|
We'll Meet Again in Heaven: Germans in the Soviet
Union Write Their American Relatives: 1925 - 1937
By Ronald Julius Vossler
Published by the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, North
Dakota State University Libraries, Fargo, ND, illustrations by
Joshua Vossler, 2001, 268 pages, softcover.
The documentary produced by Roadshow Productions, We'll Meet
Again in Heaven, based on this book is available at this webpage:
www.lib.ndsu.nodak.edu/grhc/order/tapes/meet_again.html.
German
ODIN
(Online Dakota Information Network)
Central North Dakota
Library Network
The Germans from Russia Heritage Collection is pleased
to announce the publication of this important new book, We'll
Meet Again in Heaven: Germans in the Soviet Union Write Their American
Relatives, 1925-1937, by Ronald Julius Vossler, freelance writer
and university writing teacher.
This volume, dedicated to the "Germans in the Soviet Union
who were deported, shot, starved, or worked to death under the Soviet
regime," grew out of a 2000-2001 Larry Remele Fellowship, the
author received from the North Dakota Council on the Humanities.
At the heart of this book are two hundred letters, arranged in
chronological order over a twelve-year period, and translated from
the original German into readable English. These letters, as the
author indicates, just may constitute "one of the most remarkable
odysseys of suffering of any ethnic group." Written by German
villagers in the Soviet Union to relatives and friends who'd immigrated
to the Dakotas in earlier years, the "sorrow-letters,"
as they were sometimes called, were then often sent to German language
newspapers in the Dakotas for publication for a wider audience.
These letters-written by and sent to people with last names still
known to many Dakotans, including, among others, Boschee, Veil,
Dockter, Graf, Kirschenmann, Ketterling, Kraemer, Eckman, Stock,
Goehring, Schauer, Speidel, Herr, Hauck, Flemmer, Lang, Melhaff,
Morlock, Opp, Rueb, Thurn, Rudolf, Feigert, Heupel, Hochhalter,
and Wanner - clearly show a direct link, one of "old love"
and also of family ties, between the Dakota pioneers and those unfortunate
family members who remained behind in Russia. At times, the letters,
some penned by village correspondents, are folksy and relaxed. They
speak of weather, harvests, and village life.
Often the writers add rhymes, poems, Bible verses, prayers, or
just plain thanks to people in the Dakotas-"We'd long ago have
starved or frozen without you Americans-who'd sent letters, packages,
and money to villages where "their cradles rocked," where
they'd spent a good part of early lives. As the Soviet regime consolidated
its power, and with the onset of collectivization in 1928, the letters,
always remarkably dignified, have an increasing element of desperation.
A few letters tell of brutalization by the tough cadres of Bolsheviks,
collective leaders, who rule the villages with an iron fist, but
from fear of censorship writers mostly avoid all direct comment
or description of their overseers. Some letters are sent from distant
places, such as "the primeval forest", where the death
rate is high, and where tens of thousands of German villagers have
been forcibly banished, to chop wood to bolster the Soviet regime's
foreign trade.
In 1932-1933, in the section of the book titled "Crucifixion
by Hunger" --- the period of Stalin's purposefully created
"terror-famine" --- letter-writers describe themselves
as "swelling up from hunger," eating slaughtered pets,
grass, or anything else to keep at bay "the terrible hunger-death
which stands black in front of us." That single event, the
"terror-famine," according to a wide-range of sources
cited by the author, was directly responsible for the deaths of
at least six million people, and up to ten million or more, including
at least a hundred and fifty thousand Germans from Russia. It remains
one of the world's least known but also the worst human rights tragedy
of the past century-all of which is chronicled firsthand by the
letters in this volume.
Also included throughout this book are vivid illustrations by the
author's son, Joshua Vossler, a series of powerfully rendered, yet
simple, studies of hands, and figures. The front cover shows a hand
impaled by a pen; the back cover, a poster-like drawing, titled
"Hunger Pieta," of a starving figure gripped by a skeletal
communist overseer.
To help explain the background of the letters, the author also
wrote his Introduction and Historical Overview, an in-depth history
of those twelve years, 1925-1937, gleaned from both historical sources
and also from letters sent from one cluster of German villages,
the Glueckstal region-which is "at least one of the main sources
for immigrants to the Dakotas."
At the end of that same section, the author also briefly examines
why many Germans from Russia remained "silent" about Russia,
passing little or nothing to descendants about their early lives,
or about family members left in Russia.
This silence, the author conjectures, may grow partly from the
fact that the Dakota pioneer generation, who knew from the letters
about the terrible fate of brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts,
parents and grandparents, had grown "psychologically absent,"
not speaking about the fate of loved ones in the Soviet Union because
it was just too painful emotionally.
Reading these letters, one senses imminent death, hunger, and fear.
The poverty and destitution of their daily lives is shocking. But
readers of this volume will hear in the long buried voices the integrity
of spirit of a people trying to survive in a world few of us can
even imagine.
We'll Meet Again in Heaven
$35 plus Shipping & Handling
Download Order
Form
|
