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

by Hans Werner

  The CP ship, Beaverbrae, part of reparations after the war, became the ship for emigrants on their way to Canada in the postwar years. Johann and Margarethe Werner left Bremen on the Beaverbrae on 28 June 1952 and arrived at Quebec City on 9 July 1952.

  The sailing of the Beaverbrae from Bremen triggered the assembly of two trains of colonist cars at Quebec, timed to coincide with the ship’s arrival, with one destined for Montreal and Toronto and one for Winnipeg and points west.11 My parents recalled the experience of the train leaving southern Ontario, and after a few hours the endless rocks, forests, and lakes were all they could see from the train’s windows. A particularly lively German woman who was a war bride on her way to join her husband and his family in northern Ontario had been the “life of the party” in the early stages. When the train travelled for hours through the Canadian Shield without any evidence of human settlement, she became progressively quieter. Johann and Margarethe vividly recalled the scene of the small family assembled on the platform at a remote town in northwest Ontario that was her new home. The whole car strained to get a glimpse of this new beginning, but it was hard for anyone to imagine the adjustments she faced.

  Along the unending railway tracks, the German-speaking immigrants were thrilled at the signs announcing what they thought were German city names, only to realize that in Canada Regina was pronounced very differently than the sound that rolled off their German tongues. Margarethe and Johann were headed for Swift Current, where a relative of Margarethe’s mother’s first husband had sponsored them under the Farm Worker Scheme. Their Canadian sponsor, Peter Dyck, picked them up at the Swift Current station to begin their life on a Saskatchewan farm.

  An almost morbid irony infused the story of my father’s first days in Canada. The Dyck farm was small, and a few days after they arrived a granary was to be moved on the farmyard. Johann was given the task of standing by with a rifle as the granary began to move to shoot the skunks that would emerge due to the disturbance. It was thought that, since he had been a soldier, he would naturally be able to shoot better than the other farmers, whose conscientious objector status had spared them military training. Shooting skunks on a Canadian Mennonite farm village was a long way from the daily horrors of war. Although it was brief, the interaction with the Dyck family, who belonged to a more conservative Mennonite group, was an eye-opener for the new arrivals. In contrast to their experiences, the life of the conservative Mennonite family on the sparsely populated prairie seemed narrow and limited. Johann and Margarethe did not stay in Swift Current long. The Dyck farm was too small to provide steady work for Johann, and the rest of her family, including her parents, lived in Drake, a considerable distance northeast of Swift Current. During the month Johann and Margarethe were in Swift Current, he repaired the Dycks’ farm equipment for the upcoming harvest. Her half-sister Tina tried to find Johann a job in Drake and was successful for the fall harvest.

  Sandy Blair, Johann’s new employer in Drake, operated a large farm, and his harvesting equipment included a number of combines and trucks. Johann had no time to settle into their new home but went directly from the car that had brought him and a pregnant Margarethe to Drake to the combine on the Blair farm. One hot harvest day Dale, the youngest of Blair’s sons, about twelve years old and hardly tall enough to see over the steering wheel, was driving a grain truck. When the truck drove by his combine, Johann glimpsed a fire under it. He immediately began cleaning up the swaths near the fire to prevent it from spreading. The other combines also joined the effort and, with the rest of the crew, were able to extinguish the fire before it consumed the entire field. Although grateful for their quick action, Blair accused the combine operators of being careless by tossing their still lit cigarette butts onto the desiccated grain field. Johann had seen Dale drive across a swath and suspected that straw had been forced too close to the exhaust system, where it had begun to smoulder and eventually set the field on fire. Blair did not speak German, and Johann spoke no English. The only way he could finally convey to Blair what had happened was by taking him by the hand to the truck to see for himself the still smouldering straw underneath it.

  These stories of finding his way in a strange land, and in somewhat embarrassing circumstances, were part of my father’s repertoire. When told many years later, they were conveyed nostalgically and with a certain fondness for the challenges of his early days in Canada. Not many of his stories portrayed the depths of pain and worry associated with starting over in a strange land. Those stories were left to my mother to tell.

  The arrangement with Sandy Blair was that he would provide them with a house in exchange for their providing room and board for another two workers and for Margarethe to cook meals for the harvest crews. That was hard work since she was eight months pregnant. The house was about nine miles from Drake on the open prairie. When Blair was asked about allowing her parents to move in with them, his answer was no, he was not operating an old folks’ home.

