From Kleefeld with Love 3

We pick up the story in the earlier post about Kleefeld (see here) as Anna (Enns) Harder Klein narrates several visits to Kleefeld many years after the horrible events of the late 1920s through the mid-1940s.

Now I wish to relate something of our journey back to our Heimat in Russia. … We left in July of 1963. Brother Gerhard accompanied us. We were overwhelmed with emotion as we approached our village of Kleefeld. We wandered about everywhere, peering over the hedges and examining the gardens. At the cemetery we were able to locate stones with familiar names, including father’s and grandfather Wiens’s grave. … Many of the gravestones were broken. … We traversed the village, back and forth. Some houses were in ruins. … Our parents’ home was still standing, but the barn and machine shed had been dismantled. …
     In June of 1976, my husband and I returned again. Much had changed in the intervening thirteen years. Alexanderkrone had been nicely built up. The church/school building had been converted into a clubhouse. Many of the houses had been dismantled and the materials taken to Neukirch. Friedensruh was almost entirely dismantled. No trace was left of Pragenau and Steinfeld. Here everything was plowed under. Almost nothing was left of our beloved Kleefeld. The cemetery had been entirely destroyed and the area now used as a manure pile. This upset me terribly. Not far from Melitopol, I later met a Russian woman with whom I had gone to school. When I began speaking about the cemetery in Kleefeld, I became quite agitated and said I couldn’t imagine someone stooping so low as to use a cemetery for a manure pile. She agreed with me. (Harder 2003, 190–92)

The site of Kleefeld today. No trace of the village is visible from the air.

As noted in a 2014 post about Kleefed (see here, scroll down), none of the village’s houses or buildings or streets remain today.

It seems that some portions of the village were burned during World War II. John Harder explains: “Sara [Helene Harder Käppel] made a last visit … to her beloved Kleefeld just as the German Wehrmacht (occupation army during World War Two) ordered the evacuation of all Germans to Germany ahead of the retreating troops. As she left Kleefeld for the last time, she looked back and saw her beloved village in flames” (Harder 2003, 193, quoting Leland Harder, The Blumstein Legacy,  130).

The buildings within Kleefeld that avoided the torch in the 1940s no doubt included those that still stood in 1963. In all likelihood, they were dismantled or collapsed during the late 1960s and early 1970s, with useable materials being used somewhere else and rubble carted away. Whatever the cause or course of their demolition, they are certainly gone forever now.

Photograph of 1930 Kleefeld school children reproduced in Harder 2003, 93.
Photograph provided by Gerhard Dyck, Winnipeg.

No one can say what would have happened to Grandpa and Grandma, their children, and my generation had our ancestors remained in Molotschna. Nor can we say what happened to the Bullers who did stay in Kleefeld, such as the three Buller children Abraham, Neta, and Katja identified in the photograph to the right.

All we can know is that we are the fortunate ones who benefit even now from our forebears’ brave decision to leave.

Source

Harder, John A., ed. and trans. 2003. From Kleefeld with Love. Kitchener, Ontario: Pandora Press. From Kleefeld with Love can be purchased here.