AR departure from Marienskaya

Our Departure from Marienskaya

The time came in the autumn of 1918 when my parents decided that it was necessary to leave Marienskaya. And to take their family to their ancestral village of Gnadenfeld in the Molochnaya colony, some 120 miles as the crow flies to the south west. All our earthly belongings, including my mother’s house plants and all our furniture, musical instruments, including a piano and a pedal-operated organ, a harp that my father had built, guitars and balalaikas and a mandolin, our books and family albums, some edible farm produce and whatever else we had. These were loaded onto seven hay wagons, so-called ladder wagons, each drawn by a pair of white, long-horned Russian work oxen.

In mid-October, my eldest brother, 23 year old Heinrich, who had recently returned from military service as a medic in the Caucasus, accompanied this caravan of seven wagons and their oxen drivers to lead them on the long trek to Gnadenfeld. Brother Dietrich, then 16, was in charge of a wagon lauded with hogs and peacocks to be delivered to the other Heinrich Klassen estate, Reimerhof, in the Molochnaya colony.

My mother and sisters and all the younger children, Fran, Rudi and I, were taken to the station at Grishino and spent the night in the railroad car traveling to Halbstadt. I no longer remember the wagon ride that then must have taken us to Gnadenfeld.

On arriving in Gnadenfeld, our family movies in with my uncle, the Reverend Heinrich Dirks and my aunt Marie Dirks, who had continued to reside in the home of my grandparents after my grandmother Agnethe died in 1911 and my grandfather, missionary and Elder Heinrich Dirks died in 1914.

This house was set well back from the broad street. It was distinguished by a white picket fence along the earth sidewalk, backed by an evergreen row of oriental arborvitae. Beside the white stucco house with its red tiled roof, stood large, overshadowing black locust trees. In both German and in Russian they are referred to as white acacias. There were also fruit trees and a vegetable plot and also a large straw-thatched hay barn.

The expected early arrival of brother Heinrich and the caravan of ox-drawn wagons never happened. Concern grew into anxiety and anxiety was transformed into deep distress. My father arranged for a wagon and a team of horses and, together with his brother Aron, who also lived in the village, set out in  a search for his son, making his way in the direction of Marienskaya.

As already stated, these were revolutionary times of great social unrest and war. In South Russia, the Red Bolshevik army was challenged by the White army still loyal to the Tsarist regime, long after the Bolsheviks had consolidated their power and control in Moscow and in Saint Petersburg. Operating between these armies, sometimes joining the Reds and sometimes the Whites, was an army of roving bandits and robbers headed by Trofim Makhno. Makhno was a real scoundrel. He had once worked as a swine herder on the estate of yet another Klassen, unrelated, as far as we know, to the owner of Marienskaya. But Makhno had no love for his former employer and carelessness about names and identities may have played a part in the tragedy for our family. And so it was that as my father neared the midpoint on his return to Marienskay, he learned near the town of Guilai Polye that the Makhno army had attacked our caravan and most brutally murdered brother Heinrich. In conversation with local folk of the area, my father learned that when the lead driver of the wagon train had, upon questioning, informed the attackers that they had come from Klassen’s estate, their fate was sealed. Father was directed to a shallow grave in the frozen ground where Heinrich’s brutally mutilated body had been buried beneath the broken-off doors of one of our wardrobes. All the furniture had been smashed or otherwise destroyed, and books and family albums had been done away with.

My father was even told that, if any consolation, he should know that his son was killed in a hurry, when the bandits had sounded an alarm and were in a great hurry to escape. Earlier, two Russian merchants had been slowly put to death with deliberate for-fun torture, including putting cigarette stubs into slashes made into their bodies. After Makhno’s men departed, the oxen drivers took their teams and the wagons back to Marienskaya. After finding his son’s dead and mutilated body, my father returned with the corpse to Gnadenfeld.

Heinrich’s funeral was in Gnadenfeld with a requiem service in the Mennonite village church.

