Category Archives: History

Fate unknown

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This week I attended, with my sister and brother-in-law, an exhibit at the Mennonite Heritage Museum, Abbotsford, B.C., called “Unearthing the Vanished: Mennonite Experiences in Stalin’s Great Terror.”

It tells the stories of some of an estimated 9000 Mennonites — generally men — arrested during the Terror of 1937-38 in the Soviet Union. These stories are but a sampling of the 9000, and the 9000 itself but a portion of the number in the larger population who were affected in that period. (See, for example, books like Solzenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.)

Janet Boldt, one of the writers/researchers of the exhibit, whose own relatives were taken in the Terror, gave us an excellent introduction to the exhibit.

In panels of text, photos, art, and poetry, and materials like a boy’s begging cloth and copies of trial documents, the exhibit presents the background to the Terror, details of arrests and interrogation and sometimes (if known) outcome, as well as faces in a 3-panel Wall of Sorrow. Even starker than photos are simply names with “profile cutouts.” In many cases, all that can be said is “Fate unknown.”

“Take a moment to gaze at their faces,” the exhibit guide advises. “[A]ll were part of the fabric of society, all were part of what it means to be family.”

A wail of lament

The exhibit also addresses the affect of these arrests and disappearances on women and on children. Collectively, it’s emotional; it’s moving. It’s a wail of lament.

I can’t help thinking of a 1912 funeral photo (below) of my grandfather’s family (he’s the second from right in the back), at the time of his father’s death. Of these siblings, only he and one brother, far left, would later manage to immigrate to Canada. What was the fate of the rest of them? A few letters in the early 1930s speak of Verbannung (exile) and great hunger.Of her family, my grandmother wrote, “If only I knew where all our family members are…. What happened to them all?”

It’s also impossible to look at this exhibit and not think of images and videos we see in the news every day, not arrests into a “Black Raven” vehicle at midnight but masked and often unidentified ICE agents seizing people in broad daylight. Reports of terrible treatment in places like Alligator Alcatraz are emerging. There seems no recourse in these grabs to lawful procedures or justice. It’s neither alarmist nor conspiracy theory to draw parallels between the “disappeared” of my heritage and today’s new masses of the “disappeared.”

Seven years ago

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Well beyond time to show up here if I’m going to call myself a blogger, but honestly, nothing original is urging itself upon me to say. How about a few days of my journal from seven years ago then? The prose is a bit loopy in places, but it’s a journal — one is talking to oneself! My words from the past often seem strange to me, events already over and long forgotten, but there I was, in those days. (Do you remember these episodes in “the news”?)

Tuesday, August 8, 2017

8 p.m. Enjoying cool air of balcony. Fallen flower petals litter the floor, cherry tomatoes now eager to ripen. Helmut at Habitat [for Humanity work site] today and I did revisions [to a story and essay].

Per David Brooks, who opined at NYT that he was trying to divest his brain of Trump, and Garrison Keillor who had a great column about his high school reunion and how the man’s name didn’t come up at all, and then how what’s (more) important is tomatoes, I didn’t watch news in the afternoon hour I often allow myself to puzzle, but listened instead to an Eleanor Wachtel interview with Edna O’Brien. “Oh wow,” I said to myself when it was done, “that was good.” Truly rich in ideas, emotion, compassion-capacity. – So all good, and turns out I have an Edna O’Brien short fiction collection on my shelves. –

But during my brief victory away from the news, there is a new “development” that occurs. Bombast from North Korea, bombast from D.T. who promises “fire and fury…and force,” “like the world has never seen.” Shock, for he sounds just like Kim Jong Un. It’s really quite frightening, this build-up of tension, both of them nuclear powers.

Friday, Aug. 11, 2017

Two quite opposite emotions today—one a sense of fear/sick/disgust/worry—who knows how to describe it, as the rhetoric continues, and continues—ON THE U.S. SIDE. It’s quite frightening really, and as leaders urge the rhetoric be lowered, D.T. carries right on. His poll #s continue to drop, as markets are too, and it’s as if he thinks he’ll gain people back by talking tough. “People like it,” he says…. It really did quite bother me. I bleat it all Godward, yes, but am mostly bothered by piety [when someone says] well we’re in the last days, we don’t understand, just “watch and pray.” That is good advice, but are we really in the last days? I think we have to resist warmongering like that. Poor Koreans and others in Asia, Guam, etc. Lord have mercy.

But, the world is coming to an end, so why not buy a painting? Was compelled by a “R. Lake” I saw in the thrift shop yesterday, a landscape, flat though low mountains on horizon, a large tree centre, some small buildings. It’s not like real detailed, you have to stand back, but there’s something about the blues. Anyways, it was still there this morning, had in the meanwhile looked up R. Lake, which is Randall Lake, born 1947, of Utah, ex-Mormon, his paintings recently more political—gay man, taking on Mormon Church for their damage to LGBTQ etc. $65. So happy with this acquisition, now in our bedroom.

Haircut today too, some puzzle fun, and some work (revisions), though not as much as I should have, if I wasn’t so anxious about nuclear war or busy rearranging our walls.

