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A legacy of suffering

Harold Jantz

A family picture taken about 1926 or ’27 of Helena Jantz and her children, grandchildren and several children taken into her home as orphans – the picture was taken at about the time the Soviets were beginning to tighten the screws on their life in Ukraine. A dozen years later, all of the men in the back row had been arrested, sent into exile and perished, or were executed soon after arrest, and the two women at the ends of the front row had also been sent into exile. The one on the left was the only one to return.

One story among many

For the past several years, I’ve lived with a story of suffering. Though it comes out of my own family, it could be the story of tens of thousands of others of Russian/German Mennonite background. I’ve become persuaded that we are denying ourselves the opportunity to be enriched by the lessons of our own history because the suffering which was a part of a relatively recent past is virtually unknown to many of today’s Mennonite younger generation.

Of course, many Mennonite Brethren in Canada and the United States do not have a Russian/German Mennonite background. They have stories rooted in other ethnic backgrounds and personal histories. But collectively the history of the Mennonites in Russia is very important to our churches, both for those who have a Russian/German Mennonite background and for those of other ethnic backgrounds who have entered into this legacy by spiritual birth. What our spiritual ancestors suffered should not be forgotten.

My father was the only member of his family to leave the Soviet Union in 1923. He was a young 21-year-old, his widowed mother’s right hand since he was the eldest unmarried son at home. But he was also in love with my mother, and because her family had made a firm decision to come to Canada, he faced a terrible dilemma: stay with his mother and care for her farm with two much younger single brothers, or leave them and follow my mother. He chose to follow my mother. Only days before mother’s family left for Canada, they were engaged, and later that year, in Laird, Sask., they were married.

In the decade or so that followed, Grandmother Jantz, her older married sons and my father’s one sister wrote several hundred letters. All, as far as we know, have been preserved. We have now transcribed these letters from the old gothic German script and translated several score into English. This story is taken from those letters.

My grandmother wasn’t Mennonite. She came from a Lutheran-Catholic background. Through the witness of the Mennonite Brethren church in a village called Friedensfeld (now Miropol, literally “field of peace”), she came to a lively faith in Christ, was baptized and joined the church there. While she became a woman of great devotion, the years between 1923 and 1937 tested her faith harshly. Her letters portray very active church life in 1923 when our father left the Ukraine. They also document, step by step, how the restraints on the churches became tighter. By the early 1930s, one letter noted that even if some of the older people of the village came together only to sing Christian songs, they were likely to be reported.

Church taken away

My grandmother’s letters told how the church was taken from the believers: First, their meetings were moved into the home of one of the members, and then, one Easter, they were simply denied the right to meet. In the years that followed, she described how they were sent to work in the fields on Easter. One year, the May Day celebration was moved from May 1 because it happened to fall on Easter according to the Orthodox Church’s calendar. The authorities were determined that the Christians should not use it to celebrate Easter.

The church building became a music and dance hall. Visiting troupes performed events that ridiculed the faith of the villagers. Grandmother described her horror at the “spectacles” put on to persuade villagers that what they had once believed was just myth and folly.

That was only a small part of the suffering. Famine brought terrible suffering because the produce of their fields was confiscated from them to the point that some years their lives hung by a thread. If it hadn’t been for help from abroad, they might not have survived. As it was, there were entire years when not a single letter failed to talk about the struggle for food. Grandmother wrote about people who starved to death. Disease was rampant. In one letter, she mentioned four grandchildren who had passed away within five months.

She followed that news with the words, “I believe we’ve come into the night in which no one can work.” They were living with constant fear. Between fear of starvation and fear of what the authorities might do to them, they felt terrible pressure. She suffered fierce migraines when the tensions were greatest. At home, they felt unable to conduct family devotions and pray. Fear that one of the children might give them away, heavy work schedules and the presence of strangers they were forced to accommodate made family devotions virtually impossible.

Grandmother’s oldest son, Paul, who had become a lay minister in the church, was sent off into exile in the Urals in 1931 because of his activities, and never came back. The letters that both he and his wife wrote described terrible suffering. In one, he wrote of 1000 people out of 9000 exiles who had died in a matter of months. He wrote of the death of his wife. At one point, he expected to die of starvation and wrote what he thought was his farewell letter. He survived, only to be executed in 1938 on fabricated charges that he had spied for Latvia.

Grandmother’s eldest son was one of six men in the family who had stayed in the Soviet Union (five brothers of my father and a brother-in-law). All but one of them were taken away, Paul in 1931 and the others in 1937-8, and all died, some within weeks of their arrest. Two of the women were taken away, too; only one came back. The one brother who survived, an engineer, still lives in the city of Ekaterinburg, in the Urals, where he moved after spending 14 years in labour camps.

