Norka, Then and Now
By Kari Rady
Our mood was buoyant as we bumped down the rutted dirt track toward Norka, about 65 kilometers southwest of Saratov, from where my father’s Russian German family had emigrated to Portland, Oregon, in the early 20th century. My father laughed, joking that he was going to get back the family farm. With no road signs, we stopped to ask directions of an elderly woman with kind blue eyes. She offered to show us the way, unhesitatingly climbing into a car full of strangers to share our adventure.
Norka was second largest colony in the Volga Region and soon one of the most prosperous, despite a decade-long drought that greeted them, fire, and illness. Some credit this to it having been a Crown Colony, unlike those overseen by unscrupulous agents who may have provided no housing and, who among other things, were said to have deliberately held up settlers’ arrival to bilk them for food money.
There were probably some log houses called Kron Häuser, or Crown Houses, built when the majority arrived on Wednesday, August 15, 1767 (according to the Gregorian calendar). By the end of September, Norka had 218 families with 753 people, mainly from the county of Isenburg or the duchy of Hessen. But even with shared housing, there wasn’t enough to go around. Settlers rushed to construct zemlyanka, partially underground huts. Anton Schneider, one of Norka’s founders, wrote that “throughout the winter we lived miserably and in the greatest need. The dark winter days and the eternally long nights seemed to last forever. We were separate from all other human beings, and in many cases did not even have enough to eat.”
Norka’s success is also attributed to its location on a river near the port city of Schilling, where goods and produce not sold locally could be taken and where necessities such as timber could be bought.
Norka was also known by its German name of Weigand(t), for its first Vorsteher (leader) Johann Conrad Weigandt. Unlike most colonies that used the German name amongst themselves and the Russian name only when forced, Norka has always primarily been known as Norka (Russian name for mink, which lived near the village and along the river).
Only two years after its founding, in 1769, along streets laid out in a strict grid pattern, there were 172 homes and 168 stables to house their 440 horses, 410 cows, 40 oxen, and 7 pigs (no sheep). Two mills for wheat and six for rye had been established; and they had threshed 1,361 quarters of wheat (over 340 tons) and 417 quarters of rye (over 100 tons), which were stored in 118 granaries or barns. In 1773, visiting Professor Peter Simon Pallas wrote about Norka and Huck: “These colonies have since their founding produced their own grain not only for food, but for sale.” Norka established four large communal storage bunkers for grain where farmers placed the following year’s seed crop, plus some extra. When the harvest was poor, grain could be borrowed and repaid later. Most of Norka’s male settlers were farmers, unlike some places where a number of craftsmen were forced into agriculture after being promised they could remain in their professions. This, and the fact that residents hailed from the same region making cooperation easier, is also said to have contributed to the town’s rapid success.
As early as 1775, Norka had blacksmiths, a wheelwright, cooper, and a shoemaker. There were silk weavers, a camlet weaver, mill owners, a church sexton (who worked as a farmer as well), and a watchmaker. The 1775 census reported that most of the 957 colonists were “diligent”. They lived in 219 households, of these 11 were unable to farm. Even then, there was “insufficient” forest land, which would be a source of friction with their Russian neighbors.
In Norka’s early days, according to former resident Conrad Brill, settlers would fall victim to Cossack raids on their cattle and horses. However, their growing prosperity led wealthy Germans with land bordering Russian properties to hire Cossacks to police their lands. If a Russian’s goat strayed onto a German plot, the goat’s owner would be beaten. Peasants would also be beaten for picking up firewood on German land. “These Cossacks were hard on the Russian peasants, as they had been on the earliest German immigrants...” Brill said.
By 1798, there were 1,662 residents, living in 226 households. German families were generally large and the population increased rapidly. Families with eight children were common. Boys were especially prized, because Volga German land was passed on by the mir system, whereby land was held in common by the colony with each dusch (lit. soul, meaning each male in the family) being allotted a parcel. The mir system also led to padding the census data in the event of death or in later years with increasing emigration to avoid having to return any land to the Russian government. Originally, Norka was allotted 11,418 desyatina (over 30,000 acres); this grew to 21,468 desyatina (nearly 58,000 acres) by 1886. Some would sell their land or have others farm it for a share so that they could take up other employment.
Orphaned boys were placed easily because of their dusch, but girls were often overworked in a sort of foster care system. Lacking relatives, elderly persons who couldn't care for themselves would be passed from house to house, remaining a day or two in each, so their care would be shared equally. Some treated them well, while others called them a “bag of bedbugs” and couldn't wait to be rid of them. A newlywed couple might be placed with elderly homeowners requiring help in return for becoming inheritors.
As Norka’s population grew and available farmland was exhausted, colonists formed the “daughter” colonies of Neu-Norka, Neu-Hussenbach, Rosenfeld, and Brunnental. By 1886, there were 7,641 persons and 877 households in Norka, of which 322 families were “constantly absent”, there were also 81 “outsiders”. A.N. Minkh’s 1898 report listed 54 industrial enterprises: 11 stores, 5 taverns, 11 blacksmiths, 11 shoemakers, 5 tailoring shops, 7 joineries, 5 tanneries, 6 oil mills, and 6 windmills for grain.
