Deportation Day Remembered

Citing danger from behind the front lines to to the Red Army as it fought against Hitler, in August of 1941 Joseph Stalin ordered that German Russians be deported from European territories to far-flung corners of the Soviet Union.

By then ethnically German Russians had already been living on the Volga for more than two centuries. Some of them supported the Bolshevik revolution; even for those who did not, the Soviet Union was their homeland, and they were as ready and willing as anyone to defend it from fascism. 

This is one of the reasons why remembering the deportation is particularly painful for German Russians today. They had no sympathy for Nazism, yet because of their language, faith and cultural traditions, they were associated with the enemy. Now, every 28th of August, German Russians gather together to remember the injustice of Stalin's regime (and the regimes that followed) and the innocent suffering their people experienced.  In this part of Siberia a very large percent of Lutherans have their roots in the Volga region; some even remember their childhood homes there. Yet for decades they had no chance to return, and now there is nothing to return to...

Though more than seven decades have passed, for many it has been hard to reach a point of healing. One of the reasons for this is the fact that ethnic Germans (unlike many other minorities that Stalin suppressed) were never officially acknowledged as a “repressed people;” it is as if the government is saying, somehow, that the deportation was justified. And it painful. Both Father Clemens Wert (S.J) (right) at the Catholic cathedral and I tried to address their pain and to bring words of comfort. It wasn't easy, though, insofar as it was not clear the degree to which we could speak with those gathered (first at the Cathedral, then at a chapel outside of the city) as those sharing with us one faith.

Knowing how small our own, Lutheran congregation is, I had hoped to see that the participants (more than a hundred) in the day's services were practicing Catholics (since so few of them are practicing Lutherans). Yet, it was clear by their confusion during the prayer service that that was not the case. Perhaps German Russians today, in terms of religious affiliation, are similar to the wider population, which, to a large degree identifies themselves with a particular faith tradition based on family history, though does not actively participate in any congregation. It comes to mind that, because of their history, perhaps Russian Germans are even more alienated from their traditional faith than others here. 

The day was filled with memories, with prayers, and with the desire to take some lessons from these events, insofar as younger participants are now generations removed from that fateful fall when their grandparents or great-grandparents were  loaded in cattle cars and brought to Siberia.