Unprepared for the Journey

[ Note: This blog entry was originally posted in May 2012.]

I'm beginning another journey, but for this one I don't pack any bags or make any reservations. However, it requires a lot of organization, and the making of some difficult decisions, not one of my strengths. On this journey I will be travelling backward in time. It will probably be an emotional roller coaster. I'm tempted to just cancel my reservation.

My sister got me started. She brought over two large boxes of letters and cards that our mother had saved over the years and asked me if I wanted to go through them.

Our mother died in 2008.

I am tempted to push everything to the back of the closet and leave it there, because I'm really not ready for this trip. However, I have already started, by pulling something from the top of the pile and I am hooked. It is a gorgeous Mothers Day card, which was given to mom not by one of her eight children, but by my dad , who loved to give her cards at every occasion. I think she kept them all!

Next, a letter, written by me, when our children were young. It includes a note written by our youngest, who was seven at the time. There is no time limit on this journey, and I stay here for a very long time. My baby has learned to read and write, and in her childish scrawl she sends her Oma a poem. Now, when I read this poem I have reached the age my mother was when she received it, and I can read it with her eyes and with her heart.

Strange Tree

Elizabeth Madox Roberts

Away beyond the Jarboe house

I saw a different kind of tree.

Its trunk was old and large and bent,

And I could feel it look at me.

The road was going on and on

Beyond to reach some other place.

I saw a tree that looked at me, 

And yet it did not have a face.

It looked at me with all its limbs;

It looked at me with all its bark.

The yellow wrinkles on its sides

Were bent and dark.

And then I ran to get away,

But when I stopped to turn and see,

The tree was bending to the side

And leaning out to look at me.

I know this tree intimately. It has my mother's face, one of the last times I saw her, after she had a bad fall, and I hardly recognized her. The wizened face of age that pleads to be recognized, the one I don't really want to see, but it keeps looking at me, beseechingly.

Comments (received after original posting in May):

Marge:

Okay, so this is why we don't throw this stuff away. It's so that people like you, who have so much talent for the written word, bring us back to look with wonder at how incredibly blessed we were to have the life we had. How wonderful that we had a father who loved to go out and buy our mother beautiful cards. He couldn't afford much, but wanted to express his feelings and if he couldn't do it with his own words, then he'd do it through Hallmark. It doesn't matter, he did it and that's what counts. And a young granddaughter who at the time, probably didn't even see the significance of the poem she was sending. But, on some level, knew how important it was. And we read it now and think of our mother and maybe even think of ourselves growing old and hoping we can be even close to the woman she was. 

Elfrieda:

Thanks Marge, for your affirmation! Your last sentence expresses my sentiments exactly. I just pulled a photo out of the box of Mom wearing a baseball hat, which I can't even imagine her doing! Christine took the picture. I showed it to Ivan and Sasha and they both thought it was me! 

Dora:

I'm glad you're taking us along on this journey! 

"To be a healer you need seven wounds"

"To be a healer, you need seven wounds" (Wilma Derksen, Path of the Heart)

When you have lived as long as I have, it is not that difficult to find seven wounds. However, most of the ones I listed occurred when I was younger. I had the rest of my life to deal with them, to try to come to terms with them. Wilma Derksen, in her book Path of the Heart, writes, "Life continues to break us and those around us. The challenge will always be in the putting together of the pieces, not in looking at the completed [puzzle].”

I work hard at trying to put together the pieces, and then an enraged psychopath comes along and kills twenty elementary school children by shooting them at close range. It devastates me and I walk around preoccupied with the thought of evil.

"Every criminal was once a tender, innocent and defenseless child."

Organizers of an art display by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan made the above comment. Cattelan's work, which explores life, death, good and evil, is installed at the former Warsaw Ghetto, where thousands of Jews were killed or sent to their deaths by Hitler's regime. It features, among other items of art that try to speak about the situation of hidden evil everywhere, a statue of Adolf Hitler on his knees, praying. (Winnipeg Free Press, Dec.19th, 2012). Can you imagine this man at his prayers? What would be the content of his petitions?

It becomes easier when I picture him as a youngster, waiting in fear and trembling for his father to come home and give him a beating every day for no reason, other than that of venting his own frustration on a defenseless child! (For Your Own Good, Alice Miller)

Recently I heard a CBC broadcast that asked people to report on their feelings of revenge when they had been wrongly treated. The most powerful story came from a woman whose father had been bludgeoned to death by a schizophrenic neighbour whom the family had befriended. For a good part of her life she carried around thoughts of revenge. When she finally met the perpetrator, he talked about the devastating loss of his mother when he was four years old. Suddenly she could imagine him as a four-year-old, bewildered, alone and frightened. She pictured her four-year-old niece whom she loved dearly, and she forgave him at once. This woman was liberated from the burden of revenge she had carried with her all those years.

