Sometimes persistence + dumb luck pays off and leads to a new discovery. This is one of those times. This series has tried to discover the identity of the Johann Buller from Waldheim who was mentioned in several accounts of exile in Stalin’s Soviet Union (see here and here).
In the early 1930s Johann and his family fled Molotschna to Krasnogorovka, a village in the Donbass area of the Ukraine roughly 85–90 miles northeast of Waldheim. Like many Mennonite males in that time and place, Johann Buller was arrested on unspecified charges; whether he was later released is not entirely clear, but we assume that he was.
We next encountered a woman named Anna (Njuta) Buller, the daughter of Heinrich Harder, former minister in Halbstadt, Molotschna colony. She and the other Mennonite residents of Krasnogorovka were exiled nearly 2,000 miles east to the village of Algabass in southeast Kazakhstan. There Anna buried her father, gave birth to a son named David, and then buried her mother as well.
We wondered if Anna might perhaps have been the wife of Johann, and we pondered the significance of no mention of a husband during the accounts of Anna’s life in Kazakhstan. Finally, persistence and dumb luck allow us to fill in (at least parts of) the rest of the story.
The unexpected source of information about Johann Buller comes from Aron A. Toews’s
Mennonite Martyrs: People Who Suffered for Their Faith 1920–1940. The book contains the stories of more than sixty Mennonites who suffered some sort of loss or privation, from exile to imprisonment to death, at the hands of the Soviet authorities. One of the individuals whose story is told is Heinrich Harder, the father of Anna (Njuta) Buller. The entry is worth quoting in its entirety.
He was a teacher but also a minister of the Molotschna Evangelical Mennonite Brethren Church, whose meeting hall was located in Lichtfelde. He himself, came from Neu-Halbstadt. His wife Helene was a daughter of the widely known teacher, minister, and poet Bernard Harder of Halbstadt. She also possessed outstanding poetic gifts. Many a fine poem of hers has appeared in our periodicals. I can still remember one of her poems which appeared in the Mennonite papers under the title Lose Blätter in which she portrayed the lot of the scattered Mennonite refugees in a most gripping fashion. This family unfortunately had no children, though both loved children intensely. Later they adopted a daughter called Njuta (Annie) who gave them much joy.
Heinrich Harder possessed a good pedagogical training and was a teacher for many years. His longest stay was at the estate Steinbach on the Juschanlee River. Here lived the well-known families Peter and Nicolai Schmidt, Jakob Dick, Klaas Schmidt, the family Regehr and others. The school was only small, but the teacher Harder completely dedicated himself to his profession. He had a very friendly manner which attracted people, yet he possessed a very steadfast character. In the school district stretching from Steinbach to Mariental he, together with his colleagues, was a regular participant in the teacher conferences and contributed much to their vitality. His colleagues included Abram Janz, Elisabethal; Johann A. Toews, Alexandertal; the teachers Boese and P. Toews, Schardau; Abram H. Harder, Pordenau; Peter Wiebe and Abram Nickel, Mariental.
During the German occupation in the summer of 1918, the teacher Heinrich Harder celebrated his twenty-fifth jubilee as a teacher. The author, at the request of the Molotschna Mennonite Teachers Association, presented the jubilee address utilizing the text, “The laborer is worthy of his hire.”
He left Steinbach and accepted a teaching position in Sparrau when Steinbach was largely depopulated by the Bolsheviks and a communist children’s home was established there. Since he was also a minister, he had to give up his beloved teaching position because of pressure from Soviet authorities. The family then moved to Neu-Halbstadt, where he had been appointed as minister of the Mennonite Brethren Church. The services were held in the so-called Vereinshaus
(Association House), where the services of other Mennonite groups were held as well.
Almost all of the ministers had emigrated or fled and so he had much work in the congregations. He did not labor in peace for long. As a minister, he was soon disenfranchised and deprived of civil rights. One high tax assessment followed another and soon he was obliged to leave his post. He and his family moved to the Memrik region. The meetinghouse in Halbstadt was closed and turned into a high school gymnasium.
Here (Memrik) they were very poor. Finally H. Harder found a position as night watchman at a government project. Later he was sent to the high north together with all the other Mennonite inhabitants near Memrik. All reliable information has been lacking since then. (Toews 1990, 96–97)
Fortunately for readers, the account does not end there. According to the translator’s preface, the original German manuscript of this book was destroyed in a house fire and had to be reconstructed (Toews 1990, 96–97). The silver lining in all this is that, due to the delay, some new material could be added to the account. Thus we find beginning with page 98 a postscript on Heinrich Harder from May 1948.
We have just now received further information about the last years of the whereabouts of the Heinrich Harder family. At the beginning of the 1930s, they had moved to the Russian village Borisowka, in the region of Stalino (Jusowo). Other Mennonite families were also living here: the deacon Abram A. Dick and family from Lichtfelde; the Andreas Buller family from Waldheim; Flemings and Woelks from Rudnerweide and others. Hans Buller, the son of Andreas Buller, had married H. Harder’s adopted daughter, Njuta. They lived together with their parents and spent several happy years there. In March of 1935, they wrote that they still felt secure, as if protected by a rocky cliff. Materially, they were not too badly off. They had their so-called family evenings (they were not to be called services) where Mennonite families came together and edified themselves through the Word, and with song and prayer. They were always happy when the day off stipulated by the government fell on a Sunday. They were still celebrating birthdays together and a lovely Bible verse was the usual birthday gift.
