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

by Hans Werner

  There was also time for music and laughter. Everyone in the Johann Werner family was a musician. Tina mentions that she was the main voice in her section of the choir and that she played the guitar, zither, and harmonica. She remembers her father playing almost any instrument, while her mother was an accomplished singer. On an evening when the Werner house was full of visitors, Tina took the zither, and her friend from across the street the guitar, and they began singing. My grandparents joined them for a time before returning to help entertain the guests. Tina recalls that her parents loved singing and music, and the family sang every evening. It was a time of “joy and happiness.” At dusk, when the workday had ended, her father took the violin, and the family sang and played. When it got dark, the lamps were lit, and everyone took out their handiwork.

  Most people, she remembers, led upright lives and attended worship services. In contrast, in the memoir’s accounts of the events of the First World War, the civil war that followed, and then collectivization, people’s status as believers and unbelievers became more clearly stated, and in her estimation many lost their faith entirely. Her positive portrayal of the relationship with her father and brothers in the more carefree years before the First World War is characteristic of her portrayal of men generally. However, after the trauma and turmoil Tina experienced in the early 1920s, men in her memoir become more distant and less reliable. The male figures who represented security and safety before these events are portrayed thereafter as unfaithful; they are taken away from family and loved ones because of arrest and exile, or they die. Men generally can no longer be relied on.

  Even before the First World War broke out, the Werner family’s labour resources started to be taxed. Abram was drafted into the medical corps in the fall of 1913. He was stationed at Moskalenki along the Trans-Siberian Railway near Omsk and wrote to say that things were going well. News of the outbreak of the war in August 1914 shocked the entire village of Nikolaipol, and almost immediately all the adult males were called up for service. For Mennonites, service meant the medical corps or the forestry service that had been established as an alternative to military service for pacifist Mennonites. My grandfather Johann begged his father to assume responsibility for his family. He had also been called into service and would be stationed in Tomsk, where many Mennonite young men served as forestry workers.10 By then, his family included three children: Anna, born in 1910, Sara in 1911, and Aganetha in 1914. The senior Johann was now in his late fifties, old enough for Tina to refer to him as elderly and not able to work as hard as he had before. The outbreak of the war and the loss of his sons to medical and forestry service meant the harvest would have to be gathered by the senior Johann and his wife, daughters, and daughters-in-law. Tina and her father attempted to cut the grain, but she could not handle the horses. With her father managing the horses, and with Tina and Anna, my grandmother, working at it together, they could manage the sheaves. After the grain was cut, Anna and Tina went to the fields to gather the sheaves, while her parents threshed the grain with a threshing stone in the yard. It was time consuming and difficult but possible. In the middle of it all, they got word that the senior Werner grandfather in Skvortsovko was dying.

  Johann left the remainder of the harvest to the women. His wife took him to Slavgorod, where he took the train back to the village near Petropavlovsk, where the family’s Siberian odyssey began. He arrived in time to see his father still alive, to visit with him briefly before he died, and to stay long enough to attend the funeral before returning to Nikolaipol. His father had lived to the ripe old age of ninety-two and had been active until a week before his death.

  Because of his father’s age and the fact that there were no other males around, the younger Johann, my grandfather, obtained leave from alternative service to return home most years to help with the harvest and during seeding. On Christmas day 1917, Johann and Anna had another child, my father, whom they named Hans. Johann might have already returned home permanently from his forestry service to be present at the birth because by then the Bolsheviks were in control and had withdrawn Russia from the war. In March 1918, Tina married Jakob Reimer, the neighbour boy from across the street with whom she had fallen in love five years earlier. The Werner clan continued to grow, and by 1919 my grandfather Johann had built his own home in the village, and his brother Abram had moved into the house on the senior Werner’s yard. The senior Johann also began reducing his own farming activities by giving land to his two sons. In 1920, he seeded only three desyatin, but the village farmers threshed his grain to grind into flour because their own was not yet ripe. Their own supply from the previous year had all been taken by the ruthless grain requisitions of the new Bolshevik regime.

