by Hans Werner
Mennonites trace their origins to the radical wing of Luther’s Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. These radical reformers believed that Luther had not gone far enough, particularly on the question of membership in the church. In their understanding, only adult believers should be baptized and become members of the church. As a result, they were rebaptized and came to be known as Anabaptists. They also developed a distinctive belief that the Christian should be a pacifist. The persecution that came their way because of what were considered heretical beliefs helped to create a sectarian view of Christianity manifested in a desire to live apart from others—whom they considered part of “the world.” To secure freedom to practise their radical beliefs, Anabaptists negotiated with various rulers who granted them military exemption and other privileges in exchange for their promise to be productive and orderly subjects. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Dutch–North German branch of these Anabaptists came to be known as Mennonites after Menno Simons, one of their early Dutch leaders. At the same time, some of them migrated to settle the lowlands of the Vistula Delta in West Prussia. In the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, two waves of Mennonites from the Vistula Delta accepted an invitation from Catherine the Great to peasants all over Europe to settle the lands she had recently conquered in her wars with the Turks.
Mennonites from Prussia established two major colonies in Catherine’s New Russia, now Ukraine. The Old Colony, as it became known, was founded in 1789 at the junction of the Chortitza and Dnieper Rivers in the later province of Ekaterinoslav. The second colony was established a few years later along the Molotschna River in the province of Taurida. The tsarina’s hope, and that of her successors, was that Mennonites would be model farmers for their peasant subjects, but there was also a desire among both tsars and Mennonites for them to live separately from their Russian neighbours. By the First World War, Mennonites had established a commonwealth of colonies and daughter colonies across the tsar’s empire. The colony of Zagradovka of my father’s memory was one of them.
The earliest Mennonites to establish themselves in far-off Siberia were wealthy landowners who purchased large tracts of land from the Cossacks and in some cases established enterprises such as mills and farm equipment dealerships. Although the wealthiest Mennonites in Russia owned large estates or industrial enterprises, Mennonites generally had become wealthy relative to their Slavic peasant neighbours. They had developed numerous institutions and a distinctive Russian Mennonite culture that used a particular dialect of Low German in daily exchange and gradually High German for church, business, and other formal communication.
My father was not sure but thought his parents had married in Siberia. His father died in a cholera epidemic when he was only four years old, and the connection with the extended Werner family was broken at that point. He had vague recollections of being told his grandfather had lived in Russia “on a German passport,” but it was not entirely clear what that meant. Did it mean he had never become a Russian citizen or only that he had been born in Germany? It often seemed my father preferred to believe the Werners had not been Mennonite but were of Black Sea German colonist stock. Lutheran and Catholic Germans had also accepted Catherine’s invitation and settled in colonies north of the Black Sea in Ukraine, not far from the Mennonite colonies. They were called colonists to distinguish them from their German-speaking Mennonite counterparts.
One story my father enjoyed telling did shed some light on earlier Werner family history. Sometime in the 1930s he and a group of other young people managed to get permission to use a truck from their collective farm to take a trip to the area where the Werner family had lived when he was a child. My father remembered paying his aunt, Tina (Werner) Hinz, a visit. Some of the Siberian villages had both a number and a name, and the Hinzes lived in a village that was one of a cluster of small settlements known as the “Eighties Villages.” After visiting his aunt, my father travelled farther to Nikolaipol to visit his grandmother. During the visit, she told him to guard the Werner name because he was the only surviving male member of the family. According to her, all the others had died at the same time as his father. He remembered little else of the visit with her other than she had been a small, wiry woman.
The mist of the past had seemingly enveloped everything else about where the Werner family had originated. It left many questions. Although it seemed that with a name like Janzen my grandmother’s family was certainly Mennonite, whether the Werners were Mennonite remained unclear.
