Henry’s Paper

One of the family treasures that Carolyn (Peters) Stucky shared is an agricultural workbook that Grandpa’s younger brother Henry created during the 1928–1929 school year, when he was in seventh grade. We will likely devote a number of posts to the information inside that school book, such as a description of Henry’s daily chores, a full accounting of the family’s machinery, and the like. However, that is not our interest at the moment.

Several nights ago when I opened the workbook to explore its contents, I noticed one sheet (pages 3 and 4, to be exact) of a German newspaper tucked inside. The first article that caught my eye was titled “Helsinki, die Stadt am Meere” (Helsinki, the city on the sea). To the left of that article was another: “Dr. Jekyll und Mr. Hyde: Die Geistesverwirrung des englischen Bürgertums” (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: the mental confusion of the English middle class [or bourgeoisie]).

The date on the paper (upper right) was intriguing: 10 February 1944. Why would Henry have kept a paper from that date? I glanced quickly through the rest of the articles but did not see anything that might relate to him personally. Now I was really curious: Why this newspaper on this date?

The search took a turn toward the dark side when I learned that the paper, the Völkischer Beobachter (National Observer [upper left]), was the official newspaper of the Nazi Party between 1920 and 1945. Why would Henry, who was married to a Jewish woman, have kept a Nazi newspaper among his treasured items?

Looking again at the date of the paper, it suddenly became clear: on 10 February 1944, Henry, Bea, and Lois Gunden were still being detained in the Baden-Baden hotel, under the watchful eye of the Gestapo; they were released a little more than a month later, on 15 March.

Although we can never know for certain, it is reasonable to think that Henry received the newspaper from his Nazi captors. The Völkischer Beobachter, whose purpose was to propagandize on behalf of the Nazi Party, would no doubt have been freely shared with the prisoners, as a means of impressing them with accounts of Nazi success and discouraging them with stories about Allied setbacks. Henry, it seems, kept the newspaper as a souvenir of his experience, a tangible reminder that he had survived the year-long ordeal.

If this explanation of the paper’s provenance and significance to Henry is correct, then we have another piece, another object, from our family history connecting us to Henry and, beyond that, to his internment by the Nazis. History, I think, is most meaningful when it resembles that school-time activity called Show and Tell. Likewise, our family history is richest when we do not tell stories in the abstract but rather show the objects that our forebears treasured and recount the story of those items’ significance. So it is that we can now say: this is the newspaper that Henry read during his internment by the Nazi regime, the paper that he carried with him when he was released on 15 March 1944.

Family Photos: Growing Rye 2

I promise that this is the last post showing rye growing, at least for the immediate future. However, since there was a second batch of photos of Sara and Maria’s rye crop, I thought I should post these as well. As before, we have a series of four photos.

The first photograph shows the two sisters cutting the rye with shears. Unless Sara and Maria grew rye on more than one occasion, this and the other photos were probably taken in 1968, the same year as the photos in the first Growing Rye post (here). If so, these photos were taken on a different day, since both are wearing different dresses than they were in the first group.

The perspective in these photos differs from that in the first group of photos: either the sisters are on the opposite end of the rye strip, or the two groups of photos were taken from different sides of the rye. A clue in the first two pictures hints at the answer. Visible in the background, on the other side of the rye, is a block wall. No such wall is in view in any of the photos of the first group. This implies, I think, that these photos were taken from the other side of the rye strip.

The third photograph supports this conclusion, since the trellis that was behind the rye in the first group of photos is now seen to be in front of the rye in this group. In other words, we are looking at the same end of the rye strip in both groups of photos, but the two groups were taken from different sides of the strip.

One final photo shows an important variation. Note that Maria appears to be holding a scythe, not the shears shown in earlier photos. Perhaps this is simply for a photo op, but it does raise a question about the source of the scythe: Was it from our family’s history, or was it merely a tool that they acquired somewhere along the way? Curious minds want to know.

Of course, other questions come to mind (perhaps some reader can provide answers): Where precisely did the sisters live in California? What, if anything, did they do with the rye once they harvested it? How often did they grow rye? Did they grow other crops as a sort of living memory for their early lives on the farm? The more we learn, the more we want to know.

Family Photos: Growing Rye

Included in the box of treasures sent by Carolyn (Peters) Stucky were twenty-one family photographs. The photos range from the 1930s through the 1960s. I will periodically post some of those photos on the blog but am happy to send anyone who wants the scanned files as well.

The four photos below were, according to a comment on the back of one photo, taken on 4 July 1968. It seems pretty clear that all were taken the same day, since Sara and Maria, the two subjects of the photos, are dressed the same throughout. The comment on the back of the third photo below reads: “Harvesting our rye crop in our back yard. Had a lot of fun watching it grow and mature.” 

I confess that I know only the basic details of Sara’s and Maria’s lives. I know that Sara was a nurse and that she and Maria also moved when their parents, Peter P and Margaretha, retired to California. They did return to Henderson, presumably after the death of their father in 1964. Thus it is safe to locate these 1968 photos in the back yard of their house in Henderson. (If someone knows where that house was, please let me know.) When the photos were taken, Sara (born 30 September 1899) was sixty-nine and Maria (born 21 May 1908) was sixty. 

The top photo is of Maria standing in front of unharvested rye; her left arm and hand hold up a bunch of cut stalks. Note the shocks of grain on the right of the photo. The second photo is a comparable shot of Sara; she is holding a set of shears, the top of which is, upon closer inspection, likewise visible in the photo of Maria. The final two photos show the sisters cutting the rye (or at least pretending to). 

