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

by Hans Werner

  Johann Froese, normally a hard worker, became despondent and talked about nothing else than his conviction that he would be arrested. He was sure the Moscow adventure would doom him. On a February evening, an engagement celebration was held at their home, the traditional Mennonite polta evening, for a couple from the village. In my father’s memory, toward evening Froese said that he was going out to visit, that preparations in the house were too loud for him. This was not uncommon since he often went visiting to “Old” Matthies or the Wiebes across the street. The engagement party went on into the evening without him until the guests all went home. It got to be midnight and then one o’clock in the morning, and Froese had still not returned. Herman, one of the Froese boys, was dating one of the Wiebe girls, and together with my father, who was thirteen, they set out to find his stepfather. They walked down the street to the end of the village where Matthies lived, and there they came upon a single set of footprints in the snow leading to the village herdsman’s shack. Mennonite villages were laid out with a community pasture at the end of the village where the herdsman, often a Russian, would tend the villagers’ cattle in the summertime. In February, it was empty. Since there was still light in Matthies’s window, the two of them decided to ask Matthies to join them. My father continued:

  We went there, and the door was snowed under, and there was one deep footprint leading inside—the door opened to the inside. The door was pushed shut, and snow had come in between so you couldn’t close it completely. I had the lantern, and I stooped in and looked. The herdsman’s shack was only a small building, a small barn for one horse, at the end a small granary, and then there were two rooms where people could sleep—it was only equipped for the summer. The entire house was empty—and now for the granary—there the door was closed. Herman pushed it, and it opened, and right there in front of the door he had hung himself. He was standing—not hanging—standing with his knees bent.24

  Everyone was in a state of shock. The whole village was frightened. It hit Herman and Johann, Froese’s sons, particularly hard. There had never been a suicide before in the village. It was the only time my father admitted in his stories to having been frightened. He went to his mother’s room to sleep because his fears were keeping him awake. In Mennonite religious understanding, suicide was the ultimate sin, and according to tradition those who died by their own hands were not to be buried in the church cemetery. In the context of Stalinist Russia, such sensibilities no longer had currency. Although no letter is extant that directly reported these events, in a letter to Aganetha in the 1930s Anna noted, “I asked, and they consented to bury him in the church yard.”25

  Although my father’s recounting of these events was always vivid, situating them in time was more difficult. My father placed the death of Froese a year or more after they had returned from Moscow when they were already part of the collective farm established at the time. The story he told was that Froese had a job tending the collective farm’s horses. However, my conversations with his sister Katya placed Froese’s suicide on 8 February 1930, just over a month after they returned from Moscow.

  For my father, the suicide of his stepfather was always a turning point in his stories of growing up in Siberia. His stories often hinged on whether some event had been before or after the attempted escape to Moscow. After the death of his stepfather, he always placed himself in the role of the senior male member of an otherwise helpless family. That was likely not the case in the early 1930s, and his stories might have overemphasized his role to create that version of himself.

  The memories of our childhood are often more prominent than the relatively brief period of time they represent. For Hans, the first twelve or thirteen years of his life were remembered as a time of personal challenges but not a time of great tragedy. Certainly the trip to Moscow was remembered as an adventure. The letters of his mother, who lost a daughter, and then a husband through tragic circumstances, portray much more poignantly the depth of the family’s trauma. As a boy growing up amid the trauma, my father cast his stories as those of a survivor. These years would also have been the time for his mother to tell him about his father and the Werner family. Either the times interfered with such storytelling by his mother, or he forgot the stories. The suicide of his stepfather emerged most prominently in the stories of his growing-up years. Few stories, however, conveyed a sense of the rhythms of daily life in his family or village. Neil Sutherland suggests that childhood memories follow the lines of patterned scripts: school, neighbourhood, chores, and other domestic routines.26 My father’s scripts were seriously disrupted by the waves of instability brought on by the cholera epidemic and the suicide of his stepfather. Although childhood memories are often fragmented, likely the lack of stability contributed to even greater loss of narrative coherence in the stories of his childhood. Adolescence brought a greater awareness of the world around Hans, and his stories of the failed attempt to escape Stalin’s Russia coincided with his entry into adolescence and a time when he would adapt to the Soviet system and to a large extent make it work for him.

  3

  Ivan, Stalin’s Hope

  By 11 December 1929, some 2,350 of those who had gone to Moscow, most of whom were Mennonite, had been returned to their villages on the Kulunda Steppe. Their determination to emigrate was not quelled, however, by this apparent failure. Throughout the winter and spring of 1930, local functionaries of the Stalinist regime tried to cope with continuing passive resistance by Mennonites who remained determined to emigrate rather than join the collective farms being established. Those who had returned to their villages from Moscow refused to accept seed grain, turned away offers of credit to put in crops, and sometimes did not reoccupy their own homes, choosing to stay in temporary quarters, all so that there would be nothing in the way of getting away quickly. The local government in Slavgorod even attempted to have their possessions returned to them for the same price they had sold them, an impossibility given that they had spent the proceeds on passports and that in most cases the purchasers could not be located.1