Wilma Derksen, whose pre-teen daughter Candace was murdered in Winnipeg in 1984, was the invited author at a supper book club meeting my four sisters and I held recently, after we had read her two latest books, Path of the Heart and Echo of the Soul. She shared with us that she and her husband Cliff made a promise to each other very soon after the police discovered Candace's body, that they would not be consumed by anger, bitterness, revenge and other negative emotions. Since Candace's murder, they have worked tirelessly helping others in similar situations to deal with their trauma.

In Wilma's above-mentioned books, many people need healing from what life has brought them and from their reactions to it. They come to an elderly woman whose only claim to fame is that she has seen an angel, and this made all the difference in her life. This woman takes time for everyone who asks for her counsel. Mostly she just listens, with understanding and compassion. The narrator of the story is her little granddaughter, who is also "wounded" and sits at the grandmother's feet listening to the people and learning from her grandmother's counsel; in the end she finds the path to her own healing.

Evil will always be a part of our world. It is so relieving and liberating when someone who has been victimized shows us by example how to not only cope with evil but how to become actively engaged in fighting it -- not with guns and other violent means but in a spirit of listening with love and compassion.

"The Road Leads On"

The Way

Friend, I have lost the way. —

The way leads on.

Is there another way?

The way is one. 

I must retrace the track.

It's lost and gone.

Back, I must travel back!

None goes there, none.

Then I'll make here my place,

(The road runs on),

Stand still and set my face,

(The road leaps on),

Stay here, for ever stay.

None stays here, none.

I cannot find the way.

The way leads on.

Oh places I have passed!

That journey's done.

And what will come at last?

The road leads on.

    On the road to the former Kroeger clock workshop (Rosenthal)

The above poem by the English (Orkney Islands) poet and novelist Edwin Muir (1887-1959) describes some of my feelings as we boarded an overnight train from Kiev to Zaporozhye on our Poland-Ukraine trip. This past October Hardy and I went to locate the places where we were born, Hardy in Poland (see previous post) and I in Ukraine.

In 1943, leaving all its worldly goods behind, the Neufeld family, like so many others at that time, fled from Ukraine to Germany, via Poland. The family consisted of a baby, a toddler, two young parents, a grandmother and an adolescent (my uncle). As a four-month-old baby, I of course remember nothing of this flight. We were fortunate to go by train, rather than fleeing on foot as so many others were forced to do.

On this trip, with TourMagination, I was going in the opposite direction, back to the place I was born, the village of Chortitza, on the Dnepr River near the Black Sea in southern Ukraine.

I wished so much that I could recall that first train trip out of Chortitza. I tried to imagine how everyone must have felt . . . 

My parents left behind a small but comfortable house my father had built when they got married in 1940. Mom loved that place. 

My grandmother (Katharina Kroeger) didn't want to leave. She had received new courage after her husband was cruelly taken away from her in 1938, falsely accused and imprisoned, never to be heard from again. She was growing and nurturing an orchard of plum trees. It was her birthday. She had just harvested new potatoes and was preparing a special birthday supper.

Her teenage son was surely wondering where all his friends were.

My two-year-old brother was probably restless, cooped up in one place, wanting to use his legs to run and explore.

The Neufeld family home in Chortitza before the Russian Revolution

                                             

 The house Dad built for his new bride in 1940

And what about me, the baby? I remember nothing. At least I think I remember nothing. However, memory is a strange thing, stored somewhere in the deep recesses of one's brain, jumping out when least expected, creating havoc with one's emotions.

When our tour group arrived in Zaporozhye (the city that now surrounds Chortitza) the next morning, everyone complained about the discomfort of this train ride. Even though all of us had sleeping berths, people had felt the jolts and bumps as the train stopped and started, had constantly awakened from the noise of the whistle, and were worried about getting the luggage out in time, etc., etc. I however had slept like a baby! The rocking of the train had made me feel comfortable and cozy, as if I was in my mother's arms in a rocking chair. Then it occurred to me: that is how I must have felt on that desperate flight out of Ukraine. Secure in my mother's arms, I blissfully knew nothing except warmth, comfort, food within close reach, the beating of my mother's heart and the rocking of the train. The memory had come back to me, triggered by the motions and sounds of the train!