In case of crime, Germans would not go to Russian authorities unless the offense was serious and against them personally. They preferred to deal with it themselves. For their government, one senior member from each household served in the Gemeinde, which handled the village affairs. Every four to six years, the Gemeinde elected a village council. Decision making could be long and bitter, turning into all night meetings, before a smaller Gemeinde consisting of businessmen, the Vorsteher, Schreiber (scribe), schoolmaster and preacher would make the final decision. Reverend Wilhelm Stärkel was granted “unprecedented power” by the Winska Na Schelnic (the highest Russian official in Saratov).
In Norka’s first year, a combination wooden school and prayer house was built. Then work commenced on the largest, best buildings in the village, the church. Originally, services were conducted separately for Lutheran and Reformed worshippers. Eventually intermarriage and social factors led to joint services. Johann Georg Hervig became Norka’s first resident pastor. From 1769 to 1782, Hervig baptized 700 children. In 1822, a new church was erected on the site of the original one, under Reverend John Baptista Cattaneo from Switzerland. When couples came to Rev. Cattaneo seeking a divorce, he would listen closely to both the man and woman. Then, as both were usually to blame, he would pull out a stick and give them each a beating. Divorces were rare during those days. Rev. Cattaneo also shared his knowledge about beekeeping and agriculture, in addition to being an experienced therapist and surgeon who, by 1819, had led “16 amputations of hands and legs, 277 operations for cancer and other tumours and has made more than 8,000 inoculations against smallpox”.
Hermann Dalton wrote in his 1862 Geschichte der Reformirten Kirche in Russland report that there were 642 boy students and 600 girls in three schools, with one teacher, the Schulmeister. The Schulmeister stepped in when the pastor was unavailable. A Russian school was built in 1868; and starting in 1890, Russian language classes were required by law. Eventually, there were four schools with names noting their positions in the village, such as the Oberdorf Schule (Upper School) and Mitteldorf (Center) Schule. While in 1897, 80% of Russians were illiterate, few in German colonies couldn’t read, even though quality of the education was said to be low. Teachers were poorly paid, and according to Emma Schwabenland Haynes, some had difficulty themselves reading and writing. Children studied reading, religious studies, writing, arithmetic, and choral singing. Attendance was compulsory from age six to 15, although children were known to skip school at harvest time, etc. In general, discipline was enforced through fear of God.
Well-to-do families would send their sons to a Saratov boarding school to improve the boys’ Russian skills and financial prospects. Most Germans kept to themselves, spoke their own dialect, and only had contact with Russians when business required. Other than a church newspaper from Germany, there were no newspapers. “The rest of the children did not know anything about the outside world,” wrote Jacob Miller, “only what someone had told them.” Most expressed no interest in politics, wishing merely to be left alone with the rights granted by Catherine the Great intact.
In 1882, residents erected the Third Church. Townsfolk turned out to raise a hollow boxed metal cross into a slot atop the steeple and celebrate. The church still stands, albeit without the approximately 10-meter-tall Gloche Stuhl (bell tower) that held three large bells. The largest bell weighed over 135 kilograms (over 300 lbs.) and reportedly could be heard over five versts (three miles) away.
During blizzards and heavy fog, the bells would peal nonstop to guide people home. They also served as a fire alarm. Upon seeing a fire, villagers were required to run toward the bell tower yelling, “Fire! Fire!” Then the next nearest person they came to would take up the cry, running toward the bell. People kept wagons and carts with firefighting equipment and were well-rewarded for stopping fires from spreading.
But the church’s glory was its German pipe organ. Rev. Stärkel ordered the organ, which could play 20 registers, from the E. F. Walcker & Cie. of Ludwigsburg, Germany. Despite being only about 25% of the size of a full pipe organ, at full volume the whole church would vibrate.
During services, men would be seated on one side of the aisle and women on the other. Afterwards, women would exit first, followed by the men.
Even the power of the church couldn’t eliminate belief in witches and evil spirits. Sometimes an elderly man or woman would be pegged a witch when a baby became ill or another negative event coincided with a particular person who stopped by. Brill recalled one woman telling her daughter “to put scissors, crochet hooks, knitting needles and several other items under the baby’s pillow” to help the child get well following the visit of a “witch”. Stomach upsets among children were blamed on witches; however, Brill thought the spicy foods and wursts that everyone ate were probably to blame. Many kept goats. When one showed up at church or a wedding, it was said to be a witch. One woman whose livestock and chickens regularly died was deemed a witch, but the deaths were likely attributable to her low-lying land being downstream of the tannery that emptied its vats into the creek.
On New Year’s Eve, to predict the coming year’s rainfall, farmers would cut an onion into four pieces—one for each quarter of the coming year. They would put salt them and leave them out overnight. It was said that the quarter with the most moisture on it would have the highest rainfall in the next year.
