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  Historical Committee
BOOK REVIEW
by Rachel Waltner Goossen
A Family Torn Apart. By Justina D. Neufeld. Kitchener, Ont.: Pandora Press. 2003.
In my childhood I heard from my family the name of
Justina Neufeld, a German-speaking Mennonite refugee from the Soviet
Union who in 1948 had stayed for a time with my grandparents’ family in
Mountain Lake, Minnesota. Justina had recently arrived from Holland,
where Mennonite Central Committee workers had befriended and helped
sustain her and many other refugees. As a seventeen-year-old newcomer
to the MountainI Lake
community, she was a few years old than my mother and her siblings.
Justina earned her way as a household worker but also attended public
school, where she quickly learned English and made remarkable academic
progress.
Justina had been
the youngest of ten children in her
Dutch-Prussian Mennonite family in the Ukraine, and everyone in the
Neufeld clan had
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experienced chaos and violent
upheaval during the war. Fleeing the repressive Stalinist regime in
1943, Justina and six other family members had made a harrowing
crossing to the Polish border, reaching temporary safety. But with the
war still raging, the family splintered further as Justina’s mother
sent her to stay with her brother’s family, who had recently settled in
France. For the next several years, Justina lost contact with most of
her siblings, as well as her mother, and lived in constant dread of
deportation to the Soviet Union. Finally, in 1947, after years of
uncertainty about her status and the fate of loved ones, Justina, along
with her brother Gerhard and his family, entered the United States
through the refugee assistance program of MCC.
In the years following her Mountain Lake sojourn, Justina stayed in
contact with my grandparents, and by the late 1990s I became aware of
her project to write the story of her earlier life. The experiences of
her past—of the Neufeld family’s dispersion across North America,
Europe, and parts of Asia—have until now been mostly privately-held
memories. In this book, however, her experiences—and by extension, the
terror experienced by many European Mennonites in that time—are shared
for a broader reading audience. A Family Torn Apart is Justina’s
unflinching tribute to her parents and her eight older brothers,
sister, and great-aunt, “Tante,” who lived with the Neufeld family as
their world shattered in the summer of 1941.
Justina was age ten that year, when the Soviets’ war with Germany began
and Justina’s father—along with other Mennonite men of her village—was
abducted. For the next two years the family lived under military
occupation, sharing the grief of neighbors whose husbands and sons had
also disappeared. As the German army began to retreat to the west, the
Neufelds and many of their German-speaking neighbors fled for their
lives. No one knew what lay ahead; they could only guess what they
might need to survive. Justina recalls how on the last day in their
home village of Gnadental, the family decided what to carry on their
journey. Their Krueger clock was carefully wrapped and loaded onto the
wagon. Two weeks later, one of Justina’s brothers, fearing that the
clock and a prized sewing machine were too heavy for the horses,
prepared to leave them by the roadside. Justina’s mother would not hear
of it, insisting: “They will buy bread for us some day” (p. 113). Years
later, Justina would learn that her mother and sister—after forced
repatriation to the Soviet Union—had indeed managed to stay alive by
trading the household items for food.
A Family Torn Apart is an apt title for the family’s unfolding tragedy.
A reprinted torn photograph of the Neufeld family—taken before
Justina’s birth—serves as the book’s cover and as metaphor for the
narrative itself. The author, reflecting on the trauma of events sixty
years ago, says that she could not have written her story earlier,
“because the wounds of separation were too raw” (p. 17). She adds: “I
knew from the beginning of my life that I was loved …. This closeness
with my parents was a tremendous source of comfort to me in my years of
flight and turmoil, but also made my final and unexpected separations
from Papa and Mama more painful when they happened to me at age ten and
at age thirteen. From my family I got the basic values that guided my
life” (p. 197).
Now a U.S. citizen, Justina has put down roots in this country, but, as
part of lifelong effort to keep connected to family members, she made
several trips in the 1970s to see relatives in Kazakhstan. In 1995, she
returned for the first time to her home community, Gnadental, a village
of the Schlachtin-Baratov region of the Ukraine. Six years later, she
and her husband traveled to the Ukraine once more, again gathering
information and looking—after many years of few answers—for information
about her father, Dietrich Peter Neufeld, who had been arrested by the
Soviet State Police in 1941 and never been heard from again. Two of
Justina’s brothers, Peter and Franz Neufeld, had managed to escape
westward during World War II, but, in German-occupied Poland, both had
been naturalized as German citizens and drafted into the German army.
By the end of the war, they had disappeared, and, despite many years of
trying, neither Justina nor other surviving family members managed to
learn their fate.
Despite its wrenching narrative, A Family Torn Apart reconnects the
Neufeld family through memory amplified by photographs, maps, sketches,
and, above all, the author’s own resolute voice. Now a retired nurse
and mental health care administrator, Justina Neufeld tells her story
as a compelling cross-continental epic. Her book is a lament as
powerful as the Psalmist’s plaintive cry, with which she opens her
work: “From where will my help come? My help comes from the Lord.” In
the face of unspeakable loss, she shows us profound grace in human
experience.
Rachel
Waltner Goossen teaches history at Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas.
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Mennonite Historical
Bulletin
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Mission
Statement:
"God calls us to preserve our faith heritage, to interpret our stories,
and to proclaim God's work among us."
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