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

by Hans Werner

  On 12 January 1945, the Red Army launched a massive attack to cross the Vistula River, and on 25 January German military vehicles with loudspeakers were on the streets of Ratibor telling everyone to flee for their lives.19 Margarethe and her family were a sorry lot. Her parents were in their seventies; her younger brother and husband were away, their fate unknown; her half-sister Tina had two small children and a husband left behind somewhere in the east; and Margarethe had an infant a few months old. They joined hundreds of other refugees in horse-drawn wagons in a desperate flight over the Sudeten Mountains into Czechoslovakia in exceptionally cold weather. On the way to Troppau (Opava), the refugee caravan was strafed by Soviet fighter–bombers, and the refugees were forced to abandon their wagons for the ditches. Mothers had wrapped their children tightly to ward against the cold and in the panic clasped them even more tightly. Many children suffocated. When they reached Troppau, Margarethe went to the train station to see the little blue bodies piled up on the platform. Her own daughter had survived, for which she was relieved and immensely grateful because she could not imagine having to tell Peter that she had suffocated their daughter. In Troppau, Margarethe and her family were loaded onto trains and travelled to Oderburg, where they remained for a day or two. In my mother’s memory, the events of these days were disjointed, and it was apparent that Margarethe had been mentally and physically at her limit.

  In Oderburg, the elderly were taken away, and Margarethe and her half-sister were separated from their parents and her uncle Peter, who was travelling with them. In my mother’s memory, this separation came in the context of a rumour that the old were to be euthanized. All they could do was pray: “we prayed so hard, where could our father have stayed?” There were so many people, and all they could hope for was that their elderly family members would catch a glimpse of the red hat that Margarethe always wore. It was mass confusion: “they came and called the men, all old people, and we didn’t know what was going on.” Some people claimed the old men had all been loaded into vehicles and taken away. Toward morning, they all came back and told stories of having been shuffled between vehicles and then suddenly dropped off at the train station again. After two days of tension and confusion in Oderburg, the family members were reunited and loaded onto a train to continue their journey to the west, away from the advancing Red Army.20

  Margarethe deteriorated to the point that her fellow refugees thought she was close to death, and they worried they would end up burying her beside the road. Understandably there is considerable interference in the memories of my mother about the exact sequence of events during these difficult days. Her memories do not place importance on where she was on which day. She remembers much more clearly the small acts of kindness shown to her by people on the refugee flight: the woman in the train station who invited her inside and gave her milk for the baby and a change of clothes after the harrowing flight to Troppau, the transport leader who always came to check on how she was doing, the unidentified soldier who gave up his lice-infested straw mattress so she could lie down and rest.

  The train eventually passed through Dresden, and in my mother’s memory they stopped at Dresden just a few days after it was firebombed by Allied bombers on 13 and 14 February, though accounts by other travelling companions suggest they had come through Dresden a week or more earlier.21 Margarethe and her extended family were unloaded at Wernigerode in central Germany and transferred to a camp with no food, no bedding, and a director who was rude, especially to women and children. They became beggars and were grateful when people were not rude to them, even if they did not give them anything. There was no sleep to be had with nightly bombing and constantly hungry children. When air raid sirens screamed in the night, it meant going down to the basement among the water pipes, where they were sure to drown if the exploding bombs did not kill them.

  Then suddenly they had to move. In their minds, there was no purpose to moving. If they were all to die anyway, the camp near Wernigerode was as good as anywhere. But they moved nevertheless. The move was only a short distance to the village of Lautenthal, some sixteen kilometres from Wernigerode. The move was fortuitous for them. A few weeks later the borders were drawn for what would become the east zone under the control of Stalin and the western zones under the control of the Allies. Wernigerode would be in the Russian zone, while Lautenthal would be in the British zone.