  There were immediate financial pressures. The Canadian Mennonite Board of Colonization had financed the trip to Canada, and the debt had to be repaid. An April 1953 letter from the board listed Johann and Margarethe’s payments of over $400. The letter was addressed to John Werner. Sometime after he arrived in Canada, Johann had become John, while Margarethe had become Margaret. Along with financial pressures came joys but also grief and loss. On 5 October 1952, the couple’s first child was born in the Lanigan hospital. I was named Hans Peter, after my father and likely after Margaret’s first husband. Her half-sister, together with her children and parents, lived in Drake in a house owned by the church. Tina had a part-time job cleaning the church, for which she was paid forty dollars a month and free use of the house.12 But early in 1953 she became ill with cancer and died on 23 March. Her children, Erwin and Marie, fourteen and eleven, became orphans. Tina’s death and the birth of a baby meant that the number of dependants who looked to John and Margaret for their livelihoods had jumped from two in Germany to five within the first few months of their arrival in Canada.13

  Although Margaret’s aged parents did not have to move out of the house immediately, the question of where they and the two children would stay and how they would live became more pressing. John had fulfilled his promised year of farm work, and the decision was made to quit work at the Blair farm to take up a job as an auto mechanic in Drake. That would allow them to move into town and afforded them the opportunity of having the grandparents live with them. It also soon became clear that, though the two orphan children had relatives in Drake, they were looking to John and Margaret to take care of them.

  In November 1953, John started work at a small garage in Drake at a salary of $250 a month.14 The move was a disaster. The owner of the garage had his own problems, and John had to beg to get even ten dollars of the wages he had earned. By February 1954, he could go on no longer and negotiated for a pickup truck as part payment of the wages owed to him. He borrowed money from Margaret’s uncle Peter to drive to Steinbach, Manitoba, a Mennonite town quickly gaining a reputation as the regional “automobile city” and the home of his sister Aganetha.

  She had married Peter B. Reimer in 1934, which John knew about from some of the last letters they had received while he was still in Siberia. Peter was a farmer and, in the 1950s, quite successful. The Reimer family had been members of a subgroup of Mennonites known as the Kleine Gemeinde that had settled in the Steinbach area. As a result of a church split, another group, known as Holdeman, had been formed, and some time before my parents arrived in Steinbach Peter had joined that group. The Holdeman church had a large following in the Steinbach area, and their characteristic beards for baptized males and black head coverings for women made them readily visible in the community. Aganetha was mother to twelve children, and a reserved nature together with her husband’s increasing religious eccentricity meant the divergence of her life experiences from those of her brother was extraordinary.

  John travelled to Steinbach and stayed at his si
ster’s farm for a month while he looked for work. He got a job at an auto dealer as a mechanic, a job more suited to him than farming. For Margaret, the time John was away was lonely. She felt responsible for the whole family and was gradually running out of money. Her story of adjusting to a new life in Canada included an account of a lady who appeared at her door to collect money for the Red Cross. Margaret had only a dime left but was too embarrassed not to give the woman anything. So she gave her the dime. That evening John came back from Steinbach with the proceeds of his first paycheque. After a few days in Drake, he returned to Steinbach alone to work and find accommodations for the family.

  When John returned to Steinbach, he tried to buy a house. In one of his stories, he recalled asking his brother-in-law Peter for a loan to make the down payment. Peter took him down into the basement of their farm home, reached up between the floor joists, took down a bag, and counted out $500. This was unimaginable wealth for John. Trying to borrow the rest from the local credit union was impossible; he had no credit record and no equity. Negotiating with the seller to take back a mortgage did work out, however, and within a month or two the groundwork had been laid for a new beginning. In April 1954, John returned to Drake to pick up the family, and a day after his arrival their second child, another son, was born. The move to Steinbach now included an extended family made up of John and Margaret, who were thirty-six and thirty-two, and their two children, one of whom was a newborn and the other aged one and a half; Margaret’s parents, who were seventy and eighty-three; and Marie and Erwin Vogt, Tina’s children, who were thirteen and fifteen.

  Meshed with stories of hardship were stories of the humorous side of adjusting to a new country. John was driving his pickup truck when he came upon a skunk on the road. Not being familiar with skunks, he had not worried unduly about avoiding it and accidentally drove over it, only to experience the pungent smell familiar to all rural prairie folk. He tried unsuccessfully to wash the truck and finally had to park it in a gravel pit near Steinbach for two weeks until the smell had dissipated enough that he could live with it.

  Until Erwin and Marie could begin work, John was the only wage earner, and it meant careful management of the household and hard work in the garden and kitchen on Margaret’s part. Nevertheless, the move to Steinbach was a crucial turning point for the Werners. The dramatic increase in automobile ownership that characterized the 1950s and 1960s boded well for John’s skills and Steinbach automobile dealers. With relatively consistent employment, John and Margaret could make the mortgage payments on the house that John had bought on Main Street at the edge of town. They joined the Steinbach Mennonite Church, whose members were in large part Mennonite immigrants who had come to Canada from the Soviet Union in the 1920s. The church helped to supplement the income needed to support Margaret’s elderly parents until her mother had been a resident for ten years and became eligible for Old Age Security.

  Another cycle of autobiographical memory began with my first memories: the memory of my grandfather taking me by the hand to watch equipment digging a hole for a new water treatment facility near our home and then the memory of how he became ill and his death in 1957 when I was five. John and Margaret also continued to be parents to the two orphaned children. As a fifteen year old, Erwin had more developed connections to Drake, and when he got his driver’s licence he went back, but according to my mother he came back with tattered clothes and no money. Marie was much more conscious of being an immigrant and worked hard helping my brothers and me with schoolwork.

