Martin Johann Janzen
Martin’s first wife was Anna Hildebrand (1853-1890); they had 5 children. After being widowed, he married Katarina. He and Katarina had 7 children: Gerhard (1892-1938), Martin (1894-1934), Tina (1894-1945), Peter (1899-1978–my grandfather), Maria (1901-1971), Sara (1902-1973), and Kornelius (1903-1938). After Katarina died, he again remarried, to Helena Enns (10-18-1873 to 4-19-1917), and had 4 more children, Susanne (4-6-1906), David (1-19-1909), Isaak Herbert–he changed names after becoming a Nazi, not wanting a “Jewish” name (1911-1990), and Aron (11-16-1912). After Martin died of asthma, Helena was married to another man who moved her and her children to some new Mennonite villages in the Ural Mountains near the city of Ufa, where after 5 years, she died. Then the children were taken to an orphanage in the Molotschna Colony. The administrator Abram Harder then took them to Germany.
Susanne, called Tanta Susa by our family, married Hugo Scheffler. They were very dear to our family. We visited their home in Bellingham, Washington in the ’70s and later I saw Tanta Susa in Ritzville, Washington during our 1984 Bethel College choir tour. (Source of info on Tanta Susa is correspondence to my father from Susa’s daughters Eva Marie and Ruth.)
Notes from my father: “Opa’s brothers and brothers-in-law mostly died in the 1930s from Stalinist terror. Our parents had wisely fled before things got worse in Russia, though they suffered a great deal on the way. Part of their suffering was due to newly enacted immigration laws in the U.S. which were caused by fear that Eastern European immigrants would ‘mongrelize’ the pristine northern European races which were predominant in the U.S. at that time. Talk about race prejudice! When the German armies invaded Russia in 1941, Stalin declared all ethnic Germans in Russia at that time to be enemy aliens. So he shipped the Volga Germans to work in the mines of Northern Russia and shipped the southern ethnics to Siberia. Our Janzen relatives were caught up in this migration and suffered terribly before they became established. The surviving women had to work in forced labor camps during those war years. After Stalin’s death, things eased up some, so many moved south to the Asian lands like Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan where the climate was somewhat milder. Cousin Sara Loewen and her children [whom my parents visited in Germany in the late 1990s] lived in the latter before they migrated to Germany. When the Soviet empire broke up, the Asians pressured the Germans to leave. Our Aussiedler [emigrant] cousins then came to Germany.”
On the exile of the men of Memrik under Stalin, see next to last paragraph at http://gameo.org/index.php?title=Memrik_Mennonite_Settlement_%28Dnipropetrovsk_Oblast,_Ukraine%29
On Germany’s stance toward the Ausseidler, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_return#Germany.
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