  The turmoil that engulfed Russia during the First World War hardly appears at all in Tina Hinz’s memoir. The war went increasingly badly for Russia, and in February 1917 riots broke out in the capital of Petrograd, as St. Petersburg had been renamed at the beginning of the war. The riots led to the February Revolution in which the tsar abdicated and a provisional government took over with the intention of establishing a liberal democracy. The provisional government kept Russia in an unpopular war, and in the workers’ councils, or soviets, Lenin’s Bolshevik Party gained the upper hand. The October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution brought to power the Communist Party, as the Bolsheviks had renamed themselves. Lenin’s party signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and took Russia out of the war. For the next three years, however, Russia would be embroiled in civil war.

  In Siberia, the new regime quickly gained a modicum of power, and by February 1918 the towns and cities along the Trans-Siberian Railway were in Bolshevik hands. Bolshevik control, however, would be short lived. By June 1918, anti-Bolshevik forces assisted by Czech prisoners of war controlled Siberia. In a coup later that year, a formal White regime came to power under Admiral Kolchak, who installed himself as dictator. For a time, Siberia was an independent region. That situation ended when the Red Army crossed the Ural Mountains in 1919. The clash between the Bolshevik Red Army and Kolchak’s White Army was as intense in Siberia as the contest between the Whites and Reds elsewhere in Russia. On 15 January 1920, Kolchak was captured at Irkutsk and eventually executed. West Siberia was once again firmly under Bolshevik control.11

  The events of the civil war took place primarily in the cities along the Trans-Siberian Railway. The Mennonite villages near Slavgorod were not entirely spared, however. In September 1918, disenchanted German peasants in Podsosnovo, a Lutheran German village not far from Nikolaipol, aligned themselves with Ukrainian peasants who had settled in nearby Cherno Dol to organize a revolt against the brutal White regime. The uprising was stimulated by an order mobilizing those born in 1898 and 1899 for service in the White Army. One thousand peasants gathered in Cherno Dol on 1 September, and in the early morning hours they left for Slavgorod, where they encircled the city and drove out the White Army detachment stationed there. They released political prisoners held in the city and then went home, leaving local Bolshevik sympathizers to set up a revolutionary government. Reaction from Omsk, the seat of Kolchak’s White government, was swift, and the Cossack Hetman Annenkov was immediately dispatched to quell the uprising. His forces arrived by train on 8 September, stopping about six kilometres from Slavgorod, near Arkhangelsk, where they plundered and burned the village. Two days later they recaptured Slavgorod. Four hundred peasants were killed in the battle for the city, and another 2,000 were killed in the ensuing punitive raids on the surrounding villages, including Podsosnovo.12

  These events make only cameo appearances in Tina Hinz’s memoir. Tina describes the years of the civil war as difficult but offers few details. She seems to conflate a number of different civil war events with the dramatic peasant uprising near her home. She notes that both the Red and the White Armies exchanged their tired horses for fresh mounts, which they confiscated from the villagers in Nikolaipol. In general, she describes the White Army as being more brutal to the resident population. The Whi
tes sometimes shot people on the street at random, and she reports that they took two young men from Nikolaipol with them who were never heard from again. The events of the peasant uprising and their consequences for Podsosnovo left a distinct impression on Tina in that they “were remembered for a long time.” She recalls the battle and how “the rumbling went on for hours before it finally became quiet.”13 Here her memory again combines events. The peasant uprising culminates with a Red Army victory rather than the punitive actions of the White Army Cossacks. Her handwritten version and the version published by her family in Germany illustrate the subtleties of social context in the telling of stories. In her memoir, Tina claims “our side won, the Whites had to flee,” while in her family’s edited version the same passage proclaims “the Reds won, the Whites had to flee.” Her version told in the 1960s and that of her descendants in Germany in the 1990s tell the story in ways that were politically and socially acceptable for their respective contexts.