Until 1914, when the first hospital and dental office was opened, Norka lacked a doctor and relied on midwifery and folk healing, some of which worked despite now seeming strange or disgusting. Conrad Brill said that for colic, bird droppings were scraped from fences, mixed with milk, and fed to babies. Perhaps after the poppy seeds that grew in most yards passed through the birds’ system, a mild narcotic effect might have remained to calm and put the baby to sleep. Fresh cow manure was placed as a poultice on severe cuts, such as an axe wound, to draw out infection. One’s own fresh urine might be used for burns, conjunctivitis, and other eye problems. Catherine Bauer, a midwife and healer, said that for stomach and headaches, “We just bore it out.” She used hard-boiled egg yolks, wax and butter for burns. For warts, boils, and carbuncles, Conrad Brill said, “You cut a potato in half and held it to the wart, giving it a quarter turn as you said, ‘In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.’ You then buried the potato”. “This you did for seven nights, if you remembered it that long and didn't have to start over. If the parents had the garden planned, you could grow nice potato plants from each night’s buried potato, providing you placed them in a straight row.”
With so many people sharing the same names, nicknames were used to tell them apart. During Conrad Brill’s time these included: Pretzelmenja (pretzel man) Weber, Schmir Bosum (greasy stomach) Burbach, Stonehous (stonepants) Doring, Gerver (tanner) Faigler, and a Giebelhause‑Schnooper because he would quickly sniff back drips from his runny nose. There was Wintmeil (windmill) Giebelhouse, a tailor called Schniter Hahn, and Souf (tippler) Helzer. One school came to be known as Kaiser School, not for the German leader, but for Deffe (deaf) Kaiser who lived next door. “We had a man called Soie Biezer (pig biter) Reisbick,” Brill said, “but I never knew why.”
Every Thursday, Norka had a weekly street market where leather goods, food, roots for tea, rice, barley and more were sold. There might be visiting tinkers or salesmen. Russians preferred to trade fish for eggs—three “fair-sized fish” for an egg—grain, and other products, rather than purchasing them. Norka’s grain was transported to the port city of Schilling, from where it was sold to buyers from Europe or other parts of Russia. Lumber came from Schilling. There was also a bigger annual market. Some carted their produce and wares to Saratov, about 60 kilometers away. But the drive required passing through the fearsome Kasacka Wald (Cossack Woods) “where many passersby were robbed and murdered...between Rybuschka and Saratov,” Brill said.
The weaving of sarpinka cloth (cotton cloth similar to calico) was an object of pride. Some examples by J. Deines’ and W. Spady’s companies were even exhibited at the International Exhibition of 1862, in London.
In 1910, the installation of street lights was proposed by one of its richest residents, Peter Sinner. He owned a four- or five-story electric mill driven by two large water-powered generators, and employed about 20 people there during peak times (after 1917, it was destroyed by Bolsheviks). Sinner was involved in banking and owned other mills and businesses. People were suspicious that it was a scheme to further enrich Sinner through selling electricity and voted the measure down after considerable debate.
In the early 20th century, many were employed by the Faiglers’ tannery, where workers were generously given a hearty noon meal and schnapps breaks. Another major business was the Pauli brickworks with rows and rows of hard-fired bricks. Of the mills, the Giebelhaus mill was the most beautiful, but as it ran on wind power, it produced less than the Sinner’s water-driven mill. Another mill just outside town was owned by the Schreibers. Millers were paid with a large scoop of flour for every Bout ground (~40 lbs.) Brill related. The men wore leather coats to keep the dust from their clothes, and unscrupulous millers cheated clients by loading an extra scoop into their sleeves. A man known as Lammed Armige (lame-arm) Hohnstein was charged, dismissed, and publicly whipped for that.
Girls frequently couldn’t marry the mate of choice. When a girl reached a marriageable age, their godfather would selection her future groom, sometimes to a man they’d never met. As many women died during childbirth, a widower, often in his 30s or 40s, would marry a young 15- or 16-year-old girl to care for him and his children, who might be even older than she was. If a girl returned home telling of abuse and the husband complained to the council, the girl would usually be forced to return to her abuser. Although public whipping was the punishment for beating one’s wife, rarely would a man be punished for abusing a wife or child.
Trespassing and theft were also punishable by public whipping. And there were even a few cases of murder.
A hired man who worked for the Schnel family was once hired by an elderly Russian to help drive the cattle he’d purchased to Saratov. In Kosack Wald, the hired man slit the old man’s throat and stole about five rubles from his pockets along with the cattle, which he sold at market. Having feared robbery, the old man had hidden most of his money in his leggings. Upon discovery of the body, the perpetrator was easily identified, sentenced, and deported to Siberia to work the mines in the summer, cut ice each winter, and permitted to visit Norka three days per year. Later he and others sentenced under the tsarist government were pardoned by the Bolsheviks.
