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.