Remember Us: Letters from Stalin's Gulag (1930-37): Volume One: The Regehr Family

By Ruth Derksen Siemens

Pandora Press, Kitchener, Ontario, 2008, 207 pages, softcover

"Remember us as we remember you" the plea from a father for his family in a prison camp in Stalin's Gulag empire. Jasch Regehr's letter is a criminal offence. Documents of the NKVD, the Soviet Union's secret police agency, confirm that "correspondence abroad" is punishable by arrest and imprisonment without trial.

Yet this father's letter was delivered to a tiny prairie town in Canada. From 1930-37, other letters written by Russian Mennonites a nine-year old girl, her mother, brother and sister, extended family and friends arrived in Carlyle, Saskatchewan. Most of the 463 letters traveled by covert means and circuitous networks. Aggressive prison guards, hostile censors and informers were obstacles to secure delivery. Once safely in Canada, the letters were stored in a Campbell's Soup box. They moved from attic to attic for nearly 60 years, and were finally discovered in 1989 by Peter Bargen, son of the recipients.

For the author, Ruth Derksen Siemens (a first-generation Canadian of Russian-Mennonite descent) these letter writers are not faceless, nameless people from the past. They are her blood, her kin. From the position of an "insider," the author guides us through the accounts that depict not only death and horror but also the hope that sustains the prisoners in their darkest hours.

The world does not know this story. The silence is inscrutable. The Gulag and the millions who died must enter our public moral consciousness. Thankfully, these letters and some survivors are still among us who can validate events; the amnesia is not yet complete.

The letters gathered in this publication (Volume One) have been written by one family: Jasch and Maria Regehr and some of their children. Subsequent volumes will include letters written by other prisoners. These first-person accounts are damning evidence in the human court of justice. We will remember! We will celebrate those who wrote. And we will be changed.

Portions of the profits will be donated to the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) and Mennonite Historical Societies in Canada.

About the Author

Ruth Derksen Siemens (Executive Producer of the documentary and author of the book) is a first-generation Russian Mennonite who grew up in Vancouver. She spent many spring and summer months at her grandparents farm in Yarrow (in the eastern Fraser Valley region of British Columbia). Here she was immersed into the ethnic culture of a replicated Russian settlement. As a pre-teen, she moved with her family from Vancouver to another Mennonite village. Arnold was a retreat into European Mennonite customs, rituals and language.

Music was her first passion and career choice, but a longing to understand language and its rhetorical uses directed her to return to university. Ruth is now an instructor of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of British Columbia, a researcher and historian. Her primary research has been conducted in the field of rhetoric and discourse analysis in an English Department, but her interest in historical documents and their linguistic implications remains dominant. Her PhD studies in the Philosophy of Language at the University of Sheffield, UK investigate letters written from the former Soviet Union (1930-38) by Russian Mennonites, many of whom were imprisoned and died in Stalins Gulag.

Her publications include both refereed and non-refereed articles, anthologies, and books. Her publication, Remember Us: Letters from Stalin's Gulag (1930-37) is now available. A one-hour documentary Through the Red Gate, produced by Out To See Entertainment Inc., Vancouver BC, is also available now.

Remember Us: Letters from Stalin's Gulag

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