If anyone can add further context or information to these photographs, please do so.

Correction and Update

I asked … and received. Thanks to Carolyn for supplying additional details and photographs relevant to the post above about Sara and Maria. First and most important, the photos of the sisters harvesting rye were taken in California, not Henderson, Nebraska. In fact, according to the date on the back of the photo of the moving van to the right, they moved in August 1973, so slightly more than five years after the rye photos were taken.

Their house in Henderson is pictured below. Carolyn reports that it was at 811 S 15th St., two houses north of Dave and Elizabeth Regier (their house is visible on the far left of the photo). Elizabeth was Sara and Maria’s sister. The website Xome.com (here) reports that the house was built in 1969, so it was relatively new when the sisters made it their home.

Henry and Bea’s Colleagues 2

As mentioned at the end of the last post, Lois Gunden was another MCC worker who served alongside Henry and Bea in France. In fact, Lois was the third MCC worker, in addition to Bea and Henry, interned in Baden-Baden’s Brenner Park Hotel. A number of years ago Lois Gunden’s niece wrote several articles recounting Lois’s brave service in France (Gunden 2013a, 2013b). Somewhat later Lois’s great-grandniece Amelia Davenport (2019) developed a website to portray the same.

In these sources we learn that Lois Gunden was twenty-six years old when she, along with Helen S. Penner and Joseph N. Byler (the Lyon-based MCC director we encountered earlier), crossed the Atlantic on the S.S. Excambion. It was October 1941: northern France was occupied by German forces; southern France was ruled by the German-controlled Vichy government.

Lois was bound for the Villa Saint Christophe, a twenty-room house (twelve rooms, according to one source) in Canet-Plage, in southern France. The home, located on the Mediterranean shore, right on the beach, in fact, now served as a home for roughly sixty refugee children and their caretakers. 

When Lois and Helen Penner arrived, the children were primarily Spanish, the displaced victims of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Most of their parents lived in the wretched conditions of the Rivesaltes refugee camp roughly 12 miles from the villa. As Vichy France increased its oppression of Jews to curry favor with their German backers, the Jewish population of the Rivesaltes camp increased, so that by the middle of 1941 Jews made up a full third of the camp population. 

In early 1942, some Spanish refugees held in the Rivesaltes camp were allowed to return home, and some children left the Villa Saint Christophe with their parents. The rooms did not remain empty for long. Their places were quickly filled with new refugee children, who were increasingly Jews originally from Germany, Austria, Poland, and France.

Mary Jean Gunden explains:

By early July 1942, the Vichy government agreed to deliver for deportation up to 50,000 Jews. Those already in camps in unoccupied Vichy France, such as Rivesaltes, were deported to Drancy, a transit camp in Occupied France. From Drancy, they were deported to Auschwitz. Mary Elmes [an Irish colleague] visited Lois at the Villa on Aug. 9, 1942. Lois wrote, “Mary informed me about return of Polish and German Jews to Poland, where death by starvation awaits them.” In the deportations of August, September and early October 1942, if children under the age of 16 were not in the camps with a parent, they often weren’t searched out, particularly if French officials knew they could already meet their quota for the scheduled transports. Lois now understood the importance of moving as many Jewish children out of the camps and into the Villa as possible. (Gunden 2013b)

That last sentence is key: Lois and the other workers sought to move as many Jewish children as possible out of Rivesaltes and similar camps, so those children would not be sent to the death camps in Germany. According to the Yad Vashem database (here), Lois was responsible for saving the lives of at least nine children in the last half of 1942.

In November 1942, she traveled to Lyon to witness the wedding of Henry and Bea. Readers will recall that this was precisely the time that German forces occupied Vichy France. “Unable to return to the Villa, Lois worked with Henry to provide an operating plan so that existing staff could continue to care for the children. The staff moved the children several months later, when German occupiers requisitioned the Villa” (Gunden 2013b). Then, early in 1943, as we learned earlier, Lois, Bea, and Henry were taken into custody and held in the Baden-Baden hotel for a year, before returning to the United States. 

It was because of Lois’s courageous and compassionate actions that Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center honored her in 2013 as one of the Righteous among the Nations. At that time, Lois was only the fifth citizen of the United States to receive this great honor. I encourage everyone interested in Lois’s story to read all the sources below.

As interesting and consequential as Lois’s story is, our interest in her was prompted by the fact that she was a colleague of Henry and Bea’s. Their stories intersected and were intertwined with hers. From her story we can learn additional details about Bea and Henry.

For example, we gain a hint of when Henry began his MCC service in France when Mary Jean Gunden (2013b) writes:

Lois Gunden and Helen Penner began work at Villa St. Christophe on Oct. 22. Joseph Byler went on to Lyon, about 300 miles north, where he relieved Jesse Hoover as the director of the small MCC operation in France. Also working from the Lyon office was Henry Buller, who had already been serving for eight months.

If this information is correct, Henry began his MCC assignment in February 1941 or thereabouts.

The same article confirms the identification of Beata in Joseph Byler’s journals (see here) as Bea when it reports that “Lois had gone to Lyon to witness the wedding of Henry Buller and Beata Rosenthal, an assistant in the MCC Lyon office.” Apparently Bea was known to her colleagues as Beata, which bears a striking similarity to her birth name, Berta. Whether she went by Beata to obscure her Jewish identity or because Beata was her usual nickname is unknown. 

