Telling the Story

Each and every life and time has its stories, waiting to be remembered, to be told, to be written or dramatized, to be put to music and dance, to be illustrated!

While no one knows what the literary world will look like on the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic, David A. Robertson (a Swampy Cree bestselling author of children's books, novels and graphic novels) writes that he is certain it will remain just as vital: 

Stories will always be important. I think they'll be even more important than they were before because of how we'll interact. We'll need more of them -- they teach us, connect us, create community, do all these things we'll need. And they document. There will be a lot of stories written about all of this. That's important too. (Winnipeg Free Press, April 9th, 2020).

I have tried to educate myself about my grandparents' stories. Most of these were transmitted orally or written in the family Bible or in small birthday books; some came through photographs haphazardly pasted into albums. How they even managed to keep these photos throughout their time of wandering the world and how they kept their sanity remains a mystery to me.

I wish I had more stories! And as I read the historical background and historical novels about that time (see my April blog post) and place my grandparents and my parents into that time period, I'm gradually beginning to understand what happened to them and to imagine how they must have felt.

Translating old letters and articles from German into English for people eager to know their family stories has also been helpful. Recently I transcribed and translated letters from Mennonite parents in Russia written to their young adult son who had just emigrated to Canada in 1926. There is so much love and yearning on these faded, yellowing pages sent from the parents to their child, so much longing to embrace him once again. I also translated a diary of someone's grandmother living as a refugee in Germany during WWII with her three teenage children. She is in survival mode and life is tough! So much courage!

Sample of one of the documents I translated

My grandmother and my parents kept their sanity in these turbulent times, times so difficult that they would rather forget them. "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is a saying I heard quite often. And I survived as well but remember very little, probably because I was too young and my world too unsettled.

Now my grandchildren are clamoring for stories. They are at home during this COVID-19 time, trying to do their school work online, missing their friends. Sasha and I decided we would write each other stories and mail them. Our printer is broken and we haven't been able to get the right part for it at this time and so I needed to write my stories by hand. It occurred to me that my grandchildren don't even know how to read cursive writing, so I would have to resort to printing!

I had made a promise and knew someone was waiting, and so I began. What stories could I possibly write for her? I decided to write what I knew and remembered from the very beginning of my life. And so I began ... block printing on a sketch pad, and even adding little drawings with pencil crayons! It is no longer a chore but something I look forward to doing each day after breakfast.

As I write, I discover things about myself. My life has never been boring. I was thrown into this maelstrom of events before I was weaned from my mother's breast. I had no choice in the matter, as none of us do! My safety net was my family and as long as that remained intact I would be alright. My father, himself orphaned at a very young age, knew this, and did his utmost to keep us together. The only time we were separated from him was when he was drafted into the German army in January 1945, just before the war ended. He returned to us in May of that year, an emaciated skeleton, greeting a two-month-old daughter who was born in his absence.

The final stretch of the long road on which my father returned to us after his release as a POW

The biggest miracle in my life is that through all this turmoil we never lost each other. I believe this is what will come through in my stories for Lena Kate and Daniel, and for Sasha who asked me to write them. 

"Through memory, love transcends the limits of time and offers hope at any moment of our lives."                                                                    (Henri Nouwen, Daily Meditation, March 23, 2020)