Sleep walkers, ghosts or angels?  The story of Helene Hoeppner Hildebrand.
by Louise Bergen Price

In 1833, during the pioneer days of the Chortitza settlement, Helene Hildebrand disappeared from her house in the middle of the night; her body was found the following day in the Dnieper.  What happened, and how did she get there?

Grandson Cornelius Hildebrand wondered, too.  Over the years, he asked questions of relatives, finally writing down what he remembered.  In 1934, his son, Kornelius J. Hildebrand, submitted this story to Der Bote.  I first  read Helene’s story in a handwritten genealogy book, a blue scribbler left in my Oma Sawatzky’s papers.  Her sister, Mariechen had an identical account, as did their cousin, Jacob Pauls, all painstakingly copied from the Bote article.

 Later, my sister, Helen Bergen, located an English translation of this account at the  Mennonite Heritage Centre in Winnipeg entitled, “When angels walked the earth.”  In this shortened version by Kornelius J. Hildebrand (Helene’s great-grandson) ‘figures in white’ become angels and there is no mention of the inebriated couple gallivanting in the cemetery.  This account ends with:  “Then my grandmother would point out the places: here the boat landed, this is the gate the angels went through, here the Russian girl did see those two angels, over there is the cemetery!”

David Rempel, (a great-great-grandson) takes a more prosaic approach.  In his book  A Mennonite Family in Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union, 1789-1922  (Univ. of Toronto Press, 2002)  Remple suggests that Helene walked in her sleep, and drowned.  “Whatever the cause{of her death}, a litany of superstitious fables soon surrounded her death resembling such Gogolian tales as May Night…” (p. 53)

Can someone sleepwalk for seven kilometres, along the river and a village street?  My own feeling is that she suffered from severe depression.  In any case, I have become fond of my great-great-great-great grandmother Helene Hoeppner Hildebrand.  That she was well-loved is shown by the tear-stained faces of her children, and by the fact that a granddaughter was later named in her memory.  Although Helene was born in 1775, her grandchildren’s lives overlapped with my grandmother’s.  There are only ‘three degrees of separation’ between her life and mine!