Finally, the 2013b article provides exact dates and details for the trio’s internment and return to the United States a year later:

Lois and the Bullers were escorted by police to Mont-Dore on Jan. 27, 1943, and held in a hotel for several weeks before their transfer to Baden-Baden, Germany, as part of the official North American Diplomatic Group. After complex negotiations for a prisoner exchange, they arrived in New York City on the Gripsholm on March 15, 1944.

Bit by bit we have filled out the biographies of Bea Rosenthal and Henry Buller. Perhaps additional information will come to light as we continue new explorations. Only time will tell.

 Works Cited

Davenport. Amelia. 2019. Lois Gunden: Sheltering Jewish Children in Peril during World War II in Vichy France. Website available here.

Elmes, Mary. Righteous among the Nations entry. Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center. Available online here.

Gunden (Collins), Lois. Righteous among the Nations entry. Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center. Available online here. See also the Women of Valor entry here.

Gunden, Mary Jean. 2013a. “Letters from Lois.” Goshen College News. Available online here.

———. 2013b. “Lois Gunden: A Righteous Gentile.” The Mennonite. 1 September. Available online here.

Henry and Bea’s Colleagues 1

The last few posts have focused on Henry and Bea’s experiences, both together and separately, as MCC relief workers in Europe during the days of and immediately following World War II. We began (here) with a Mennonite Historical Bulletin article about the Mennonite Central Committee’s work in Europe (Shenk 1984), supplemented by accounts from three persons who were interned alongside Henry and Bea in Baden-Baden, Germany (“Guests of the Gestapo” 2013). Following that, we let Bea tell her own story (here) and mined her account for every detail that might shed light on her experience. Finally, two additional posts (here and here) explored photographs and videos that showed Henry and especially Bea performing their MCC service.

It was particularly clear in the last post that Bea and Henry worked alongside some rather remarkable colleagues who also faced obstacles, challenges, threats, and dangers during this time. Peter and Elfrieda Dyck, for example, led thousands of Russian-born Mennonites to new lives in South and North America. Several other MCC workers are also worthy of notice both in their own right and for what light they can shed on Henry and Bea’s experiences.

We encountered one such colleague in the first post linked above: Joseph N. Byler, who worked with Henry, Bea, and other relief workers in Lyon, France. We learn from yet another Mennonite Historical Bulletin article that Byler was director of the MCC’s French operations from November 1941 through November 1942 (Homan 2010; my brother Dan corresponded with Homan about Henry and Bea before Homan passed away). 

Although the entire article is well worth reading, one page is of particular interest to our family, since there Homan offers additional details about Henry and Bea. He writes, for example, that, after Byler left in November 1942, “Henry Buller of Mountain Lake, Minn., assumed director responsibilities” (Homan 2010, 7). This is the first I have heard that Henry functioned as the director of MCC’s French operations, but that is not the most surprising tidbit. Was Henry, in fact, living in Mountain Lake prior to his MCC service? I do know that some of Peter D Buller’s children (thus uncles and aunts to Henry) lived in that Mennonite community, but I did not know (if Homan’s information is correct) that Henry did. Homan goes on to report:

Buller quickly learned the French language and came to appreciate the French and their culture. He was asked in 1942 to head the AFSC office in Montauban, one of its most important posts, where they could use his talents to the “fullest extent.” Although tempted, Buller declined the offer. (Homan 2010, 7; in n. 13 Homan states that most of his information about Henry came from Bea)

Homan then turns to Bea, whom he identifies as “an unofficial MCC worker [who] joined the office in late 1941”:

Beatrice R. Rosenthal, a 21-year-old German Jewish refugee, was hired as secretary and interpreter. Her father, Richard, had been a respectable lawyer in Duisburg, Germany. The family, consisting of her parents, a grandmother and brothers Gerd and Kurt, fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and first settled in Antwerp, Belgium. Kurt left for the United States in 1936, and the rest of the family planned to follow. When Belgium was overrun by Germany in May 1940, the Rosenthals moved to Lyon in Vichy France, where Beatrice learned about Quaker and MCC relief. The MCC office hired her in December 1941 because of her language skills. But she brought more to the office, at least as far as Buller was concerned, as the two of them proceeded to start a romantic relationship. On November 11, 1942, the day on which Germany occupied Vichy France, Henry Buller and Beatrice Rosenthal were married at the Lyon City Hall, which was already occupied by German soldiers. [Samuel] Ybargoyen and MCC worker Lois Gunden were witnesses. (Homan 2010, 7)

Additional details we learn here are that Bea’s grandmother accompanied the family on their flight from Nazi Germany, that the family went to Antwerp (earlier we knew only that they had gone to Belgium), and that Henry and Bea were married in the Lyon City Hall in the presence of two named witnesses. What is most interesting about this page of the Homan article, however, is its copy of two leaves from Joseph Byler’s diary.

The handwriting is clear enough that we can make out just about everything written. The diary is for 1–4 September 1942, a Tuesday through a Friday. All the entries bear the label “Lyon,” which is where Byler served as director at that time.

His entry for Tuesday gives a good sense of the diary:

This was certainly a busy day. Beata and I were busy all day trying to help people. Many of the Jews are in ????? and therefore in need. We purchased a pair of sandals for a six year-old child. There are 120 Jewish children whose parents were sent to Germany. We are trying to help find homes for some of them.

     In the evening Miss Barlet called about an ill child whose un-married mother needs help. I agreed to help her, Miss Barlet, to have the child transferred to another place if arrangements can be made.

     During the last night I heard for the first time the anti-aircraft guns in action. They really poured it on for a while. Miss Barlet said she thought it was the celebrations of the Fourth of July.

