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

by Hans Werner

  Sara Letkeman together with fellow collective farm workers in Osterwick on a Sunday in 1939. She is the second from the right in the second row.

  Things changed immediately. Armed guards were posted throughout the village, and that night when the young people assembled on the village street they were sent home. No lights were permitted. “You had to grope around in the dark for everything.” Sara remained in Osterwick only a few more days before she was sent south toward the Crimea to cook for a construction crew building a highway. The kolkhoz had to supply a crew of four men and twelve women for this construction effort. Her story became quite cryptic when she talked about this experience. In the beginning, the group stayed with a Russian family who, she recalled, had been very nice to them. It seems their accommodations changed later, and the village filled up with Russian men, soldiers, and support personnel for the military buildup. Without explaining, my mother said, “then at night they would come around—I was fortunate.” Apparently drunken men would come to get her to cook for them in the middle of the night, and she felt vulnerable and threatened. After feeding them, Sara and a friend slept in the hallway in front of the bedroom door behind which a group of married men slept. They felt safer there. Later they got away and slept in a barn; she thought they had “been lucky” to “get away from there.” They did not sleep that night for fear of being found. Later in the story, she referred to those who “came for the girls that night” as officers. In contrast, the Red Army soldiers who came back from the front soon after were nice to them and told them stories about the horror of the initial attack by the Germans.4

  Sara had a boyfriend before the German attack who had been drafted into the Red Army. Even in the confusion of the war, she received a letter that arrived after she left Osterwick but was delivered to her by someone from there. The letter had obviously been written before the attack, and her boyfriend expressed confusion about what was going on. He had been released from the army, and the insignia had been removed from his cap. He could not tell her where he was. This troubling letter and the realization that the war was going badly for the Soviet Union convinced Sara and other girls that they needed to return to Osterwick. They tried to convince their supervisor, a Mr. Siemens, to allow them to return with a wagon that had come from Osterwick with supplies, but he refused. They decided to go anyway and left on foot.

  The girls walked all day to get to Kichkas, where miraculously they were able to buy train tickets to Zaporozhye. At the train station, fear again gripped Sara as everywhere she looked there were unaccompanied men. On the train, a young man opened the door to ask if there was anyone on the train from Schoenberg, a village next to Osterwick. He was a former classmate,and with tears streaming down his face he asked them to greet his parents, for he did not know if he would ever see them again. All he knew was that he was being sent away. The already stressful train ride became worse when the doors to their car were thrown open and they were accused of being German spies. After some time, they convinced the police they were not German spies, but their problems soon became more serious. When the train got to Zaporozhye, the tracks across the Dnieper River and the dam had already been bombed. When they reached the city, they really became aware that they were getting closer to the front.

  My mother’s memory was unclear about details of these events. The stress, constant fear, and chaos that accompanied the journey contributed to her confusion. The Mennonite village of Einlage, renamed Kichkas in 1941, was on the right bank of the Dnieper, the same side as Osterwick. That seems to indicate that the girls were north of Osterwick rather than in the Crimea and would have had to cross the Dnieper to get as close to Osterwick by train as possible. Her memory seemed to fail my mother when she told these stories, which she attributed to confusion and stress. As she put it, “I don’t think I was quite normal anymore.”5 Bombing of the bridges over the Dnieper meant that they could not cross the river by train, but it seems that planks had been laid across the damaged sections of the bridge so that a horse-drawn vehicle could still cross. It was twilight before they found someone in the sea of men who would take them across the river. They got home when it was already dark. It was her birthday, 13 August, and after an initial scare when she found the house empty, Sara found the rest of the family intact. She reported to the kolkhoz headquarters the next day to explain their return and found that all the girls had found their way back, but Siemens, the supervisor, and the other men had not returned. The village was in turmoil, and secretly plans were being made to escape to the German lines, which everyone thought must be nearby.

  For Sara’s family, the option of escaping to the German lines was unrealistic. Her father was seventy years old, had poor eyesight, and walked with a cane. Her brother Jacob, sixteen, had been ordered to hitch up a wagon to transport Jews across the Dnieper. On 10 August, her half-sister Tina’s husband had been sent across the river with animals and farm equipment.6 Sara’s parents had decided not to let Jacob go and hid him instead. While Sara was away, they had dug a hole in the small orchard in their yard and covered it with planks and sod to make a small shelter. Jacob spent the day in this shelter. The night of 16 August and all the next day the family stayed in the shelter because of the constant shelling and gunfire. The makeshift bunker kept getting smaller as walls caved in from the vibrations of explosions. From time to time, they heard someone banging on the doors of their house, and it was hard to keep Tina’s young children from crying and giving away their hiding place. Finally toward evening it got quieter, and Sara left the bunker to go to the neighbour’s house. She knocked on the door, only to be greeted by three Red Army soldiers, who immediately yelled “Stoi!” when she turned to run. In spite of their command to stop or be shot, Sara ran through the bushes, the long grass, and the creek to arrive back in the shelter, shaking but unharmed. The family spent that night in their house in an otherwise empty village—everyone had left. Sara’s mother decided they could still be sent to the east, away from the advancing Germans, and began baking in preparation. My mother could not recall if she completed baking, but she had mixed the dough. At two or three in the morning, the village came alive with retreating Red Army military vehicles. At daybreak, the constant noise of vehicles ended, and “it was quiet. Over here you could hear a sheep bleating, there you could hear a cow bellowing, here a dog would bark; it echoed everywhere.”7

