Remember Me

It is November, the month of remembrance. In Canada we celebrate Remembrance Day in honour of those who went to war for our country.

I'm doing my own remembering. I’m holding my grandmother’s notebook in my hand. It is a dark blue "Hilroy Exercise Book, #993 Wide Ruled," the kind I had in high school back in the early sixties. In her frugal Mennonite way, Oma would often take our old discarded notebooks and write between the lines where we had done our math or science exercises. Although this notebook is not a used one, she still writes between the lines to save paper!

My grandmother writes in German, her mother tongue. Her hand-writing is small and neat; I have no trouble deciphering it.  

The blue notebook is not a diary but a recollection of some of the events of my Oma’s flight (together with our family) from Ukraine to Poland and Germany. She wrote in retrospect, after she was finally reunited with her siblings and her mother in Canada. I can still see the small table she had set up in her tiny bedroom. There was always a Bible on it and usually a Mennonitische Rundschau or Der Bote (two Mennonite papers of the time). She spent many hours in that room—reading, meditating, writing letters, and praying.

Oma’s recording of her memories begins with a tragic event in our family. It is one of many she has had to endure since the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. (See my post of July 15, 2012.) For some reason, she wrote this one down, not at the time it happened but years later, when she had time to think about it. I have not seen any reflections of her other major traumas [for example, the death of her father and her in-laws within weeks of each other during the typhoid epidemic of 1919 and 1920; the resulting immigration to Canada of her mother and most of her siblings in June 1923 (this is recorded in the family Bible she brought along from Ukraine); the loss of her infant son Gerhard in 1934; the false accusation, imprisonment and disappearance of her brother Dietrich in 1937 and her beloved 
husband Abram in 1938]. 

At the time of this event, my grandmother and her youngest son, sixteen-year-old Jakob, were in a refugee camp in Stargard, a small Prussian village. Two of her sons, eighteen-year-old Dietrich and twenty-year-old Hans, had been conscripted into the German army. Her daughter, Tina (my mother), with her husband and two small children had found refuge in Bernsdorf, a village in East Germany. 

My grandmother writes about her young sons in the army: “Our hearts were heavy with an almost physical, palpable pain as we feared for their lives. This fear soon became a terrible reality.”

Oma writes that she was sitting on a bench under some evergreen trees with a friend. It was 8:45 on a balmy June evening (June 15, 1944) and they were engrossed in conversation, when all at once my grandmother experienced “a jolt that sent shock waves throughout my body. I jump up from my seat, exclaiming, ‘What is going on with me? What is happening?’” 

The next morning, she woke up with no idea as to what had caused her anxiety attack. Late in the afternoon her neighbour in the camp is called to the office of the director. She returns, and after much agony and trembling, she finally manages to stammer, “Something terrible has happened to your son Dietrich. He is dead!” A visit to the camp director confirms the terrible news and my grandmother prepares to go to the funeral at the military headquarters at Fürstenberg near Berlin. The German army is generous: she is given train tickets for herself and for several family members and a dear friend. The camp director himself telephones family members with the news.

When she tells her youngest son what has happened, “he leans against a tree and bursts into tears. They were close in age as schoolboys and true friends together, always getting into scrapes and sticking up for each other. Now everything was over, they were never, never to see each other again in this world. Their paths had parted forever and another path must begin."

                              

The Kroeger family, just before their father was arrested. Dietrich is leaning against his father's arm.

Oma continues, "We come to Berlin where we see the results of this destructive war. The once so beautiful railroad station is roofless, tattered and with broken pillars, every corner utterly devoid of beauty. We have just become eyewitnesses to this terrible scene when the sirens begin to howl and we have to leave the train and flee into the bunker where many other frightened faces stare at us. However, the danger is soon past and we can return to the outside world. 

“When we arrive at the military camp everything that had happened to our dear Dietrich is revealed to us. In the evening the soldiers were told to clean their unloaded weapons. Carelessly, the person sitting directly across from Dietrich had forgotten to unload his rifle. He hit the trigger accidentally, and the bullet went directly into Dietrich’s right eye and through his head, killing him instantly. It happened at the exact time that I experienced such a jolt to my heart!”

My grandmother goes on to describe how she went to view her son’s body and the full military funeral that followed. She knew that there was one more thing she needed to do. She asked the captain if she could visit the person who had caused this accident. Reluctantly, he agreed. 

“The door opens and in walks the deeply regretful, guilty one. I pity him greatly; unwanted, unplanned, to have brought such a great heartache on himself and others. I stretch my hand out toward him, which he grasps immediately and willingly. Quietly we look at each other for a long moment, then he bows his head, and tears stream from his eyes. I will remain silent about the short discussion that followed. I just said to him that I took it as an act of God. He can be assured of full forgiveness from me, and I will not remember his guilt. At the end, I asked him if he was willing to give me a kiss in my son’s place—which he willingly did, and our forgiveness was sealed by God. Both of us were left feeling comforted."

On Remembrance Day, I choose to remember this act of forgiveness. If only all of us were so ready to forgive we would not have to remember the ones who died horrible deaths in battles that need not have taken place at all.