Faith against all evidence

When times were most desperate, Grandmother wrote how she clung to her faith against all evidence – but just barely. In a letter dated April 24, 1932, she wrote: “It’s Palm Sunday here, but no sign of it.

Helena Jantz and her husband Abraham at the time of their marriage: full of hope and confidence in the future.

O, how the heart longs for the fellowship of God’s children; will we ever experience it again? Or has total darkness broken in upon us? Often I wonder: Is everything as it says in God’s Word and we have believed? May our loving Father forgive me if I can no longer understand it all. I cannot describe how depressing things are; you can’t possibly imagine it.”

On another occasion, Grandmother described how desperately they had prayed, yet nothing had seemed to change. If Christ came to earth bodily and she threw herself at His feet, told Him all that was happening and implored His help, she wondered, surely He would not refuse her.

Yet, at other times, she saw God’s hand. She had opposed our father’s departure, but ten years later she said God had been in it, for it was because of his help from far-off Canada that they had been able to survive the terrible starvation. On another occasion, during a visit to her daughter and son-in-law in the city of Dnepropetrovsk, she found a fellowship of Russian believers and attended their services. It was like stepping “into a new world,” she wrote, “when one is able to hear the Word of God again.”

A few months later, she told my parents, “My longing to see you once more is not likely to be fulfilled. I am happy that you belong to Jesus. Stay true to the end. Don’t allow earthly things to rob you of the peace of God or of your devotion and time for prayer. That’s probably what happened to us here, and now the loving Father has to judge us so severely.” Then she wrote of how she prayed for her children and grandchildren, concluding, “Some of my children already believe very little. Yet I don’t believe they will be lost, for when a different time comes, they will come to the Saviour in droves. Even in those who seem so hard, one senses a yearning for something different.”

Unanticipated answers

Grandmother’s prayers were answered in ways she couldn’t have anticipated. During World War II, she managed to escape to the West, and in 1948 she arrived in Canada to be reunited with her son, my father, and our family. She lived another 14 years in Canada and left an indelible impression through the vigour of her faith and the strength of her mind. Many of her grandchildren did come to faith, even though their fathers and/or mothers had been taken away never to return. The eldest of her grandsons was baptized in Germany by my brother only a year or two ago, one of the last to leave Russia for a better life elsewhere.

A grandson a few weeks ago described to me how both his father and mother were taken away in 1937-38. The children were literally thrown out of their house, the family goods were auctioned off by the authorities, and the children were left to fend for themselves. My cousin said that at that point he could have turned bad. Yet he didn’t. It was the Christian influence from his past that restored wholeness to his life.

Just before Christmas last fall, I attended the funeral of still another cousin, the son of another of my father’s brothers. As I mingled with the family and heard the pastor speak about this man, I sensed how God had been at work and how lively was the faith in Christ which had sustained these people. Even though my cousin’s father had been taken away when he was just a boy, the faith of his grandmother and mother had left an indelible impression. He died secure in his knowledge of Christ. He had lived as a man of freely voiced and strong convictions, using his gifts in ways that enriched many people.

A legacy

What has the suffering done within our family? It must be said, first, that it has left deep scars. There has been great loss. I have one cousin who lost both parents and all siblings. Some scars are not as visible, yet they are there, and they are permanent.

The suffering also brought about a deepening. Answers are not as glib. Assurances that God solves all problems are not said as easily. No one who has pleaded, wept and cried to God as my grandmother said she did and felt that heaven seemed as impenetrable as iron can ever be glib about the promises of God.

The suffering brought compassion, too. Compassion for others who’ve been victims of oppression. Compassion for those who are hounded and despised because their politics don’t fit or their colour isn’t the one favoured by the government. Compassion for the starving. Compassion for refugees and the stateless. That’s what my relatives learned. They’ve taught us compassion.

And, in the end, there remained a bedrock faith in God. Against all evidence, some clung to their faith. Others found their way to Christ after years. Even though God appeared to be silent for long periods, Grandmother never abandoned her faith, and she died with the assurance that God had been faithful. She had been reunited with our family, through whom she had been supported and encouraged during her darkest years. At one point, through a dream, God gave her peace about what had happened to each of the sons who had been arrested. And, in a truly miraculous way – through an overheard conversation in the prison camp – her surviving son in the Soviet Union was able to re-establish contact with her in the mid-1950s. When she died, she was truly at peace with God, and filled with a sense of joy. God was faithful.

Harold Jantz is a member of River East MB Church in Winnipeg, and a former editor of MB Herald and ChristianWeek.

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Last modified June 22, 2000.

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