Escape from Russia
As told to Rosemary Phillips
Katherine Berg has been a resident of Grand Forks for over
twenty years. Katherine has a fascinating life story to tell, and
over a good hot cup of tea at my kitchen table she spoke about living
in Russia as a Mennonite; about the family escape to Canada in 1924;
life on the Prairie; and eventually a new life in Abbotsford, British
Columbia, where eventually she and daughter Sonia Willson opened
a drive-in “Snack Shack”. This is Katherine’s
story.
Chapter 1: Life in the Russian north
 |
| Katherine
Berg a few years ago on the steps of Golden Heights in Grand
Forks, B.C. |
I was born in Russia in Orenberg, north-east of Moscow. My father
was a minister and we were farmers, and farmers then, as long as
you had enough to eat, were called “beaujois”. That
means “rich”, and of course Communists hated anyone
who was rich.
And so we had three strikes against us - we were a huge family,
we were rich, and we were Mennonites.
The journey of the Mennonites
As Mennonites we were known as the defenceless Christians. Our
people came out of Switzerland and Germany in the 1500s and settled
in what are now Belgium and Holland, and built the dykes. Martin
Luther had just left the Catholic Church, and with him was Meno
Siemans. When he saw all these people coming with no leadership
he took them under his umbrella and they were called Meno Knights
– the Knights of Meno – so ever since we’ve been
called Mennonites. Holland was so small, and had so many people,
so they moved on to Poland.
Catherine the Great invited the Mennonites to Russia in the late
1700s. She came from a small German principality called Anholt-Zerbst.
That little country isn’t there any more.
Countries change their names and their borders and whatever, right?
All of Europe needed farmers to produce food. Men were sent ahead
to Russia to look the situation over and all that they asked for
was freedom of religion and that we would not bare arms. Russia
was a very rich country. They had mining and timber. I believe they
had the most timber in the world. And the wheat that grew –
you know, it was feeding almost the whole world. The wheat was called
Red Rooster. Many years later the men brought the Red Rooster grain
to Canada in their pockets, and started growing it on the Prairies.
It grew very well in very cold climates and also produced wonderful
bread. Not so good for cakes and pastries and stuff, but we didn’t
do that anyway.
Everything grew in Russia. They said that if you put a broom handle
into the ground, in no time flat it would sprout. It was a very
rich country as far as growing things. Tremendously wealthy.
Life on the farm
When I was growing up, I’m not sure how much property we
had. We had very little. But we had two girls in the house for help,
a maid and a nursemaid, and of course men in the barn to take care
of the horses and do the field work right?
My father was going back and forth to Moscow, back and forth, with
horses and wagon. I think it must have been 50 or 60 miles. Imagine
how they did that. Because he was a minister he was well travelled
and although he had only three years in school he could read and
write. He wrote poetry and he was a choir leader.
I don’t remember my grandparents at all. They came from an
area where there was fruit, further south. My father used to tell
us that if you were there you would have wheelbarrows full of apples,
eh. And of course we never saw an apple - until I came to BC. It
was too cold. We were not that far from Siberia. We had gooseberries,
rhubarb and little red berries. I just can’t remember their
name. In the summer of course you had sauerkraut and pickled tomatoes
and different things out of the garden, but no fruit. We had lots
of wheat. We literally lived on bread, and wonderful bread, three
times a day.
The villages were all numbered. We were number 10. And so you had
the houses on each side of the road of the village. In the morning
the cowherd would come. You’d have to have your cows milked
and looked after, and have them on your step going out of your driveway.
Then the cowherd would take them to pasture. The grazing and wheat
fields were outside the villages.
The farms were further away. At our farm there was a house and
a big summer kitchen, and then there was a barn. You never went
outside in the winter. It was too cold. And the wolves in the winter
were always hungry.
The well was beside the pig barn. We never had any trouble. Imagine
eh? All the water came from the well. The bathroom was an outhouse
for sure. You’d sit on the toilet and the wind would be blowing
shooo-shooo, and ever so often there would be a small white weasel
with you. For a bath we just had a tub in the middle of the room.
On Saturday at night, first the youngest got the bath, then the
older. All the same water. You just added a bit more warm until
the last one.
Lots of children – no birth control
Well, there were a lot of children. I keep counting. I think twelve
survived. Every two years a woman had a child – there was
no birth control. She would nurse so far then the child had to start
eating. The mother would be expecting a new one and this one was
just one year old. It was handed over to the older siblings. Well,
the food was bread, and here’s a two-year-old just on bread
right? I’m not sure how many but five or six children died
at two years old in our family, in every family. Diphtheria. I think
they were malnourished. We have a picture of my mother and father
sitting with one of them, in the coffin. It was about two years
old.
