Sweeter Than All the World

by Rudy Wiebe

  And for these moments, before he escapes into exhaustion and sleep, Adam can manage to scrawl on a page in his journal:

  It is August ?? 1990—the sun does not yet quite set, tomorrow I will recognize what I have seen before.

  And believe it too.

  FOURTEEN

  A PLAN FOR JEWS AND MENNONITES

  Gnadenthal, Ukrainian SSR

  1941

  TUESDAY, JANUARY 1, 1863:

  New Year’s Eve in church, Foda preached Ephesians 4:22 and 25. They announced Mrs. Isaak Unruh and baby died after she suffered 22 hours. She was married 14 years and nine children with four living. I knew she died. My friend Anna sat on the front bench by me and cried, she’s the oldest.

  The first words I wrote in my diary. When you’re ninety, your own handwriting is like a story some stranger you once knew made up. Or like looking at an old picture, the only things you remember are what the picture shows, which anyone can see and it isn’t really remembering. But then, the longer you look, more begins to come back, until you have lots of bits and scraps and maybes. But they happened when you were a different person.

  I was born ninety years ago today, October 4, 1851. Not in this house of course, or even this village, but not far away. Neuendorf, Chortiza Mennonite Colony, Ukrainian Russia. They named me Katerina. I was the fifth living child and second daughter of Aaron and Esther Loewen.

  My father Aaron, Foda we always called him, was born the second son, at last, after one son and eleven daughters. With only seven children living, Grosspa Loewen could have found a full farm for him in Chortiza as easily as he did for my uncle Jakob, but Foda liked reading more than sheep or grain. He became a village teacher.

  Then the Czar’s government started the Plan for the Jews, the Judenplan Mennonites called it. It was to be a model colony of landless Jews settled in villages on government land learning how to farm. And Mennonites, considered such good farmers, were supposed to live and farm with them, to show them how.

  Because Foda’s brother Jakob Loewen was an exceptional farmer, they appointed him Judenplan administrator. It was he who persuaded Foda to become the village teacher, but also to take a land grant as a model farmer in one of the four new Judenplan villages, Novovitebsk.

  So we left Chortiza, and that’s when Foda started to keep a diary. Not just of weather and who came to visit, but the colony struggles too because being the teacher means you’re always poorer than the large estate landowners. You understand hardship, and you read the life of the village in the faces of children every day on the school benches.

  Two years later Foda was elected to be the Mennonite minister too, and then he heard everything else that was happening in the village. He had to settle not only Mennonite school and church problems, but also the quarrels between people—the Mennonites, the Jews, or both together. Foda heard and knew so much, and he could not lie. He could not stop writing it all down either. Often he had to find words that meant two different things, one good—in case anyone other than he ever read it—and the other at an angle, to help him remember what really happened.

  The Judenplan Colony was started in 1852, two days’ travel by wagon west of Chortiza. I was less than a year old. We lived in three different Judenplan villages, until it became too difficult and we finally settled in Gnadenthal, a new village for Mennonites only laid out in the new Baratov Colony in 1872. I live here still, in 1941. Live and hope to die here in the house that we, Aaron Loewen’s family, built ourselves where its one street crosses the little bridge of the stream that runs in spring.

  Foda sat at our big-room table writing, in both Novovitebsk and Gnadenthal, almost every evening. There was no table then in the corner-room where he and Mama, and later Mutta, slept. Too many children, too many chests and too much bedding. He wrote with a long feather he sharpened, dipping into the bottle of ink he made from soot. I liked the paper, folded open, the clean white growing blacker with twists and long strokes of Gothic script. I was learning to write Highgerman words from him in school. I heard Highgerman read aloud in church, but sermons were mostly in Lowgerman and that was all Mennonites spoke at home then, even the preacher’s family. With the Jews we used what Russian we had; we children were told the less we spoke to them the better. They were so different, they would only lead us astray.

  To write I found bits of paper for myself. The paper felt so fine, so beautifully smooth. In school we wrote on stone slates. I never had a folded book such as Foda would fill, margin to margin, and only a pencil. I started that New Year when Anna cried so much for her mother. Our mother was very sick too but I never cried out loud in church, nor did Foda when he asked them from the pulpit to pray for her. I always wanted to write down more, even when I misspelled most of the words. But I had no paper, and always I knew so little.

