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Sina who waters the Mennonite graves

Helen Rose Pauls

Her letter starts out the same way mine usually do to our European cousins: “My German is not so good, but I hope you can understand it” – only her German has a Russian influence and mine an English influence.

We met Sina when we visited the Mennonite graves on the island of Chortitza as part of the l999 Mennonite Heritage Cruise Tour to the Ukraine.

I had visited this graveyard 20 years earlier with Gerhard Lohrenz on one of his marathon Mennonite history tours of the Soviet Union. At that time, we had scrambled and plunged through thistles and tall grasses to find the dirt-encrusted headstones bearing familiar names, hidden in the underbrush.

Sina and Helen Rose Pauls

Now all was different. Cleared dirt paths surrounded the ancient slabs, and the writing was more legible. Orange and golden marigolds, like surprises from God, flourished at the base of the stones. And there she stood, a kindly looking grandmother wearing a gardening apron and carrying a plastic jug from which she was pouring water onto the flowers. We approached her, and she greeted us in German. She could easily recognize the tourists who came from North America to explore their roots.

She got the water up from the Dnieper River, she said. There was a place close by to get down to the stream. The flowers she grew from seeds she saved each fall and planted each spring – not much variety, but more each year.

We, who are so used to buying fresh seed each season from the local store, had heard that seeds were very scarce in the former Soviet Union. Seeds were what we had thought to bring when our tour directors suggested that each tourist have small gifts ready for the locals. In fact, I had managed to get 400 packages of flower and vegetable seeds, left on the shelves of the garden shop in August, just before the trip – for just 17 cents a package, once we had explained our mission to the manager. What fun my husband had had being mobbed by the old women, who are the roadside fruit sellers, when he began to distribute the seeds. Seeds were also what we were taking back to Canada as souvenirs: sunflower seeds from my grandfather’s village in Sagradowka.

By now, our flower seeds were all given away, but we still had some vegetable seed packets: kohlrabi, radishes and beans. She accepted them with wonder and thanks. She seemed very moved, and we exchanged addresses.

Sina was one of the survivors of the many German Lutherans who also accepted Catherine the Great’s invitation to come to Russia at the end of the 18th century. How she remained in the Ukraine after the ethnic cleansing before and during World War II is a mystery.

That Christmas, we sent her a greeting and a picture of our family. The next year, she sent us news that the kohlrabi and radishes, which she had planted in her sister’s garden, had been mostly eaten by caterpillars, but the beans had been very good. In fact, she had never tasted such good beans, and had saved half of them for seed for the next year. This year, I sent her a picture of the Ukrainian sunflowers which form a backdrop to my flower garden.

“Why do you bother with the Mennonite graves?“ we had asked her.

“My mother is buried in Siberia, and I cannot visit her grave, “ she replied. “So on Sundays, I come here and think about my mother, and I water the German graves.”

Helen Rose Pauls is a member of Sardis Community Church in Chilliwack, B.C.

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Last modified October 9, 2002.

© 2002 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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