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Conversations with the Elders, No. 10
A Conversation with
Maria Haverkand Lang (born 1936)
by Sister Alice Ann Pfeifer, C.S.A.
with Sister Mary Elise Leiker, C.S.A.
© Copyright 1997, the Sisters of St. Agnes, Fond du Lac,
Wisconsin and FEEFHS, all rights reserved
First posted: 28 January 1997
"Maybe if my grand parents hadn't changed their minds, today I, too, would be an
American," Maria said as
she gazed at us thoughtfully across her kitchen table. At first she had been surprised to learn
about our Volga
German roots - especially about me because I do not speak the German dialect that Sister
Mary Elise knows so
well.
But Maria was better able to "place us" upon hearing the story of our ancestors' emigration
to the United States
in the 1870s. She then asked us the same question posed by so many German Russians after
they have learned
about the great number of American "cousins" they have: "But if your great-grandparents
wanted to leave
Russia, why didn't they just go to Germany?"
After Maria heard our explanation, she fell into the short reverie that resulted in her
announcement that she,
too, might have been born an American.
It seems that while her mother had still been a very young child - before the outbreak of
World War I - her
grandparents had migrated to the United States. Within six months, however, homesickness
overwhelmed them
and they returned to their native village on the hilly side of the Volga River. Mathias
Reising had been one of
the richest men in Goebel in those days. Had he lived longer, he perhaps would have seen
the day he would
have been persecuted as a kulak. As it was, however, no one in the Reising
family experienced
exile until all of the German Russians of Goebel were sent to Siberia at the start of the
Second
World War.
That included all five of Mathias' children who had lived into adulthood. (Two of them are
still living today, in
the same part of Western Siberia where they were sent more than 50 years ago: Rosa
Reising, age 82, and
Anna Reising Goet, age 85. Their sister, Maria's mother, died 14 years ago and is buried in
a well-tended
grave in the village of Novoyeh Derevneh.)
From the Banks of the Volga to the Forests of Siberia
Born May 26, 1936, Maria was only five years old when the people of Goebel received their
order into exile.
She had a brother three years older than she, Johannes; a brother two years younger, Jacob;
and a little sister
on the way - Anna, who would be born in Tyumen Oblast on June 17, 1942. Her parents
were Johannes and
Maria Haverkand, both born in Goebel, he in 1911 and she in 1908.
Tears come to Maria's eyes when she remembers her mother. She could sing so
beautifully, Maria
says, All the old hymns. Songs like Grosser Gott. I felt like crying whenever I
heard her sing. I
still cry today when I hear those hymns sung in our church. I feel sorry that I can't join in.
The hymnals
are printed in German, and all I can read is Russian.
Maria's mother was a woman who prayed constantly and who diligently taught her children
to pray. Although
the communist government had turned Goebel's large Catholic church into a social club and
had forbidden
people ever again to assemble for prayer, that didn't stop families from continuing to pray
within the privacy of
their own homes.
Maria is not sure how many families in Goebel continued to pray after the restrictions on
religious practice were
introduced, but she knows of at least four families, besides hers, that did. Those who had
prayed " before
there was atheism still prayed after that, and those who had never prayed before did not
suddenly start praying,"
she recalls.
Maria's mother made sure that all the Haverkand children knew the Ten Commandments, the
Our Father, the
Apostles' Creed, and, of course, the Sign of the Cross. The children were instructed to
make the Sign of the
Cross often throughout the day - upon arising in the morning, before leaving the house to
play, before going to
bed at night.
In the fall of 1941, however, all of their peaceful routines were suddenly disrupted. Like all
of the other
German Russian families of Goebel, the Haverkands were given 24 hours to pack, and under
the cover of
darkness, a horse drawn wagon came to their house to take them away.
As they boarded the wagon with all they could carry, they asked their driver, also a German
Russian, "Where
are you taking us?" He snarled, "To the Volga - where all of you will be thrown into the
river!" The next
morning they arrived at the riverbank, but no one tried to drown them. In fact, nothing
happened to them for
three days. They just sat and waited for a boat to come, and when it did, they boarded it and
chugged
upriver to a place where they could be herded onto a freight train headed east.