  Seventy-eight years. I still have that first piece of paper. Like Foda, I wrote the date first. That helps to start: write a fact you know exactly. The piece is with the others in a small box at the bottom of my chest. An old woman doesn’t need to hide paper behind a brick in the wall any more, no one now knows about it anyway to want to see it. No one imagines living as long as I have. Nor I think, in Russia since 1917, would anyone want to.

  But as the Jews say, Who tells God what to do? In ninety years I’ve told Him very little, but I’ve begged Him often enough. And even that…

  Many of my diary sentences end like Foda’s, with … ein Gedankenstrich, he called it. A line sometimes to the edge of the page, a long streak of thought impossible to write out. Or wiser not to.

  I find in my Bible what my father preached in 1863 in Novovitebsk. That Judenplan village was thirty kilometres from here, but after pogroms and civil war it’s all gone. A ploughed field along the Sheltaia River. Foda was always so sad at the beginning of a year, he warned everyone about sin. But never the Jews. As a child I could not tell whether the Jews actually knew, or cared, what hell was. It seemed to me the Mennonite sin that Foda preached would, if it possibly could, take every person alive down into hell to burn for all eternity but no, Foda said the Jews had to deal with God in their own way. It was not our way, we had the Mennonite duty to be honest and believe as Jesus taught.

  There were always some Judenplan Mennonites who thought we should not only teach the Jews how to farm, but also how to be Christians. Foda always said that if we could just live like Jesus, that would teach them enough.

  So Jews on the Judenplan came to him only about agreements that they said Mennonites had broken, or money, or property gone. But our people came to him from all four villages carrying their sin, telling him every one of them and going away happy. He grew sadder and sadder, but always asked for more. I read the verses he preached the first of January: “You must give up your old way of life. From now on there must be no more lies: you must speak the truth to one another, for we are all members of one body. Even if you are angry, you must not sin.”

  I wasn’t a “body member.” I was barely eleven and not baptized, though I expected to be when I turned seventeen. What “old way of life” could I give up? Surviving childhood, as so many children did not? I wasn’t angry. I was a girl, fourth behind men, and boys, and women, and I could cook and milk cows and feed babies—they were sent from God and died according to His Will—the way my friend Anna Unruh, just fourteen, would have to do now, with her mother in her grave. I had never in my life dared to tell a lie. Must I start, so I could then be obedient and stop? What did I know, to lie about it?

  Thursday, January 17, 1863:

  Diedrich Wiebe came with Deacon Dietrich Franz. I heard Diedrich Wiebe tell Foda he is sick unto death and he dirtied himself with cattle. He was so sorry, for a long time. Foda prayed, Jesus son of David have mercy, cover us with your robe of righteousness so we can stand before you naked.

  We were eight Mennonite families living in Novovitebsk with forty Jewish families. I had never heard anything when men came to our door, always two together and sometimes with their sons or even
wives but never daughters. I wouldn’t have heard what Bigbelly Diedrich Wiebe said either, but I was washing the top of the oven in the big-room when they came in and shut the door. I shrank down still as a mouse. Diedrich Wiebe sat with his stomach spreading rounder than a washtub against the table. A big man crying, after a while he stuttered that. I wrote the words down—it was all so strange—and hid them behind the loose brick below my bed. What did that mean? I dirtied myself with cattle.

  But Foda’s prayer about standing naked was perfectly clear. In prayer, or preaching, things that were sin if you actually did them were often reversed into wonderful salvation, like being washed clean in the Blood of the Lamb, though the blood spraying from the neck of a chicken whose head I chopped off made me anything but clean. So prayer to be covered with a robe from Jesus to make you both clean and naked was fine. But not Bigbelly’s cattle—that I didn’t understand then. It was winter, the frozen ground under snow, cows were not muddy. Or smeared with thin shit from spring grass so you got more than dirty when you were milking and they hit you with their tails. Anyways, Bigbelly Wiebe never milked, only Mrs. Wiebe and their girls. What was this?