Although my family was without a home for the first four years of my life, I don't remember feeling homeless, neglected or hungry. In fact, I have no memories at all until we settled down in the Paraguayan Chaco. I wanted to stay there forever, but "the road leads on" and my life changed again.

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."

Of Geese and Guests

Since our move to Winnipeg four years ago, Hardy and I have enjoyed observing large flocks of Canada geese. They are our first sign of spring and also the sign of approaching winter.There are several small artificial lakes in our area, and it seems the environment must be just right for geese and ducks.

We've asked ourselves why the geese make such a journey twice a year. Frank Shaw, in his book Birds of Canada (1988), says this is like asking mountain climbers why they climb a mountain peak. They do it  because it's there and they love the challenge! The geese instinctively know where the best food is and they are equipped to find it.

When the flocks of geese began to leave us this fall, so did the many guests we had in August, and suddenly everything seemed so quiet. We can still hear the honking of geese in the sky above us, but the laughter and the voices of our summer guests are gone.

Hardy's cousin's daughter from Germany has a great love for the outdoors and the environment, and is especially drawn to the huge national parks we have in North America. Like Canada geese she and her family return because they just can't stay away. She packs all their camping gear into duffel bags and makes the trip across the ocean, husband and kids in tow. After their park adventures, the kids (two young teens) spend several weeks with us. They practise their English, get to know their Canadian relatives and learn about our Canadian way of life, while their parents go back home. The children's grandpa (Hardy's favorite cousin) also comes along for part of the trip and then accompanies them on their flight home.

Shaw tells us that Canada geese fly in family flocks because they don't have an inbuilt migration map. The young depend on their parents to lead them on their first journey south in fall and on their first return to the breeding grounds in spring. Canada geese mate for life, and only if one of them dies will the survivor take another mate. Shaw says such a strong pair bond is essential if the new season's youngsters are to be safely taught the lessons of route finding and the location of winter quarters.

Like Canada geese, our cousin's daughter and her husband and father are preparing their children and grandchildren to navigate the life journey they are undertaking. There are many obstacles and dangers along the way, so they need to be nurtured and taught carefully and well.

       

                           

It takes a flock to raise a goose and a village to raise a child!

The Ties That Bind

Recently, on a lovely summer day, my almost four-year-old granddaughter Sasha and I went for a leisurely walk around the lake close to our house. As usual, we enjoyed watching the geese and ducks paddling in the water. To our delight, a mother duck came swimming toward us, a whole string of ducklings in tow. We counted them. There were eleven. "She has eleven babies," I said to Sasha. Taking her soother out of her mouth, Sasha looked at me intensely with her big brown eyes, and I knew she had something important to say. "Oma," she said, "that is too many babies. She should only have two. Two babies is enough!" Such wisdom, from a child who still wants her soother! The world has certainly changed since I was that age.


A couple of weeks later, on a blistering hot summer day in mid-July, we found ourselves at the splash park not far from our house. It was filled to capacity and we had to stand in line in the hot sun, waiting our turn to enter. In front of us was a tall muscular man with three young boys. I found myself staring at him, unabashedly, not because he was so good looking (really!) but because I was fascinated by his amazing tattoo. Emblazoned across his broad back, just below his neck in large letters were the words The Ties That Bind. Adjacent to the words, and cascading down his left arm was a leafy vine. I couldn't help myself, I had to make a comment: "I normally don't find body art attractive, but your tattoo is lovely," I said. He turned around and I saw the name ISOBEL engraved on his chest. We chatted a bit and I asked him about his boys. He told me that he has eight children, four boys and four girls. (I knew what Sasha's opinion was about that!)  My mind was busily stereotyping as I formed a mental image of someone with probably three different women. Goes with the tatoos, right? Brazenly I asked him if his children all had the same mother. He proudly pointed to the name on his chest and said, "Yes, Isobel is their mother. We had ten altogether, but we lost two of them." "How old were they when they died?" I queried. He told me they were two months and four months. I was horrified and wanted to know how they died. Two of them in infancy? Were they crib deaths?  "No," he said, "they died in the womb." I was so impressed that what society usually calls a miscarriage and often dismisses as not real, were to him also his children. I had a poignant moment, standing there in the hot sun with a stranger, as I remembered  the child I birthed prematurely and never held in my arms.