In Tyumen Oblast in Western Siberia, trucks met them at the railroad station and transported
them on the final
18 kilometers of their long journey into exile. Their final destination, the settlement of
Okenyuka, was nothing
like home. A dense growth of tall birches surrounded them on every side. They soon
learned that they were to
work on a Soviet sovkhoz [state farm], different from a kolkhoz
[collective farm]
because they would receive small salaries in return for their labors. In time, her brothers
became tractor
drivers and she, a milkmaid.
In May of 1942, Maria's father was ordered to report to Sverdlosk for service in the
trudarmiya, the
dreaded Soviet heavy labor corps. (The industrial city of Sverdlosk lay to the west of them,
in the Ural
Mountains that divide the more temperate lands of European Russia from the frozen forests
of Siberia.) The
following month, Maria's little sister, Anna, was born, but her father didn't live long enough
ever to lay eyes
on his youngest child. The hunger and deprivations of life in exile had been taking a slow,
steady toll on him.
Six days after arriving in Sverdlosk, he died.
Simple Pleasures and Sharp Deprivations
Despite her eight-hours-a-day job on the sovkhoz, Maria's mother did all she could to
provide her children with
a childhood as happy as possible under the circumstances. Just as they had done on the
Volga, they continued
to celebrate Christian holidays such as Christmas and Easter.
"I was so afraid of the Christkind," Maria says with a chuckle, "that I hid under
the bed when he
came!" She was always happy, however, to sample the Christmas candy and cookies that he
had brought. For
the Easter holiday, her mother always fashioned a beautiful lamb out of butter, and the
children surrounded the
lamb with eggs they had colored. They kept the lamb and the eggs on display throughout
Easter Sunday while
they feasted on rivvelkuchen and other baked treats.
Although Mrs. Haverkand worked hard to make holidays special and bright, other days
brought unavoidable
discomforts and deprivations. Family members slept on straw mattresses. Sometimes they
had shoes to wear;
sometimes they didn't. There was little meat to eat, mostly bread and potatoes, and
sometimes not even
that.
When staples ran low, Maria's mother made soup from boiled grass and from different kinds
of plants that grew
in the forest. Maria recalls that one plant, in particular, made them break out in an itchy
rash whenever they
consumed it - but putting up with the bothersome rash was better than feeling the pangs of
unsatisfied
hunger.
Despite all of Mrs. Haverkand's best efforts; however, Maria nearly starved to death when
she was twelve. "I
can still remember how white my skin was," she says pensively, stroking her arms, an
expression of pain
stealing over her face like a dark shadow - discouraging us from inquiring any
further.
"Everything I Could Have Wanted"
Years passed. Almost before she knew it, Maria was 26 years old and still unmarried. An
older woman on the
sovkhoz, however, began thinking that Maria would be the perfect match for her 24-year-old
nephew in
Chelyabinsk. So the woman arranged for a meeting to take place between the two young
people.
"He wasn't anything like any of the men in my own village," Maria exclaims almost
girlishly, her eyes dancing
as she recalls her first meeting with Leo in 1963. "He was tall, strong, handsome -
everything I could have
wanted."
Leo Lang had been born into a German Lutheran family near the city of Saratov on the
Volga River. His
family also had been exiled during the war, but to Kazakstan instead of to Siberial.
Eventually the Langs ended
up in the city of Chelyabinsk - like Sverdlosk a short distance north of it, a major industrial
city that was
heavily populated with Trudarmy workers during the '40s and with their descendants during
the subsequent
years. Leo's parents were Karl Franzovitch Lang and Maria Fyodorovna (Rutz) Lang, and
he was their only
child.
The attraction between Maria and Leo was instant and mutual. Well before Leo's 10-day
visit to Okenyuka was
over, Maria had agreed to return to Chelyabinsk with him. Although Maria's mother
objected that everything
was happening too fast, Maria did as she had decided and soon was in Chelyabinsk, the bride
of Leo
Lang.