  I sit now with my box of little pencil papers in my lap. I look out of my window at the village street of Gnadenthal, Colony Baratov. Every day, seeing mostly trees. In the evening the glass reflects my old face, folded together by so much to remember, but I can look through it easily. I will not waste oil for a lamp to light up every wrinkle.

  The trees are tall again, rows we’ve planted four times over in my lifetime. During the horrors after 1918 we dug them down to the roots to burn in our stoves. Four armies overran us then, all at the same time, as they pleased. The Czar’s White Army, the Communist Reds, the Ukrainians’ Independence Army, Nestor Machno with his terrifying Anarchists. After the three united to destroy the Whites, they fought and killed and starved each other until the Reds had slaughtered the other two, and almost all our men, sons and fathers and husbands, including my Benjamin … I will not remember. Trees grow and get chopped down and grow again as they can.

  Sixty-nine years in Gnadenthal, this so-called Valley of Grace. My relatives write me that the Mennonites have carried this village name with them hopefully all over the world—Siberia, Canada, the United States, even Mexico, Paraguay, Brazil. I don’t know, all the letters stopped when Stalin began dragging our men away in 1937. Over fifty years in this house. And for the twenty years before that in a Judenplan house, built exactly the same way. Foda said most Jews did not like to farm. Mostly they wanted to be pedlars or innkeepers; brandy was so easy to sell. The Mennonites were to teach them farming, but Foda himself had time for almost nothing except teaching and preaching and hearing Mennonite sins.

  Poor Bigbelly Wiebe. He could hardly speak, tears running down his cheeks. A big man crying never happened except at funerals, and then at most the husband.

  Those tears were strange to me then, overwhelming. Like the shudders you feel walking past the graveyard behind the school at night. In bright sunlight the memory of coffins sinking into opened ground, hell or heaven, feels different. I could not bear his weeping. Hidden on the oven, I wept too.

  A man and a cow. Such a simple, you could almost say a “clean and private” sin. In ninety years what haven’t I faced, revolution, civil war, anarchists, starvation, Machno murderers, typhus, the God of Fear Stalin and his smiling police. Sometimes your spirit can pray only for swift and final massacre. Eichenfeld-Dubovka, seventy-nine men, three women shot in one night of October, 1919. And how many women and children violated.

  The love of God and of family, I have known that too. I must not and will not forget that. So much, flowing even from the other side of the world in letters. Here in my box on my lap. From Saskatchewan, Canada, and once Fernheim, Paraguay.

  Now war is come again. German war, like no one on earth, they say, has seen before. Faster than you can think, on the ground and from the sky. Beautiful Kiev is destroyed. Two months ago, on August 16th, I saw the first German tanks come down our street in this lost corner of the world. Into Gnadenthal. Around the clattering tanks, soldiers on motor-cyles, one steering, a second in the sidecar holding his machine gun in the air. Hitler’s hooked crosses on their round iron helmets. Pouring into Gnadenthal like ants.

  Friday, February 1, 1863:

  Mama too sick to get out of bed. Diedrich Wiebe died at midnight. Deacon Franz came to attach the Life Awakener to Mama. Its end is a round disc of long needles. I ran away into the barn.

  I remember I hid in the dry hay above our cow and few sheep. But even in the darkness I still saw those needles. They used the Brauchscheidt Life Awakener, just brought from Germany, all over the Mennonite colonies. Mama’s brother, August Wiebe, had studied in Germany and was a doctor in Chortiza. He called it stupidity, but people used it because so many people of all ages died and sometimes using it seemed to help. Foda agreed they would pray and apply it on Mama’s back because she could not breathe. It was a thick cylinder with a spring that you wound up with a handle, then released, and the spring drove the needles on the disc into the skin.

  Mama’s whole back was needled black in big circles. She could not lie on it. After two days she was covered with yellow pus like a stinking cloth. Deacon Franz said that was very good because that would draw her sickness out. I had to help wrap her with cotton soaked in Brauchscheidt’s oil, so the sickness would rise out even faster. But she could sleep. She sounded weaker when she coughed.

