Forget-Me-Not

Living in our democratic country where I enjoy a culture of plenty and relative security, it is easy to forget that this is not the case for many millions of people and was not the case for our family living in the Soviet Union before 1943 the year we became refugees.

However, I have a small booklet which helps me to remember. It was given to my grandmother by her favorite sister Agneta, when they said their farewells and emigrated to Canada in 1923, leaving behind my grandmother Katarina Kroeger and her young family as well as my grandmother's single brother, Dietrich Epp. The booklet is called Christliches Vergissmeinnicht (transl. Christian Forget-Me-Not) and serves as a place to record important events such as births and deaths of family members and friends.

     

On March 15, 1938, my grandmother wrote: My dear husband Abram Kroeger was imprisoned. No one knew what happened to him in prison but he was never heard from again..

On July 28th of this year we received our answer to what we had long suspected, and I recorded it in my grandmother's date book -- November 14, 1938: My grandfather, Abram Kroeger was executed by shooting at 8:30 p.m. in Dniepropetrovsk. He was exonerated (of all charges against him) in 1989.

I asked myself why he was exonerated, and it occurred to me that it must be because he made no confession to the false accusations against him.

A similar thing happened to my grandmother's brother, Dietrich Epp, who was falsely accused and imprisoned on September 5, 1937.

In June 1944, my grandmother experienced another searing loss when her young son Dietrich (named after his uncle and conscripted into the German army), was accidentally shot while the soldiers were cleaning their guns. I wrote about this in a blog post (see Nov. 19, 2016).

My three brothers are currently on a trip to Ukraine and were able to access archival files. That is how they discovered what happened to our grandfather and our great-uncle.

My sister Irma assembled a collage (above) of these three innocent victims of a senseless war and is using it as a screen saver to honour them and also to serve as a reminder that they "lost their lives to senseless war and the misuse of guns. It's up to this generation to work towards 'Never Again'!"

"Oh, the Places I've Been!"

Almost-ten-year-old granddaughter Sasha stayed for an overnight recently. After breakfast she needed something to do and I was her only source of entertainment. The day before she had spent the whole afternoon drawing, coloring and writing stories in a book I began with the grandchildren at our rental cottage last summer.

The Artist at Work

Sasha needed a change from yesterday's intense drawing and writing activity. The teacher in me kicked in. I love nothing more than seeing the light in someone’s eyes when they discover something new. Better yet is when I too learn something in the process. 

We played a game using the big world map on the wall downstairs. We took turns selecting places we chose on the map and asking the other person to locate them by the count of ten. It was fun and we learned a lot about the world. 

I happened to see the word Taklimaken on the map and liked the sound of it, so I asked Sasha to find it. I gave her some hints and some extra time and she located it. I could not believe that in all my years as a student and a teacher I had not heard of the Taklimakan Desert, the largest desert in China and the second largest shifting-sand desert in the world! Sasha asked Opa and he had not heard of it either! We googled it and learned a lot about this fascinating area.

Taklimakan Desert in Western China

It occurred to me that although Sasha knew more about geography than I did at her age, she had always lived in one place and had never been further east than Ontario or further west than Alberta. As I traced my own journey around the world for her, I was amazed myself at what an experienced world traveller I had already become at age nine.

My journey began at the age of three months, when, in my mother’s arms, I left my birthplace, Ukraine, and travelled by train to Poland and further into Germany to escape being sent back to Ukraine where we would likely face slave labor and almost certain death. When my father returned to the family after having been conscripted into the German army during the last few months of WW2, he found us living on a farm in southern Germany (Bavaria). He was very concerned for our safety and decided we would be better off leaving Germany.

So by the time I was four, our family joined others at Bremerhaven (northern Germany) where the Mennonite Central Committee had rented a Dutch cruise ship, the Volendam, to take refugees to South America. With over 2,300 passengers our ship sailed for Argentina. We couldn't land for some time because we didn’t have permission from the Argentinian authorities to do so. 

["Yes, Sasha, I was also one of the 'boat people'!" Fortunately our sponsors were trustworthy people. Three cheers for MCC which is still helping displaced people around the world!]

In Argentina we lived in a tent city until we were able to go to the Paraguayan Chaco; there we spent five years (1947-1952) in a village we helped build (yes, even little children could stomp the bitter-grass into the clay to make bricks, chase grasshoppers and other predators from the crops, haul water, etc.).

I left my beloved village for a much larger world when I turned nine (just a few months younger than Sasha is now). We travelled by train and small boat to Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, where we spent several months waiting for our visas. From there we flew to Montreal and took the train all the way west to Alberta. After ten years, when I had just graduated from high school, our family moved to Winnipeg, where I met the love of my life and we embarked on further adventures in Africa. After 18 years we returned to live in Ontario and then, after 24 years in the Kitchener-Waterloo area, we moved back again to Manitoba. I believe we will not move again!

If you want to read some books to your grandchildren or nieces and nephews about children who have travelled the world, below are two delightful ones that are some of our family's favorites. The authors, both accomplished artists, wrote and illustrated their books.

 The story of Barbara Cooney's book takes place in the Canada's Maritimes.

 Miriam Rudolph's book about Paraguay is bilingual -- English/German.