The Constructed Mennonite - History, Memory, and the Second World War
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The Constructed Mennonite
History, Memory, and the Second World War
Hans Werner
University of Manitoba Press
Winnipeg, Manitoba
Canada R3T 2M5
uofmpress.ca
© Hans Werner 2013
Printed in Canada
Text printed on chlorine-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper
16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database and retrieval system in Canada, without the prior written permission of the University of Manitoba Press, or, in the case of photocopying or any other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca, or call 1-800-893-5777.
Cover design: Frank Reimer
Interior design: Karen Armstrong Graphic Design
Maps: Weldon Hiebert
All photos courtesy the author.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Werner, Hans, 1952–
The constructed Mennonite : history, memory, and the Second World War / Hans Werner.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Issued also in electronic formats.
ISBN 978-0-88755-741-5 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-88755-436-0 (PDF e-book)
ISBN 978-0-88755-438-4 (epub e-book)
1. Werner, John, 1917–2003. 2. Mennonites—Russia (Federation)— Siberia—Biography. 3. Mennonites—Manitoba—Biography. 4. Immigrants— Manitoba—Biography. 5. Storytellers—Manitoba—Biography. 6. Ex-prisoners of war—Manitoba—Biography. 7. World War, 1939–1945—Biography. 8. World War, 1939-1945—Influence. 9. Autobiographical memory. I. Title.
BX8143.W37W37 2013 289.7092 C2012-908123-X
The University of Manitoba Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for its publication program provided by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Department of Culture, Heritage, Tourism, the Manitoba Arts Council, and the Manitoba Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Illustrations
Introduction
Part 1 Siberia
1 Beginnings
2 Difficult Years
3 Ivan, Stalin’s Hope
4 The Mist Clears
Part 2 War
5 War Stories
6 Johann: Becoming a German
7 The Fog of War
8 The 401
9 The Collapse
Part 3 Becoming Normal
10 New Beginnings
11 Margarethe (Sara) Vogt (Letkeman)
12 The Immigrants
13 Memories, Stories, and History
Appendix: Family Trees
Glossary
Notes
To Kadin, Abigail, Anna and David
Acknowledgements
I want to thank Royden Loewen, Dan Stone, Melissa Werner, Jim Suderman and the anonymous readers for U of M Press for taking the time to read and offer thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this book. I am also indebted to archivists at the Mennonite Heritage Centre in Winnipeg, the Mennonite Church Archives at Goshen College, Goshen, Indiana, and the German Military Archives in Freiburg, Germany, for their assistance in helping me to uncover and make available what were often obscure sources. It was a pleasure working with Weldon Hiebert on the maps and I again benefitted from the patience and interest of David Carr and his staff at U of M Press. I am most indebted to my parents, John and Margaret Werner, both of whom have passed on, for patiently telling their stories over and over again. In spite of this much appreciated assistance, the responsibility for what is in these pages is solely mine.
Illustrations
Maps
1 Mennonite settlements on the Kulunda Steppe
2 Mennonite settlements in West Siberia
3 Places where Ivan was stationed as a Red Army soldier
4 German attack on the Soviet Union, June 1941
5 Movements of the 401 Artillery Brigade, 1943–45
Photographs
1 Site of the former village of Grigorevka, 2010
2 Werner-Froese family’s passport photo taken in Moscow, 1929
3 Ivan and his friends holding musical instruments, 1934
4 Aganetha (Neufeld) Werner
5 Mladshiy Leytenant Ivan Werner, c. 1941
6 Johann Werner in the truck he drove for the Carl Leib firm in Pabianitz, Poland
7 Johann Werner’s baptism group
8 Sara Letkeman with her fellow collective farm workers, 1939
9 Johann and Margarethe Werner wedding photo, 1951
10 Canadian Pacific immigrant transport ship, the Beaverbrae
The Constructed Mennonite
Introduction
It was one of those March days in the southern Canadian prairies when the sun’s warmth has the feel of spring but the air still has an edge of winter. I travelled alone from Winnipeg to Steinbach, Manitoba, a small city forty-five minutes away where I had grown up, to visit my father in the hospital. He had been diagnosed with stomach cancer some months earlier and had steadily been losing weight because he could no longer eat properly. When the surgeon performed exploratory surgery, it was I who had to tell my father there was nothing that could be done for his illness, and though it was not a subject he discussed, he knew he was dying. On this Sunday, I knew I would be alone with him, and the thought crossed my mind that the circumstances of my visit might free him to tell stories he had never told before.
