The experience of going to my mother's place of birth, to Memrik in the Ukraine, has left an indelible impression on me.

I had gone to explore a mystery: my own connection to this place.Why is my inner landscape the vastness of the Ukrainian steppe, I who was born in the undulating loveliness of the German Palatinate, an area no bigger than a few Mennonite Estates East of the Dniepr.

As a small child I heard many stories of a fabled land inside the dark giant of Russia. I heard of characters in those tales whose turbulant lives and deaths were on a level with that of Bluebeard and Sleeping Beauty. They all had to do with my mother whom I could touch and who was real. The stories settled into my deep unconscious like fallen leaves onto a lake bottom, impressions that surfaced many years later. I was on my first trip to Russia. Seated in an Aeroflot  plane of considerable age and minimal comfort which was taking us over Siberia to Chabarovsk, I heard  a chorus of complaints from fellow travellers. My own inner voices – and I don’t know where they came from- were calling: a far cry from the cattle cars, a far cry from the cattle cars…

In the hills surrounding the great Lake Baikal where we found ourselves after several days on the Trans-Siberian Railroad first spring flowers were blooming and chirping songs of birds filled the air. THIS COULD NOT BE: after all, this was Siberia the land of frozen wastes and death.

And now  in the heart of the Ukraine I connected with a great sadness and pain. All my life I have been carrying the pain of two world wars  and the ravages of revolution and anarchy which swept over my mother’s country. I could never identify the source of  this deep grief, but I knew it was there even as a child and long before a therapist told me that she saw oceans of sorrow in my eyes.

My mother survived and passed on her boundless pain to me her fourth child. Perhaps it happened because only days after my birth her brother Johann Martin was arrested and exiled to Siberia. One day in Zaporozhye in a museum I discovered a photograph of my uncle in an exhibit, a picture taken after many years in Siberia, a man marked  with the suffering of the century. I saw in the Museum of Stalin’s holocaust in Dnepropetrovsk innumerable faces whose light was extinguished by that brutal regime. I saw on my mother’s birth place ruins, rocks and weeds, two huge old pear trees, silent witnesses to the burgeoning life in the sheltering home of yore that was now destroyed.

I cannot remember Mother ever expressing this pain.

I have had to travel across continents and seas down the mighty Dniepr as well as far into the past to bring into sharp focus and into the present moment the reality of the place, the land of origin of my ancestors and my orphaned mother - an origin deeply anchored in my own soul – a place that mysteriously continues to hold the spirit of their presence.

Back at home I filled a vial with the rich black soil that had brought me forth and I lit a candle in memory of:

  Johann Janzen
  Jakob Janzen
  Gerhard Janzen
  Martin Janzen
  Aron Janzen

  I remember you
  I remember them
  I remember

  I remember.

Return to main cruise page