A time of mass celebration was the fall Kerb festival with music, dancing, and revelry held after the harvesting and butchering were done. It lasted three days to a week and is thought to have pagan origins in Isenburg and Hessen. Conrad Brill recalled that although he heard of alcohol-free festivities, the one held at Dicker (fat) Helzer’s house was raucous and began with the windows being removed to the barn for safekeeping. Liquor was sold, and dancers paid the live band after each set. Helzer kept at hand a piece of wood roughly the size of a baseball bat and was known to use it when things got unruly. Following the Sunday church service, the celebration began with marching and singing in the streets. Church leaders disapproved and refused the use of public buildings, perhaps in part because it led to unplanned marriages the following winter.
Children were required to go to school, but parents could pay a fee so that they didn’t have to attend past the age of 15. They also worked as best they could to help out around the house, in the fields, or at other jobs. In the winter they played hockey and had sing-alongs. Like youngsters everywhere, boys would get up to pranks, such as putting sparrows between the panes of a double-pane window. Grabbing some ripe fruit from a tree or berries was common. Once a foreman in an orchard decided to teach some boys a lesson and invited them to come get some pears. When they got up in the trees, he threw stones at a beehive on the next tree causing the boys, who were quickly covered with welts, to flee.
With the 1871 decree repealing all the privileges granted by Catherine II, emigration soon began. Two men, Johannes Krieger and Johannes Nolde, were sent to the United States to search for land for friends and family members. In 1875, 85 families, most from Norka, sailed to America, where many would settle in Colorado; Iowa; Nebraska; Fresno, California; and Portland, Oregon. Other Russian German families would end up in Canada and even Argentina. But not all wanted to leave Russia or liked the US once they got there.
It might be that a loved one would refuse to leave, so another would also remain in Russia. And some, like Sashja Spady, complained so much about the hard work and blisters he got as a hod carrier for Portland Electric Power and Light, that his family sent him money for the return fare. Or like George Schwartz (who returned from Portland to Norka, bringing his family and money for a mercantile store) who said that, “America wasn’t the place for a guy 65-years-old, starting over. In Russia, the father was head of the family, his boys farmed and he bossed. In America, it was a woman’s world. The man got a job, she handed him a lunch bucket and he went to work, while she set [sic] on the front porch swinging on the porch swing, comparing notes with her neighbor ladies. When the husband got home, she might have supper ready and again, she may not, but either way there wasn't much he could do about it. If he hit her, like he could in the old country, she would take him to court, get a divorce, and take away all of his possessions.”
While many supported the Tsar, wanting to believe that the government would continue to uphold past promises despite the erosion of their rights since the 1850s, some poorer residents supported the Bolsheviks. The majority, preferring to farm and be left alone, were called members of the “Green Army”.
Volga Germans were squeezed by both White and Red army troops who forced them to provide whatever was requisitioned, with little hope they would be reimbursed. Horses were taken, although especially at first, tired, skinny horses were left in exchange. Some would hide their horses, or at least the best ones. Conrad Gosshorn Derr would lead his four best mounts to a small corral disguised a hay stack when troops came. This worked until once a horse sneezed, whereupon as punishment all his horses were seized and none left for exchange. Nuznossiger (walnut-nosed) Helzer tried hiding his in a brushy area outside town. But one of the horses he’d hidden was the colt of a mare that was taken. The colt, smelling its mother, whinnied, the mare answered, and all were lost to the troops.
Once the villagers who’d remained in Norka, heard cannon fire and were informed that they would receive orders from a Bolshevik commissar in nearby Dufka. When Vorsteher Fink and some of the Gemeinde sent a delegation of young men to go meet with him, other villages refused to participate. When the conversation with the commissar quickly turned ugly, the son of Miller Hahn grabbed a pitchfork leaning against the commissar’s house and repeatedly stuck the man in the stomach, resulting in the man’s agonizing death. The young man who’d killed the commissar fled Norka with his father before the Bolsheviks figured out who’d done it. Vorsteher Fink and a man named Spoe, who’d been instrumental in sending the young men, left town.
Then one morning, the villagers were summoned by church bells to find the village surrounded by troops and artillery. The guilty parties were ordered to step forward. One by one the young men did until there were seven of them. When an eighth started to join them, the interpreter softly said, “Das langt schon, die suchen nur sechs nebst dem fuhrman.” (That’s enough. They are only looking for six besides the driver.) They were driven to the rock quarry and shot. Brill wrote that Adam Mikkels, wasn’t killed instantly and managed to crawl home where he died trying to crawl over the fence. The troops spent three days searching for the miller’s son, Fink, and Spoe. When the troops gave up, they took 300 of Norka’s best horses, loaded all the wagons they wanted with grain, and took three wagon loads of guns and ammunition. The Bolsheviks returned several weeks later to publically whip Fink and Spoe.
