Sister intro by Walter

The Letters of Greta Rempel Loewen

1923 Through 1936

Depicting the Life of a Young Family

Under Communism and the Reign of Stalin

This is a collection of letters that my mother wrote to her sister, Evangeline Dyck, nee Rempel, and her brothers Herman, Dietrich, Frank and Arthur in the United States.

Aunt Lina (Evangeline) had kept them all, chronologically arranged and carefully preserved. The letters were written in the period from April 23, 1923 to October 7, 1936. Some of the letters my mother wrote were lost. None came for the year 1935.

Aunt Lina sent Mother’s letters to me after I arrived in Canada, with the thought that they would be more meaningful to me than to her. Unfortunately, I was unable to read most of them since they were written in German Gothic script.

Recently, I mentioned these letters to my cousin Agatha Schmidt, and she kindly offered to transcribe them into Latin script. Many, many thanks to her for this enormous service and for doing it so well! Agatha also taped these letters.

The paper on which these letters were written tell yet another significant story. I regret that I am unable to include a sample with each copy. They are very important to me, as they contain so much of the story of our family and are, for me, the only tangible items that my mother actually held in her hands. What is of special importance for me is that they bear witness to her genuine faith in God.

So, I thank God for such a loving and good mother.

Walter J. Loewen

Winnipeg, Canada

1995