  The events of the civil war and the clash of peasants and Cossacks in a village nearby seem not to have touched the extended Werner family directly. The events of the summer of 1921, however, would devastate them. Tina’s memoir tells the story of the loss of Ivan’s father and grandfather with much greater detail than my father could have remembered or possibly ever knew. Tina begins her account by capturing the intense sense of foreboding she had on a Monday or Tuesday. Her father and brother Johann had been threshing and came home dusty, tired, and hungry. They had a sense of satisfaction, however, because they reported that the crop was now completely under roof. Tina was weepy and told them she sensed someone was going to die or something important was about to happen. Her brothers and father tenderly tried to reassure and encourage her. Her mother and other women in the family do not enter the account, possibly because her mother was recovering from typhus and might not have been up and about. Her husband Jakob finally suggested they go home to sleep, and the others agreed that “tomorrow things will be better.”14

  Shortly after going to sleep, according to her account, Tina woke up not feeling well and “had to go out to vomit, had diarrhea, and had to vomit again and again. It did not stop anymore.” She did not return to the bedroom, where her husband was asleep, until morning, when he realized how sick she was and scolded her for not saying anything to him earlier. He put her back to bed and covered her with a blanket. Soon she began to have cramps in her legs, and then the cramps moved up her body until she also had severe stomach cramps. Jakob ran to get her father, who suggested she be given no water to drink, only peppermint tea. She recalls that she could not see her father because her “eyes had sunk too far into [her] head.” As the disease progressed, she developed even more intense abdominal pain and shortness of breath. She remembers little of the next days; however, in an apparently delirious state, she gave birth to twin boys on Saturday of that week. The twins were stillborn.

  The symptoms Tina describes are those of cholera, a disease caused by a bacterium ingested from contaminated food or drinking water. The disease strikes quickly and if not treated can cause death within hours. The epidemic that gripped the village of Nikolaipol would eventually spare Tina but claim many lives among the extended Werner family and in the rest of the village. According to her account, Peter Born from the village had fallen ill on Tuesday at four o’clock and was dead by midnight. On Wednesday evening, her father Johann had become ill. Her brother Johann, my grandfather, had gone to the mill with her sister Maria’s husband that day, and both had returned home deathly ill. Father and son had died that same Wednesday night, 26 August 1921, and the younger Johann had been buried in the same coffin with his father. Maria lost her husband and two daughters, but she recovered. My grandmother Anna survived, as did her son Hans, my father, but his sister Anna did not.15 Abram, the last surviving adult male Werner family member, became ill and died on Saturday of that week. In total, the village lost thirty-five people to the cholera epidemic. A combined funeral service was held for them at the school, but many family members were too weak physically and emotionally to attend. Tina candidly remarks it was simply “too much at once.”16

  Tina (Werner) Hinz’s memoir follows the model described by Jill Ker Conway, who suggests that, for women writers to convince their readers to “take up an important cause” or “follow a new spiritual path,” as Hinz does, they cannot depart too far from “accepted stereotypes which affirm the man of action and the suffering or redemptive female.”17 Hinz is clear about the purpose for writing down her story: “I wish to write down as well as I can my life experiences so that, if after a long time my children think of reading them, they may come to know what my life here on earth was, and as a result they will learn to know me better.” She is conscious that her memories—the intimate—will become public even if only for her extended family. Hinz clearly wants the memoir to be read as an exhortation for her children to maintain the Christian faith. She becomes explicit about this purpose at the end of the memoir, where she assures her readers that, based on her experiences, “when the storms of life come and the strongest can hardly stand,” holding on to faith is the only way of surviving.18 Certainly her depiction of her growing-up years follows the pattern of painting her father and brothers in a heroic fashion. She portrays them as sensitive men of action making good on the Siberian plain. In the second part of the memoir, where she chronicles her later life and where the story of my father’s family does not reappear, men are subsumed into the evil forces that conspire to separate Hinz from her God. Her memoir focuses on her suffering, and though she becomes a revered midwife in this latter part of her story, the dominant theme of her memoir is her suffering.