Working alongside Byler are two women: a Miss Barlet (otherwise unknown to me) and Beata, who is none other than Bea Rosenthal. That Beata is Bea will be demonstrated in a subsequent post; suffice it to say for the moment that the identification is certain.

This is not Byler’s only mention of Beata. In fact, they must have worked closely together, for she makes an appearance every day.

Wednesday: I met Beata at the ??? where I applied for my French visa de sortie [exit visa] for three months. … After we reached the office Beata hurried to several committees about these Jewish children whose parents were sent to Germany.

     In the after-noon we again had many callers, but managed to get a number of letters written in addition.

Thursday: I was up at 7:00 a.m. (too late to have breakfast) and met Beata at Rue Republic where we tried to awake Braun but failed. … At about 8:30 we left in the city truck for Grenoble where we looked at a very large chateau for a colony. We had an excellent dinner there and inspected the place. It is very large with splendid equipment. The garden is very much dried up. There is a little fruit. At 4:30 we had a lunch of milk, bread, peaches and chocolate after which we left for Lyon, arriving at about 7:45—very tired. Beata and I had dinner at the cave.

Friday: We had quite a few callers at the office. Two mothers (Jewish) came and begged us to try and take their children to Switzerland. One mother cried—it was very sad—but we are unable to do it. In the p.m. Beata purchased quite a lot of clothing for the colony.

When Bea was twelve years old, she and her family had fled Nazi Germany to save their lives; now Bea worked alongside MCC colleagues such as Joseph Byler to preserve the lives of other Jewish children whose parents were not so fortunate. (For additional information on the Byler papers, including his full diary, see here.)

Of course, Bea and Henry were themselves taken into custody; the Homan article recounts their ordeal:

In January 1943, the Germans instructed all Americans to go to the ski resort Mont Dore in south-central France. From there they went to Baden-Baden, a German health resort, where they arrived on February 16. The group of 165 included MCC workers Lois Gunden and Henry and Bea Buller and five Quakers, plus diplomats, journalists, spouses and children. They were housed in the large and comfortable Brenner Park Hotel where they were served by the hotel staff but guarded by the Gestapo. 

     Negotiations between Germany and the United States for an exchange of interned nationals began early in 1943 and lasted until February 1944. In the meantime, the internees had to entertain and amuse themselves and each other. … The internees were well fed and, under guard, allowed to go outside for walks in the Black Forest and engage in sports. They organized parties, held worship services and established what they called Badheim University, which offered a great number of courses and lectures. Its organizers billed the ersatz school as “education of the ignorant, by the ignorant, and for the ignorant.” 

     At first Buller felt that internment was a “great university of practicing patience and tolerance.” But boredom eventually set in. … After lengthy negotiations, Germany and the U.S. State Department were able to reach an agreement, exchanging 687 German nationals for 271 Americans held in Baden-Baden and Godesberg. The Baden-­Baden internees left on February 19, 1944, and arrived in New York on March 15. After France’s liberation, MCC, including the Bullers, returned to France to provide relief and care for children in five homes. One of those homes…, in Château de Vair in Anetz sur Loire, was run by Bea’s parents, Richard and Marie Rosenthal. (Homan 2010, 7)

Homan’s account offers fascinating details. We learn, for example, that the MCC workers were first taken to Mont Dore, some 95 miles west of Lyon. After that, they were interned in the Brenner Park Hotel (pictured at the right) in Baden-Baden, Germany. They arrived at the hotel on 16 February 1943 and left one year and three days later, on 19 February 1944 (perhaps Bea’s memory of one year and six days included the Mont Dore time?).

The most fascinating new information we find is that Bea’s parents managed one of the MCC’s homes for children. This information comes, Homan reports (2010, 14 n. 43), from Gerard Rosenthal, Bea’s younger brother who apparently still lives in the Denver area. Their home was in the Château de Vair in Anetz sur Loire, an impressive seventeenth-century castle complete with a moat (see below).

The Homan Mennonite Historical Bulletin article that formed the basis for this post discussed a number of MCC workers in Europe, including Joseph Byler and Bea and Henry Buller. Homan also devotes time to Lois Gunden, who was interned alongside Henry and Bea in the Baden-Baden hotel. Gunden’s story is particularly fascinating and will be told in the following post.

Works Cited

“Guests of the Gestapo.” 2013. 9 July post on the website of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. Available online here.

Homan, Gerlof. 2010. “Friends and Enemies: The World War II Origins of MCC Work in France.” Mennonite Historical Review 71.2:7–14. Available online here.

Shenk, Rachel. 1984. “Mennonite Central Committee in Europe, 1940–70.” Mennonite Historical Bulletin 45.2:1–9. Available online here.

From Bremerhaven to Freedom

The previous post included a photo of Bea Buller and other MCC workers standing in front of a ship at Bremerhaven, Germany (see here). The Mennonite Archival Information Database (MAID) caption to the photo identified most of the people in the photo, including Peter and Elfrieda Dyck, who are standing behind the main group on the ship’s gangplank.

The earlier post mentioned that Mennonite refugees were transported to South America on four separate occasions, each time setting out from the port of Bremerhaven, Germany. The dates on which the ships departed were 1 February 1947, 25 February 1948, 16 May 1948, and 7 October 1948, each time under the leadership of Peter and/or Elfrieda Dyck, the couple standing on the gangplank.