The Red Army decreed that young men of draft age were required to report for service in Saratov. A sandstorm hit as they were walking to the boat from Schilling, requiring them to get medical care and return afterward. Instead they sailed home, where they were rounded up. When they received orders that they were to attack White Army troops the next day, 18 of them, including Conrad Brill, snuck back home. Eventually they were rounded up and sent for trial in Saratov. Brill said they caught a lucky break, because instead of being shot, an old career soldier who told the tribunal that “he was more familiar with these cases concerning the young Volga Germans and army life, because he had tried to train so many of them as they were drafted from about 1900 and they were all dumb farmers, who didn’t speak the Russian language, had never been away from the farm enough to know anything or need to know of Russian laws up to now. He recommended we be re-trained and serve in a labor force rather than be trained to be foot soldiers. They shipped us to Katharinenstadt for assignment handling supplies.... I remained in Katharinenstadt until all hostilities were over in 1920, then returned home to Norka.”
Growing jealousy over Norka’s prosperity and the amount of land that had been allotted to and purchased by the Germans came to a head. Norka’s potato fields were miles from town, but just across from the Russian village of Rebinske (Rybuschka), which was short of arable land. In 1918, officials in Saratov informed Norka’s Gemeinde that the land was to be surrendered to Rybuschka. Norka residents went to farm it anyway, only to discover that three of their own pro-Bolshevik villagers had informed officials in Rybuschka. After an axe attack on Norka villagers and a shootout in which both sides participated and wherein a Norka man and woman were shot, the land was relinquished.
The Gemeinde then formed a home guard to protect Norka’s land from seizure. As Alexander Sinner had served in the Russian cavalry, he was nominated to train and lead it. A Bolshevik sympathizer in Norka called der Krimmel Kaiser informed the authorities, whereupon Sinner was arrested by the Bolshevik Army, taken to Saratov, and reportedly shot.
To protect his grain, Brill’s brother-in-law, Heinrich Leihl, the leather coat maker, maker) built a concealed wheat bunker into a hillside, and covered it with straw. It was quite effective until water filtered through the hay causing the grain to ferment and compost, producing a cloud of steam just as a Russian cavalry troop rode into the yard where the women were making bread. The troops threw all the dough, flour, and grain onto the ground and trampled it all with their horses. They arrested him for hoarding and confiscated his farm equipment. At the time, a person was legally permitted to serve another’s time in jail, which one of Lehl’s sons opted to do for his father, despite the jailer trying to shame the young man out of taking the place of a “hoarder” when so many were starving.
Another man, a well-to-do farmer named Albrecht, constructed a grain storage bin beneath the rock and dirt of a nearby stone quarry. It worked until the Probst brothers tracked a rabbit to it through freshly fallen snow. The boys returned with a wagon and bored holes through which they drained several hundred pounds of grain, then pegged the hole, intending to return for more. Afraid to go home, they sold the grain at the market. When Albrecht heard of the other hoarder’s arrest, he went to check his own stash. He, like the boys tracking the rabbit, traced their wheel tracks to the Probst home. As Albrecht began to lecture the parents, they reminded him that the law was harsher on hoarding than thievery, and he dropped the matter.
Hard on the heels of war-time confiscations, came drought and the famines of 1921 to 1923, and 1932 to 1933, and complete confiscation of grain. It was not allowed to use any grain grown, it had to be purchased. And in an effort to break well-to-do farmers who were perceived as an impediment to the socialist ideals, confiscation grew until even the seed for the following year’s crop was seized.
“When the villagers wrote about the confiscations to their families in the United States,” Brill wrote, “they naturally formed the idea that we were going through the ordeal completely innocent ... we always thought that being Volga German farmers, we could stay immune from most of the internal Russian problems, but with as many of our people who burned grain or destroyed it to keep the Russians from getting it, we had other poor Germans who had also been victims of the greed [perpetrated] by fellow Volga Germans, who were as handy at fleecing their fellow man as they were at taking advantage of a strange Russian peasant. There were hundreds of people right in Norka, whom the hoarders and crop destroyers could have given grain, asking that maybe next year they might repay it, or do some work for it. Instead it was wasted and soon all, or most, would suffer hunger for themselves and their families.”
Norka families wrote to their relatives in America complaining that all their grain had been taken, leaving them without enough to even bake a loaf of bread, they were starving, and conditions were unimaginably dire. As even the seed for crops had been seized, a famine was guaranteed to ensue. When relatives sent money, they were told not to send more, because they were being persecuted because of it or that the money never arrived. While some grain was sent by charities, it was insufficient and transport poor. The letters that did arrive in the US told of unspeakable horrors like the minister who’d rushed to a home where he’d heard the mother was preparing to eat her own child. Then for many, the letters stopped altogether. Roughly 1/3 of the Russian German population, died before it was over.
Under Bolshevik pressure, Norka voted to close their church in 1935.