My father told stories about his life experiences for as long as I can remember, and together with my mother’s autobiography his stories of the Stalinist years in the Soviet Union, the experiences of the Second World War, and the immigrant experience in Canada framed who we were and are. The stories were fantastic tales for a boy growing up in a sleepy Mennonite town in southern Manitoba. My need to understand my father’s stories became more acute when I became an adult, and in the 1980s, some twenty years before the March trip, I interviewed my parents more formally and tried to uncover any additional sources that could shed light on their remarkable life story.
The primary subject of this book is my father’s story and how it was told, and the book has two purposes—the first is to tell the life story of an otherwise ordinary person who experienced the upheavals of the twentieth century in the form of war and totalitarianism from a unique perspective. As David Thelen says in an essay on the relationship between individual experience and history, this account of my father’s life is an attempt to join “the process of creating history” with the “experience of living life.”1
My father was born to Johann and Anna (Janzen) Werner in 1917, just after the Bolshevik Revolution. He was named Hans, and in the German-speaking community where he grew up he kept that name until he went to school. Then in Stalinist Russia he became “Ivan” and part of Stalin’s hope to transform the Soviet Union into a strong, industrialized bastion of communism. When war enveloped the world, he fought as a Red Army soldier, first in the Winter War with Finland, then as a junior officer stationed on the German–Soviet frontier when the Nazi armies attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941. A new era would begin for him when he was captured by the Germans, only to be resettled in occupied Poland, where he became “Johann,” was naturalized, and then drafted into Hitler’s German army. He fought on the Western Front for the rest of the war
before being captured by the Americans in April 1945, a month before the war ended. He was a U.S. prisoner of war until 1946, when he was released and began trying to emigrate to Canada. Before that happened, he married my mother, a refugee with many of the same experiences, and after they finally arrived in Canada in 1952 his life in a new country would be marked by another name change. He became “John” and lived the life of an ordinary postwar immigrant finding his way in Canada.
The series of names—Hans, Ivan, Johann, and John—while referring to the same person mark the various ethnic and national identities that my father negotiated. Each name change in my retelling of his story marks a change in who he was. To his children, however, he was always “Papa.” His main credits were that he was a skilled auto mechanic, a good husband and provider, the father of a suburban postwar baby boom family. He was always an immigrant in the sense that he never spoke English fluently and was somewhat of an outsider because of his distinctly military past in a town with a sense of itself as a pacifist religious community.
In her reference to Art Spiegelman’s Maus, the graphic biography of Spiegelman’s father, a Holocaust survivor, Susan Engel suggests that the story is “told twice, once to his son and then again to us, his son’s readers.” It is also heard by two audiences, the “son who is finding out what his father endured and why his father is the way he is,” and the “rest of us, hearing the grim details that augment and bleakly enliven what we know about a distant time and place.”2 The stories told here have a similar pattern. My father’s stories were told first to private audiences, and with this writing they become public and history. From his memories and stories, we gain another perspective on what Stalinism, Nazism, famine, war, and migration meant. His memories in that sense become part of what the collective memory of these events is and will be.
My second purpose in writing this book is to explore the nature of autobiographical memory. Scholarship in literature, the neurosciences, and oral history has illustrated the complexity of understanding what we can actually remember about the past, how memory works at the level of the brain, and how we construct the narratives that tell others about what we remember. My father was a good storyteller who captivated many casual listeners with tales of his experiences. I heard him tell stories for forty years or more and have heard many of them repeated innumerable times. Some stories were told sparingly, and occasionally he allowed fleeting glimpses into his memory, exposing details that did not otherwise appear in his stories. Some of his stories had gaps, and he kept secrets that he never told but that other research uncovered.
The stories we tell about our pasts fall into the category of what psychologists call episodic memory, “the kind of memory that allows one to remember past happenings from one’s life.” It belongs to what has become accepted as long-term memory but is different from semantic memory, the more general knowledge that all of us know and remember, such as how to ride a bicycle.3 The intricacy of how the brain remembers is beyond the scope of what I can consider here; however, autobiographical memories are not limited to the functions of the brain but are also the domain of narrative and language. We not only remember but also tell, and we can only know about someone’s autobiographical past when he or she conveys it to us in language. Psychologist Ulrich Neisser concludes that “the consistency and accuracy of memories is an achievement, not a mechanical production. Stories have a life of their own.”4 The stories my father told had a life of their own, and the following pages are also about the way he told them. We are always constructing ourselves when we share memories of our past lives with others. My father’s stories are a part of creating the self, using “autobiographical material as a way to know and communicate who we are now.”5
Writing about one’s father is hardly an exercise embarked on from some distant vantage point or objective hilltop. My father’s story is also my story. My interest in history was stimulated to a large extent by my attempts to come to terms with, contextualize, and make sense of my father’s many stories. Jill Ker Conway’s question of “what we can make of…the network of kin who constitute our tribal past” has a necessarily personal answer: “if we can know them, they are a set of compass points by which we can chart our own course.” In her case, discovering that her father’s early death could be explained by the same heart condition she had “changed the emotional and moral climate” of her childhood and offered “personal evidence of how much history matters.”6 For me, the history of the Second World War was always framed in terms of my father’s experience, and to a large extent my quest to understand his story drew me into more formal studies of history.