When I became interested in discovering more about the Werner family origins, I did come across rare occurrences of the name Werner in Mennonite genealogical records. That at least left open the possibility that the Werner family was Mennonite. I chased down other hints—a possible relative who had moved to Brazil; a Mennonite pastor who had officiated at my parents’ wedding, spent time in Siberia, and apparently come across a Werner family there; and genealogical records of Black Sea Germans. Nothing seemed to offer any hope of uncovering a Werner past that connected to my father. It seemed I would have to be content with him just having “appeared” on the Siberian plain in 1917.
Map 1. Mennonite settlements on the Kunlunda Steppe.
The cholera epidemic that took the lives of most of the male members of the Werner family struck the village of Nikolaipol in the summer of 1921 and resulted in the quarantine of the village until the fall, when it was believed that the cooler temperatures would reduce the potency of the disease. When movement into and out of the village resumed, the reality of how my grandmother, Anna (Janzen) Werner, and her family were to survive hit home. It seems she had few options other than depending on the goodwill of her brothers Aaron and Julius Janzen. Both lived in the village of Silberfeld,1 another of the Eighties Villages located about fifty kilometres southeast of Nikolaipol. In late fall 1921, Aaron came to get his sister and her family. Life in the Soviet Union of the 1920s was not easy, and it seems Anna’s brothers struggled with their own families, adding even more impetus to the need for Anna to remarry quickly. It is unclear how the unfortunate choice of a husband was made, but she married a German colonist with a last name my father remembered only as Jon or Jonas. He thought he was from village number eighty-five; however, if his recollection that the village was the same one where his aunt Tina (Werner) Hinz lived sometime later is accurate, it would have been Khoroshee, a neighbouring village to Silberfeld, the home of the Aaron Janzens.2 Khoroshee was village number eighty-seven, and Jonas lived there with one daughter who was approximately Hans’s age and a deaf mute. Only young Hans became part of the family created by the new marriage; his sisters Sara and Aganetha remained with their Janzen uncles, Sara with Julius, Aganetha with Aaron. It is also unclear exactly when the marriage to Jonas took place, but it was likely in February 1923.
My father did recall that Jonas made samohonka, or moonshine, and was an alcoholic. He was always drunk and frequently abusive. Young Hans was often physically abused, particularly when the two children did not play well together—a frequent occurrence aggravated by his stepsister’s disability. Although my father had a general recollection of these days, his memories were fragmented. His stories never conveyed any sense of how seriously he had been abused; he never mentioned specific injuries or incidents. My father stuttered, and some explanations suggest that stress during the time when a child is learning to talk can aggravate, or even contribute to, stuttering. Perhaps his stuttering originated in part from the abuses suffered at the hands of his stepfather.3 The unfortunate marriage to Jonas quickly became unbearable for Anna, and by May or June 1923 Hans ran away, or, as he corrected himself, his mother sent the six-year-old boy back to the Janzens in Silberfeld. It was not that far away, and he knew the way because he had walked there often with his mother. The Janzen brothers sent someone on horseback to let his mother know that he had arrived safely, and some time thereafter came to take her out of what was obviously an unbearable situation, one in which she was likel
y also being abused. Anna returned to the Aaron Janzens, but she had become pregnant. My father recalled how during the night his uncle Aaron had rolled him up in a blanket and carried him to the home of his other uncle, Jacob Janzen. When he woke up, he wanted to go back, but his older sister Sara, also there, suggested he stay with them for a few days. Tina, or Katya as she would be called, was born on 8 February 1924, and, while the Werner children kept the Werner family name after the marriage to Jonas, Katya was apparently not given the name of her father. The memories of the marriage to Jonas did not fit with the narrative the family wanted to sustain, and my visits with Katya many years later added nothing further to the story.
