The grandfather I never knew
A trip to the grave of a martyred grandfather
by Ted FransenPrint Article Email to a Friend
He was the grandfather I never knew, kept alive only through my Oma’s stories. More than six decades after he was executed for his political and religious beliefs by Stalin, I was the first in the family to stand at the place marking his death.
I am a Canadian, born in Ontario, living in Manitoba, working in Winnipeg, but last summer I stood on the Russian soil once called home by my grandparents and mother and mourned my grandfather. My pilgrimage took me to Kiev and Zaporozhe, Ukraine, as well as Orel, Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia.
My grandfather Jacob A. Rempel was executed on Sept. 11, 1941, but for decades no one knew his fate. His wife kept hoping that someday her husband would join her and their children in Canada. The family had barely escaped the terror of the Soviet Union as post-World War II refugees hoped and prayed their father, a political prisoner, would rejoin them. His life story has been retold in Hope Is Our Deliverance (Rempel & Enns, 2005).
Throughout my early childhood in the 1960s, I heard whispered voices talking about the International Red Cross, a possible sighting in Siberia. My older brother explained it to me as my Oma’s desperate hope that our grandfather was still alive.
Hardly a week went by in which my mother did not say something about her father. He had been a great father as well as a community and church leader. He had risen from being a stable boy to a university professor, from dreamer to martyr. My mother showed me the letters her father had written from the Siberian Gulag and from his prison cell in Orel, Russia.
Shortly after my wife and I got married, her grandmother told her own account of being attacked and raped by marauding bandits during the Russian Revolution. In despair, my wife’s grandmother dragged herself to the edge of a deep well and contemplated suicide. The intervention of her pastor—my grandfather, who happened to come across her whimpering body—prevented her from making that choice. The encounter at the well between our respective grandparents certainly had some incredible long-term effects.
These connections to the memories of my grandfather were forever seared into my consciousness.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 came new openness and access to official records. We finally learned the fate of my grandfather. He was one of 157 political prisoners held in Orel, Russia, 400 kilometers south of Moscow. On Sept. 11, 1941, they were loaded onto trucks and taken to the Medwedewskij Woods, 10 kilometers east of the city, and shot.
According to official Russian records, my grandfather was prisoner #123. The bodies were left in the woods in a shallow mass grave.
About three years ago, I discovered that a monument had been erected at the spot in the Medwedewskij Woods near the city of Orel by family members of some of the 157.
On July 18, 2007, at 4:30 a.m. local time, I stepped off the train in Orel, Russia, and was greeted by Tatjana, my guide and interpreter. She welcomed my family and me to Orel and asked the driver to head out of town to the monument.
I approached the monument with reverence. I placed the flowers I had purchased at the public market at 5:30 a.m. at the base of the monument. I read Psalm 13 and Psalm 23 out loud and asked my family to join me in saying the Lord’s Prayer. The whole scene felt surreal.
We wandered into the woods and tried to imagine the groans and anguished cries from the victims on this Sept 11 tragedy. I could almost imagine my grandfather lying there and forgiving the soldiers who had taken his life, then whispering the name of his beloved wife, my Oma.
We then drove in silence and headed for the austere stone building—vintage 19th century. I walked around the outside perimeter of the jail that had been my grandfather’s prison from 1936 to 1941. In his letters he had written about looking out of his cell into the woods. I imagined his eyes peering out at the world between the bars.
This was a once-in-lifetime experience for me. Over 60 years had passed since my grandfather perished as a martyr. Throughout those years I never gave up hope that someday my own pilgrimage would reconnect these sacred memories with the present. Standing at the monument in Orel was unbelievable. Being the first descendent of my grandfather, a martyr, made it an incredible journey for me.
Ted Fransen is a member of Morden (Man.) Mennonite Church.
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Ted Fransen is a member of Morden (Man.) Mennonite Church.
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