  Opposition to forced collectivization was not peculiar to Mennonites but had become general by the spring of 1930. In the face of near revolution in the countryside, Stalin published his famous “Dizzy with Success” article in newspapers on 2 March 1930, in which he blamed regional functionaries for excesses in the drive for collectivization while claiming the 50 percent level that apparently had been achieved to be a great success.2 Although the article signalled a temporary easing of the pace of forced collectivization, it was hardly noticeable to the Mennonite farmers of Siberia. The Slavgorod area, where Mennonites made up a large part of the German population, continued to experience dramatic declines in its agricultural economy. By June 1930, declines in the numbers of horses, cattle, sheep, and hogs ranged from 32 to 88 percent, higher than the already staggering losses in the region more generally.3

  In spite of the apparent step backward from the use of force, Mennonite resistance to the state grew in intensity throughout the spring and early summer of 1930, coming to a head in late June. On 19 June, a meeting was held in Alexandrovka in the centre of the Mennonite settlement near Slavgorod to which the secretary of the regional party committee was invited. When he failed to appear, the meeting elected a chair and proceeded to collect names to make up a list of those wishing to emigrate. The list was confiscated by the late-arriving party officials, resulting in Mennonite women in the group trying to tear the briefcases with the documents out of their hands as they rode off. The next day a larger group made up mostly of Mennonite women gathered at the regional government offices in Halbstadt to demand return of the documents. Although their demand was not met, officials called for a meeting on 27 June of delegates from the entire German-speaking region that would include members of the collectives as well as independent farmers. In the Mennonite villages, rumours spread that regional party officials had been authorized to allow emigration, and on the morning of 27 June over 1,800 people showed up for the m
eeting. When officials tried to restrict participation in the meeting to appointed delegates only, the crowd entered the building, pulled tables outside, and demanded an open meeting. They elected a chair, Katharina Siemens, a health-care worker and daughter of a former Mennonite schoolteacher. The election of a woman as chair might have been seen as a way of forestalling the retribution that would follow if they elected male leaders. The meeting passed resolutions against anti-religious education and requested permission to emigrate. This display of public opposition demanded action by the party, and a number of the leaders of the mass demonstration were arrested. On 2 July, the arrest of one particular participant touched off another demonstration in front of government offices in Halbstadt. The crowd ultimately entered the back doors of the building, dragged out the arresting GPU (Soviet State Police) officer, and demanded that he call his supervisors to convey their demand that the individual be released. They subsequently also took a party official as hostage. The arrival of an armed twenty-person unit of the GPU finally ended the standoff, and, not surprisingly, numerous arrests followed, including that of Katharina Siemens.4

  These dramatic events in the Halbstadt area were largely unnoticed in the Froese family. It is clear, however, that resistance to the new regime was also present among the Froeses, at least before Johann committed suicide. My grandmother’s first letter to her daughter in Canada after the family was sent back from Moscow held out the possibility of another attempt “in a month or six weeks, possibly in spring, but hopefully in winter.”5 My father also recalled the events in Halbstadt somewhat because some participants who had fled the scene tried to avoid arrest by hiding in their village. However, for my father’s family, the suicide of Johann and the pressing need to find some way to survive meant their attention was focussed on their own problems.

  Having lost almost everything in the attempted escape via Moscow, and with the subsequent loss of husband and father, there was no other option for Anna and her children but to join the collective farm. Joining it was not automatic, however. My father recalled that they had to beg to be allowed to become members. The Moscow adventure and Johann Froese’s strident anti-collectivization rhetoric had given them what Orlando Figes terms a “spoilt biography.”6 But they had nothing, and by joining the collective farm they could receive the basic food allocation that collectives had been instructed to extend to poor and mid-level peasants who joined them. It also meant a move away from their home in Grigorevka, still resisting collectivization, to neighbouring Markovka, already collectivized. For my grandmother, entry into the collective farm was obviously an embarrassment. When she described the harvest in a letter to her daughter and the Loewens, who had adopted her, she added, “of course, we didn’t seed alone for ourselves, but rather two villages together.”7

  The return from Moscow also marked the gradual decline of my grandmother’s prominence in my father’s stories. Not surprisingly, since Hans was becoming an adolescent, he began to identify more with his peers than with his mother. The state also had a greater grip on his imagination through school and its activities. Although he continued to be called Hans at home, in his life away from home he became known as Ivan. Much of this had to do with his return to school. He remembered school as being easy, and because he was older he progressed through two levels in one year. But school had changed; instruction was now all in Russian, and it was likely in school that Hans became Ivan Ivanevich.