In August 1935, Njuta wrote to Canada noting that the help from the dear friends of their parents had kept them alive. They were only lacking in lard. Mother was becoming steadily thinner and their earnings only bought bread. During this time, Heinrich Harder found a position as a teacher of German in a ten-class school. He was highly respected in the school and the director of the school often came to visit him. Previously, he had been employed as a night watchman by a
nurseryman. In 1935 they celebrated Christmas with the Abram Dick family, and they even had a Christmas tree. The teacher H. Harder had brought a number of books along. These were Circulated and there was a good deal of reading.
Yet on April 30, 1936, Heinrich Harder and his son-in-law, Hans Buller, were arrested and imprisoned. The charges were probably related to the holding of religious services. They loved to sing the songs of Zion and that had not gone unnoticed.
In June 1937, they were freed but they did not say why. At that time it was dangerous to write or receive letters from abroad.
In one letter from that time, they mentioned Acts 8:3 where we read. “But Paul made havoc of the church and, forcing himself into homes and dragging out men and women, he put them in prison.” They also mention the song, “Master the tempest is raging.”
In March 1939, H. Harder lay seriously ill in a hospital. He suffered from a stomach ailment, and his wife had heart problems. They recovered and during this year they, together with their children, were able to move into their own four-room house. Dear friends lent them the extra money. They were happy together. They planted vegetables and flowers near the house. Then came WWlI and all the German settlers were forcibly deported to Kazakhstan and other places. The journey began on October 2, 1941, and on November 4 they disembarked. On December 23 and 24, the temperature stood at minus 45. Bitter misery and poverty held sway among the
deportees: they were now to establish a new livelihood without any means.
Heinrich Harder and his family came here (Kasakstan?), but they did not survive for long. Both died, one soon after the other, and were buried here.
The son-in-law, Hans Buller, eulogizes his parents-in-law and especially the father. He writes to his kin, the Heinrich Bullers in Ontario.
In the years when father sun had a regular income as a teacher in the diaspora, he did much good among the poor. He possessed an upright heart, was always kind and friendly, and can right be counted among the great of our people. I mention our dear aged ones, once again, and praise the goodness of God that He has taken them unto Himself. My dear father-in-law was a great gift to me. At his table I could absorb and learn what is currently so useful to me. I still have many things to ask now that his mouth is closed forever. There was hardly a thing for which he did not have an answer. He was not a craftsman for he hardly knew how to use a hammer—but he was a teacher by the grace of God. He has fought a good fight.
Is that not a splendid testimony for one of our servants of God who breathed his last so far from home? (Toews 1990, 98–99)
Buller Time would normally not include such an extensive quote, but in this case it seems warranted because GRANDMA has little information about Heinrich Harder. The rest of the post will focus on him and his wife Helene. The information gathered about Johann (Hans) Buller will be the focus of the following post.
We begin with the entry for Helene (or Helena) Harder, Heinrich’s wife. Helena Harder, daughter of Bernhard (Bernard; see the account above) and wife of Heinrich Harder, can be none other than the matriarch in view in the Toews account, as well as the earlier stories related by the Woelks
here and
here. This Helena Harder was the adoptive mother of Anna (Njuta) and thus the mother-in-law of Johann (Hans) Buller.
Since Helena 127118 is the matriarch of these stories, her husband Heinrich 127125 certainly must be the patriarch.
Needless to say, the information provided is rather sparse. For wife and for husband we know only the names of her parents and that Helena and Heinrich were married. Thanks to the accounts of their later years in exile (Woelk and Woelk 1982; Toews 1990), we can now fill in a number of details.
1. We do not know when Helena or Heinrich was born, but we might reasonably guess around 1855, since Helena’s parents were married in 1854, and she was their firstborn child (see GM 37422).
2. We are told by Toews that Helena was the daughter of Bernard Harder of Halbstadt, an original (1804) Molotschna village in the northwest corner of the colony. Toews locates Heinrich in Neu-Halbstadt, a later village that was immediately adjacent to Halbstadt. From this we can deduce the most likely birth villages of the pair.
3. The couple had no biological children but did adopt a girl named Anne (Njuta). Presumably she should be added to GM and listed in their entries as an adopted child. Her husband Johann Buller presumably also needs to be added and/or linked to Anne.
4. Based on the accounts, we can list dates of death for Helena and Heinrich. According to Woelk and Woelk (1982, 33), on 10 April 1942 Anne reported the death of her father sometime during the night before. Her mother followed nine months later, on 7 January 1943 (Woelk and Woelk 1982, 34).
5. We can also specify the place of death for both: “the Kazakh village of Algabass in the region of Akmolinsk” in southeast Kazakhstan (Woelk and Woelk 1982, 32).
6. The final information GM might add for Helena and Heinrich is where one can read more about their lives:
- Woelk and Woelk 1982, 16–18, 29–34
- Toews 1990, 96–99
Heinrich and Helena Harder were not direct members of our family, but we may have been related to them through adoption and marriage. Whether we are related is ultimately of no concern; their stories deserve to be remembered on their own merits, as do the stories of all who suffered for their faith in Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Sources Cited
Toews, Aron A. 1990. Mennonite Martyrs: People Who Suffered for Their Faith 1920–1940. Translated by John B. Toews. Perspectives on Mennonite Life and Thought 6. Fresno, CA: Center for Mennonite Brethren Studies, Mennonite Brethren Biblical Seminary
Woelk, Heinrich, and Gerhard Woelk. 1982.
A Wilderness Journey: Glimpses of the Mennonite Brethren Church in Russia, 1925–1980. Translated by Victor Doerksen. Perspectives on Mennonite Life and Thought 4. Winnipeg: Kindred.