Saturday, August 12, 2017

So yesterday I posted my feelings on FB—re North Korea, my cries for Korean people, opinion that DT brought world to brink—….quite a few comments, which is always a little surprising… Karla B. alerts me to tomorrow’s Sunday of Prayer for Peaceful Reunification of Korean Pen. Betty B. says Australia feels very close. John L. proposes how both leaders will spin this. Carol Ann W. recalls Cuban Missile Crisis, how she played Bach. Dayna D. shares Anne Lamott:

What to do in the face of Locked and Loaded? The usual: Help! Thanks. Wow. Radical self-care. Trust & surrender. Serve the poor. Breathe.

 So, interesting conversations that FB provokes. I just “like” everyone and leave it at that.

BUT, End of the World is so yesterday, she says (to herself) sarcastically. Who’s even thinking about that?! Today it’s Charlottesville, VA. Neo-Nazis, KKK, Alt Right gathering, violence and counter protests. A car rams counter-protestors, a woman killed, 3 deaths in all. DT generically calls for unity and condemns violence “from many sides, from many sides.” Dos not condemn white supremacists who chant Heil Trump and wear MAGA hats, David Duke who reminds who elected him. I listened to the statement and agree, it was tepid, he who can be so specific in his criticisms. He… can’t name it for what it is.

Someday, maybe 10-20-30 year from now, if someone reads this, they may say, well is she just hyperventilating, worrying… Believe me, it is this bad on this continent, this sense of division, this sense of something terrible unleashed from the top. “Blood and soil,” they chanted, as they walked with their tiki torches. And “Jews will not replace us.”

Well, the Sabbath nears. Breathe, dear heart. Read your Edna O’Brien book. Think of your new painting-print. Your kids and grands… [Gratitude] for this day. For the blackberries we picked this morning. For the Staples store that opened nearby today. For a pot of yellow mums. For Helmut.

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Stories and songs

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I forgot my phone at Bonnie’s house yesterday so have no photos to prove I attended the second day of the Russlaender conference! But I was definitely there, at my alma mater, the University of Winnipeg, for a day as rich as the first. It felt less compressed, because there were only three presentations per slot instead of four as had been the case during parts of in the day before. Once again, there was much of interest.

It struck me that though an academic conference, many participants and certainly many in the audience had their own stories and lineage to set into what they were hearing about the period under consideration: the emigration of some 20,000 Mennonites from Russia in the 1920s. For one example, Josephine Braun, a great-grand-daughter of Isaac J Braun of the somewhat notorious Friesen-Braun trial in Saskatchewan, presented her attempts to dig deeper into the life of a man whose story had been suppressed within her own family, as Braun was jailed for some five years and then deported back to Russia, with his wife and sons left behind to somehow manage in Canada. A fascinating story with much remaining mystery.

The question at the time of that decade in Russia was: leave or stay? In another paper I particularly enjoyed, on Friday, Colin Neufeldt presented a long list of reasons people had NOT to emigrate. Some 20,000 did, yes, and it was that decision and the reasons for it as well as subsequent immigrant adjustments to a new environment that these days are commemorating, but the large majority did not leave. Some wanted to but couldn’t for various reasons and others could have but didn’t, also for various reasons. Many, perhaps more than we realize, he suggested, wanted to participate in the creation of the world’s first socialist state. For those less privileged within the Mennonite community, there was the possibility of upward mobility in the new circumstances. Also, the New Economic Policy seemed for many an optimistic reconstructive step after the chaos of the civil war. And of course there were always family reasons: one member of a couple might wish to go but not the other, or there were elderly parents to consider and so on.

Last week, before coming, I happened to be looking at some pages of my grandmother Helene Derksen Harder’s diary, where she recounts in broad strokes the last years and months before their decision to leave and then the auction and flurry with papers/permissions and other preparations for the journey. She tells of instances of great fear as “guests”–her euphemism for bandits and soldiers–invaded the household, wanting food, horses, money, and so on. She tells of hunger, loss, tension, deprivation. She mentions the bravery of her old mother who helped them pack, realizing she might never see her daughter again. Now I want to search those pages more thoroughly for my grandparents’ particular motivation to leave–along with their three small children—their beloved homeland and parents for new and unknown future.

grandmother Helene Harder
grandfather Heinrich Harder

As mentioned already, it was the decision to leave, whatever the motivation, that the conference (as well as a train tour from Quebec City to Abbotsford these weeks) was commemorating and for me the most wonderful way to do it was yesterday evening’s Saengerfest. Choirs–adult, youth, children–singing songs old and new, and we in the “sold out” Centennial Concert Hall sometimes got to sing along too. It’s songs of lament and faith and hope that reach back to connect both the stayers and the leavers, that sustained those who suffered through the challenges of their decisions; it’s the songs that now mostly strongly connect me into that story and my heritage and into my own childhood and youth, that brought me to tears last evening.

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I’ll end with mentioning just one small part of the festival of song. In Bach’s “Befiehl du deine Wege” (Entrust Thy Ways), conductor Henry Engbrecht had the choir begin each line together and then sing it individually, however slowly or quickly, and then at his signal end in harmony on the final note. It was the strangest and most astonishing cacophony of sound and then resolution, a perfect demonstration of the hundreds of individual stories we each set against the backdrop of historical events but drawing together as community then, as we hear one another, in harmony.