Johanna Peters Dyck

born 1923 in Warwarowka # 2, Ukraine, Russia

When I was nine or ten years old, my wish was to someday be wealthy enough to drink a cup of tea before bedtime!

My parents were Justina Grunau, born in Nieder Chortitza, Ukraine, Russia, and Heinrich Johann Peters, born in Heuboden, Ukraine. Both parent's first spouses had died; my half-sister Susanna was born in 1915.

I remember visiting Mother when I was about three in the Chortitza Hospital after she had an operation. Dr. Choroschmonenko practiced there. He and his wife were both medical doctors. In 1931-1932 Mother worked in the Typhoid section of the hospital. Because she worked shift work, I was home alone many nights. It was dangerous to talk about religion or religious holidays in those days but I always knew when Christmas came because I was born on the 25^th of December. I was alone on Christmas Eve again; it was the year of the Hungersnot (famine) in the Ukraine, but it became one of the most memorable Christmas Eves of my life. My sister, who worked in the Doctors Choroschmonenko household, brought me an evergreen branch with cookies and candies.

Ten years later, in 1941, when food was again very scarce and times were hard, my father was able to help Mrs. Doctor Choroschmonenko get a job at the employment agency in Dnjepropetrovsk so she could provide for her two children.

For nine years, 1928-1937, Father was in concentration camps, the longest in Murmansk, close to the Finnish border, working in a fishery. He had enough food while people died of starvation in the Ukraine, the breadbasket of Russia. We kept in touch by letter, and at my Dad's request, I wrote a letter to Joseph Stalin asking him to free my Father. I never received an answer.

I started school in Zentral/Voronejh. It was a small school, two grades together. I also went to school in Burwalde, Schöneberg, Chortitza, Nikolaifeld, Halbstadt and other places. Mother had no voting privileges, so we needed to move regularly.

Father returned to the Ukraine in 1937. We had gotten a letter from him saying that he was in Halbstadt working in the post office, taking care of horses and delivering mail to surrounding villages. Mother and I went there to live; my sister had married Jacob Wiens in about 1934. We lived there about two years and I enjoyed school very much in Halbstadt. They had good teachers and the subjects were all taught in the Russian

language.

We returned to Nikolaifeld shortly before the war. In the summer of 1941, the people in our village and three surrounding villages were evacuated by the communist government to be sent to Siberia. But we did not make it to the Dniepr River. We got to Neuenburg where we camped for the night. As we went into the village for water in the morning we saw strange military men on motorcycles with sidecars. These soldiers spoke German and asked us "Wer seid ihr?" (Who are you?). We were overjoyed! The soldiers told us to stay here because our village was not yet occupied. We stayed in the next Russian village to the north from Neuenburg for a few days before returning to Nikolaifeld. Life returned to normal, as much as can be expected, during war. We were under German rule and thankful not to be in Siberia!

In October of 1941, Dad went to Dniepropetrovsk, a city about 50 kilometers north of our village. The telephone service was not working and we did not hear from him. Times were hard, especially for people in the big cities and many came to the village to trade clothing, etc. for potatoes, eggs, milk, and so on. One day in November of 1941, I went with some people from Dnjepropetrovsk to look for Dad and found him working in the employment agency as translator. I got a job there as well and lived with Dad and soon two of my girlfriends joined us and the three of us got a small room for ourselves. One of the girls worked for the railroad and one for the police, all three of us and Dad, too, as translators.

In the following year, Mother joined Dad and me in the city and for the first time in my life I had the feeling that I did not have to run or hide. This feeling lasted only a short time.

In September of 1943, the Germans helped us leave Dnjepropetrovsk. Dad was in the hospital at the time, but well enough to come with Mother and me. We took food and what we could with us and left by freight train; destination Litzmanstadt, Poland. My sister and family, and the people of the village followed in October with horse and wagon, destination Oberschlesien. In Poland we lived close to Litzmanstadt in a former sanitarium, surrounded by a beautiful pine forest. I got a job working in an office. One day, when I answered the telephone, it was my boss, Fritz Block, who was now in Litzmanstadt. He was looking for me and I started working for him again.