In those days men didn’t have to divorce their wives, they
killed them with childbirth. My Uncle Henry had two wives, and Uncle
John had three. There were always old maids. They would inherit
these big families and these husbands. Oh my goodness, when a widow
and a widower got married it was too much. Each of them had at least
twelve children living. Twelve here, and twelve there. Can you imagine
the hubbub at the table?
We really looked after our own. There was no welfare, nothing like
that. We didn’t need judges, lawyers or jails. Anything went
wrong it was dealt with at home – end of story.
So on a very small farm you could feel ooh-hoo beaujois –
you were rich eh? We had sheep for Marino wool, sheep you ate, pigs
and cows. Cows weren’t special, but the horses were Arabian,
bred on the desert, and they were very rare. Because my father was
a minister he had to go back and forwards to Moscow, with horses
and wagon. I think it must have been 50 or 60 miles. Imagine how
they did that? So, at one time we had 15 horses – but with
the Revolution they were stolen and we were left with only one.
Common Ism - common thought
Lenin, he was the one that started it all, and he was Jewish. He
said that “Ism” is a thought, and Common Ism is a common
thought – the rich would not be so rich and the poor not so
poor. That was the original idea. Then Stalin came in – I
don’t know how that all happened, but he took over and then
things got worse than they had ever been before. The Red Army –
they would come through the villages and pick up everything –
just take. They had guns and we didn’t. So they would do as
they pleased.
I was seven at the time.
With Stalin came starvation
In 1923 the government said that you had to give half of your wheat
to them. Well you had to, that’s it eh? My father said that
with half the wheat we could still live through the winter and put
our crop in next spring. You had to have enough wheat to plant,
because you never had enough money to buy any.
We managed to get that to the government but they hadn’t
planned for it, and there was not storage for the wheat. It was
poured on the ground. And the snow would be two or three feet deep
every winter. Terrible amount of snow. In the spring the grain had
two feet of snow on it and mice and rats were running through it.
They had a man with a gun there, and if you went and tried to get
a handful of wheat in the mouth, and you were starving, he was allowed
to shoot you and nobody would say anything. There was no law and
order.
My parents never held anything back from us. They would tell us
everything that was going on. They would bury vegetables in the
summer. We would stand there and look as they dug and covered them
with straw and then dirt. Nobody ever squealed. It was our winter
supply – we had to save some. Kids knew everything, but we
didn’t tell. I think everybody was like that.
In the big cities people were literally starving. We were lucky.
On the farm we had pigs. We made sausages and smoked ham. And we
had chickens and eggs. And we had wheat to bake bread. The men would
take this produce into Urenberg and Moscow and sell it for a very
good price. That’s how come we had money, along with selling
the Arabian horse. Otherwise we not have been able to leave Russia
and start a new life in Canada. We would have had nothing.
Chapter 2: Escape from Russia - saved by a pee pot
Another sister dies
Just before we left Russia my youngest sister Helen died. She was
two years old. We all stood around the cradle and watched. Nothing
was held from us children. I remember her biting her teeth. She
must have been in pain. She couldn’t breathe. Diphtheria closed
the air passages. The next thing was the funeral. I can just see
her lying there, you know, in her coffin. Someone gave us a geranium.
They had them in their house, and they would bloom in the winter,
all over the windows. So Helen had a geranium in her hands. And
somebody gave us a pink sash. By that time things were poor. We
couldn’t buy anything and thieves had been around already
helping themselves. Of course my mother was already pregnant and
before we left we had a new sister – called her Helen too.
We finally ran out of names you know.
 |
Katherine’s family
just before they left Russia. Katherine is seated in the
front on the left. Their hair was short because with poverty
came lice. |
|
Leaving the farm
We couldn’t sell our farms. They went back to the government.
So all we had was the little bits of things in the house and the
animals to sell for money. The day we left I remember getting up
very early in the morning. The sun was just coming over the east
there. I’d never been up so early eh. And I saw the sun coming
up. All the neighbours were out to see us leave. I was feeling so
proud that they would come out to see us, and ME, leave. They were
all standing around saying, “Goodbye.” And they were
saying, “The Revolution will come to an end.” My two
uncles had a cart and horse to take us to Moscow. They stayed in
Russia. They had their homes and said they were not leaving.
My mother’s brother was with us, and he stuttered. Everywhere
we stopped they thought he was retarded. But he wasn’t. He
stuttered. Then we would have to wait for him, eh. We would go through
the lines, and finally he would come running – I can see him
limping. My father would say, “We are not leaving anybody
behind because if we do, they will starve.”