  Sunday February 17, 1863:

  Widow Wiebe will marry Isaak Unruh. Thirteen people, eleven children, brought together. Anna won’t have to do all the work in the house any more. Foda preached Isaiah 43: I am the Lord, your Holy One, I make rivers in the desert to give drink to my chosen people. Mennonites are chosen, he said, we must be examples, not drink so much brandy at weddings and funerals. Mama lies under the blanket, she wants to work and she wants to die.

  No adult would tell a child such things then, but, besides sickness, our Mama was also pregnant. Foda insisted that all life, in sickness or in health, was a gift from God. Such a great gift.

  Friday, March 22, 1863:

  We started to seed, our family was first on the land. Uncle Jacob’s Jewish workers helped us. At supper Foda said it was seventy-five years today, 1788, when the first Mennonites left Danzig, on the invitation of my namesake Czarina Katerina II. Grosspapa Loewen was eight, he told him many sad wandering stories. Foda said remember 1788, fifty Mennonites by oxcart went to Riga, and then Dubrowna for winter. In spring they and a thousand more from Danzig came down the Dnieper River to Chortiza, and there I was born sixty-three years later.

  Uncle Doctor August came this afternoon. Mama’s back is a little healed. She moans, she does not move.

  Monday, April 1, 1863:

  Today Miller Abraham Reimer lay in the ditch. Abel saw him and told Foda. He was drunk, the innkeeper Lippen on Ekaterinoslav Road sells him brandy when he wants it.

  Easter Monday, April 8, 1863:

  Our Mama died. At last she is with Jesus and his angels. The Abraham Reimer buggy came around our corner fast and tipped and broke, the team ran away with the front end. The family, eight, fell in the ditch, and screamed. Mrs. Reimer hit him on the ground, that’s what you get for drinking. Foda said before God’s Almighty throne for our Mama there is no sin or death or sadness, only golden light.

  Wednesday, April 24, 1863:

  Foda sold our last wheat to the Jew Stuppel, Abraham Reimer’s partner. He settled a dispute about milling. Greta and I made butter for Gerhard and Foda to sell at the market in Krivoi Rog. A letter came for us with eleven silver rubles in it.…

  We had almost nothing to eat after Mama died, but Foda said the faithful Lord would provide. As I remember He did that mostly through our relatives, especially Uncle Jacob Loewen and also the Heinrich Heeses of Ekaterinoslav. Tante Anna Heese was Mama’s aunt. Onkel Heinrich was called “the Prussian” because he came to Chortiza as a Lutheran to live w
ith the “defenceless” Mennonites, as he said, and escape Napoleon’s army. He was a better pacifist than most Mennonites, and a kinder, more gifted teacher too. He built schools to train teachers, but the old Ohms thought he taught students too much, it was better Mennonites didn’t know all that. So when he was already white-haired he moved his family to Ekaterinoslav. The rich Russian noblemen there paid him a great deal to teach their sons. He loved Russia and wrote poems for children in Russian, he taught us one of them when he visited Novovitebsk. It began with a lilt, we could sing it:

  The proud Queen of Great Britain,

  Consults with frauds and liars.…

  The first Russian words I knew. I was only six when the Crimean War started, but I remember the proud Queen of Great Britain, so young and already such a liar. “Victoria” Onkel Heinrich Heese called her.

  Thursday, May 23, 1863:

  Pentecost. Eleven boys and thirteen girls were baptized. We heard Bernard Klassen the widower wants to marry Maria, the daughter of his second wife, who died. She is sixteen and not even baptized. Gossip is sin, Foda scolded us. The Ministers’ Committee will send her to relatives in another village.

  Friday, June 21, 1863:

  We harvested our oats, again we were the first. Not much, the summer is so dry. Uncle Jacob hired fifteen Jews to cut it in a day. He paid each half a pud of grain and the noon meal. Foda wrote down the names and numbers.

  In those years on the Judenplan we harvested oats in June. This year in June we heard Germany had invaded Russia. Adolf Hitler, whom Stalin had praised so loud in every newspaper and radio speech, was now a “fascist bloodsucker.” He had broken the “eternal friendship” treaty in less than two years.