As much as our family had lost all our possessions, except for the “clothes on our backs”, the charitable people of Gnadenfeld provided us with some of their clothing and with blankets and other bedding. As already stated, the home in which my mother’s family had once lived, and in which my uncle and aunt, my mother’s brother Heinrich and sister Marie were still living, now gave us shelter and a roof over our heads. My father was able to arrange for the use of some land on which our family could now raise a little grain, potatoes, pumpkins, melons and vegetables. With a newly acquired team of horses and a wagon, a couple of milk cows and some pigs and chickens, we had the essentials for continued survival.

I had now reached the age where some work was also expected of me. There was weeding and hoeing in the garden and in the fields. I also rode the horse that pulled the cultivator between the rows of corn. At the age of ten in the summer of 1920, I spent many hours on many days riding round and round on the back of a pair of horses on the circular threshing floor at my uncle Abram’s place. The horses were harnessed to a threshing stone left over from earlier decades of pioneer life. Hewn out of granite, or some other hard rock, the threshing stone was a three to four feet long fluted cylinder of star-like cross section, perforated from one end to the other to accommodate an iron axle to which the harness was attached. Pulled over a bed of freshly cut wheat, such a stone would tumble with a heavy thud from one of its ridges to the next, thus bearing the grain out of the ears.

I was enrolled in the village elementary school and our family became active participants in the life of the Mennonite village church. Although instruction in the school was in high German and Russian, the language of the school playground was exclusively in low German, a dialect much closer to English than is high German. It was the language the settlers had brought with them from Holland and northern Germany and continued to use in their homes in the Ukraine. Thus I became fluent in this form of speech myself. In three years, I finished this village school, and before our departure from the Ukraine, I also completed one year in the local secondary school, in which instruction was exclusively in Russian. For me, life in Gnadenfeld was , of course, very different from life in Marienskaya.

Among the fifty-five or so Mennonite villages of the Molochnaya colony, Halbstadt and Gnadenfeld were not only a good deal larger than any of the other villages, but were also recognized as the cultural leaders of the colony. Halbstadt, situated upon the Molochnaya River, at the northwestern corner of the colony was both the larger and also the older of the two, having been founded when the first settlers established the colony as a long line of villages on the east or left bank of the Molochnaya River soon after 1800. Gnadenfeld was founded in the 1830’s as the chief settlement of the eastern addition to the original land grant. It derived its name, I believe, from the fact that this land grant was facilitated through the gracious cooperation of a Russian land-owning nobleman. Thus the village came to be called Gnadenfeld, which in German means “the field of grace”.

Except for Halbstadt and Gnadenfeld, each of the Mennonite villages of the Molochnaya were laid out along a single, very broad street. The farm yards and the other homesteads of Gnadenfeld were laid out along two broad streets, intersected and joined by a single cross street or huddle street at the center of the village, giving the street pattern of the settlement the form of a large capital letter “H”. Along the adjacent sides of each of the two east and west running streets were the farmsteads of twenty so-called “full farmers”, each possessing some 165 acres of land. These full farmers’ homesteads each had a street frontage of about 240 feet, and a lot area of about 5-¼ acres. These large lots accommodate the family residence with the attached stable, a large hay and machinery barn and a threshing area, as well as a sizable fruit orchard and vegetable garden. Between the back ends of the full farmer's' large lots on each street, a shady, tree lined pedestrian lanes, one ending at the village elementary school and school yard, located on the east side of the middle street, and the other ending at the church and churchyard on the west side of the middle street, were accessible to all the inhabitants of the village. A foot path traversing the whole length of each full farmer’s lot, from the side walk along the street, to the school lane or to the church lane at the other end of the lat was available for public use.

Across the broad street from the full farmers were smaller lots with residences for farmers with smaller operations and for tradespeople and professionals, as well as for public buildings, such as the high school, the hospital and the governmental offices of the village. North of the residential lots on the north side of the village, and south of these lots on the south side, each of the full farmers maintained a tree plantation providing lumber and firewood and also protecting the community from wind and storms. And so the east end of the village, whence came the prevailing storms, the village had a broad planting of trees and shrubs, serving as a windbreak across the end of the settlement.

Extending from each end of each of the two major streets of Gnadenfeld was a road, or track, leading to one of the neighboring villages. There was also a broad grassy area beyond the windbreak leading to the south, past the first series of grain fields to the village cow pasture or commons, to which the hired herder drove the cows in the morning and whence all the cows returned in the evening. Each cow enters its own homestead to be milked and to find more food in the stable.

