect with them when he got back to Germany. The encounter with Froese and the reference to a Hinz relative proved to be fortuitous. Not only were the Hinzes in Germany relatives, but the Tina (Werner) Hinz my father had visited in the 1930s had written a memoir that had been preserved by her descendants. It tells a story my father could not tell.

  The memoir tells the story of my father’s ancestors. The memoirist’s father and my great-grandfather was Johann Werner, born in a suburb near the Black Sea port city of Berdyansk in 1856. My great-grandmother was Aganetha Neufeld from the village of Steinfeld in the large Molotschna Mennonite settlement. Later references in the memoir suggest that this might have been Aganetha’s second marriage. Tina mentions half-brothers named Warkentin, but they must have lived elsewhere since there is no mention of them living with the Werner family. The courtship of Johann and Aganetha is a recollected story of what Tina remembered being told by her parents. Aganetha had come to visit her brother in Berdyansk, where she met Johann. Johann, his father Johann, and his uncles Heinrich and Jakob were all factory workers. After their marriage, both Johann and Aganetha worked for a few years in Berdyansk before they moved to the village of her parents, where Johann worked in a windmill. He then made parts for wagons and seed-cleaning mills for the Jacob Rennpenning factories of Fabrikerwiese in the Mennonite Molotschna colony.1 Johann made the wooden parts at home and delivered them to the factory, where the metal parts were added before assembly. Tina was born in 1898, when her father was in his mid-forties. By that year, the family was about to join the growing numbers of Mennonite workers who had no land and no prospect of becoming farme
rs. Johann changed his work again when he was hired to work on a nearby estate as manager. The job paid well, but Johann was out of work again when the estate was sold. It meant another change of workplace and a move to a nearby village, where he did finishing carpentry for a Catholic priest in charge of a church being built there. To supplement the resources needed for a growing family, the children helped with opening silkworm cocoons to make silk in the winter. A wealthy Jewish family who lived in the village also provided some paid work for Tina and her brother. On the Sabbath, the two of them went to light the lamps in their large home; they were paid three rubles a month for their work.

  Johann Werner’s father and brothers had moved to Siberia sometime before 1906, and in December of that year Johann also decided to move and join them to finally realize the dream of being his own master. His wife Aganetha was opposed to the move, and as Tina recalls he tried to persuade her by asking if “the children should always only be servants for other people.” That prospect he said he could not bear and lamented that the two of them “live in a stranger’s house, have no garden, no land and have to be workers.” Even if the land in Siberia “was only rented land,” it was better than what they had.2

  Map 2. Mennonite settlements in West Siberia.

  The Werner family’s move to Siberia was part of a large migration that established one of the largest daughter colonies of Mennonites in Russia. The Trans-Siberian Railway opened up vast areas of the West Siberian plain, and, not unlike the story of western Canadian settlement, the tsar needed settlers to make the railway viable. The first Mennonites moved to Siberia as individual families and established small villages or purchased large estates between Omsk and Petropavlovsk, along the railway line. It seems the senior Werner and Johann’s brothers had settled on rented land near Petropavlovsk. Tina recalls that her family left Ukraine to join them in December, travelling in red railway cars that were often cold because they had only small stoves and were not insulated. Her father had sent his brothers some money, and they had rented a house for the family about seventy verst from the city of Petropavlovsk in the predominantly Mennonite village of Skvortsovka, where brother Jakob lived. The family had enough money left over to buy three horses and a cow to begin their new farming life. Johann’s parents and brother Heinrich probably lived in a village approximately twenty-five verst away. Grandfather Werner is described as being big and tall, while Tina remembers her grandmother being a wisp of a woman.3

  Johann had sold all of the family’s furniture before the move, and his first task upon their arrival was to use his carpentry skills to refurnish the household. He also built basic farm equipment and in the spring began farming the land he had rented. The village was surrounded by forest, and Tina indicates her mother soon adjusted to the new environment, particularly because of the prolific wild berries that kept her busy canning jam all summer long. She reports that, even after that first summer of farming on their own, they had grain to sell; “we had bread, and my brothers and sisters did not have to be servants for strangers.”4

  In July 1908, during the second Siberian summer for the Werner clan, the younger Johann Werner, my grandfather, married Anna Janzen. The Janzens were a Mennonite family who had also moved to Siberia from Ukraine. After their marriage, the junior Johann and Anna continued to live with his parents until the fall, when free land became available on the Kulunda Steppe in the Barnaul area, some 700 kilometres southeast of where they had initially settled. Attracted by the possibility of actually owning their land, the senior Johann decided to make the long move to the Kulunda Steppe. The settlement the family decided to join would become one of the largest Mennonite settlements in Russia. Approximately 50,000 desyatin5 of land were granted to Mennonites for settlement on the basis of each household receiving fifteen desyatin per adult male member. In addition, each settler family was promised fifty rubles when they moved onto their land and another fifty rubles when they improved the land by breaking up some of the native sod and constructing buildings.6 After a trip to the area in the fall of 1908, Johann returned to report that he had drawn lots and received a parcel of land in a new village that would be called Nikolaipol. Mennonites had managed to negotiate an exception to the tsarist government’s general rule that the land was to be distributed only on the basis of the number of adult males. Instead, Mennonites petitioned for and were granted permission to divide the amount of land they would be eligible for on the adult male basis equally among households. The resulting farm size ranged from fifty to sixty desyatin.