  The war ended for Margarethe and her family on the morning of 11 April, the same day as her future husband Johann was captured near Unna. Early that morning when the sun was just up the Americans came, “every four metres a soldier,” with their rifles at the ready. By this time, they had heard such horror stories of what would happen when the Americans came that they could only conclude their final hours had arrived.22

  In the weeks after the end of the war, an order came for their entire group to be ready to move again. They were loaded onto military trucks and taken to the Goslar train station to be sent back to the Soviet Union. The prospect of going back held some appeal. For Margarethe’s sister Tina, it meant possibly being reunited with her husband; for her parents, it offered the hope of seeing her brother Jacob. But it also meant returning to the world of Stalin and the oppression that came with it. In the Goslar train station, they were given K-rations, the train was decorated with boughs of evergreen tree branches, and the hammer and sickle appeared everywhere. The group of women, old people, and children decided they were not going to the Soviet Union. In spite of the prods from the rifle butts of the Red Army soldiers and the rows of ostarbeiter filing by them heading for the train, four abreast and singing Ukrainian folk songs, they refused to board the train. A British commander arrived and through an interpreter tried to convince them to go to their homeland rather than starve in a devastated Germany. They remained unconvinced and told him that, “if Germany was to starve, we were going to starve with her, we were not going back to Russia.” In a remarkable display of passive resistance, they told the officer it made no difference to them where they died and did not need to travel a long way to die in the end anyway. The officer relented and advised them a truck would come in the evening to take them somewhere. They did not know where or what would await them.23

  The truck that came took them to Rammelsberg, an abandoned silver mine in the Harz Mountains just outside Goslar. It had been a camp for the ostarbeiter, and there they were unloaded to fend for themselves. They were literally starving, relegated to eating the crusts that Uncle Peter found in the garbage and using the discarded coffee grounds to make coffee. Contact with a former soldier who had been in Chortitza during the war put them in touch with an estate farm called Ohlehof, where they were able to find work. A Dr. Lampe managed the estate. He needed workers since the estate’s entire Eastern European forced labour force had gone home. At first, the estate came to pick them up each day with a tractor and wagon, but eventually they moved into a chicken barn on the estate itself. Margarethe was terribly weak and could hardly manage the work. Her first job was spreading manure, but she was so weak she could hardly lift a fork full of manure. After a short time, she was soaked in sweat, and her arms started to swell.

  Margarethe was fortunate to be taken aside to work in the supervisor’s home, where special treatment and additional food allowed her to gradually regain her strength. But her daughter Katie never recovered from the refugee flight. Although she had survived the harrowing flight over the Sudeten Mountains when so many other children suffocated, she was never healthy again and now had contracted tuberculosis. While they were at Ohlehof, she was placed in a sanatorium, but the doctors offered little hope. Margarethe took three months off work to care for Katie, but she died in her arms in 1947. Katie was buried in the small cemetery on the estate. She was just over two years old.

  The group of refugees in the chicken barns in Ohlehof lived in constant fear that Stalin would not stop at the line just east of where they were and that they would again fall into Soviet hands. Upon reflection, my mother recalled that it mus
t have seemed she had lost her mind entirely even though the war was over. Ever since they had left Ratibor, she had received no news of her husband Peter, and whenever she could she spent hours at the Goslar train station watching the trains with POWs on board arrive, hoping he might magically come walking off the train. It did not happen. Margarethe and her parents had the same hope for Jacob, but he also never appeared. For her half-sister Tina, there was no such hope. She knew her husband Julius had stayed behind in the Soviet Union.

  Eventually C.F. Klassen, the untiring MCC refugee worker from Canada, visited the small group of refugees on the Ohlehof estate. My mother recalled how the news spread that a Canadian was coming to visit. She and her family had the largest accommodations of the Mennonite group that worked at Ohlehof, so the entire group met with Klassen in their home. It was a memorable evening. Klassen seemed to know everyone’s relatives in Canada. The group stayed up until the early hours of the next day questioning Klassen about family and friends in Canada. The visit signalled the beginning of the attempt to emigrate to Canada.

