AR Dirks heritage

My Dirks Heritage

Just as my great grandfather Johannes and my grandfather Aron had emigrated from Koenigsberg in East Prussia to pioneer in the Molochnaya valley in South Russia, so also my mother’s ancestors had left Germany to make their homes in that same area of the Ukraine.

My maternal great-great grandfather, Tobias Dirks, with his married son David Dirks and wife Elizabeth Voth Dirks, emigrated from Brenkenhoffswalde in West Prussia to make their new home in the Molochnaya colony.

My own grandfather, Heinrich Dirks, was born on August 17, 1842, in the village of Waldheim. Except for some eleven years as a missionary in Sumatra, he lived most of his life in Gnadenfeld. There, in 1869, at the age of 27, he married Agnethe Schroeder, whose grandfather, David Schroeder, had brought his family from the Bremen area of northern Germany, where they had been merchants.

Heinrich Dirks became a highly educated man, especially so for his time. Completing the Vereinshule (Union School) at the age of 21, he studied abroad to prepare for the ministry and the mission field by enrolling at  the Missionshaus (Mission House) at Barmen, Germany in 1862. There, he graduated in 1866. During the following year in Amsterdam, he received private instruction in Javanese, Malayan, Dutch and English in preparation to become a missionary in the Dutch East Indies. In 1867, he was ordained to the ministry in Gnadenfeld. Two years later, on August 31, 1869, Heinrich Dirks was ordained a missionary by August Lenzmann.

Then, on November 24, 1869, after an impressive farewell from the Mission Board of Amsterdam, the young couple, Heinrich and Agnethe Dirks, sailed for Sumatra on the Dutch sailing vessel Electra.

Driven only by wind, the voyage of the Electra was slow and long. Although the Suez Canal was completed in 1869, the Elektra sailed around the continent of Africa and encountered raging storms after rounding the Cape of Good Hope and entering the waters of the Indian Ocean. As told by my mother by her parents and passed on to me, the ship was tossed mercilessly by the gales and huge waves, throwing the vessel from one side to the other so that the cross masts of the ship struck the water now on starboard and then on the port side. At the time of this voyage, the young missionary couple were expecting their first child, anticipating the birth after their arrival in Sumatra. But the violence of the storm was too  much to allow the pregnancy to follow its normal course. The turmoil of the tempest brought on premature labor, and twin girls were born on the high seas of the Indian Ocean on February 5, 1870. One of the infant girls was stillborn and her little coffin was buried at sea. The survivor was my mother, weighing only two and one half pounds. At the time of her birth, she would be held in the palm of one of her Father’s hands as if sitting on a chair! She was named Elisabeth, and for the ship on which she was born. She was given the middle name Elektra.

The missionary family of three disembarked on the west coast of Sumatra at the capital city of Padang, just about one degree south of the equator. On foot and by litter, they made their way over mountainous terrain to the city of Muara Sipongi less than one degree north of the quarter. From there they traveled up a tropical river canyon to the village of Pakantan, where the canyon expanded into a wide, bowl-like valley with room for rice fields, and surrounded by a ring of jungle and forest-covered mountains. There on January 10, 1871, Heinrich Dirks and his wife Agnetha formally opened a new mission. And there, my mother lived her childhood and attained the age of eleven before her family, in 1881, now with several of her younger brothers and sisters, returned to Europe via the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean Sea to the village of Gnadenfeld.

My told us, her children, many stories of life in Sumatra that she remembered from her childhood in Pakantan: the festivals and ceremonies of the native animists. One involving a slain tiger whose human soul was to be driven out of his body. And a mock ceremony in which, with a dead tiger-cat, the children of the village played at imitating the adults. The pet monkey owned by the family and his antics until he made too much havoc in the home. And the breeze and gecko lizard admitting residence with slatted flooring and elevated on stilts in which the family lived in their tropical home upon the equator.

Recently, it was my good fortune to see this village where my mother lived during the years of her childhood. Early in 1987, as guests of my former student, Dr. Maria Weissenberg Barrows and her husband Frank, my nephew Rudy Dyck and I visited Sumatra. From Medan, Dr. Barrows took us on a five-day excursion past Lake Toba to Pakantan to visit friendly enthusiasm  and were deeply impressed by the joyful congregation as we took in their church service and felt a part of their circle, even though, of course we could not understand the language used in the service.