PART SEVEN Oral Histories and Family Memoirs - Mountain Light ...

while later some wagons did come with horses and oxen and took us ten kilometers farther. My Uncle
Johann had eight children and he was sent to Graznovka. We went to Korneevka.
At first glance it seemed alright. Some Germans were already living there. We gathered at the
center and the kolhoz (collective farm) director, a Mennonite named Jacob Ivanovich Dyk, said, “Look
around to find someone to take you in.” So he was friendly enough to us. We joined a family named
Abraham Gerhardt. They had five children and were also Mennonite. They didn‟t want to take us at first.
We went several times with my father to beg them to offer us sanctuary. There were promised this would
only be temporary because of the list that had been made. Some of us made earth homes with straw roofs
and no windows.
We spent the first night in a public hall but the next day we went to the Gerhardts. Almost
everyone by then had found someone. We were there about two months. Then we moved to a collective
farmhouse, about twenty feet wide and thirty feet long. It was divided in two with a small kitchen inside
and a place for the horses inside as well. This was early December. We had no evergreen trees for our
first Christmas there, so my grandmother got a bare birch tree and tied colored fabric to it. The other
family was my Uncle Phillip. He had eight children. We sang and prayed at Christmas. We put clothes on
the windows at Christmas because we didn‟t know what to expect. Our elders already had us memorize a
poem or verse so we looked forward to the holidays like this and Easter and Ascension Sunday. I sang
this song:
“Today is Christmas,
Joy and joy.
Christ was born for us.
Shepherds in the field,
Saw a star leading to Jesus.”
We shared grief and joy together, always thinking the next day would be better. We waited over fifty
years.
On the New Year guns were fired into the air. At the end of January and beginning of February,
all able-bodied workers were forced into the Trudarmia (Soviet Labor Army). Officials came and knew
from registrations how many families and children there were. A doctor glanced at each person. First the
men were gathered. In the village four kilometers away, they took my uncle, my aunt, and the three older
children. Those twelve and younger were left behind. My mother and grandmother took them in. Our
father was taken but my mother was pregnant and gave birth to my sister in March 1942. We all cried
now that Grandpa was gone and my father taken away. He took me into the corner of a small room and
we prayed. They took him and the others to the train station and left. Some months later were received
word that he was in the Sverdlovsk region building an aluminum factory at Krasnoturinsk in the Ural
Mountains.
I lived with my mother. We ran out of food about the time my sister was born. We went to a
haystack and tried to find a few kernels of wheat. We ground it up like coffee and boiled it to eat. Very
little was in the forest to be found. My mother took her dress to a village seven kilometers away to trade it
for a bag of potatoes. We put straw underneath and covered them to keep them from freezing on the way
home. We cut small pieces out for spring planting. We could have eaten them in a week but we cut them
in small pieces to make soup. No milk, nothing else.
When spring finally came things got a little better. We went to the garden and got frozen
vegetables from the past year and more kernels from the stubble fields. There was a windbreak that had
caused snowdrifts and I saw a place where there were some small frozen potatoes. I warm shoes and I put
a small basketful on my back. They thawed and made such a mess down my back! Then I walked back
but my shoes got stuck in the mud. I had to try to go back barefoot and get them. I cleaned my feet in the
snow and got my shoes and went back home.
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