With the separation from Jonas, the need for a husband to help provide a stable economic basis for her family became a pressing issue again, and Anna soon remarried a second time. It is unclear how the marriage to Jonas was formally ended, though it seems he soon died as a result of his excessive drinking, and there might not have been a need for a formal divorce. In March 1924, a month after Tina was born, Anna married Johann Froese, a widower from Pashnaya, a group of villages located some forty or fifty kilometres south of Silberfeld. Her remarriage meant further separation for the remnants of the Johann and Anna (Janzen) Werner family. My father remembered being packed up in a sleigh for the journey to Grigorevka, where Froese farmed. His new stepfather had a family from his first marriage, and my father remembered being greeted warmly when they arrived. Again only young Hans and the infant Katya became a permanent part of the new family. Sara spent considerable time at the Julius Janzens, while Aganetha seems not to have joined the Froese family at all. Froese’s family included another younger Sara, called “Little Sara” to distinguish her from “Big Sara” Werner. There were also boys, Herman and Johann, and another daughter, Maria. The marriage to Johann Froese finally brought some stability to the remnants of the Johann Werner family. Improving economic prospects for the peasants on the Siberian steppe helped it along. By the spring of 1924, when Anna remarried, the Soviet regime had stepped back from the harsh economic restrictions of the civil war years. The New Economic Policy or NEP period was implemented in 1921 while Lenin was still alive, and it allowed considerable free-market activities for peasants and a slight relaxation of social and religious restrictions. Peasant farmers such as the Froese family were able to sell their grain and gain some measure of economic stability, though basic consumer goods remained unavailable.
The Kulunda Steppe, the area in which Grigorevka and the other Mennonite settlements were located, is a vast and austere landscape. When I visited the Slavgorod area in 2010, it reminded me of the Canadian prairies. The landscape was as flat and treeless as parts of the Red River Valley and dotted with salt lakes like southwestern Saskatchewan. The West Siberian plain was still a wild frontier in the 1920s, at least in the eyes of a European traveller. In his writings, Helmut Anger, a German academic travelling in Siberia in the fall of 1926, noted the conversations he had with fellow travellers about the presence of wolves, confirmed by the remains of animals that he saw from the horse-drawn carriages on which he travelled. Among the few stories my father could tell about my grandfather was one about wolves. When his father, Johann Werner, had gone to see the neighbours on a winter evening, his mother heard a hurried knock on the window and made out the shadow of her husband, who immediately disappeared only to knock again on another window. She went to the door to undo the latch, and he burst in and quickly closed the door behind him. He was out of breath because a wolf had been following him.
The outlines of the former village street of the village of Grigorevka in the foreground leave but a small imprint on the vast Kulunda Steppe.
Photo by the author, 2010.
Anger had some difficulties hiring drivers to take him around the countryside. He noted particularly the hesitancy of sceptical Mennonite farmers he approached to hire to take him to the next village. He was clearly an outsider, and he attributed their reluctance to previous negative experiences with curious visitors from Germany. On his way to Grigorevka, the village where Hans was a young boy at the time, they passed by one of the numerous salt lakes that dotted the plain, and he painted a picture typical of the Kulunda Steppe. The lake was “surrounded by the brown steppe along whose shore some kind of salt loving weeds formed a red carpet and whose surface mirrored the blue sky and some large dark, but golden rimmed clouds.” Anger described the four Pashnaya villages, of which Grigorevka was one, as “poorer than any of the other Mennonite villages I saw on my trip.” His hosts pointed to poorer soils as the cause, with wheat averaging twelve bushels per acre compared with the twenty to twenty-five that could be obtained in the Omsk region. In Grigorevka, Anger stayed with the village mayor, whose home he characterized as “poor, but clean.” In the evening, his host’s yard was filled with young males who played a game that, from his description, sounded a lot like dodge ball. My father, nine at the time, was probably too young to have participated. Based on Anger’s one day of interaction with the villagers, life in Grigorevka was difficult but stable economically and socially.4
Although life in his new home seemed to offer promise, my father’s memories of growing up in the Froese household were not pleasant. Johann Froese was a troubled man with a vicious temper. He often took his anger out on his young stepson, and his own sons often had to rescue the youngster to prevent serious physical harm. My father recalled a windy harvest scene in which it was his job to climb on a load of sheaves to trample them down so that the wind would not blow them off the wagon. The wind kept catching the sheaves before he could get to them, and his stepfather, in a fit of rage, thrust the pitchfork at him, shrieking that he would “spear all the holy ones.” Herman and Johann quickly had to help young Hans down the back of the wagon, and he scurried to safety while Froese continued to thrust his pitchfork in the direction where the young lad had just been. Hans suffered other humiliations. It was common in winter for household members to relieve themselves in the barn. Young Hans was not allowed to use the gutter in the barn, like the rest of the family did, and had to go in his own special area.