THE END OF OUR JOURNEY
Our elderly Russian guide told us of her youth, walking from her village to her aunt’s in Norka during WWII, past the bloated bodies of those who had starved to death. By then there were only a few German women who’d married Russian men in Norka. The rest of the Volga Germans had been unilaterally accused of treason, loaded into unheated boxcars, and shipped to prison camps in Northern Russia, Siberia, and Kazakhstan, following Joseph Stalin’s Decree of Banishment, on August 28, 1941.
It’s known that 198 persons from Norka were shipped to the Urals, to the Usol’lag Corrective Labor Camp for logging, because this was listed in Gedenkbuch – A Memory Book of the Germans in Labor Army Usollag NKVD/MVD the USSR 1942-1947 (published 2006). Even there, some, like Alexander Schreiber’s platoon, kept up their history of hard work and were awarded a handmade certificate signed by the camp’s commander and People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs and the Secretary for the Communist Party Bureau for “successful implementation of a production plan that increased labor productivity during WWII. Usol'lag camp Commander and People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs and the Secretary of the Communist Party Bureau ementation of a production plan that increased labor productivity during the Great Patriotic War (Russian term for World War II). In February 2013, former employees at Usol’lag—with some of the highest mortality rates of any in the gulag—cheerfully celebrated the 75th anniversary of its founding and its “proud traditions”, with songs, dancing, balloons, and toasts.
Our guide related that Jewish refugees from Ukraine had been moved into the German houses in Norka after the war. They would live in one half and burn any orchards and the other half of the house for fuel. When nothing remained, they’d move on to the next until there were no German houses left.
Norka is now known as Nekrasovo, perhaps for the Russian writer, Nikolay Nekrasov. Nekrasovo is apropos in that it also may mean not beautiful or ugly. As my father gazed sadly at the remaining houses, many crumbling and uncared for; at a drunken group stumbling toward an old German brick house—“We’ll sell it to you, cheap!”—and at the poorly stocked food shop, which appeared to be the only business, he shook his head sadly, “Even if we could figure out where the farm was, I wouldn’t want it.”
But my thoughts were on my father’s grandmother, my great grandmother, Katie (Helzer) Giebelhaus, who’d complained about her husband, my great grandfather, saying she should have stayed in Russia and married her other suitor instead. But then she’d never have settled in Portland, with other families from Norka who bought homes near one another, would never have gone to the Lutheran church to listen to services in her dialect, and kept many of the ways of the “Old Country”. She wouldn’t have admonished the butcher in their clean and tidy section of Portland not to put his thumb on the scale, and wouldn’t have confronted the grocer’s daughter who didn’t know my great grandfather was married with five children and not the widower he claimed. And if she’d stayed, she would never have held me up when I was a baby, proudly proclaiming, “Dat’s da blue eye!” The first one born with blue eyes, like her, in three generations.
Norka was second largest colony in the Volga Region and soon one of the most prosperous, despite a decade-long drought that greeted them, fire, and illness. Some credit this to it having been a Crown Colony, unlike those overseen by unscrupulous agents who may have provided no housing and, who among other things, were said to have deliberately held up settlers’ arrival to bilk them for food money.
There were probably some log houses called Kron Häuser, or Crown Houses, built when the majority arrived on Wednesday, August 15, 1767 (according to the Gregorian calendar). By the end of September, Norka had 218 families with 753 people, mainly from the county of Isenburg or the duchy of Hessen. But even with shared housing, there wasn’t enough to go around. Settlers rushed to construct zemlyanka, partially underground huts. Anton Schneider, one of Norka’s founders, wrote that “throughout the winter we lived miserably and in the greatest need. The dark winter days and the eternally long nights seemed to last forever. We were separate from all other human beings, and in many cases did not even have enough to eat.”
Norka’s success is also attributed to its location on a river near the port city of Schilling, where goods and produce not sold locally could be taken and where necessities such as timber could be bought.
Norka was also known by its German name of Weigand(t), for its first Vorsteher (leader) Johann Conrad Weigandt. Unlike most colonies that used the German name amongst themselves and the Russian name only when forced, Norka has always primarily been known as Norka (Russian name for mink, which lived near the village and along the river).
Only two years after its founding, in 1769, along streets laid out in a strict grid pattern, there were 172 homes and 168 stables to house their 440 horses, 410 cows, 40 oxen, and 7 pigs (no sheep). Two mills for wheat and six for rye had been established; and they had threshed 1,361 quarters of wheat (over 340 tons) and 417 quarters of rye (over 100 tons), which were stored in 118 granaries or barns. In 1773, visiting Professor Peter Simon Pallas wrote about Norka and Huck: “These colonies have since their founding produced their own grain not only for food, but for sale.” Norka established four large communal storage bunkers for grain where farmers placed the following year’s seed crop, plus some extra. When the harvest was poor, grain could be borrowed and repaid later. Most of Norka’s male settlers were farmers, unlike some places where a number of craftsmen were forced into agriculture after being promised they could remain in their professions. This, and the fact that residents hailed from the same region making cooperation easier, is also said to have contributed to the town’s rapid success.
