The Trees Remember

"The trees remember! The houses don't forget! The stones cry out!"

Our Polish tour guide Katia said this over and over as we looked at ancient trees, neglected houses, and broken gravestones.

This past September, Hardy and I spent time searching out our places of birth. Hardy was born in Danzig-Westpreussen (present-day Poland) in 1937 and I was born in Ukraine in 1943, and we both thought it was time to go back for a visit..

Although Mennonites lived for over 500 years in Poland, I have heard very little about that period of history. Russia's more recent dramatic and traumatic past is a more familiar story to me.

Katia, with her sparkling personality and her immense knowledge of Polish as well as Mennonite history, made our families' history spring alive for us. The many cemeteries we visited, where broken memorial stones lay scattered on the ground, prayers I still remember from my childhood etched on one side, names and dates on the other, spoke to us of a once vibrant community where our forebears lived lives that had meaning and purpose. They built the dikes that stopped the Vistula River from overflowing its banks and destroying the surrounding countryside as it had done since time immemorial. They built windmills and farms and churches and raised their children to respect God and community.

All this came to an end as the Russians invaded Poland and forced its inhabitants to leave everything behind; barns and stables full of horses, hogs, cattle and poultry, fields ready for harvest. Like Lot's wife, those who turned back were destroyed, but so were many who fled. It was a time of chaos and upheaval, leaving in its wake horrific suffering and loss.

Our bus drove down a tranquil tree-lined country road as Hardy told his story to the rest of the group of travelers. We were looking for a house he remembers vaguely. The family left in haste when he was only seven and had just begun school. He recalls running home from school, desperately afraid of a vicious dog at one of the neighbours'. As he told us this memory, we heard a dog barking fiercely and saw it running alongside the bus, baring its teeth viciously. "There's the dog!" we all cried out. "Now where's the house?"

       
                                           Photo credit: Karen Smeed                                                                                                                  

We stopped at a brick building now occupied by Polish people. The couple living there told us that this building used to be a school and advised us to go back about a kilometer along the road from which we had come. This brick building was the school Hardy began attending in 1944 (although he had no recollection of it).

The bus driver turned around and the excitement in the bus was palpable! Even if Hardy had not remembered his former home, the evidence was there; this building cried out to be recognized. On the front gable, in big, bold letters were the initials "JS" and the date 1921. Hardy's grandfather's name was Johannes Schroeder and the year they built the new stable (after the big fire) was 1921. The brick building facing the road with the initials and date on it was indeed the Schroeder stable. The house, that used to stand perpendicularly to the right of the stable, was no longer there. That is the house to which Hardy's mom (Anna Froese) moved when she married into the family and the place where Hardy spent the first seven years of his life.

People were living in this stable and the yard was obviously a lumberyard, with stacked boards and piles of firewood everywhere. Goats clambered over scattered logs and greeted us happily, but there were no people in sight even though it was evident that this was a residence.

Later we stopped at the Mennonite museum in Nowy Dwor [Tiegenhof]. To our surprise we saw a copy of the Plautdietsch Bible which Hardy had copy-edited in 2002 while he was with the Canadian Bible Society. It had found its way to the country of his birth somehow, a mute reminder of what had happened to that little boy running home from school so many years ago.

"The trees remember."