"How could you have been so sure of someone you hardly knew?" we asked - innocently
enough we had
thought - but Maria's face suddenly turned as red as that of a child caught stealing from a
cookie jar. "Such
questions you ask!" she humorously scolded as her face reddened even more. Then she
offered us another cup
of coffee and told us about her first years in Chelyabinsk.
They weren't entirely wonderful and easy years, but the passage of time did prove her right
about Leo. He was
and remains an excellent husband and companion. The challenge of their first nine years
togethr, however,
came in the form of having to share an apartment with Leo's parents. His mother was
immer boese
- always angry, always scolding.
She didn't hide her dislike for anyone, not even her obvious dislike for her own
grandchildren, Ira and Andrei,
born in 1965 and 1968. By 1972, thankfully, Leo and Maria were able to move into an
apartment of their own.
It is the same seventh-floor, two-bedroom apartment where they continue to live today. By
Russian standards,
it is quite comfortable and spacious.
"When the New Church is Built"
Maria has been a member of Immaculate Conception Parish ever since it was first organized
in the early 1980s.
Her cousin, Maria Frick, had acquainted her with the parish. In those days there was no
resident pastor, but
Mass was regularly offered by the traveling priest whom Siberian Catholics have fondly
nicknamed "the Iron
Monk" for the great courage of his spirit and the strength of his physical endurance. He is
Father Joseph
Swidnicki, as energetic and as active as ever, but now living in the city of Omsk and leaving
the care of the
Chelyabinsk parish to four missionary priests from Germany.
Lately, Maria's husband has been expressing an interest in becoming a Catholic. "But he
doesn't even know
the Our Father yet!" she says with a laugh. "I told him he must go see our priests. He says
that he will when
the new church is built." In the meantime, whenever he rises in the morning for work, he
gives her a nudge
and reminds her that she, too, must rise - to be on time for Mass.
"When the new church is built" is becoming a phrase frequently heard these days. Ask an
elderly couple when
they will seek a religious blessing for their civil marriage, and they say, "When the new
church is built." Ask a
man when he will begin accompanying his wife to Mass, and he says, "When the new church
is built."
In the Metallurgical Region of Chelyabinsk, the skyline is taking on a distinct new
appearance as the Gothic
spire of the new church slowly rises above all the other shapes and forms surrounding it,
sharply contrasting
them in its solemn stateliness and its singular beauty. The new church rises like a monument
to the power of
one man's dreams, for Father Wilhelm Palesch saw the need for a larger worship space for
the city's Catholics
long before anyone else did. The new church testifies to the skill of its German architect as
well as that of the
Russian and German workers who are following the architect's plan.
The new church stands like a big "Danke schoen" to the many foreign donors
who have agreed with
the worthiness of Father Wilhelm's dream. Not to be forgotten, either is the fact that it
stands on the very spot
where barracks once housed hundreds of German-Russian exiles who had been torn from
their homes in
European Russia during the cruelest war of this war-ravaged century. It stands there where
the barracks once
stood, shining like a promise, a strong and silent symbol of what endures when all else has
been lost.
[In a cover letter sent with this "Conversation" Sister Alice Ann added:]
In the final paragraph of my story, I make reference to the new church, which is literally
becoming the talk of
the town, among Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Yet much remains to be done on the
church, and funding it
is a constant worry for Father Wilhelm. His heart's wish is that all the work can be paid for
and finished by
next October 13, so that he can honor Our Lady of Fatima by dedicating the new church on
her day. Everyone
here, as I'm sure you've heard, considers Our Lady of Fatima the special patroness of
Russland.
[At Sister's request, therefore, the Sunflower Chapter of the American Historical Socxiety of
Germans from Russia has agreed to collect and forward donations for completion of the new
church. Checks should be written to "Chelyabinsk Church Fund, c/o Sunflower Chapter,"
and mailed to 2700 Elm Street, Hays Kansas 67601-1712.
[This interview took place in September of 1996.]
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