Grouw, Friesland, Netherlands, 1946-47

My grandmother Helene Bräul (age 42) with my mother and her sister crossed into The Netherlands on February 21, 1946. My uncle Walter and his friends—seventeen-year-old decommissioned German soldiers at war's end—crossed a few days later. Peter J. Dyck, the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) Europe Director offered a first assessment of the Mennonite tragedy under Stalin to his Canadian counterparts.

“They are truly like sheep in a wilderness and the women of 36 years look much more like 50 years. They told me that if I thought that I and my parents had witnessed terrible times in Russia during the revolution and the subsequent years of famine they could assure me that that was mild in comparison to what followed since 1927 when we left Russia. They told me one tragedy after another and it appears, if what they say is to be taken as representing the whole of the country and our people there and not only a section, that most of our Mennonites have perished.” (Note 1)

Dutch Mennonite leader T. Hylkema painted a similar picture of these “bedraggled” refugees and co-religionists in his book Fredesheim (note 2).

The refugees entered The Netherlands with little more than a "Menno Pass." Only 437 of these had been issued before the Soviet Union exerted enough pressure on the Dutch government to close this door (note 3). Nonetheless the Dutch “adamantly refused to return to the Soviet Union those Mennonites that had already been admitted” until the Soviets could offer proof of identity, citizenship, and of voluntary collaboration with the Germans (note 4).

MCC first brought the refugees to Amsterdam by bus where they were greeted by American MCC workers who by-and-large did not speak German. MCC had arranged for a large hotel and some schools to house everyone.

In Amsterdam they could rest and enjoy good food until permanent lodging could be found. On one of days the refugees were taken on a sight-seeing trip in Amsterdam. Käthe (my mother) remembers that she and other children were able to visit a zoo for the first time in their lives. And at the MCC depot they were all allowed to take one item of clothing.

The stay in Amsterdam lasted only one week. Käthe remembers Russian agents coming to their house in Amsterdam twice. The refugee strategy, however, was to be unresponsive to the Soviet Repatriation Commission members’ questions. “Yet, the interviews caused significant fear among the refugees, who kept their children indoors on the days of the Russians’ presence” (note 5). Fundamentally, however, the Dutch government was committed to their security and well-being. Many Dutch Mennonites had been moved by the plight of Russian Mennonites since the communist terror of 1918, had supported the famine and refugee efforts in the 1920s and in 1930 (note 6). Yet most Dutch Mennonite ministers had spoken out clearly and early against National Socialism as an ideology of race and Volk over worship of God, and as a form of “modern paganism” that gave priority to duty, obedience, and discipline over love (note 7).

On February 28, 1946 a group of the refugees was delivered by truck from Amsterdam to the northern Dutch province of Friesland. Helene and daughters were designated to live in Grouw, together with fourteen other refugees, each housed by Dutch Mennonite families. Grouw is a small, picturesque town of about 3,000 people situated on a lake southeast of Leeuwarden. Helene was billeted with H. A. J. van Straalen, who owned a cigar and photo shop on Hoofdstraat 313.

Käthe stayed with the neighbours, the Willem Leistra family and their children Jan and Sjoerdtje. Here they called her “Tini,” for “Käthe” sounded “too German.”

Sara stayed with the family of Frans H. Pasma, who had been pastor of the Mennonite congregation in Grouw since 1921. He was a participant at the Mennonite World Conference in The Netherlands in 1936 where the suffering of Mennonites in Russia was presented (note 8). During the war years, Pasma chaired the executive committee of the Dutch General Mennonite Conference (Algemene Doopsgezinde Societeit) and advised Dutch congregations regarding policies and regulations under German occupation (note 9).

The Dutch had been under German rule since May 10, 1940, and that September the executive “issued a strong call to all congregations to remain faithful to the example of their illustrious Reformation ancestors” (note 10). At least seven Dutch ministers were imprisoned during German occupation, and a hundred or more Dutch Mennonites died in a German concentration camp (note 11). The Nazi SD (Sicherheitsdienst) retreated from Grouw on the night of Thursday, April 12, 1945, blowing up two bridges as they left. That Sunday Pasma preached a “liberation” text:

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation, who consoles us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God. … He who rescued us from so deadly a peril will continue to rescue us; on him we have set our hope that he will rescue us again (2 Corinthians 1: 3, 4; 10).”

Ninety minutes after the service ended, Canadian troops entered the town and were greeted with “indescribable shouts of joy” (note 12). Six Jews emerged from hiding; five of them lived for a few years on the “top floor of the milk barn of Mr. Blaauw … only the medical doctor and two ministers were aware of that secret” (note 13).