Not surprisingly the main sources for this book are my father’s stories, told to visitors in our home, sometimes to us as children, and then formally in interviews I conducted with my father in the mid-1980s when he was in his sixties. My interviews were not informed by any reflection on oral history methodology. They were also quite different from what might be termed an “oral history project” in the sense that I, as interviewer, was the son of the subject and both benefited from and was constrained by my own memories of stories my father had told ever since I was old enough to remember them. The interviews were conducted in the Low German language, in which he was most comfortable, then transcribed and translated. The interviews were interspersed with research in secondary and some significant primary sources, which then became parts of annotations to the original transcriptions. The later interviews revisited some of the stories told earlier and were tempered by my deepened understanding of the contexts of the stories. Although I seldom made direct reference to additional research, the later interviews attempted to resolve gaps and inconsistencies in his stories more specifically. Some of what I uncovered in additional research, however, was never raised in subsequent interviews. After the formal interviews, I had occasional conversations with my father that revisited some of his stories more informally. Only notes were kept of these interactions.
There are significant additional primary sources that inform this book. My father kept a limited number of personal documents from the postwar period in Germany. They included a German driver’s licence, various work-related documents, and a document pertaining to his release as a prisoner of war. The Mennonite Church Archives in Goshen, Indiana, are the repository of the records of the Mennonite Central Committee and are home to the records of its work with refugees in postwar Germany. These records proved invaluable for reconstructing the process of my father’s immigration to Canada. The files of the Berlin Documents Centre, since transferred back to Germany, contained the records of his naturalization as a German citizen in the 1940s. In the German Military Archives in Freiburg, a valuable collection of war diaries pertaining to his unit turned up, and the Deutsche Dienstelle, a German government organization dedicated to maintaining the records of former members of the German military, was invaluable in providing the details of my father’s military service. A memoir written by his aunt became available some time after I interviewed my father in the 1980s, and it told the story of the Werner family before my father’s birth. The memoir was brought by family members from the Soviet Union who immigrated to Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, an event that signalled the beginning of the collapse of communism and finally permitted ethnic Germans to emigrate in large numbers.7
Although the focus here is primarily on my father, Chapter 11 contrasts many of his memories with those of my mother, who experienced the same historical events but from the point of view of a woman, not a soldier. Her story relies on many of the same sources, and my interviews with her were conducted in the same time period as those with my father. The memories of my father’s aunt and those of my mother suggest gendered points of divergence in the telling of life stories.
The contexts of the lives recounted here transcend a number of national, ethnic, and linguistic boundaries. The webs of autobiographical memories explored in these pages are inexorably entwined with the primary relationships of family, a
nd the contexts of revolution, war, and migration contribute to complex familial relationships in my family’s stories. To help the reader navigate these webs, there are maps and photos interspersed in the text, an appendix with family trees for both my parents, and a glossary of terms and foreign words that appear in the stories.
When I visited my father in the hospital on that March Sunday in 2003, I came away without any new stories. The stories that had been untold remained untold. A short while later he died, and his autobiographical memory took on a new form as the memory of a father’s stories told and retold, giving him a form of immortality.
Part 1
Siberia
1
Beginnings
My father told many stories, and, like most children, I developed an interest at some point in knowing more about my grandparents and great-grandparents. When I asked him about earlier Werner family history, he remembered almost nothing. He could tell me he was born in Russia in 1917 in the village of Nikolaipol on the West Siberian plain just after the Russian Revolution, an event that would change the world for his and many other families. His name, Hans Werner, made it clear he was not Slavic. The turmoil that enveloped families in Russia around the time he was born and for many years thereafter had seemingly destroyed the desire of his family to narrate or for him to absorb the past before his birth in any significant way. In the stories he told, only fragments of memory shed light on anything of the family’s history before his birth. His mother’s family name was Janzen, a common name among Mennonites in Russia, and he thought he remembered her telling him they had migrated to Siberia from Zagradovka, a Mennonite colony in Ukraine.