North of the village and also well beyond the nearer grainfields flow a small tributary of the Molochnaya, a pretty little stream with the name Kurushan. The Yooshanley was a similar stream a little farther to the south of Gnadenfeld, also flowing westward eventually to enter the Moochnay River.

In the cow pasture and in the meadowlands along the little creeks, I remember many spring flowers, including crocuses and grape hyacinths, violets and dwarf irises and many others. Later in the summer, wild poppies spread their red charm over many fields. Skylarks poured out their cheerful song from high up on the wing in the springtime. Sparrows, starlings, swallows and wheatears, nightingales and wagtails, shrikes, magpies and rooks, hoopoes, as well as kestrels and hawks were all common birds in the village and surrounding wood lots. In the fields there also were quails and partridges and on occasion buzzards. Near the creeks there were lapwings and a variety of wild ducks.

Although life for a young boy was still a wonderful adventure, these were years of social unrest, revolutionary war and famine in southern Russia. Makhno’s army frequently raided the zMennonite villages, sometimes not only robbing homeowners of their clothing, blankets and other bedding, and household goods, as I remember these bandits doing to us in Gnadenfeld. But also plundering and setting some of the villages to the torch. I especially remember one occasion of our whole family sitting up late into the night when word had reached us that some of the neighboring villages had been torched and were going up in flames. We were all to be ready for a hasty escape would this scourge befall Gnadenfeld.

During the years that our family lived in the old Dirks home, the Molochnaya region continued to be a hotly contested battlefield between the southwardly crowded White or Tsarist army and the advancing Red Bolshevist army. The thunderous explosions of artillery shells, the burst of shrapnel in the sky above, the continuous tat-tat-tat-tat of machine guns and rifle fire, the cavalry galloping down the street, my older brothers having to assist in collecting the dead from the fields of battle, even the occasional war plane overhead, and the bomb craters left after a battle, will be memories that will remain with me forever.

As our village changed hands from Red to White or from White to Red over and over again, soldiers would be quartered with the families of the village. And often also, my older brothers would be called to provide a team and a wagon with a driver to transport soldiers as the fighting front shifted from one locality to another.

The attractive white picket fence backed by the row of green arborvitae trees gave the house in which we were living that special allure that resulted in its selection by the commanding officers as their personal headquarters. And so, we would alternate hosting now the Red officer and then the White and then back again the Red and so on and on. The best aspect of this course of events was our being spared the assignment of larger numbers of regular soldiers with their dirty clothing and disease-carrying lice. Lice were a special scourge during these years of war. They had probably been brought into every house in the village and so also infected most or all of the school children. And lice are the carriers of the dreaded and deadly disease of typhus.

Every day, as we children returned home from school, our clothing came off and was put into the oven, not of course to burn them, but to get them hot enough to kill the lice. And daily, while our clothing was being sterilized, we were thoroughly combed with a fine-toothed louse comb to rid the head of parasites as well.

And yet, war-born disease did enter our house. Brother Herman returned home from the university in the Crimea and, although he had overcome the climax of his own infection with typhus, he was so weak that he repeatedly fell unconscious as he made his way home, cross country from the railroad on foot. In the summer of 1920, my mother, as well as my sister’s five-year-old daughter Olga, each succumbed to amoebic dysentery and died in our home.

Although dysentery was the medical cause for my mother’s death on that August day in 1920, she had also suffered a long period of grief over the brutal murder of her son Heinrich (Heins). In the pocket of her work apron was found a scrap of paper on which she had, in her own quiet way, long been composing the lines of a deeply religious poem centering on her intense spiritual struggle over the cruel loss of her son. And her effort to reconcile that horrible event with her faith in the righteousness and love of God. That wonderful poem, copied by my father in beautiful calligraphic  style on some old ledger paper from the attic, all that was then available in those disturbed revolutionary times, is my most highly prized memento of my mother as well as of my father. Some years ago, I did my best to translate this wonderful poem into English so that I might be able to share it with some of my English-speaking friends.