  At nine o’clock in the morning on 18 August, a cloud of dust marked the advance of the German Army. After briefly hiding in a granary on their yard, Sara’s family came out to greet the black-uniformed soldiers of the panzer army that had advanced to the Dnieper River at Zaporozhye. Gradually over the next hours and days, people returned to the village. Some had hidden in cornfields while on their way east to cross the Dnieper; others had been overtaken trying to escape and returned to their homes under German occupation.8

  For my mother, the story was one of liberation. It was the German Army that freed them from Stalin’s clutches, and she was forever grateful in spite of the story that emerged about Nazi atrocities. Her memories of the Nazi liberation were what Steve Stern terms “memory as salvation,” a way of remembering that acknowledges evil done but frames it as necessary because it offered salvation to the person remembering.9 In contrast to my father, for my mother the memories of becoming German in the Nazi context were used to tell stories in ways that reflected her desire to view the escape from Stalinism as a positive and justifiable experience rather than as a product of a regime guilty of atrocities.

  Life under German occupation was refreshing at first. The Sunday after the front passed over them and they were under German occupation, some villagers met for a church service at the Anton Krahn house, the first time in many years that the community had worshipped together. It was important to my mother to point out in her story that the sermon was offered by a passing German soldier who happened to be a Lutheran pastor.10 The people attending “had not been able to sing, they had only cried.” Over the next few weeks, worsh
ip services were established on a regular basis in the schoolhouse, and Mennonite cultural life resumed, a relief from the oppressive communist ideology that had overshadowed everything. The first Christmas under German occupation was memorable; my mother told the story while sobbing intermittently: “It was very nice; it was the first Christmas after so many years. In the clubhouse, the building that had been the club during Soviet times, there we had our Christmas program. The youth brought baked goods; we made little bags.... There were a lot of girls, and the boys carried the bags away when they were filled. We filled the bags there and had a program, just like we do here except—you know, they were so emotional.”11

  The resumption of religious observance also meant that baptisms could again become part of the life cycle of the Mennonite people of Osterwick. On 24 May 1942, Gerhard Dueck baptized Sara in their church.12 But one dark cloud hung over the Letkeman family. Julius Vogt, husband of Tina, had been sent east and not returned. The war front now separated Tina from him, and she had effectively become a widow, so the relief they all felt was tempered by the sadness of separation. It also meant Tina was again part of the Letkeman household, and by now she had two children: Erwin, two-and-a-half years old, and Marie, just five months old.

  Although some collective farms in occupied Ukraine reverted to private ownership, in Osterwick too many men were missing, so the German occupation government decided to keep the kolkhoz intact. In the first few days after the front passed, the remaining horses, livestock, and equipment were collected, and the harvest resumed. The grain was now destined for the German war effort, but Mennonites had become prized members of the master race and got more per trudanye than they had before and more than their Slavic counterparts would get during the German occupation.

  Living under German occupation was not without tension, and soon Sara became aware of moral dilemmas that came with the Mennonites’ new status as Germans. In one case, a Mennonite woman who had married a Ukrainian refused to take him back as her husband even though the Germans released him from a POW camp because he had a German wife. One Mennonite woman had married a Jew, who then disappeared and was likely shot, but the woman and her children were spared. A Ukrainian woman who was married to a Jew gave her children into the care of her sister and died with her husband.

  There were also moral dilemmas for Sara. She was now the primary breadwinner for her family, and if she took a job working for the German occupation government she got paid in currency rather than an amount of grain or produce per trudanye in the kolkhoz. That was worth a lot. Her first job was cooking for the supply troops who stayed in the area for a number of months. After they left, she was the cook for the night watchmen who worked for the German occupation. They were mostly Ukrainians who had declared themselves willing to help the Germans, but their supervisors were Mennonite men whom Sara knew. In 1942, these watchmen were ordered to round up the Jews in the area and take them to some undisclosed destination and shoot them. As my mother recalled, “it was terrible when they came home, they felt terribly badly about what they had to do.” Cooking for the occupation police proved to be too much emotional strain for Sara, and she quit. She witnessed the police arresting and imprisoning people who came from cities nearer to the front to gather food because it was in such short supply. “It bothered me terribly when they imprisoned those poor people.” She also felt increasingly at risk working alone with a group of policemen, who were steadily becoming “brasher.”13

  The new identity that Sara and other Mennonites had acquired of being favoured as ethnic Germans in an occupied Ukraine was made most clear to her when she went to pick up her first paycheque after working for the German occupation government. When she gave her name as Sara, the clerk said they had no Sara Letkeman on the payroll, but they did have a Frieda Letkeman. When she investigated, it turned out the soldiers had renamed her Frieda because it was unacceptable for someone with a Jewish name like Sara to be in the employ of the Germans. In defiance of being named by some soldiers, she formally chose her own German name, Margarethe.

