Victims of Yalta
by Louise Bergen Price

 The Peter and Susanna Bergen family was one of many thousands separated because of the terms of the Yalta agreement.  While Peter Bergen was interned in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp, his wife Susanna and their children were “repatriated” to Irkutsk, Siberia where they worked in the forest, cutting trees.  They were not allowed to leave their area of banishment until 1956.

 Peter Bergen came to Canada after he was released into the west in 1951.  Over the years, he sent numerous packages to his family (the women’s dresses in the photos were likely sewn from material that he sent.)  Each year,  he applied to Russian authorities for exit visas for his wife and children; each year he was rejected.  To symbolize the hoped-for reunion, he asked his family to send a photograph, and had his own photo inserted by an Abbotsford photographer.  Peter died in 1969 without seeing his family again.  Susanna died in 1982 in Alma Ata; their children have emigrated to Germany.

 Many of those who were repatriated died in horrific conditions.  “History has been written and the blame has been put at any number of deserving feet.  Yet through it all, one aspect of Yalta has been given little attention by scholarly and popular writers alike.  The subject is the planned, pre-ordained murder of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in the months and years after World War II.  The victims of Yalta died at the hands of Stalin and hs surrogates, but only with the cooperation and active participation of the Western Allies: the United States and Great Britain.”  (http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/yugoslav-hist1.htm)

 It soon became apparent to the Allies that many refugees about to be “repatriated” were terrified at the thought of being forced to return to their land of birth, and would do almost anything to avoid going “home.”  By August 1946, the Americans decided not return displaced persons who feared religious, racial or political persecution.  This did not prevent Soviets from entering the American zones and trying to pursuade refugees to return.  Soviet repatriation missions were offically expelled from American, British and French zones in 1949, 1950 and 1951.  (Epp.  Mennonite Exodus, p. 367)