  Johann Werner spent the winter trying to find a way to move all of their goods by rail, but since the new Mennonite settlement was not connected to the Trans-Siberian Railway he finally decided to make the journey by sleigh. During the winter, Johann and his boys built the sleighs, including one with a caboose-like enclosure to provide shelter for the family on the long trip. At this time, the family included Johann and his wife Aganetha, their son Johann and his wife Anna, and unmarried children Abram, Maria, Tina, and Jakob, the youngest. The senior Johann and the other Werner brothers remained behind in the Petropavlovsk area. In March, the caravan of three sleighs left Skvortsovko and travelled along the tracks to the city of Omsk. The family stayed in various homes along the way, as was the custom for travellers throughout nineteenth-century Russia. From Omsk, they turned south to follow the Irtysh River to the Pavlodar area. There, Tina reports, they stayed in the Mennonite village of Nadarovka for a day, and then travelled to the new town of Slavgorod, which at the time must have been little more than a few shacks.7 They arrived at four in the afternoon on a Sunday in their new home village of Nikolaipol.

  Even though Tina is retelling some of what can only have been told to her by others, her memory is vivid. At the time of the move to Nikolaipol, she was ten years old. She remembers, for instance, that the sleigh trip to Slavgorod took eighteen days. The first task when they got to the Nikolaipol village site was to build a sod hut; a proper house would follow. The sod had to be broken since the Kulunda Steppe had been home only to the Kirghiz and their herds. The Kirghiz were Turkic-speaking nomads who had been displaced by the tsar to allow for settlement by Europeans.

  Nothing was seeded that first summer because the land was still native sod, and the family had to buy everything for the upcoming winter. In the fall, Jakob, the youngest son, died; of fourteen children born to Johann and Aganetha to that point, only five had survived. Fall also brought the second marriage in the family when daughter Maria married Franz Eckert from the village. My grandparents, Johann and Anna Werner, spent the winter with Anna’s parents in a village near Slavgorod. Anna’s brother and two sisters had contracted diphtheria, and all three died within a week. The oldest, Kornelius, was twenty-four, his sister Justina was twenty, and the youngest, Lena, was sixteen. The newly married couple spent the winter helping the aging parents. In spring, the senior Janzens moved to their other married children’s home in the village of Silberfeld, and Johann and Anna returned to Nikolaipol. The summer of 1910 was busy for them. Their first child, also named Anna, was born, the newly broken land had to be seeded, and they built a barn and the typical Mennonite storage building, the sheen. The family all worked hard to make the clay bricks used to build these buildings.

  During the next ten years, the Werner clan prospered. Tina remembers her parents having “luck with the livestock,” which allowed them to advance economically. By 1913, she reports, they had “four cows, eight horses; God had blessed them.”8 By 1917, the younger Johann also had three horses, the four cows had become six, and with Johann’s two cows and all the young stock the farm had become one of the more prosperous in the village. During the First World War, the railway was extended from Tatarsk on the Trans-Siberian line to Slavgorod, making it much more profitable to grow grain to sell on the market for cash.

  These were also the years when Tina became a young woman and was courted by one neighbour boy but fell in love with another. She was only fifteen when Isaac Regehr, son of a newly
arrived family who lived across the street and her brother’s friend, lingered after a visit to ask whether she would marry him. She turned him down because she thought she was too young. A few months later another neighbour boy, Jacob Reimer, came to tell her that he had been in love with her since childhood and wanted to marry her but was prepared to wait until she was older. After a few days of thinking about it, she consented. Her brother Abram married Maria Derksen from a nearby village, a marriage Tina opposed because he had promised a girl in Omsk that he would marry her. My grandfather Johann and grandmother Anna moved out of the family home to establish themselves in their own house nearby.

  It was a time of vibrant church life. Tina reports glowingly on choir programs in which the women wore dresses they all had sewn from the same material and the men all wore black suits. She tells of how she was moved to commit herself to faith at an evening service conducted by a visiting minister. She attended classes at which they memorized the catechism, and she faced the question of whether to be baptized by pouring water on her head, as was done by the larger Kirchengemeinde, or by complete immersion in the river, as was the custom of the Mennonite Brethren. She must have chosen to remain with the Kirchengemeinde since its bishop, Jacob Gerbrandt, baptized her at a ceremony in the church in the village of Reinfeld. Although the names of ministers and the faith practices she describes are clearly Mennonite, the word Mennonite never appears in her memoir. Many former Mennonites in the Soviet Union became Baptists after 1955 and have no memory of a specifically Mennonite faith practice.9