My parents were from the ‘old’ country and I,
born a year after they arrived in Canada back in the
fifties, wanted nothing to do with the old country. I
was a proud Canadian and not too eager to swallow
the Saturday morning German school classes and
the old fashioned German Baptist outlook on life.
As I got older, I did try to understand. But I focused
on my father. He was a German-German,
born in Germany. He’d been a pilot for the Luftwaffe.
His stories about the Nazi times were exciting,
perhaps because they were mainstream. I
could see movies about my dad’s past and I was
intrigued by a Germany that had let someone like
Hitler take control. (Curiously, I now realize that
my dad did not say much about the later war years
when he was part of the military police fighting the
Soviets.) But I did know that my father spent more
than five years in the Soviet gulag system. After
his sudden death about ten years ago, I started paying
more attention to my surviving parent.
My mother, Else Schroeder nee Ristau, was not a
German-German. She was a Russian-German — a
Russian German Baptist, born in Ukraine. I had a
right to be confused. Now she is a Canadian but
her German-ness still defines her. I admit to being
impatient with this strong attachment to her German-ness. After all, she’s been in Canada more
than fifty years and, besides, she was not even a
“real” German. But now I think that I understand.
Federofka. There was a time when I could not pronounce
or spell the word. I definitely could not
find it on the world map taped on the rec room wall
as I was growing up. It was just another part of my
mother that I could not understand. To me she was
an enigma.
But, using modern magic, (aka the internet), I was
able to learn about Federofka and the surrounding
Volhynia area. Don Miller’s book, “In the Midst of
Wolves” introduced me to the German Baptists of
Russia. It was the beginning of an incredible journey.
A photograph of a child in his book was recognized
by my now 85 year old mother. It was of
her long forgotten cousin, Sofie. Letters between
Omsk and Winnipeg were exchanged and the serendipity
just kept on happening.
In May 2004 I went to Federofka on a tour hosted
by Don Miller. It was an adventure in time
travel—a safari into the wilds of the Soviet Union
of the 1920’s and 30’s. Volhynia was, in those
years, a most dangerous place.
Like an iceberg that only shows its tip, there was a
lot of my mother that I could not understand.
Once, during the 1920’s, there was a little girl
growing up on a farm in Federofka, near Zhitomir
in the area known as Volhynia. Then, in 1930,
politics started to interfere with the simple farm life
of the German colonists. And my mother became
involved in one of the major tragedies of recent history.
Stalin! He is the one who eventually brought my
parents together. Curiously, I did not see any of
Stalin’s statues when I visited the Zhitomir area
that spring, only Lenin’s. But I felt his shadow.
And the darkness of Stalin was always there in my
childhood as I grew up in the fifties and sixties,
safe in the middle of Canada, in the City of Winnipeg.
His darkness was manifested through silence.
They did not want to talk about the past. My parents
were starting over and they focused on the future.
But it was the silence of the past that brought
me to the now humble village of Federofka.
With the help of Helena Nickel, a local Federofka
woman in her eighties who speaks German and still
remembers my mother’s family, I was able to find
the empty field where once the German school
stood. I was shown the blooming irises in the middle
of the woods that mark forgotten graves of German family members. Straw thatched houses built
of pine timbers are still scattered throughout the
Volhynian countryside. Although my mom’s family
home is gone, I can imagine what it looked like.
It was the windmill, however, that my mother
hoped I would find. Built by her father, Eduard
Ristau, it was on a slight hill overlooking his 17
hectares of red soil. But I was to be disappointed
in this quest. According to Helena Nickel, the
windmill was dismantled by the manager of the
new collective soon after it was expropriated. Back
in 1930 my mother’s family was exiled to Siberia
and their farmland collectivized. Today, only the
red granite rocks that formed the windmill’s foundation
remain. I walked on the slightly raised land
and imagined the windmill while remembering the
story my mother told me.
Once she had hidden in the windmill when she was
playing hooky. It happened when Stalin first decreed
that children go to school on Sundays. My
mother was the only child of the village whose parents
insisted she actually follow the new orders. So
she skipped out, hiding in the windmill and eating
the cherries that had been meant for the teacher. I
looked, but no, there were no cherry trees growing
from the discarded pits beside the windmill’s foundation.
The Federofka of today (now called Kaliniwka) is a
depressingly poor place. Alcoholism is destroying
the men. Suicide takes the young who don’t manage
to escape to the big cities. This leaves too
much work for the women who are lacking needed
medical attention. But there is hope. Outside of
Federofka a new company called Red Stone is
breathing much needed economic activity into the
area. We stopped and talked with the entrepreneurs.
They appreciated our interest. And now an
idea is growing in my mind. Perhaps some day I
can use a red granite boulder from Federofka to
remember my grandfather and the many thousands
like him who were executed and then thrown into a
Zhitomir ditch. Today the weed-strewn ditch gives
no hint of the bones that lie there. That brings me
to another exciting part of my trip.
I was able to visit the former party archives in Zhitomir.
With the aid of a most helpful interpreter, I
read through pages and pages of documents pertaining
to my grandfather’s arrest and subsequent
execution. My great uncle, Gustav Ristau, and
Gustav’s son, Bernhard, met a similar fate. With
the information gained, I was able to retrace my
grandfather’s steps before the fateful June 4th,
1937 arrest. I was able to see his signature on the
papers that condemned him to death as an enemy of
the Soviet regime. A couple of months in jail and
regular beatings made innocent prisoners guilty. It
was ironic to learn that the main interrogator was
himself executed later, in 1940, for mistreating his
prisoners. I also learned that my grandfather, along
with the others, was officially “rehabilitated” in
1958. The evidence against him was not based
upon fact.
And so my journey began and ended with graves.
When we were first picked up from the Borispol
airport, a flat tire gave us an unexpected rest stop at
a Kiev cemetery. I marveled at the beauty and colour
of the graves. My grandparents both lie in unmarked
graves. My grandmother, Matilde, lies
somewhere near Tomsk. My grandfather lies in a
Zhitomir ditch.
Still, the red stones of Federofka mark the place
where the windmill once stood. And my life here
in Canada is founded on my mother’s enigmatic
past. |
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