We had buns, baked bread, and you put them in the oven and made
rusks, you know, so they wouldn’t spoil. And we had a sack
of cheese we had made ourselves. So we lived on that. I don’t
know how long for. We had our own wheat and roasted that and ground
it. And that was our coffee. So you could drink coffee. It wasn’t
bad. That’s how we ate until we got through.
A room in Moscow
In Moscow my father rented accommodation – a great big room,
and the first set of stairs I had ever seen. At home we had ladders
up and down. But here were stairs. It was a big room with not one
stick of furniture. I don’t know how we slept but we had our
own feather beds. So we slept on the floor.
The first morning we woke up and opened the window. We saw there
was a fair below us in the street, selling food and stuff, and somebody
was baking bread. The smell of the bread was coming into the room
because we were up a little higher. We thought this was better than
home. At home we only had fresh bread two or three times a week,
but here you could smell it every morning. And, of course we were
used to eating just bread.
And then there was the Moskva River with all those bridges –
bridge after bridge after bridge. We wanted to go swimming because
the river wasn’t very cold. The bigger children in the family
were instructed on how to bring us all back alive. The Russian people
were really good. The women had pillowcases made out of linen, and
they would fill them with air and float on them. They took care
of us and allowed us to float on their pillows.
Saved by a pee pot
Now thieves were rampant. They were looking for money, but mainly
for passports, because if you had a passport you could get out of
Russia. If you didn’t, you couldn’t. My father had put
the passport and all our money into the pee pot for safety. My younger
brother Dick would sit on the pee pot and push himself around on
the wooden floor. We always did that when we were younger, sat on
the pee pot, rocked back and forwards and moved around. Well, Dick
was doing that when the thieves broke in and were looking for money
and the passport. Dick never got up. Nobody said boo. He sat rocking
back and forth underneath the feet of these thieves and they never
caught on where the money was hidden. When the thieves left the
money came out of the pee pot.
I saw Lenin
One day we were walking around Red Square and my father picked
me up and held me right over Lenin’s face, about this far
away (Katherine signals about one-foot distance). I can see him
lying there in his coffin. A little black goatee. And he was a fairly
young man. Well of course, Lenin lay in state there for years. He
was so pickled. They’d brush him off and put more paint on
his cheeks to make him look so he was still there. There was always
a line-up to see him - even the poor. Well, the Russians they just
love to eat, eh. And the tables were always well spread. But the
poor were always starving.
As I said, common ‘ism’ is a common ‘thought’.
And social ‘ism’ is when the society takes care of everything.
It took me forever to find out what an ‘ism’ was. I’d
ask, “What’s an ‘ism’?”
Through the gate by train
After we saw Lenin we got on the train. It was not a cattle train
but one where goods were stored, a freight train. We had bunks.
I think there was straw there and we had our own feather beds to
cover ourselves up. On the train we were fed for the first time.
Until then we had only had those rusks and cheese - nothing but
rusks and cheese.
We got on the train at night. We only had to travel so far and
then we were out of Russia. Nobody was asleep because we thought
that if anything went wrong we’d still be stuck there. And
now we had left our farm. We’d have nothing. We’d for
sure be starving.
Then somebody said, “We’re through the gate.”
It was a big gate over the railway tracks. To this day when someone
says, “We’re through the gate,” I feel my heart
pounding. It meant that we were out of Russia and in a free zone.
And then of course everybody rejoiced. My goodness, they all fell
into sleep because it had been very traumatic all around. And we
were exhausted.
We stayed in an immigration place for one night and from there
went across to England. And there was my father with all these kids.
He was so proud of his family you know. The immigration people looked
and my father was going, “Yuh, yuh.” They must have
shook their heads in horror at so many kids. We stayed in England
for just one night and then we got on a bigger boat heading for
Canada.
Immigration ship to Canada
Have you ever had fruit soup? There were prunes and raisins because
there was no fruit. So we had to have dried. It was thickened with
maybe milk or cream. We loved it. Dick, he must have nearly killed
himself eating fruit soup. He loved to eat. He’d eat and then
he’d go and heave over the side of the ship. He’d throw
up because the ship was going side to side. It wasn’t a big
ship so it really jiggled around. And then Dick would go back and
have more soup because you could have as much as you wanted.
The ship went up the St. Lawrence through to Montreal and from
Montreal we took a train to Saskatchewan. We hadn’t brought
anything along except a couple of beautiful cups. Russian china
is beautiful. Well, of course, just shortly before we got where
we were landing I dropped two of those cups. That was the end of
the cups. That was the only thing we had, because you couldn’t
pack much with so many people. You had to have just essentials,
eh, to eat and keep warm.
For some reason we still had money. All these kids and all this
expense and we still had money. We bought a farm.
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