His mysterious leading

Elizabeth Enns

I was overwhelmed at the faith that most of these women had kept. My eyes were seldom dry during these visits.

When we were getting ready to leave, after our term was completed, we stopped to say goodbye at a few of the homes we had visited before. We were just leaving the Wienses and I was waiting for Ed to pull up with the car when a little old grandmother rushed towards me. She was so typical, wearing a dark dress, a kerchief on her head and an apron of cotton print. Her hair was tightly twined into a bun at the back of her head.

"Wait," she called. "I know you have listened to so many of our stories of pain, suffering, despair and weeping. Let me close off the stories with one more. It is a miracle really, and true. . . . Tell it back home."

As we sat on the steps, I studied the map of wrinkles, lines of sorrow, around her mouth and eyes, but I also saw a smile of hope in her eyes.

"Do you know," she began, "when we fled here in world War II and Stalin ordered us to be rounded up and sent back to the death camps, we wondered how the soldiers knew we were from Russia. Did we not speak a good German? When you look at us, you are surprised that we wondered. It is easy to point us out by dress and face. But I must tell my story quickly before your husband gets impatient. . . .

Martin, my son, was a prisoner in Siberia during World War II. He came out of prison a frail, old-looking man, bearing the evidence of torture on hands and feet and knowing he would never father another child. Yet he was free. He began an intensive search for his wife Anna and their son Jacob. Finally word came through the Red Cross that his family had died en route to Siberia. He did not know that he also had a little daughter Sonya.

Anna, as her children told us later, had been fortunate enough to flee before the retreating German Army, and with its help she had managed to come to Germany. In spite of the terrible war going on, she was very grateful. She worked for a caring farm couple and was treated kindly. Here her little Sonya was born. It seemed many ages ago that she and Martin had been children in a peaceful home in a village in the Ukraine. Then had come the Siberian death camps and ethnic cleansing. Could life be free from pain, fear, suffering and separation ever again, she wondered? She believed it could, if only Martin, too, could come to Germany and they could start anew.

It was not to be. The war ended with Germany's defeat, and Anna and her children were rounded up by Stalin's forces and told they were going home. Crammed into cold cattle cars, often without food and water, Anna knew she was headed for the terror-filled death camps of Siberia. Her hope was dead, and she was ill. "O God, protect these innocent little ones," she pleaded over and over again. The laboured breathing and the continuous pain in her chest were getting worse.

"Jacob," she breathed to her son, "I am so sick. Maybe I will die. I will go to Jesus, and I will ask Him to protect you. Don't ever leave little Sonya. God will take care of you."

In the morning, Anna was dead, tossed onto a wagon to be carted off to one of the many mass graves. Her children were also removed from the train and sent to a communist orphanage.

When Martin received the news that his family was dead, he stopped praying. God had let him down at every turn, he felt. He was assigned to a job on a community farm. He worked mechanically, but his feelings, his heart, felt dead. Nothing mattered anymore.

And then one morning he met Greta, who was also working there. If she had not smiled, he would never have recognized the girl he had once known back home as a happy, intelligent schoolmate.

They married. Life was bearable again, but there are some women whose arms ache until they are filled with a little child to love. Greta was such a woman. She knew Martin could never father a child, and still she longed for children.

"Martin, the orphanages are full of Mennonite children. Why don't we get one as our own?" she begged.

"Greta," Martin replied, "how can you want to bring a child into our home to love? Don't you know what happens to them?"

Yet Greta's longing continued, and love won out. Finally one morning Martin said, "Greta, you can go and bring one home."

Which orphanage should she choose? Should she bring a boy or a girl? When her day off came, Greta got onto the train and headed out to find a child.

When she entered the long, dark hall of an orphanage and saw the silent, pleading faces lining it, she wished she could scoop all of them into her arms and carry them away.

Just then, a little girl came along who smiled shyly. This is God's way of helping me choose, Greta felt. She knelt beside the little girl and asked, "Would you like to come home with me to a real home with a father and a mother?"

"Oh yes, so much," the little girl said, "but wait till I call Jacob. We go together. I could never leave him."

Sadly, Greta shook her head. "I can bring only one child. I wish you would come with me."

The girl again shook her head vigorously. "I have to stay with Jacob. We had a mother once. She told Jacob to care for me. She said God would take care of us both."

Greta could not look for another. This one had stolen her heart. "Martin, please, please. I need to bring two," she pleaded when she had returned home. "The one I chose will not come without her brother."

"Really, Greta," Martin answered. "Of the thousands of children to choose from, you can only bring this one or none at all. I do not understand you at all."

Again love won out. Seeing that Greta did not go back to the orphanage, Martin suggested that they both go and look at her little girl. Maybe he could persuade her to come alone. Then he thought of his little Jacob. What if he had ended up in an orphanage? Would he not want him adopted by a kind person like Greta?

"You came back for us," the little girl greeted them in the hall.

This time, she held the hand of a frail, thin boy with gentle eyes. "I promised not ever to leave her," he said. "When my mother died, she said I must promise. I am sorry she cannot come to you."

"We will take them both," Martin said in a very decided voice. There seemed to be an instant rapport between this frail boy and Martin.

While Greta went to collect their clothes, Martin went to make arrangements with the desk and to sign them out. When Greta came back with a child on each hand, she saw Martin, pale as a sheet, dazed, unable to sign the papers with his shaking hands.

"Martin, what is it?" Greta rushed toward him. Surely he was not taking sick here.

"Greta, read the names. . . . " He stuck a paper in her face. She read: "Jacob and Sonya Wall, mother Anna (Bartel) Wall, father Martin Wall." All the birthdays matched.

"Oh, Greta, had it not been for your persistent pleading for a child, I would have missed this miracle. These are my children, Greta--a daughter I never knew I had and my Jacob." Lovingly, he patted the boy's shoulders. "Oh, Greta, there is a God, and He does lead His people, even when they refuse to admit His presence."

"Need I tell you more?" the little grandmother asked. "Tell this story with a happy ending. There are so few of them, and yet they are here and need to be told. I don't need to tell you Martin and Greta pray again and are here close by in Germany. God is so good."

Elizabeth Enns lives in Winnipeg, Man.

Return to the M.B.Herald Vol. 36, No. 3 Home Page