Thanks to the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) YouTube channel, the Dycks’ story is available for all to hear and, even more important, to see. Peter and Elfrieda Dyck created a series of three videos that tell and show in full the story of the rescue of thousands of Russian-born Mennonites from the clutches of Stalin’s Soviet Union and their relocation to South America. 

The first video, titled “Berlin Exodus” (see here) is an hour-long presentation that Peter Dyck made in a Mennonite church near Schickley, Nebraska, a village 14 miles south of Grafton—so not terribly far from our family’s home. In this service Dyck presents the full story of the rescue of over a thousand Mennonites who found themselves trapped in the American sector of Berlin, surrounded by Soviet-controlled East Germany.

The second video, “Gott Kann” (here), covers much of the same ground but, after a brief introduction by Peter and Elfrieda, offers an amazing film record of the story, beginning with the months spent in Berlin, the arrival of the train at Bremerhaven, the loading and departure of the Volendam, the voyage, and the arrival of the refugees in their new land and their new homes. 

To be clear, this is actual film of the events as they happened, not a cinematic re-creation of them. I note that because the film shows the same group of people included in the photograph above. The significant scene begins at the 11:30 mark of the linked video, with refugees walking up the same gangplank that appears in the background of the photo. If you stop the video at 11:41 (or thereabouts), you will see that, in addition to the refugees boarding the ship, a group of individuals remains on the dock, clearly with no intention of joining the voyage.

This group is or at least includes, I believe, the individuals included in the MAID photo. Upon closer inspection, one might even suggest that Bea is the woman standing to the far left: the lighter color of her winter coat, the lighter-colored scarf, and the dark boots all match what we see in the photo. Of course, we really cannot know with certainty if that is Bea or even if she appears in this frame.

A little farther along, from 11:58 to 12:09, we see a group waving goodbye as the ship sails off.

In this case we can draw some certain connections between the MAID photograph and the film. Note first that there are three men—two wearing hats and one sans hat—in both shots. In addition, Peter Dyck identifies one of the hat-wearing men as C. F. Klassen, who is also named in the photo. One difference between the two is obvious: the MAID photo includes six women; the film shows seven. One wonders if the “extra” woman in the film is the person who took the photograph; we cannot know. Neither can we tell (at least I cannot) if or where Bea appears in the film.

One thing we can conclude with reasonable certainty is that the MAID photograph was taken on 1 February 1947, at the first transport of the Mennonite refugees on the Volendam. Earlier we dated the photo based on Henry and Bea’s personal chronology (they were not in Europe in 1948, when all the other voyages set out); now we have visual confirmation that the group pictured in the MAID photo is the same as that shown in the film taken in 1947. The photo’s date is certain.

The first two videos will be of the greatest interest to readers of this blog, but the third video, titled “New Beginnings” (here) is also well worth viewing. This final film offers footage taken before, during, and after the three voyages made in 1948. 

Before we leave this topic, there is one more photograph to share, courtesy of the MCC Media Space (see here).

Here an even larger group on shore bids farewell to the Volendam and its grateful passengers. Whether Bea is in this photograph is unknown. Perhaps someone with sharper eyes and greater patience than I have would like to venture a guess.

 

If you would like to learn even more about Peter and Elfrieda Dyck and their work resettling Mennonite refugees, you can read their Up from the Rubble (Dyck and Dyck 1991). The book is available online (here), if you are willing to register for a free Archive.org account.

Works Consulted

Bos, C. A. W. 1959. “Volendam.” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Available online here.

Dyck, Peter, and Elfrieda Dyck. 1991. Up from the Rubble. Scottdale, PA: Herald. Available online here.

Dyck, Peter J. and Richard D. Thiessen. 2022 “Refugees.” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Available online here.

Bea and Henry in Europe

While searching online to learn more about Beatrice (but see the * below) Rosenthal Buller (see here), I happened upon several photographs that include Bea and one that includes Bea and Henry. All three photos are in the Mennonite Archival Information Database (MAID). 

The first photo includes a number of MCC workers in France after World War II (1945–1947).

MAID (see here) identifies the individuals as follows: Back: (L–R): Mary Ellen Shoup, Helen Goering, Mary Miller, Elizabeth Brauer, Beatrice Buller, Evelyn Egli, Beulah Roth Fretz, Charlotte Regier, Lucinda Martin, Madeline Garber, Mary Hostetler, Elsie Bechtel, Mary Byler, John Fretz; Front: B. F. Hartzler, Cliff Lavers, Henry Buller, George Neufeld, Charles Cocanower, Atlee Beechy

Bea stands immediately behind Henry, perhaps arranged that way because they were married (although the other married couple in the photo, Beulah and John Fretz, are not standing together). MAID dates this photo to 1946, which fits our reconstruction of Bea and Henry’s history:

• Bea and Henry released from German internment: February 1944
• Henry returned to his MCC work in Europe: shortly after February 1944
• Bea worked in a U.S. MCC office: March 1944–August/September 1945
• Bea returned to MCC work alongside Henry in Europe: September 1945
• Bea and Henry return to the U.S.: sometime in 1947

A second picture, dated tentatively to 1947 (see here), shows Bea conversing within a group of people, probably other MCC workers, at some sort of social gathering. Bea is the woman on the far left; Henry is not pictured.

The third picture is the most significant and interesting, from a historical perspective.

The MAID description (here) reads:

This is a photo of a group of [MCC?] aid workers posing for a photo at the loading of the ship at the port Bremerhaven, leaving for South America. (Left to right): far back is Peter Dyck, Elfrieda Dyck. Main group: Orlo Goering (Kansas), Beatrice Buller, ?, Mary Hostetler, C. F. Klassen, Helen Goering, Jessie Brown (Kansas), Elizabeth Brauer, George Neufeld.

