Greta Intro by Arthur Rempel

To My Family

When in the summer of 1995, my nephew, Walter Loewen, of Winnipeg, Canada sent me a copy of the collected letters of his mother, I was profoundly touched. After all, these were the letters that my sister Greta (Margaret)  had written to us, her sister Evangeline and brothers Herman, Dietrich, Frank and Arthur, during the first fourteen years after our arrival in America. After my sister Evangeline’s marriage to Dietrich Dyck in the latter part of 1929, these letters were also directed to her husband. During the latter years of my sister Evangeline’s life, she sent these letters to Walter Loewen, then, for us, the only living son of our sister Greta.

During the period these letters arrived, they reached us one at a time, at long intervals, always anxiously awaited. Through them, we could learn how life was going for our sister, who had decided to marry the man she loved  and then to remain in the U.S.S.R. The opportunity to leave the land of communism was given to the rest of us through the self-sacrificing generosity of our Uncle Wilhem and Aunt Margaret Neufeld of Reedley, California, who, in the summer of 1922 had returned to Gnadenfeld, their ancestral village, to do famine relief after the end of the civil war.

At the time these letters were written, they kept us informed of the life and growth of our sister’s family, as well as of the growing oppression of Russian Communism. Reading all these letters now, after the death of my sister in a Russian forest labor camp, and in close succession is an overwhelming emotional experience. To share them with friends and relatives, including my sister’s English-speaking descendents and other relatives, I decided to translate them from the German language into English. For others, too, these letters provide an authentic record of the oppression, and the cruel ultimate enslavement of a family member under Communism and then especially under the reign of Stalin.

Arthur G. Rempel

Walla Walla, Washington

June 26, 1996