His memories of childhood were not all bad. Hans had fond memories of visiting the Aaron Janzen home and playing with his cousins, Sara and Aaron. On one occasion, they were playing blind man’s bluff in a room lit by a kerosene lamp with a round burner and large shade that hung from the ceiling. While dashing around the room, one of the children jumped up on the table, hitting her head on the lamp. The lamp came crashing down, but fortunately his older sister Sara put the fire out before the house burned down. They were all in trouble with their parents, and a severe scolding resulted. Another family story told with a certain fondness made light of the extreme shortages of clothing that plagued Siberian families in the 1920s. Since Hans was the only young boy in the family, and with a stepsister close to his age, he had worn only dresses before going to school. When he received his first pair of pants, he cried, not wanting to wear them for his first day of school.
As a boy, Hans also spent time with his Janzen relatives. One summer his uncle Jacob requested that he come to stay at their home for the summer. Grandmother Janzen was ill, and because the rest of the Janzen family were heavy sleepers the elderly woman could call for help at night until she was hoarse, without being heard. Hans was a light sleeper, so he spent the summer at his uncle’s house, getting up at night when his grandmother knocked on the wall of his adjoining room. He would bring her a glass of water or whatever else she needed. During the day, he helped with chores on the farm.
School was in the village schoolhouse in Grigorevka and was conducted in both German and Russian before 1929 and only in Russian thereafter. The teacher, Mr. Derksen, could draw well and used his gift to illustrate the “letter of the day” by drawing an animal or bird that reminded his charges of the letter with which its name began. The children sat in rows, with the youngest at the front. Students were promoted each year, and when they were in the highest grade they sat at the bac
k of the room. The turmoil of the revolution and civil war disrupted Mennonite education severely. Teachers were paid poorly, if at all, and though my father recalled the school had six grades the questionnaires he filled out some fifteen years later in Germany indicated he had only four years of formal schooling.5 He would always be hindered by the inability to read and write beyond a basic level in either German or Russian.
The village was the centre of social and, to the extent possible, religious life. The Loewens living beside the Froeses, the Martens across the street, the Rogalskys a little farther down the street—these became the families from which friends and marriage partners would be chosen and with whom the Froese family would socialize. Young Hans soon had close friends among the boys from the village who were his age: Jacob Wiebe, Abram Martens, and Henry Matthies. Religion was an even less formal part of his life. Hans remembered there had been Mennonite ministers but recalled little else about religious life. He recalled one occasion when he attended a baptism. He visualized it being on the riverbank, indicating that the baptism of the candidate was by total immersion, a practice of the Mennonite Brethren Church. The Mennonite Brethren had separated from the main, or Kirchliche Mennonite Church, in the 1860s in Ukraine. Although maintaining a Mennonite religious identity that included adult baptism, they were distinguished by their insistence on baptism by complete immersion as opposed to the pouring or sprinkling of water on the head, as practised by the Kirchliche. Hans thought his mother was Mennonite Brethren but had become part of the main Kirchliche group when she married Froese. Surviving letters sent to Canada bear out that Anna (Janzen) Werner was a woman of faith, but religious life seems not to have been an important part of my father’s early years.