This wasn't my only surprise on that day. Spreading a blanket right next to us was a young woman with twin boys, about two years old. She confirmed that they were twins. Then she dropped the bomb shell: "They also have twin brothers, seventeen and a half months older." She nodded in their direction. Sure enough, another set of golden brown curly haired boys! My daughter and I just looked at each other, our jaws hanging below our knees! Sasha and Ivan are seventeen months apart, and that is often more than enough work. The mother of the double set of twins told us that she has a  rare condition in which she will always drop multiple eggs, but she didn't know that until she had her second set of twins. "They could have been triplets or quadruplets," she said. She also shared with us that her first pregnancy never came to completion and that she and her husband are looking forward to meeting their first children in heaven and discovering if they are twins or triplets, or maybe even quadruplets!


"But how do you manage? Do you have help?" we asked her. She didnt look or act like she was falling apart! "Yes," she said. "We have hired a nanny who looks after them full time while I go to work. As soon as they go to school the nanny will be replaced by a housekeeper. She will be cleaning up a big mess!"


Our oldest grandson was four before he had any cousins and all of a sudden his baby sister and the other seven cousins came along in quick succession. When he was about seven years old he looked at me, shaking his head as yet another pregnancy was announced. "Oma, they just keep coming," he said.


I have to go downstairs now and clean up a big mess in the play room. Four grandchildren spent the day with us yesterday and they forgot Oma's rules!

Oh, the ties that bind ...

We share each other's woes,

Each other's burdens bear, 

And often for each other flows 

The sympathizing tear.

When we are called to part,

It gives us inward pain; 

But we shall still be joined in heart,

And hope to meet again.

(John Fawcett, Blest Be the Tie That Binds)

Shattered Dreams, Lost Lives

A couple of years ago, on our annual visit to Ontario to see our daughter and her family, we happened to go to the beautiful park in Stratford adjacent to one of the Stratford theatres. There is a lovely walk that takes you on a meandering path along Lake Victoria. During the summer season visitors can enjoy the sight of thirty or more swans, both Black Australian and the more widely know White Mute. Apparently one or two mated pairs hatch every summer. How fortunate we were to actually see a pair of swans in their nest just below a public walkway! I stood for a long time admiring the idyllic scene of those pristine birds, their long necks arched into a heart shaped curve as they bent protectively over their future offspring. I took a photo and it became that year`s anniversary card for our daughters and their husbands.

I was devastated when I heard some time later that a young fellow, probably intoxicated, stood on that bridge and heaved a rock into the nest, killing one of the swans. It dawned on me again, and in a new way, how quickly dreams are shattered and lives lost, not accidentally but wilfully and with evil intent.


This episode of the Stratford swans reminded me of my maternal grandmother and her horrific experience  in Communist Russia during World War II.
Recently my sister and I have been looking at old family photographs to prepare for an art exhibit by Ray Dirks, called Road to Freedom, which honours Mennonite aunts, mothers and grandmothers whose homes were no longer safe and who fled for their lives, small children in tow. Many had lost husbands and fathers. My sister and I came across a small photo of our grandmother. She gazes at the camera with not even a trace of a smile on her face. Sadness seems to ooze from her. Neither of us remembers her that way. In fact, my sister wasn't even sure it was her. We always thought of our grandmother as a strong, very self-confident woman. When we turned over the photo, it was dated 1938. Then we knew why she looked the way she did. That was the year our grandparents had a big rock hurled into their family nest. Our grandfather, a kind and gentle husband and father, was forcefully taken from his family under cover of darkness, falsely accused by Communists of planning to blow up a bridge. He was probably tortured until he signed a confession, and was never heard from again. He either died in prison or in exile in Siberia. Our grandmother, in her mid-forties, was left with five children to support. Their beautiful farm was confiscated and became part of a collective on which the family was forced to work. When the German army retreated from Russia in 1943, my grandmother, together with my uncle, my parents and my brother and me, made her way to Germany via Poland, then to Paraguay and finally to Canada.

Like the surviving swan in the Stratford park, my grandmother was left wounded. She found it very difficult to adjust to the new way of life in Canada, especially since she was separated from all her children and grandchildren in Paraguay for several more years. She felt estranged from her immediate family, who had emigrated to Canada in the 1920s. They could not identify with her experience and the resulting psychological trauma. Often she talked about her heavenly home and her heavenly father because it was easier to think about a home in heaven than about life here on earth.


Those of us in our senior years, looking back on a lot of living, know through experience that life has its share of tragedy as well as joy, and that we must learn to accept it and deal with it. However, when it is inflicted on us wilfully and with evil intent, it is much more difficult to bear.


In the late 1950s, my brother used to play guitar and sing in a group. The lyrics from a Peter, Paul and Mary song they sang (Where have all the flowers gone?) keep going through my head. It ends with the refrain, "When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?"