MAID dates this photo to 1947 but adds a question mark to signal some uncertainty. According to GAMEO, during the postwar years,

four transports left Bremerhaven, Germany, for South America with a total of 5,616 persons as follows: 1 February 1947 on the Volendam, 2,303; 25 February 1948 on the Heinzelman, 860; 16 May 1948 on the Charlton Monarch, 758; 7 October 1948 on the Volendam, 1,695. (Dyck and Thiessen 2022)

Based upon our chronology of Henry and Bea, we can state definitively that the picture was taken at the first transport of Mennonite refugees. According to Henry’s obituary in the Mennonite Weekly Review (see here), Henry and Bea moved back to the U.S., to Newton, Kansas, in 1947, which means that the photo including Bea must have been taken on 1 February 1947.  

The story behind the photo deserves its own post, which will follow in the near future. Suffice it to say for the moment that Bea was present at, and likely a part of, the rescue of over two thousand Russian-born refugees in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The Jewish girl who herself was a refugee grew into a woman who helped Mennonite refugees escape the terror of Stalin’s Soviet Union.

* Further evidence that Bea’s birth name was Berta (or Bertha) is found in the family tree we consulted earlier (see here). According to this genealogy (I remind readers that the genealogies found online are not always accurate), Bea’s father, Richard Alexander Rosenthal, married Marie Bertha Meumark. This offers a strong hint that Bea was given her mother’s middle name—a practice that was more common in days past than it is today—and thus was named Berta or Bertha at her birth. She adopted Beatrice as her name, one can safely assume, when she and the other members of her family adopted new identities to escape detection by the German authorities who had seized control of France.

Work Cited

Dyck, Peter J. and Richard D. Thiessen. 2022 “Refugees.” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Available online here.

Henry’s Memories

Since the last post focused on Bea’s story, it seems appropriate to follow up with her husband Henry. The following comments (another treasure from Carolyn) were made by Henry at the 1990 family reunion. I understand that Henry’s blunt honesty ruffled a few feathers at the time. I trust that, another three decades removed from the reunion, we can all enjoy getting to know our ancestors a little better, warts and all. (The following has been gently copyedited to improve its readability.)

In 1986 I came to this community to attend the fiftieth anniversary of my graduation from Lushton high school, and Dave and Maxine (Regier) took me to the airport. On the way, Dave asked if I would give a talk about the Peter Buller family. Well, in 1986, later in that year when you had your reunion, my wife had an operation, and I opted out. In 1988 would be the next logical time, but we had already made plans to travel to Spain and Portugal, France, Belgium, and Germany, so that didn’t work. Well last year, later in September or October, Sarah had her ninetieth birthday, and we were here and at a meeting (I think it was at Fred’s) where they gathered some of the brothers and sisters. Dave asked me to say something interesting about the Peter P. Buller farm—now that’s the rub. Ever since he said that, I’ve been thinking how in the world can I, like Alpheus in the Middle Ages, turn lead into gold or a sow’s ear into a silk purse, because I really don’t know if I have anything interesting to say about the Peter P. Buller farm. Now before I go on, I’ll give you a little bit of an outline of what I will talk about.

First I want to talk about the time frame, then [the] early years, work habits, and management of Peter P. Buller—my father—then I have a little item—“I have a dream”—and then the last thing is Dad’s greatest asset.

So, now the time frame: if Dad were with us today, which is somewhat improbable but not impossible, he would be 121 years old. Now I say that is improbable but not impossible because in February on the Today show I heard Willard Scott wish a man in Georgia happy birthday who turned 120. So 121 is not impossible. Mother would be 120 years old on the first of October this year because she was born October 1, 1870—or to put another little time frame on this, if they were living, they would have celebrated their one hundredth wedding anniversary on February 27, 1990, because they were married exactly one hundred years before. So that gives you an idea of the time I have to cover, but I’m not going to cover it all.

Now the first years after the wedding, I presume Dad came to live on the farm with Mother, on the Cornelius Epp farm, her father. And what we now take for granted is that when a young couple gets married … they go on a honeymoon. I think their honeymoon was in the corn field or the hay mow or wherever they might want to find themselves on the farm.

I’m not even sure whether Dad was farming—he was working on the farm, but in any case an extra hand on the farm was very welcome because farming was much more labor intensive than what it is now. For plowing, they had a walking plow, and for much of their mowing they had a scythe, and they made do with that. Grandpa Epp, as far as I can establish, was a self-sufficient farmer; in crops, for example, he had wheat, which he took to the mill for flour. He had rye, which was also taken to the mill for flour to make rye bread. Oats were for the horses, corn for the hogs and chickens. He had horses, cows, sheep, and hogs. Now sheep were not that common—I don’t think in this community—but I guess my Grandfather Epp thought he would have the wool and the sheep skin to use for clothing and so on.… And in the fowl category, they had chickens, geese, and ducks—chickens for the eggs and geese and ducks for the down because they had to have something to put in the pillows. Much of this work was very primitive in terms of machinery and so on; it just didn’t exist.

