For My Russian and Ukrainian Friends

My mother in-law, some years back, began assembling a family tree. Various attempts at it filled four note books. It’s all very curious. For example: her uncle Emil died in 1937; in the margin she wrote “was arrested by the communists and shot;” and as an editorial aside she added “reason unknown – communists did not need a reason.”

This post is for my Russian and Ukrainian friends, who it seems make up more than 30% of the visitors to this blog. Periodically, I’ve touched on Russian and Ukrainian history.

My father-in-law was born in Ukraine in 1909 and remembered the Russian Revolution. That’s interesting. My mother-in-law was born in Ukraine in 1923 and wound up in the U.S. in 1947 as a “war bride,” engaged to be married to a man she had never met. That’s interesting too.

I am completing a book on their story. Bits and pieces show up here. So maybe that’s what draws my Russian and Ukrainian friends.

From time to time and really more often than I would prefer, I’ve expressed my displeasure authoritarian creep of our federal government. U.S. federal administrative agencies are evolving into self-perpetuating extensions of the executive branch whose decisions have the de facto force of law. (They seem intent on serving “pink slime” to our kids for lunch. Some of their other intentions are worse.)

In saying that, I’ve just defined the Soviet Politburo. So I think maybe my Russian and Ukrainian friends follow this blog out of both sympathetic and morbid curiosity.

To those friends, I offer this excerpt from my forthcoming book.

Then came the second wave of Siberian exile. Stalin’s terror and forced collectivization followed with more than 12 million dead from execution, starvation and the depravation of exile to Siberia.

 

In Olga’s family, these are some who were caught in that political pandemic.

In the 1930s, her uncle Arthur, her aunt Amanda and her husband Emil and another Uncle Emil were all sent to labor camps in Siberia. Amanda was the only one to return.

After her uncle Arthur was sent off, his brother, Heinrich, married Arthur’s wife. Her family tree is rife with second marriages, but no divorces.

Her uncle Paul Kamenz was arrested by the communists but was pardoned after six years. A more distant uncle Ortlieb was arrested and was never heard from. Her cousin Harry is listed as missing at that time. Her uncles Heinrich and Ruben Kamenz were listed as missing since WWII in Russia. Her great uncle Heinrich’s second wife, Berta Herman, apparently went missing in 1943.

Her uncle Emil Kamenz, she writes, “was arrested by the communists and shot,” in 1937. As an editorial aside she notes “reason unknown – communists did not need a reason.”

It is so telling, the weariness of it. It must have been like a deadly plague settled across the land, arbitrarily claiming lives here and there with numbing regularity. Olga’s extended family was large; nevertheless its ranks were slowly decimated. That same plague afflicted one’s friends, neighbors and acquaintances with regularity. How many dinner conversations began with a hushed “did you hear they . . .?” Insert your chosen verb: came for; arrested; shot; sent; and . . .

Yet when Olga drew a biographical sketch for her grandchildren, the recollection of those conversations was absent. The childhood she outlined was ordinary and regular. From it one might reasonably gather that she grew up in Topeka, Kansas.

Her parents were married in 1920 and they worked on Julius’ father’s farm until 1923, when he rented his own farm. In 1929 they moved to Zhytomyr where her father built a house and worked a variety of different jobs. (Elsewhere in her family tree she writes, the land was taken in1929 for collective farming) For the most part he was a carpenter and did some earth drilling, but he also worked in a slaughter house, and in a bread factory as a furnace man. They kept a large garden with fruit trees. They had chickens, a cow and would fatten a pig from time to time. Among Olga’s favorite memories was taking the cow “on the pasture.”

She began school when she was eight.

She tells her grandchildren: “like all schools we had to do homework. We were not bussed to school. We had to walk. I had to walk about a mile rain or shine. We had no cars either and no bicycles. Where ever we went we had to walk.”

“I spent my summers on the farm at my grandmother’s, Emily Rode, with my aunts and my cousins in the village of Horodysche. I remember as a teenager, 12 or 13, a stray bullet went through my right knee – nothing special. I finished school in 1939 and started working when I was 16.”

Her best friends she says were her cousins Ljuba, and Kheika. (These cousins are not found in the family tree.)

Regarding romance as a young woman she wrote:

“I really didn’t date. As young people from church we were always together as a group. There were friends that came to the house often. I had a letter from a fellow that I didn’t know but had only met twice. Apparently he wanted to marry me. I heard from another. When that letter came I stood outside by the fire and threw it in without reading it. It was a heavy letter. My mom and a friend stood there and did not say anything.

“I had two other proposals but the time was not right for me to get married. It was during the war and my father had an accident and cut off three fingers. And then while chopping wood he cut his big toe in half. So I had to be the breadwinner. I told the young man I couldn’t get married until I was 25 years old. By then my sister could take over.

“All of my proposals were by mail.”

It must have been like that for the young women in Topeka during the war too -- getting letters, from old high school sweethearts and church friends, now off to the army, proposing marriage to the girls back home.

During WWII Zhytomyr was nothing like Topeka.

Unlike Topeka, the young men in Ukraine didn’t rush to patriotically enlist in the Russian army. If they enlisted they did so, much like Gus’s brother Sam, to avoid Siberian exile or worse. It’s more likely that the young men writing letters proposing to Olga were conscripted by the German army for forced labor and were writing from German factories and farms.

Writing somewhat more candidly in one of her family tree notebooks, in an understatement she says, “World War II brought some changes.”   

I remind my other readers that federal government, in the name of “combating terrorism,” has assumed the authority to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens and to assassinate U.S. citizens abroad. Maybe we're all in Topeka with our heads buried in the sand.