As early as 1775, Norka had blacksmiths, a wheelwright, cooper, and a shoemaker. There were silk weavers, a camlet weaver, mill owners, a church sexton (who worked as a farmer as well), and a watchmaker. The 1775 census reported that most of the 957 colonists were “diligent”. They lived in 219 households, of these 11 were unable to farm. Even then, there was “insufficient” forest land, which would be a source of friction with their Russian neighbors.
In Norka’s early days, according to former resident Conrad Brill, settlers would fall victim to Cossack raids on their cattle and horses. However, their growing prosperity led wealthy Germans with land bordering Russian properties to hire Cossacks to police their lands. If a Russian’s goat strayed onto a German plot, the goat’s owner would be beaten. Peasants would also be beaten for picking up firewood on German land. “These Cossacks were hard on the Russian peasants, as they had been on the earliest German immigrants...” Brill said.
By 1798, there were 1,662 residents, living in 226 households. German families were generally large and the population increased rapidly. Families with eight children were common. Boys were especially prized, because Volga German land was passed on by the mir system, whereby land was held in common by the colony with each dusch (lit. soul, meaning each male in the family) being allotted a parcel. The mir system also led to padding the census data in the event of death or in later years with increasing emigration to avoid having to return any land to the Russian government. Originally, Norka was allotted 11,418 desyatina (over 30,000 acres); this grew to 21,468 desyatina (nearly 58,000 acres) by 1886. Some would sell their land or have others farm it for a share so that they could take up other employment.
Orphaned boys were placed easily because of their dusch, but girls were often overworked in a sort of foster care system. Lacking relatives, elderly persons who couldn't care for themselves would be passed from house to house, remaining a day or two in each, so their care would be shared equally. Some treated them well, while others called them a “bag of bedbugs” and couldn't wait to be rid of them. A newlywed couple might be placed with elderly homeowners requiring help in return for becoming inheritors.
As Norka’s population grew and available farmland was exhausted, colonists formed the “daughter” colonies of Neu-Norka, Neu-Hussenbach, Rosenfeld, and Brunnental. By 1886, there were 7,641 persons and 877 households in Norka, of which 322 families were “constantly absent”, there were also 81 “outsiders”. A.N. Minkh’s 1898 report listed 54 industrial enterprises: 11 stores, 5 taverns, 11 blacksmiths, 11 shoemakers, 5 tailoring shops, 7 joineries, 5 tanneries, 6 oil mills, and 6 windmills for grain.
In case of crime, Germans would not go to Russian authorities unless the offense was serious and against them personally. They preferred to deal with it themselves. For their government, one senior member from each household served in the Gemeinde, which handled the village affairs. Every four to six years, the Gemeinde elected a village council. Decision making could be long and bitter, turning into all night meetings, before a smaller Gemeinde consisting of businessmen, the Vorsteher, Schreiber (scribe), schoolmaster and preacher would make the final decision. Reverend Wilhelm Stärkel was granted “unprecedented power” by the Winska Na Schelnic (the highest Russian official in Saratov).
In Norka’s first year, a combination wooden school and prayer house was built. Then work commenced on the largest, best buildings in the village, the church. Originally, services were conducted separately for Lutheran and Reformed worshippers. Eventually intermarriage and social factors led to joint services. Johann Georg Hervig became Norka’s first resident pastor. From 1769 to 1782, Hervig baptized 700 children. In 1822, a new church was erected on the site of the original one, under Reverend John Baptista Cattaneo from Switzerland. When couples came to Rev. Cattaneo seeking a divorce, he would listen closely to both the man and woman. Then, as both were usually to blame, he would pull out a stick and give them each a beating. Divorces were rare during those days. Rev. Cattaneo also shared his knowledge about beekeeping and agriculture, in addition to being an experienced therapist and surgeon who, by 1819, had led “16 amputations of hands and legs, 277 operations for cancer and other tumours and has made more than 8,000 inoculations against smallpox”.
Hermann Dalton wrote in his 1862 Geschichte der Reformirten Kirche in Russland report that there were 642 boy students and 600 girls in three schools, with one teacher, the Schulmeister. The Schulmeister stepped in when the pastor was unavailable. A Russian school was built in 1868; and starting in 1890, Russian language classes were required by law. Eventually, there were four schools with names noting their positions in the village, such as the Oberdorf Schule (Upper School) and Mitteldorf (Center) Schule. While in 1897, 80% of Russians were illiterate, few in German colonies couldn’t read, even though quality of the education was said to be low. Teachers were poorly paid, and according to Emma Schwabenland Haynes, some had difficulty themselves reading and writing. Children studied reading, religious studies, writing, arithmetic, and choral singing. Attendance was compulsory from age six to 15, although children were known to skip school at harvest time, etc. In general, discipline was enforced through fear of God.
Well-to-do families would send their sons to a Saratov boarding school to improve the boys’ Russian skills and financial prospects. Most Germans kept to themselves, spoke their own dialect, and only had contact with Russians when business required. Other than a church newspaper from Germany, there were no newspapers. “The rest of the children did not know anything about the outside world,” wrote Jacob Miller, “only what someone had told them.” Most expressed no interest in politics, wishing merely to be left alone with the rights granted by Catherine the Great intact.