  Four years after John and Margaret arrived in Steinbach, the federal government created the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) mortgage program, which meant they could buy a new home in one of Steinbach’s first postwar suburbs, with a low down payment and a long time to pay off the mortgage. They were like most other postwar Canadian couples who had a strong desire for family and household security. They raised six children in the bungalow they had built on Spruce Crescent.

  Margaret contributed to the household economy with a large garden and jars of canning that filled the pantry each fall. Picking blueberries in the forests of the Canadian Shield was an annual ritual whose tediousness was tempered by the prospect of eating the Mennonite version of perogies my mother made that was a frequent treat during the winter. The garden was contested space in my parents’ relationship. In the early years of living in the home on Spruce Crescent, the back yard was almost entirely devoted to the garden, and almost all of it was planted to vegetables. For my mother, the memories of the famine loomed large, and she placed great importance on the ability to raise your own food. Each spring my father would negotiate for more lawn and less garden, an idea my mother steadfastly resisted. Gradually, however, the grass took over the garden, and more flowers appeared, but there was always a garden. Late summer and fall were busy with picking, shelling, peeling, and canning. A kitchen full of home-baked buns and lemon twists on Saturday mornings also helped to moderate the size of the food budget needed for the large family.

  It took a few years before “Canadian” foods entered the Werner household. The arrival of pizza, which some of my siblings had tasted at friends’ homes, was nearly a traumatic event. My mother was sure the pungent smell of baked cheese signalled that whatever it was it had spoiled. Toast, on the other hand, she tasted for the first time in the hospital after one of my siblings was born. It meant that we soon acquired a toaster, and though the bread remained home baked rather than the “Wonder Bread” popular in the 1960s it was now toasted.

  When John first began work in Steinbach, he worked for an automobile dealer who also owned a construction company. His stories included driving a caterpillar and scraper constructing drains on the flat lake bottom of Manitoba’s Red River Valley. For the most part, however, he fixed cars. For a decade or more, John supplemented his day job by buying used cars, fixing them up after his regular working hours at one of Steinbach’s automobile dealerships, and then selling them. A series of six or seven 1952 and 1953 Chevrolets briefly became the family car before being sold at a profit, only to be followed by the next one that needed some repairs. There was not a lot of time for anything other than work; John worked long hours, many evenings, and every Saturday.

  Recreation for a growing immigrant family had to be inexpensive. An outing on Sunday after church was a picnic in the park. The Werner family joined other immigrant families in Winnipeg’s Assiniboine Park. In the 1950s and early 1960s, a variety of immigrant families used the park for a summer afternoon away from the daily routines and grind of finding their way into the middle class. After a few years in Steinbach, John took up fishing and, as time and resources permitted, was able to make fishing a lasting and enjoyable hobby. Family trips began to include Sunday afternoons to one of Manitoba’s many lakes, and picnics came to be replaced by overnight camping trips.

  Living in what was then a predominantly Mennonite community meant that John and Margaret could attend German church, and the language of the workplace and for most other things they needed could be Low German. As a result, they never became as fluent in English as did most of their postwar immigrant counterparts. The family doctor, Dr. Krueger, spoke fluent High German, and most businesses had staff fluent in Mennonite Low German. Being the oldest in the family, I have sharp, and not always pleasant, memories of having to take or make phone calls for my parents when there was an English-only speaker at the other end of the line or facing the obligation of reading and explaining mail that was unanticipated or unusual. I have no memories of learning to speak English. Although Mennonite Low German was the only language spoken in the home, I somehow learned English—apparently first from playing with the neighbourhood children and then in school. In contrast to most Mennonites in Steinbach, it was important in our family to be German Mennonites. It meant attending German-language Saturday school, where Pastor Hulseman from the local Lutheran church tried desperately to convey the German language to his reluctant, blond-haired, blue-eyed, and freckle
-faced charges. For Margaret, the increasing use of English among her children was a lasting disappointment, and her inability to converse easily with her grandchildren was the clearest sign of the challenges she faced adapting to a new country.

  The adjustment of my parents to Canadian life, though not traumatic, was a constant reality in our home. I recall with some guilt being embarrassed about my parents—particularly about their poor English-language skills. I do not recall any conversations about returning to Germany and certainly not to the Soviet Union. After I became an adult, there were treasured visits to Germany but only because of the connection to relatives from their “old world.” Modern Germany had little appeal for them and was really a foreign country. There were differences between my parents, my father was much less likely to look back, but it took my mother almost to the end of her life to admit that her home was now Canada.

  13

  Memories, Stories, and History

  The war years washed over my parents’ lives like a tsunami, and the debris left in its wake resurfaced in the 1950s. Much, however, was gone forever. The MCC’s search service continued to function well into the 1950s to try to reconnect families torn apart by the war. Along with placing a request with the MCC, Margaret posted notices in the German-language Mennonite paper Der Bote to try to find John’s sisters in the Soviet Union. Sometime in the 1950s, his sister in Siberia heard from an acquaintance about the request and responded. After having heard no news about each other for fifteen years, the story of their experiences after John left in 1938 began to emerge.