I don’t know exactly—I’ve already said—between 1890, when Father married Mother and came to the farm, until 1894, what kind of arrangement they had. I assume perhaps that Grandfather Epp was still farming, that is, he was managing the farm with his son-in-law Peter P. Buller as an extra hand, but I have this as 1890–1894 because in 1894 Grandfather Epp died, and that just left Grandma Epp, who died two years later. I am sure that from 1896 Mom and Dad were on their own on the farm, because Mother inherited a portion of the farm, and I suppose they made arrangements with some of the other brothers that she had and a sister about who had what. Actually, one of her brothers, Klaus, I think, he had gone to Minnesota earlier, and he met someone there, a lady, and they were married in 1890 also, and after their wedding they moved to North Dakota and then into Canada about 1895, and then Klaus’s brothers Peter and Chris followed him in 1902 and 1907. Well, that’s all I have to say about the early years because once Grandpa and Grandma Epp passed away, I am sure Dad and Mom were very well established on the farm.

Now the work habits and management of my father. One of the things Father tried to impress us with—that is, the boys and girls who were still at home—is that if something is worth doing, it is worth doing well. For example, when he made something where a 2 x 4 board would have been sufficient, he would insist on a 2 x 6. Now you and I know that extra weight is not always appropriate. But if he wanted to build a building, he wanted it to last, and in other things he wanted it to perform well. For example, in plowing of a field Dad would usually go a day ahead and pace off the area and put up flags where the plowing was to take place. They were always supposed to be in straight lines and so that the next year he would pace it off again where the furrow had been so that the hump on the first round trip the plow would make, it would throw the dirt both in the same row, then it would be eliminated. Of course, that little hump was pretty well gone with the disking and harrowing that took place after the plowing, and he wanted his furrows to be in straight lines if the field was straight, and most of the fields were straight.

Fencing: if we did any fencing, Dad would insist that, when we put in a new post, we always lined it up with the other poles, and the poles had to stand straight up, not crooked. Of course, sometimes we used mulberry posts, and they were not always so straight, but we had to “rig” them around where they would be straight.

In yard care, the lawn and vegetable garden didn’t really interest Dad at all. Well, he wanted Mom to have a vegetable garden for the beans and all the other vegetables she might raise, but he didn’t really care much about it.

There was another habit that Dad had that I didn’t appreciate so much at the time, but I’ve since learned it had value: when he walked around the place between the buildings and he saw a nail or piece of glass, he would pick it up and drop it at the corner of some building. He had three or four different places where he gathered over a period of months. Of course, this glass was picked up because the tires at that time couldn’t stand very much in the way of sharp edges, and then after he had accumulated quite a bit, he would see to it that I got a pail or some box, and then I would have to go around and pick that stuff up. I took it to the ditch or a washout ditch, and we would have to dump it there because he didn’t want it on the farm. Now I didn’t think much about it, but one of the neighbor boys came over one time, and he said your yard is so clean, and he was referring to the fact that those nails and pieces of glass had been taken care of. Another thing I remember about Dad’s working habits was that everyday after breakfast he would have a little session with us and he would say, “Now Chris, you do so and so, and Henry you ask Mother what needs to be done in the garden,” and I think this is one of the reasons farming was not very interesting for me. I was always left with cleaning the chicken house and other detestable errands. I couldn’t go out to do the plowing or harrowing—I did do a little but not very much. I was in the spot of “being nice to the baby.”

Now in terms of the harvest, Dad was mostly a wheat farmer. He was never forced to sell when the grain was harvested. Now I know that sometimes when the grain is harvested it is at the highest price, but not always, and if Dad thought the grain was priced too low, then he would store it and take it to the elevator later on. I remember during the Depression when corn was 8¢ a bushel and wheat was 12¢ a bushel my Dad didn’t sell any grain for at least two maybe three years. Now this also occurred about the time of the drought, and we didn’t have too much to store some of those years, but we had corn stacked up in those wooden frames that we built like a silo. Now then some of this corn that we picked when it was in the 8¢ range we sold when it was in the 60¢ range, and the wheat that he would have sold for 12¢ a bushel when we harvested, we finally sold for $1.15 a bushel, and I might say that was in 1933 when he did all that selling, and he was able to buy a straight-8 Pontiac that was the newest car in the community at that time. My brother Pete also got a new car; it was a Chevy of some sort.

As far as I was able to tell, here I might say Dad never divulged any business aspects of the farm and that also probably because, when I was out on the farm during the later years, I plowed up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down—it wasn’t very interesting to me, and I always wondered what good do we get out of this. I never knew if we would get $10 an acre profit or $50 or $100, because Dad never said anything about his business. About the same time Dad felt there was only one occupation that was good enough for us: farming. And as far as I knew Dad always had good credit at the bank, so if he needed money, he could go and get it, and that was not always the case.

Now he did lose a few deposits here in Henderson—there was a Henderson State Bank at one time and there was another state bank; I think it was the Kroeker State Bank—and he lost two deposits, but after a couple of years they paid 97½¢ on the dollar and the other 90¢ on the dollar, but in the meantime he didn’t have that money and had to get along without it.

Now I have a dream: Sometimes in their farming, not me but my sisters and brothers were indebted to the parents, basically to Father. There is an old adage that says if you want to make a friend an enemy, loan him or her some money, and that was true also with Dad’s plan. That was one of the flaws I saw in Dad’s plan, because when Chris or Ben or whoever was indebted to Father, he assumed the right to do a little managing, and that was not always very pleasant. I thought it would have been much smarter if Dad had said, I will give you 40 acres, and you go to the bank and borrow enough money to pay for the other 40 acres, and then they would have owed the money to the bank and not Father. I think that would have improved family relations considerably, because whoever is your creditor assumes the right to mess in your affairs when things don’t go right. Now only Ann and I never played that game. In 1944 when I was in Europe doing relief work, Mother convinced Dad to give Ann and me 40 acres without the condition of buying 40. Now all the others bought 40 and, so to speak, bought 80 for the price of 40 and did farming. At least some of the time they did farming. I don’t think Pete, for example, farmed very long; he went to Omaha and then did other work. But Mother was afraid that they were getting along in years that something might happen and then we would be out on a limb; well, they had offered me this proposition of 80 for the price of 40, but I said I’m not interested because I didn’t want to farm at that time. Well, we were given 40 acres each on the northern quarter just east of Maria’s 80 and that’s just north of the home place.