  The German Army began to flounder in the harsh Russian winters, and when it failed to capture Stalingrad in the winter of 1942–43 its fate was sealed. By the spring of 1943, the glow of the artillery shells exploding on the front could be seen on clear evenings, and then the rumble of cannons could be heard in Osterwick on quiet nights. Soviet airplanes began bombing threshing floors, and a sad sight replaced my mother’s memory of the dashing German soldiers who had come through Osterwick in the summer of 1941. “It looked sad the way they came back. They had Russian girls all over their vehicles, everywhere there were Russian girls whom they were bringing along—it looked very bad when they came back.”14 Margarethe and the other Mennonites of Osterwick began to worry. There was talk of being evacuated, assurances that the Germans would not abandon them, but when would that happen?

  The time came. On 18 and 19 October 1943, the villagers of Osterwick were loaded onto army trucks and taken to Kantserovka (Rosenthal), the nearest train station, and loaded onto trains headed for the Warthegau, the area of Poland annexed by Germany and already home to many resettled Baltic and Polish Germans. Margarethe’s family left on 19 October.15 It was a rainy evening, and to avoid the Soviet bombers the train was scheduled to leave at night. They travelled through the night, stopping frequently due to damaged tracks. The train took them to Litzmannstadt, where their first assignment was to be deloused. They were taken in buses to the Kitler factory, where their clothes were baked in ovens and they had an insecticide-laced shower. After three or four days in Litzmannstadt, Margarethe and her family were moved to Beneschau, where they lived in a large castle-like building with many other resettled ethnic Germans. Christmas 1943 was celebrated there, and in my mother’s memory it was wonderful to return to earlier traditions. Margarethe worked in the kitchen, while other ethnic Germans worked in a tobacco factory. Just after Christmas, she married Peter Vogt.

  Her first boyfriend’s letter, which she received just before the German occupation, had acknowledged that they might never see each other again and released her from their relationship. Peter Vogt, a cousin of Tina’s husband Julius Vogt, had already been interested in Margarethe during the German occupation period. He had been drafted into the German Army or one of its ancillary organizations and come back to Osterwick after being wounded. He had been hit in the leg by shrapnel in an engagement in which three or four other young Osterwick men had been killed.16 Margarethe had always rejected his advances because of her sense of obligation to her aging parents. She could not see herself marrying when it was unclear how her parents would be cared for. That sensibility was somewhat resolved by the formal admission to German citizenship, which occurred shortly after they arrived in the Warthegau. Her parents received an old age pension from the German government, and the war brought other changes in attitude. As she noted, “In situations like that, the person just thinks about today and tomorrow, you don’t think any further. If today you are healthy and have enough to eat, what will be tomorrow, you don’t know. If you are alive today, if you die tomorrow, it doesn’t matter. You actually have no worries, what you will eat, what you will wear; the worries are actually taken away from you. If you are living, you don’t know anything, you are just alive; about tomorrow, you know nothing; it gives you an entirely different feeling.”17 Peter and Margarethe had been married for about two months when Peter was drafted into the German Army. In spring 1944, she received her German citizenship.18 Although she had no particular objection to being a German citizen, the process was degrading. Like Johann a year earlier, she had to appear naked in front of a panel of seven “doctors” for a medical examination that was really a racial examination.

  In late summer 1944, Margarethe and her family were moved to Ratibor in Upper Silesia. They lived in a camp with 350 or so other resettled Mennonites. Margarethe was pregnant with her first child, so she did not go to work but took care of Tina’s two children and their elderly parents. The fron
t kept getting nearer, and soon Soviet air raids were a constant and worrisome danger. Margarethe gave birth to her first child at night in the camp’s small sickroom. While she was in labour, there was an air raid, and the midwife was reluctant to come. Margarethe suffered considerable tearing during the birth and in the confusion did not receive the necessary stitches and became infected. The baby was a healthy girl whom she named Katharina but who was always called Katie. Margarethe was unable to nurse the baby; her breasts became swollen and infected, and she had to go to the hospital. During her hospital stay, constant air raids sent patients to the hospital’s air raid shelter to escape the bombing. In the shelter, people screamed when bombs exploded nearby, and the whole bunker shook from the concussions of the explosions. After the air raids, the wounded were brought into the hospital, often completely blackened by fire and smoke. The doctors then went to work, and people in the hospital claimed there were literally piles of limbs in the operating room that had been amputated from victims. When the doctors made their rounds, they looked like they had worked in a slaughterhouse.

  When Margarethe was released from the hospital, she walked back to the camp but was unable to recognize Ratibor. Everywhere there were signs warning pedestrians not to walk in certain places because of unexploded shells. Houses were piles of rubble. She had to ask passersby which street she was on so she could navigate her way back home, where she feared the worst. Fortunately all were safe. Soon, however, even her brother Jacob, who had been spared the draft because of his extreme short-sightedness, was also called up. Margarethe and Tina went to see him when he had completed some basic training and was being sent to the front. A few letters arrived from her husband Peter, who urgently told her to leave everything and save herself and the baby. His plea weighed heavily on her in the weeks to come.