  Canada’s requirements were stringent, and the prospects for her aging parents to gain admission were slim. Margarethe was eligible for emigration to Canada right away. The problems getting admission to Canada for their parents drove Tina to opt for the whole family to move to Paraguay. She had already sacrificed purchasing bread to buy saws, axes, and wire mesh for the windows of their eventual house in Paraguay. Margarethe, generally the less aggressive of the two, had gone along with the idea initially but finally could not envision the “ragtag” family making it on the frontier in the Gran Chaco of Paraguay. They had already received a letter with the date of their departure when Margarethe changed her mind. She mustered her resolve while Tina was already packing. She told Tina she was not going to Paraguay and left the room. When she returned later that night after it was dark, Tina got out of bed and confronted her about the alternative, which in her mind meant falling into the hands of the Soviets. Margarethe remained steadfast and reminded her half-sister that she would not be the one to do all the work in Paraguay because of her young children. Even in Ohlehof, only Margarethe was able to work to support the entire family.

  But emigrating to Canada was not working out because of the age and health of her parents. Margarethe could emigrate whenever she wanted, but she refused to leave her parents behind. Tina found a sponsor in Canada and left Germany in October 1949 with her two children, Erwin and Marie, to settle in Drake, Saskatchewan.24 When Margarethe met Johann Werner in the Gronau camp, she was still trying to find a way to emigrate to Canada with her parents.

  Like those of Johann, Margarethe’s memories were also difficult to frame into stories in the context of a postwar Mennonite family in small-town Manitoba. Stories about her first marriage and the daughter who had died were not told. But her sharp sense of “telling the truth” also meant that Margarethe could not keep these stories entirely secret. Inevitably in various contexts and at different times, she allowed fragments of the story to become known. In contrast to Johann’s stories, Margarethe always framed hers from the point of view of preservation of the faith she had learned from her aunt and faith on a broader level as part of the Mennonite church. Stalin’s Soviet Union could then be framed as purely evil because of its overt challenge to Mennonite faith. Hitler’s Germany, on the other hand, could be embraced because it maintained the language of supporting Christian faith as part of German culture even as it worked to undermine that faith by substituting Nazi ideology.

  12

  The Immigrants

  The couple who stood before the minister Gerhard Fast on that September afternoon in 1951 to be married had biographies spoiled during the war years. It is not entirely clear how much they knew about each other’s respective history, but it is apparent that Margarethe had been more forthcoming in narrating her story than Johann had been in his. Nevertheless, they apparently agreed that their pasts were best left behind them, and it was understood that what had happened before was not to be raised in their relationship. Margarethe had withdrawn her application to emigrate when her parents had been turned down by Canadian authorities, and her anticipated marriage to Johann complicated her desire to emigrate together with her elderly parents if they should eventually be admitted. He had put the idea of emigration behind him and resigned himself to making a place for himself in a Germany that was quickly rebuilding after the war. Johann and Margarethe applied for a house to be built by the MCC’s PAX program, and, for her at least, there was a reluctant resignation that they might not be joining her parents even if they were able to emigrate to Canada. Her half-sister Tina, meanwhile, continued to search for a way for that to happen from her new home in Drake, Saskatchewan.

  Just days before Tina and her children emigrated to Canada on 16 October 1949, the Canadian government again rejected Margarethe’s parents’ admission into Canada for medical reasons. A summary of their situation in a file of MCC’s “hard core” cases notes only that they were apparently rejected because of “old age and physical decrepancies [sic].”1 The disappointing letter from the Canadian Government Immigration Mission stated simply that their “application for admission to Canada… has not been approved.”2 With their daughter Tina now in Canada, there was the possibility that she could sponsor the elderly couple, but they were becoming weary of all the problems. Margarethe would not consider a suggestion that a permanent home for her parents could be a seniors’ home in Germany.

