The Basket-Maker: Growing up as a Refugee
an excerpt from Stories in Sepia by Connie Braun

 My father delivers an old brown, accordion-style folder to me; in it are some of his personal papers, including an identity card dated November 23, 1946.  This little passbook’s cardboard cover is faded brown, timeworn, smooth as cloth, and split in two at the fold. Across the front, in German, English, French, and Russian it says, Identity Card for Foreigners and Stateless Persons.  No longer stapled to the seam, the pages inside are yellow, tinged brown at their uneven edges and a round purple rubber stamp mark declares, “Murau.” On the lines by each specific heading, my father is described as 164 cm. in height, oval face, gray eyes, blonde hair, 15 years old. His citizenship is “unclassified” and his profession is “agricultural labourer.” The identity photo shows him with clear skin; but there is a faint shadow of peach fuzz on his upper lip, his eyebrows are thick dark lines and his face has taken on more angular proportions. So this is what the young Korbmacher (basket-maker) looks like.

 To supplement the food provisions from the ration cards, Peter helps old Mr. Goertz, another Mennonite refugee, a basket-maker by trade.  Mr. Goertz makes all of the baskets, while Peter and Mrs. Goertz take them to market or the surrounding farms to sell or trade, one basket for a pound of butter, a pound of flour and some Speck (smoked bacon).

 Maria, too, is enterprising. A skillful seamstress, she sews and mends for neighbouring farmwives. She also crafts slippers that she sends along with Peter to trade. He takes the baskets and slippers, and wanders up the mountainside on weekends. Peter has even more items for sale or to trade. He sells cigarettes from British Care packages, piece by piece. This is black marketeering, so he hides the cigarettes between his baskets, pretending he has only legitimate items for sale when the police come by.

 Now an entrepreneur, Peter asks Mr. Goertz to teach him how to make baskets.  From the banks of the Mur River, Peter cuts only the straightest young willow shoots. When he gathers these in spring, the bark peels off easily, exposing white tendons of wood beneath. In the autumn, the bark is tougher, so Peter loosens it by boiling the branches in a large pot. Peeled willow makes lovely white baskets. Sometimes he leaves the bark on and weaves these branches into dark, sturdy work-baskets.

 In Austria, people carry everything in baskets, so Peter fashions various types in different shapes and sizes; peeled ones for wash-worn laundry or marketing, small ones to carry lunch. Sometimes he dyes the willow different colours. To hold potatoes or crisp apples at harvest time, or a Holzkorb (basket to hold wood), the baskets are unpeeled, smaller, round, like a pail with a handle. The largest baskets are used to carry hay.

 The tender willows are pliable before they are dried, so Peter can bend them without breaking them. His fingers are stained green as spring manure. He decides first whether the basket will be round or oblong at the base; and to begin, he fashions a “pad” – three sticks, split, all the halves set side-by-side. Then three more sticks, split, and set side-by-side, spaced apart and laid over-top. He uses willow reed, separated into strands, to bind these sticks together. And taking more strips of willow, or “ribs” he calls them, he lays them out, like sun rays, radiating from the pad at the centre. He bends the ribs upward to create the basket’s frame, keeping this in place by tying twine around the top. Now he’s ready to weave the supple willow through this framework.

 He first weaves to a height of three or four inches. Then he takes a small wedge of wood and a light mallet, and taps the reeds down to compress them. He weaves to a height of three more inches, taps down. By now he can untie the twine and weave tightly for a smaller basket, or loosely for a larger one. When the height, or depth, is right, he selects two strong strips, cuts them into appropriate lengths and loops them through the rim. Winding these strands, smooth as rope, he threads them back into the rim for the handle; one at each end.
 The farmers seldom travel the distance to town from their farms, and their wives hardly ever make the round trip down to Ranten or Katsch, and never to Murau. The robust women are always interested in the baskets Peter brings, and Maria’s slippers are practical for the cold plank floors.

 Peter can mimic the lilting Austrian dialect, but he is not from these mountains and when the locals enquire, he tells them about Russia and about the war, well-told tales that cause even the men to pause from their chores and lean against the fencepost to listen. By the time he is finished, they buy or trade, and seal their transaction with a slice of black bread topped with smoked bacon and a swallow of home-made schnapps that snatches Peter’s breath away. Once a month he returns to the same farms and when the Bauerinnen (farmwives) see him trudge the path to their yard with his stack of baskets they greet him cheerily, “Jetzt kommt der Korbmacher!” (Here comes the basket-maker)

 I still have one of my father’s baskets made of unpeeled strands of willow. It is now sixty years old, darkened with age, though still sturdy. He made this one when he arrived in Canada, one of the last because he found other ways to make a living. Yet this basket brings to mind the boy with silver-blue eyes like sunshine behind the morning alpine mist, who walked the ten kilometre circumference around Murau with his stack of baskets.
 
