Interest in one’s roots is sometimes spurred by chance acquaintance.

 In the summer of 2002, my husband and I traveled to Berlin to visit the family of an exchange student we had hosted. My aunt had encouraged us to visit my father’s cousins, who had recently resettled in Bersenbruck, Germany from the Soviet Union. As we drove from Berlin to Frankfurt, we realized that Bersenbruck was enroute. We decided to make contact and found their home with ease.

 A bond developed between us with the first greeting, and as I stepped into the living room, there hung the picture: a photo of my paternal grandparents on the occasion of their fiftieth anniversary in 1963, surrounded by their seven children, as well as grandchildren and a great grandchild, and seated under the trees bordering their church in the village of Arnold on Sumas Flats, Abbotsford. The picture hung in my home as well,  parents and siblings smiling into the camera as forty-one of us celebrated with beloved grandparents.

 We eagerly identified everyone, but a great sadness filled the air. “Your grandfather urged all of us  to flee our farms once Lenin and  communism came to power,” said cousin Maria, “but our parents said they would wait until after the harvest.”

 I had heard the story. In 1926, my grandfather decided to walk away from his farm in Sagradowka, South Russia with his wife and family and took a train to Moscow to obtain passports and passage to Canada. He had begged all of his dozen siblings to do likewise, but they had hesitated. After years of war, revolution, anarchy, disease, famine and uncertainty, the fields were full of ready wheat and the animal herds were once again sleek. They trusted that good times were returning at last, and promised to consider emigration at a later date.

 Grandfather was in one of the last Mennonite groups to leave Russia. The doors closed. Some of his relatives were rounded up in 1930  from their formerly idyllic farms and villages and sent into Stalin’s gulag. In the late 1930s, many men, merely for their Germanic heritage, were accused of sabotage or espionage, seized from their homes at night, and “disappeared.” In 1941, entire villages were banished to the hinterlands of Kazakhstan to labour on communal farms and in coal mines. Many of these families consisted only of women and children. Thousands perished of cold, starvation, and disease.

 For years, my dad’s few remaining cousins had studied the picture, sent to them when Khrushchev lifted the Iron Curtain. They had marveled at the obvious peace and prosperity in the photograph, the smiles, the abundance of children, and the fact that my grandparents could celebrate 50 years of marriage.  They had brought the picture with them to Germany, where it hung in a place of honour above the sofa.