  Johann and Margarethe on their wedding day, 24 September 1951.

  In August 1951, just before Johann and Margarethe got married, news came that her parents were eligible to appear for processing for Canadian immigration based on the strength of the sponsorship of their daughter Tina and another relative in Drake. In October, they went to Gronau for processing, and on 23 February 1952 the long-awaited visas arrived. The elderly couple, now sixty-eight and eighty-one years old, left Bremerhaven on the ship the Beaverbrae on 12 April to join their daughter in Drake.3 Margarethe was now faced with being separated from them because of Johann. Her letters to the MCC convey the urgency of the need to resolve her own emigration status. She advised the MCC that, “if my parents should make it over, then I would like to emigrate. But I would first like to marry Hans Werner, whom you also have in your files.”4 The process of trying to emigrate began in earnest again for Johann.

  Although the reason for his early rejection by Canadian authorities because he had become a German citizen in 1942 was no longer an impediment, Johann continued to be turned back. The accusation that he had been in the SS now loomed large in his file and had to be overcome. On 7 April 1952, C.F. Klassen wrote to P.W. Bird, chief of the Canadian Immigration Mission in Karlsruhe, about the SS cases that had not been approved for emigration. Johann and Margarethe Werner were included on the list of difficult cases to be discussed.5 On 30 April, the MCC chartered a bus to transport a group of SS cases to Hanover. The Werners were in the group that appeared before the commission that day. They had yet another medical examination, were subjected to what was termed Stage B security screening, and were “also seen by the Labour Man,” as the MCC secretary put it. Johann did not get permission to emigrate but was “labelled ‘pending’ for Stage ‘B.’” In short, he had been deferred again, but rather than the problem of his naturalization it was only because of suspicions that he had been an early SS member.6

  Waiting is a mark of being a refugee, and Johann and Margarethe now waited again. Meanwhile, a letter from Margarethe to the MCC requesting a baby parcel betrayed another new beginning. They were expecting their first child. Then, without warning on 20 June 1952, urgent telegrams arrived from the MCC notifying them that they had been granted entry into Canada. Margarethe responded to the news with relief but worried because they were “expecting their baby in the middle of October,” and it certainly would have been more suitable if the news had come earlier so they could make the journey in June.7 The various MCC offices that had to arrange transpor
tation sprang into action to make it possible for the couple to get to Canada before the ship’s policies on the transport of pregnant passengers would prevent their sailing until after the baby was born. As MCC Secretary Anne Giesbrecht explained to J.J. Thiessen, head of the Canadian Mennonite Board of Colonization, “we had to do everything possible to get ship passage for them because of Mrs. Werner’s pregnancy, and by the time of the next sailing it would have been too late and she would have had to wait until the baby was born.”8 The last day of work for Johann was 24 June, and four days later he and Margarethe boarded the Beaverbrae for the trip across the ocean to Canada.9

  The stories of their trip to Canada and the early days of adjusting to a new country needed to be a collaboration of their memories of these shared experiences and had to resolve each of their memories to produce a common narrative. Johann now deferred to Margarethe for many of the stories of their shared experiences. The ocean passage was difficult for a woman who was six months pregnant, but Margarethe proudly noted it had not been as difficult for her as it had been for Johann. She was berthed midship and did not experience as much of the heaving and did not get sick. Johann, however, got terribly seasick. He was in the bow and complained bitterly that where he was they went up and down a lot more than in the middle of the ship. Once when he went outside onto the deck for fresh air someone on the deck above was hanging over the rail and vomiting. It was very unpleasant, and years later when the children burped or vomited he had to leave the room immediately. There were more pleasant memories of the passage. Johann and Margarethe remembered seeing icebergs when they neared Newfoundland. They were dismayed, however, at the long sail up the St. Lawrence with only the odd village church steeple to be seen. They finally disembarked in Quebec on 9 July 1952.10