  Of much greater interest to Ivan than academic subjects at school were programs designed to foster the technical skills demanded by the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union. The early 1930s were the years of the first five-year plan that was to transform the Soviet Union into an industrial power able to defend the revolution against “capitalist encirclement,” as Stalin put it.8 In Ivan’s school, a Russian teacher organized a glider club that built an actual flying glider, and Ivan was an active and enthusiastic participant. The project was probably the beginning of his lifelong interest in airplanes and flying. The club was regional in scope, and the boys who participated came from schools in the surrounding villages. During the winter, they took home pieces of wood to carve into specific shapes to make the parts of the glider. Ivan’s hobby was whittling, and with his developing interest in mechanical things, the glider club was everything the adolescent boy could have wanted. The glider was completed during the winter, and the next summer the boys were actually able to fly it. The method of propelling the glider into the air was ingenious. Relying on a small hill and a large rubber band, the entire club pushed back the glider to stretch out the band, and when released, the glider achieved enough speed to become airborne. With the thermals created by the heat of the black fields providing the necessary lift, the glider gained altitude and could remain aloft almost indefinitely. The experience of flying was sheer joy for young Ivan.

  His interest in airplanes might also have been stimulated by the arrival near their village of the first airplane anyone had ever seen. One day Ivan and the other boys heard the sound of an engine in the sky. Motorized vehicles were still a rarity, and no one had ever heard an engine in the sky. The boys ran out onto the nearby field where the airplane had landed, and the pilot asked them how to get to the neighbouring village. The boys were very excited, but their elders were sure the end of the world was at hand.

  Ivan attended school for two years after the family returned from Moscow, and then at age fourteen, while still attending school during the day, he began working on the collective farm. Although the plan for collectivization included mechanizing agriculture, horses still provided the power for most farming activities. Ivan’s first job was to drive four horses harnessed to a drive wheel that powered the threshing machines. His job was to stand on a small platform on the hub of a large wheel that had a horse harnessed to each spoke. Ivan stood on the turning platform with a whip to keep the horses moving, turning the wheel, and thus powering the threshing machine. He remembered helping the local miller take out panels in the windmill’s vanes when the wind picked up. He also helped him sharpen the stones and did other odd jobs around the mill. It did not take long for him to be more formally employed on the collective farm, and he was soon the main breadwinner of the family. During the first two years in the collective, he plowed with three horses and a “slant” plow. The collective farm paid higher wages for skilled workers, and, according to his account, Ivan managed the equipment well, and the summers produced good earnings for the family.

  By the end of 1931, the drive toward collectivization was substantially complete, and the Siberian countryside, including its Mennonite farmers, had largely given itself over to collective agriculture. Three forms of collectives were possible. The Association for the Cultivation of Land (TOZ) was essentially a fieldwork cooperative in which the farmers did their fieldwork together and divided the proceeds according to each farmer’s contribution of land, equipment, and time. The second form was the artel, in which the farmers kept their home, garden, and some livestock but pooled all their other resources of land, labour, horses, and equipment. The third type was the commune, in which everything except personal effects was transferred to the collective. Mennonite farmers were most opposed to the commune system because it compromised their independence and threatened their ability to control the non-Mennonite influences on their children.

  The return from Moscow and the suicide of Froese hastened the departure from home of the older Froese boys. Johann married shortly after the rest of the family returned, and Herman spent a lot of time away from home. My father believed him to be a genius when it came to numbers and playing cards, and in addition to his work in the collective Herman spent a lot of time travelling to various clubs where he played cards for money. Although not condoned in traditional Mennonite practice, the family sometimes benefited from his gambling activities. Although not explicit about what Herman did, in a letter likely written in 1932, Anna reported to her daughter in Canada that Herman “was at our place for a while, not even the ent
ire winter. Today he bought ten pud of potatoes for two rubles per pud, but we still don’t have nearly enough potatoes.”9 In the same letter, Anna reported that a wave of typhus had swept through the village. In her letter to Aganetha, she reported that Ivan had been sick with typhus for fifteen days but was up and around again, though still weak and thin.10 My father recalled he was so weak he had to stop for a rest when he took the short walk to visit the neighbours.

  Anna’s concern about having enough food signalled the beginnings of what would become a full-fledged famine in the winter of 1932–33. Along with Stalin’s forced collectivization drive, there were relentless demands for grain from the newly created collectives. The famine was not caused by drought, crop failure, or problems of distribution; rather, as Robert Tucker puts it, “the man at the centre” was Stalin himself.11 My father remembered the unrelenting drive for more grain; the authorities “always wanted more from the kolkhoz, always more. Always more, and there was nothing.”12 The family’s food supplies dwindled until there was nothing left. In January 1933, Ivan turned sixteen, and he and his friends were old enough to fend for themselves in the deteriorating food supply conditions. Early each morning during that spring, Ivan and his friends Henry Matthies, Abram Martens, and Jakob Wiebe left home to spend all day searching for food. Whatever they found they shared. One story my father often repeated was how they went into the wetlands to search for duck eggs. He was sure their parents would have been afraid for their lives had they known the lengths to which the boys went to get food. The area was so soggy that they could not walk on the swamp, so they took their clothes off on solid ground, and by rolling into the swamp they distributed their weight over a wide enough area to stay above the water. If they were lucky enough to catch a duck, it was immediately eviscerated, wrapped in clay, and baked in a fire. Finding duck eggs was more likely, and Ivan and the rest of the family survived off the eggs and other food he found and brought home. They also picked sorrel, which his mother used to make a thin soup. The sweepings from granaries and the cracked grain and weed seeds set aside for pigeons also became food—at least if they could be kept away from the grain collectors.