The Bräuls now lived in the area from which some of their “Matthies” and “Thiessen” ancestors fled in the sixteenth century, and less than twenty-five kilometres from the birthplace of Menno Simons. The Mennonite congregation in Grouw was founded about 1570 and had a membership of about 310 in 1940.

In The Netherlands Helene found employment cleaning the homes of wealthier Dutch families, as well as doing laundry for the Leistras outside in the back courtyard with a washboard. She did this even in very cold temperatures, and her hands would later suffer. Ninety percent of all the money earned by the refugees went back to the Mennonite Central Committee to pay for their costs, including for those unable to work.

Käthe was put into grade two in the Dutch school system. Not only did she learn Dutch fluently, she also learnt to read the local Frisian dialect from her host family. Dutch adults who all understood German refused to speak German after enduring Nazi occupation. Mennonite Low German was close to the Frisian dialect, and Helene, Walter, Sara and Käthe gave up speaking High German, to the point that Käthe forgot it altogether and apparently spoke Dutch without accent.

The year in The Netherlands was the first peaceful period in many years for these refugees. “Anti-German sentiment was very intense at the time,” and it appears that little was said about the war-time experiences (note 14). Though everyone worked hard, there was also time for leisure—something completely foreign to Helene’s children. Here Walter had the opportunity to skate for the first time, and he also enjoyed going to the movies. Even from the perspective of their Dutch Mennonite hosts, the year went well with “no serious problems with the guests” (note 15).

Decades later the one piece of popular religious art that hung in our children’s bedroom in Canada was that of a guardian angel watching over two small children as they cross an unsafe bridge in the darkness of night. I think the image was a projection of mother's own childhood experience, and her sense of God’s protection and guidance in turbulent times.

Even today when my mother recalls the year in The Netherlands, she speaks of it with gratitude, almost as if she had been delivered by some holy angel to that place of safety and joy.

             ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: Peter J. Dyck, “Memorandum on Mennonite Refugees in Germany as on July 25, 1946,” cited in Frank H. Epp, Mennonite Exodus (Altona, MB: Friesen, 1962), 528.

Note 2: T. Hylkema, Fredeshiem, cited in Peter J. Dyck and Efrieda Dyck, Up from the Rubble (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1991), 106, https://archive.org/details/upfromrubble0000dyck. Cf. also Gerlof D. Homan, “‘We Have Come to Love Them’: Russian Mennonite Refugees in the Netherlands, 1945–1947,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 25 (2007), 45, https://jms.uwinnipeg.ca/index.php/jms/article/view/1223/1215.

Note 3: C. F. Klassen, “Mennonite Refugees—Our Challenge,” Fourth Mennonite World Conference Proceedings, August 3–10, 1948, edited by P. C. Hiebert (Akron, PA: Mennonite Central Committee, 1950), 183, https://archive.org/details/FourthMWCProceedings1948/page/n31/mode/2up.

Note 4: Peter J. Dyck, “Refugees,” GAMEO, https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Refugees. For a fuller account, cf. Dyck and Dyck, Up from the Rubble.

Note 5: Homan, “We have come to love them,” 47.

Note 6: Gerlof D. Homan, “‘We must ... and can stand firmly’: Dutch Mennonites in World War II,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 69, no. 1 (January 1995), 10.

Note 7: Cited in Homan, “We must … and can stand firmly,” 11.

Note 8: See the 1936 Mennonite World Conference registration list, https://mla.bethelks.edu/archives/V_6/box%2015/folder%208/110.jpg.

Note 9: Homan, “We must … and can stand firmly,” 15.

Note 10: Homan, “We must … and can stand firmly,” 15.

Note 11: Homan, “We must … and can stand firmly,” 27; 31.

Note 12: F. H. Pasma, De Doopsgezinden te Grouw (Grouw, NL: Doopsgezinde Gemeente to Grouw, 1968), 72.

Note 13: Pasma, De Doopsgezinden te Grouw, 72.

Note 14: Homan, “We have come to love them,” 50f.; cf. Katie Friesen, Into the Unknown (Steinbach, MB: Self-published, 1986), 104.

Note 15: Homan, “‘We hebben ze lief gekregen,’ Het verblijf van Russische mennonieten in Nederland van 1945 tot 1947,” Doopsgezinde Bijtragen 32 (2006), 246.

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To cite this page: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, “Grouw, Friesland, Netherlands, 1947-47,” History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), May 14, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/05/grouw-friesland-netherlands-1946-47.html.