  The memoir is dated February 1968, and it appears that all but the last few pages were written at that time. The timing coincided with her seventieth year and a temporary lull in the repression of religion. The strong anti-religious tone of the Khruschev era ended with his removal in 1964, and, though the state remained anti-religious, in the first years of the Brezhnev era anti-religious policies were pursued less aggressively than they had been before and would be thereafter.19 The memoir is written from the vantage point of a deeply religious woman who experienced trauma and incredible sadness. She casts her story as one in which God determined a difficult path for her yet one she still believes was all for her good. The story has a significant turning point that comes when her entry into adulthood coincides with events of history—revolution, war, hunger, and repression. The memories of her childhood paint a picture of an idyllic life. The memories of later years of tragedy seem to enhance these memories of childhood, a childhood that flowed by quickly but was peaceful and beautiful.

  Hinz also tells her story using models typical of Soviet German diasporic narratives. The essential themes of this narrative paint the period after 1917 as a time of troubles that ended a golden age for Germans in Russia. They had been secure in their sense of identity as a German-speaking minority; their institutions, churches, and families had all contributed to a sense of confidence in and even the superiority of their culture. After these events, the tone of the memoir reflects a sense of personal and group loss. The waves of revolution, civil war, famine, arrest, exile, and the Second World War washed over them in rapid succession, and they came to see their lives as those of a repressed minority at the mercy of a heartless regime. Even though their ancestors had left German lands in the eighteenth century, they would increasingly come to see their homeland as Germany, where they believed the ideal ethnic past could be re-created. Hinz did not live to see the diasporic imagination become reality with the migrations to Germany that took place in the 1990s. Her memoir conveys to some extent, however, the mentality that would give energy to the mass migrations of Soviet Germans to Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.20

  For my father, the missing history of his family allowed him to speculate about his origin. The appearance of Hinz’s memoir rendered his speculative stories of origin obsolete. Listening to an account of his fam
ily history before a time he could remember proved somewhat disconcerting. He found it difficult to say much about the story—it was a strange tale to him. Even though the memoirist was someone whom he clearly remembered visiting, he could not identify with her narrative of his family’s origins. The emergence of this competing story illustrated most clearly a pattern in his storytelling. He generally trusted only his own memory and versions of stories. Although he could not discount this version, he also could not make it his own.

  Part 2

  War

  5

  War Stories

  The train that picked up Ivan and his fellow recruits in the fall of 1938 unloaded them at a military installation in Kirov, where he began basic training. It meant first of all stripping and putting all of one’s personal belongings into a bag that was taken away to be put in storage “somewhere.” Next was the mandatory shower and haircut, followed by the donning of the uniform and the march back to the barracks, which completed the transformation to military life. During basic training, Ivan occasionally crossed paths with Martens and Kroeker, the two local boys with whom he had been drafted, but otherwise was only vaguely aware that young men from other German-speaking villages had also been drafted. Clearly the stories of becoming a soldier, basic training, and eventual assignment to a mechanized unit made little lasting impressions on my father, since he only recalled these events when I formally prompted him in a taped interview.

  His experience with equipment as a member of the MTS meant that Ivan was a desirable candidate for the mechanized units of the army, and after basic training he was assigned to a tank unit. It also meant that he lost track of his village friends and never crossed paths with other Mennonites or Siberian Germans again. Becoming part of a tank unit meant a change of location to Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountains, where the mandatory six months of basic training he received at Kirov were supplemented with a few months of tank training. He was trained as a tank driver, a task that required both driving and mechanical skills. The summer of 1939 must have been uneventful from his point of view; there were no stories of new friends made, camaraderie, antics, or other noteworthy happenings. The outbreak of the Second World War when the German Army attacked Poland in September 1939 was also not an event of which my father had a personal memory.