Katsch, Obersteiermark

 Among the yellowed papers in the folder, I come across a statement, dated January 11, 1948, declaring that the Family Letkemann has lived at Triebendorf 14 since February 21, 1946. They called it Der Aibel. The four-plex house was located on a smaller cattle estate owned by Fuerst Von Schwarzenburg. With his son and godson, the Duke lived in Schloss Obermurau, the Schwarzenburg Castle in Murau, during the spring and summer months, otherwise they lived in South Africa. They also owned a weekend cottage and another estate between this one and Murau. That other estate used machinery, but at Aibel, all the labour was done by hand.

  Jakob and Maria occupy one side of the main floor, while other estate workers live across the hall. The estate manager, Herr Leipold, lives upstairs with his children Herbert and Gretel. Herr Leipold’s niece, Mitzi, lives with them, too. He molests her.  The foreman, Zep, lives with his daughter on the main floor. She smokes, dates British soldiers, and leaves her clogs on the planks in the foyer. She thinks it’s cute to run and jump into them, but see what happens when Peter nails her clogs to the floor.

 Peter works in the fields like a man, but his wages equate to what the women receive – twenty-seven cents an hour. At least, he tells himself, he’s not herding cows. During the warm spring and summer days, he cuts section after section of high grass with a scythe, raking it into piles with tools fashioned from branches, and stacking this into hay mounds that dot the hillside like dozing fairytale trolls. In the winter, he works in the forest, his narrow shoulders and slim forearms burning from the relentless push-pull of the two-man hand saw.
 “We worked for ration cards, although I could have made more money black marketeering,” Father muses. “But I still went to the farmer’s market on Sunday; and I usually made something for my efforts.”

 Besides selling baskets, Peter starts another enterprise. He has learned how to manufacture cigarettes with the help of a Hungarian refugee working on the estate. Together they grow and cut tobacco plants, sort the aromatic leaves, sprinkle them with sugared water, then dry them. The Hungarian shows Peter how to roll them. Peter collects empty boxes of the Englische Feingeschnitt, the British brand, from the Care packages, and he places his cruder home-grown brand inside. He rolls a cigarette for Zep’s daughter, too – tobacco at each end with chicken manure in the middle.

 By trading and selling, Peter earns extra money for the family to travel by train back and forth to the British Consul in Graz, where they must undergo numerous medical examinations for tuberculosis and glaucoma, and fill out endless forms.
 A Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) worker in Austria instructs Jakob how to apply for immigration. One must have a sponsor in Canada willing to pay for the trip and provide the family with a place to live.

A Letter from Austria

 While Peter sells his wares on Sundays, his father, Jakob, spends the afternoons writing. Jakob acts as a representative for the Mennonite Central Committee, compiling a list of those from the Soviet Union living in Austria’s occupied zones so that the MCC can assist them. By August 1947, Jakob will have collected over three hundred names.

 Presently his stomach is bothering him; it pinches sharply so he thinks it might be an ulcer. He is fifty-seven years old when he begins to write an account of his life as an itinerant pastor in Siberia and Ukraine under the Communist regime. Jakob also writes to Mennonite publications that circulate in Canada in an effort to contact relatives who might sponsor them to Canada. His cousin Liese and her husband, Heinrich Loewen, who live on Boundary Road in Yarrow, British Columbia, along with Jakob’s nephew, also named Jakob Letkemann, in Steinbach, Manitoba, have agreed to sponsor them.  The departure is set for May, 1948.

 In a Mennonitische Rundschau letter to C.F. Klassen, Jakob expresses appreciation for the publication, which provides news from Canada and is a medium for communicating with relatives living there. In closing, Jakob addresses the readership, reminding them of their Geschwister (brothers and sisters) facing unbearable circumstances in “Communist Russia,” from where God has been banished.

 At the time these letters were written, during the emigration process, medical check-ups revealed that Jakob did not have an ulcer; he was diagnosed with cancer of the stomach. The nearby towns were inadequately equipped to perform the necessary surgery, so Jakob was sent beyond the mountain passes to a hospital in Salzburg.

 Jakob Letkeman died of cancer on March 12, 1948.  C.F.Klassen wrote the obituary for Der Bote, “Brother Letkemann’s Flüchtlingszeit is over.  He is home.” (Der Bote, April 21, 1948)  Because of Jakob’s  death, his family had to reapply to Canadian Immigration.  They left Europe for Canada in September 1948.