In January of 1945, my employer Mr. Block, sent me to take a course in counselling (Berufsberater) in the city of Posen. Here I met a girl from Canada, Johanna Fast, whose father had come to Germany before the war. We became friends but we were separated after a short time and I often wonder what became of her. Later I heard that the Fast family made it back to Canada. While in Posen news came over radio that the front was moving westward at great speed and I was not allowed to return home. I was ordered to go to the city of Schwerin via Berlin. In Berlin I had a Russian friend and stayed with her for one night. My parents and I knew this friend's address for memory in case we would ever be separated, so we could find each other with the help of Helene A, for we thought that Berlin would never fall!

In Schwerin, in Northwest Germany, I got a job in an office that placed children taken out of the war zone. Most of these children came from West and East Prussia. The news we heard was very disturbing. Had my parents made it out of the Litzmanstadt area in time, I wondered? Even though half the country was on the run to get away from the Russians it was amazing how organized it still was. Food was in short supply but, by using my stamps, I and many other displaced people ate at a restaurant without paying. They served mostly soups, and I ate up to eight bowls at a sitting and rejoiced when I found a potato piece in it, and sometimes even a sliver of meat! We walked away full, but were hungry most of the time.

Letters flew back and forth between me and my friend Helene in Berlin and once or twice my parents notified her about where they were but by the time I wrote to them, they had left. But I knew that they had made it out of the Litzmanstadt area. I prayed to God that they would not be caught by the Russians.

Shortly before Easter of 1945, I received word from my friend that Mom and Dad had found a place in Krossen, south of the city of Leipzig. By this time, it was quite hard to get permission to travel on the train from place to place, but my office manager, a compassionate lady, handed me a "military pass" destination Krossen from Schwerin, with strict orders to return to my place of employment as soon as possible.

Shortly before the train reached the city of Leipzig, countless planes started to drop their bombs over the area. Everybody left the train and we tried to hide in the field beside the track as far away as we could run. When the bombing was over, the train could not continue and the people started walking along the railroad track into the burning city of Leipzig. As far as I remember none of the passengers were hurt. Walking through the bombed and burning streets of Leipzig that morning was the closest I came to the "real action" of the horrible war. I will never forget it!

South of Leipzig I boarded a train and reached the village of Krossen where I found my parents on Friday before Easter of 1945, thanks to my Russian friend, Helene Alevenko. Years later, when I was in Canada, I tried to find her with the help of the Red Cross, without success. She was a beautiful person inside and out with the bluest eyes I ever did see and a true friend! On May 5, 1945, the American army tanks came into Krossen and for us the war was over.

After a while we found out that the part of Germany where we had found refuge was to go to the Russians so we packed up and left, heading for Westfallen. Here on Gut (estate) Wilhelmsburg in a predominant Catholic area we found work and shelter and stayed until we emigrated to Canada. It was quite a large group of Mennonites that eventually gathered on this estate. Here I was baptized and met my husband to be and I have nothing but fond memories and a big Thankyou to the people who took us in when we needed it so much.

Because Mother had to stay in quarantine for six months with scars from trachoma, I came to Canada alone. I reached the shores of the new world on the Volendam on June 21, 1948 and travelled by train to meet my sponsors, the J.P. Paetkau family in Morden, Manitoba. It was a big, wonderfully warm family but there was no work for a young girl on the big Manitoba farm. My future husband, Ben Dyck, was in Leamington, Ontario and I heard that in Ontario work was plentiful in canning factories in the summertime. I applied and was hired by Boese Foods near St. Catharines. Here I worked for one season and paid off my Reiseschuld (travel debt).

In November I came to Leamington and Ben and I were married on November 27 by Rev. N. N. Driedger. Ours was the first Immigranten Hochzeit (immigrant wedding) after the Second World War at the Leamington United Mennonite Church. In Decemher my parents came to Canada. Ben's parents had both died of starvation in the forests and swamps of North European Russia in the 1940s.

Today Ben and I have three sons, three daughters-in-law, six grandchildren and four great grandchildren. We are thankful to Germany for rescuing us from war-torn Ukraine in the 1940s and to Canada for giving us a new home.

Thinking back, I am thankful to God for all the blessings in my long life. Even the hard times were blessings because they make me appreciate more the peaceful days of today. It must have been very hard for our parents to have been born into a life of plenty and then experience the periods of revolution and anarchy, a period of sickness, hunger and murderous gangs. My Father lost his father - my grandfather - in 1917 and four brothers and two brothers-in-law in one night in 1919 at the hands of the Machno gang.

AK 2008

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