Now I’m coming to the last topic, Dad’s greatest asset: Mom. First of all, Mom was the ticket to the farm because Grandpa Epp had made the decision that his youngest child would stay on the farm and they would live with the young couple, and so Mom, being the youngest living child, when she married Dad came to live with her, and so he got a farm out of it—not only a wife but also a farm. Mom was frugal to the point of pain. She mended and prepared hand-me-downs by the bucket full, and she always said when we went to school in overalls, for example, that were patched, she said that as long as they were clean, they were respectable. Now we as kids couldn’t quite understand that: if the clothing is patched, it is patched, and when other kids are coming to school without patched clothing, we felt a little bit insulted.

Business decisions: they were strictly for Father. Mother always said Father knows what needs to be done and how to do it. She had complete faith in her husband’s ability to take care of her. As far as activities in the community that we would call political at the present time, she was apolitical. She was not interested and didn’t ever want to vote. She said she didn’t know anything about it, so she stayed home. As far as literacy was concerned, she was very literate in German. When they finally moved in 1936, her competency in English was very limited because she had never read anything that was in English, or at least very little. Well in 1936, after having a vacation in Hawaii with Maria and Sarah, they moved to southern California, where there was a gentleman—Pete Janzen—who Dad had helped to come from Russia in the early 1920s. He convinced Dad that southern California was the place to retire, and they came home and talked about buying some orange groves and sitting under the trees, picking them and eating them. Well, they had the sale of the farm in the summer of 1936, and we took off.

Now this retirement, as far as Mom was concerned, was not all that exciting because Mother would have liked to stay on the farm with some of her children (mostly she thought of me). I had already rejected the idea of farming with Dad. Anyway, she wanted to stay by her children and grandchildren, but Dad wanted to leave. Now here’s the question: why did Dad want to leave? As far as I know, Dad had burned the bridges to Henderson because Dad never attended the church regularly. I suppose they were members of the Bethesda Church, and Mom would go quite regularly with the kids—especially when the kids were [old] enough to go and take a look at their girlfriend or boyfriend in church, but Dad went only when there was a special service such as a funeral, or I remember Dad went one time when there was a special report on some missionaries in India. From time to time we went to the MB church when they had a special program, but Dad was torn away from the Bethesda Church. Why? Well, I had a talk with my brother Pete one time when he came to Beaumont, and Pete told me about two incidents that broke the connections with the Bethesda people. One had to do with the moving of the church from the country to the town. Dad was in the group that wanted to keep it in the country, and when there is some kind of change in an organization like a church, you get the pros and the cons, and things get divided. Dad was on the wrong side, and he did not like the people that were trying to get the church to come to Henderson; some of those were business people and other members who wanted to move the church. Now the other incident had to do with the behavior of my dad. Supposedly, when he was a young buck he took a load of grain to the elevator—either to Henderson or Lushton—probably Lushton because Henderson was a little farther away, and apparently when he got off the wagon so the wagon could be weighed, one horse kept its foot on the scale, and that’s a no-no because then you get a little more weight on the wagon. And somebody—a member of the church—had seen that, and this person went to the elders to say how nasty my father had been, and of course the elders called him in. (I don’t know what they would have done.) Dad was insulted, and he thought it must have just been jealousy that made that person say that, and he never went to the elders, and so he shunned himself from the church activities. These two incidents, the incident of moving the church to Henderson and this weighing incident, were the trouble. The only person I have heard this from is my brother Pete; of course, Pete was EMB (Evangelical Mennonite Brethren), and I think sometimes it was easier for the Bethesda people to say nasty things about the EMB or the EMBs to say nasty things about the Bethesda people. I have never heard the story in my lifetime. I tried to confirm this story with Marie and Sarah, but they didn’t know or maybe they knew but didn’t want to say. I’ll leave that for you to discover.

We really didn’t get any encouragement except through Mom to go to church, and Dad didn’t care for us to go to the Bethesda Church. In California, in many ways, Mom’s adaptation to this new life was better than Dad’s because Mom learned English. She even learned to memorize English poems and English verses. She attended church there very faithfully, as did my dad. Dad shifted his membership to the Upland Mennonite Church, and how he was able to get the letter of transfer from the Bethesda Church I don’t know. As far as I know, he never paid his dues, which the ministers talked about this morning in the Bethesda Church. He never paid his fees on his 80 acres, which multiplied into much more than 80 acres, so he was really not in good standing, but that’s not something I worry about. He got his transfer.

Well, Mom learned to do a lot of things. She wove baskets out of straw, and she saw to it that somebody in the family, either Chris or Pete or the Quirings or whoever was coming, would bring some good clean straw, usually to weave baskets or mats. I still have a few baskets at home that Mom made that way. She made friends, and Dad did, too, but I think that Dad basically grieved in a sense for the farm more than Mom did after Mom got adapted to life in California.

We will return to Henry and Bea over the coming weeks, drawing both from the box of family treasures that Carolyn sent and from new resources discovered on the internet.