In 1882, residents erected the Third Church. Townsfolk turned out to raise a hollow boxed metal cross into a slot atop the steeple and celebrate. The church still stands, albeit without the approximately 10-meter-tall Gloche Stuhl (bell tower) that held three large bells. The largest bell weighed over 135 kilograms (over 300 lbs.) and reportedly could be heard over five versts (three miles) away.
During blizzards and heavy fog, the bells would peal nonstop to guide people home. They also served as a fire alarm. Upon seeing a fire, villagers were required to run toward the bell tower yelling, “Fire! Fire!” Then the next nearest person they came to would take up the cry, running toward the bell. People kept wagons and carts with firefighting equipment and were well-rewarded for stopping fires from spreading.
But the church’s glory was its German pipe organ. Rev. Stärkel ordered the organ, which could play 20 registers, from the E. F. Walcker & Cie. of Ludwigsburg, Germany. Despite being only about 25% of the size of a full pipe organ, at full volume the whole church would vibrate.
During services, men would be seated on one side of the aisle and women on the other. Afterwards, women would exit first, followed by the men.
Even the power of the church couldn’t eliminate belief in witches and evil spirits. Sometimes an elderly man or woman would be pegged a witch when a baby became ill or another negative event coincided with a particular person who stopped by. Brill recalled one woman telling her daughter “to put scissors, crochet hooks, knitting needles and several other items under the baby’s pillow” to help the child get well following the visit of a “witch”. Stomach upsets among children were blamed on witches; however, Brill thought the spicy foods and wursts that everyone ate were probably to blame. Many kept goats. When one showed up at church or a wedding, it was said to be a witch. One woman whose livestock and chickens regularly died was deemed a witch, but the deaths were likely attributable to her low-lying land being downstream of the tannery that emptied its vats into the creek.
On New Year’s Eve, to predict the coming year’s rainfall, farmers would cut an onion into four pieces—one for each quarter of the coming year. They would put salt them and leave them out overnight. It was said that the quarter with the most moisture on it would have the highest rainfall in the next year.
Until 1914, when the first hospital and dental office was opened, Norka lacked a doctor and relied on midwifery and folk healing, some of which worked despite now seeming strange or disgusting. Conrad Brill said that for colic, bird droppings were scraped from fences, mixed with milk, and fed to babies. Perhaps after the poppy seeds that grew in most yards passed through the birds’ system, a mild narcotic effect might have remained to calm and put the baby to sleep. Fresh cow manure was placed as a poultice on severe cuts, such as an axe wound, to draw out infection. One’s own fresh urine might be used for burns, conjunctivitis, and other eye problems. Catherine Bauer, a midwife and healer, said that for stomach and headaches, “We just bore it out.” She used hard-boiled egg yolks, wax and butter for burns. For warts, boils, and carbuncles, Conrad Brill said, “You cut a potato in half and held it to the wart, giving it a quarter turn as you said, ‘In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.’ You then buried the potato”. “This you did for seven nights, if you remembered it that long and didn't have to start over. If the parents had the garden planned, you could grow nice potato plants from each night’s buried potato, providing you placed them in a straight row.”
With so many people sharing the same names, nicknames were used to tell them apart. During Conrad Brill’s time these included: Pretzelmenja (pretzel man) Weber, Schmir Bosum (greasy stomach) Burbach, Stonehous (stonepants) Doring, Gerver (tanner) Faigler, and a Giebelhause‑Schnooper because he would quickly sniff back drips from his runny nose. There was Wintmeil (windmill) Giebelhouse, a tailor called Schniter Hahn, and Souf (tippler) Helzer. One school came to be known as Kaiser School, not for the German leader, but for Deffe (deaf) Kaiser who lived next door. “We had a man called Soie Biezer (pig biter) Reisbick,” Brill said, “but I never knew why.”
Every Thursday, Norka had a weekly street market where leather goods, food, roots for tea, rice, barley and more were sold. There might be visiting tinkers or salesmen. Russians preferred to trade fish for eggs—three “fair-sized fish” for an egg—grain, and other products, rather than purchasing them. Norka’s grain was transported to the port city of Schilling, from where it was sold to buyers from Europe or other parts of Russia. Lumber came from Schilling. There was also a bigger annual market. Some carted their produce and wares to Saratov, about 60 kilometers away. But the drive required passing through the fearsome Kasacka Wald (Cossack Woods) “where many passersby were robbed and murdered...between Rybuschka and Saratov,” Brill said.
The weaving of sarpinka cloth (cotton cloth similar to calico) was an object of pride. Some examples by J. Deines’ and W. Spady’s companies were even exhibited at the International Exhibition of 1862, in London.
In 1910, the installation of street lights was proposed by one of its richest residents, Peter Sinner. He owned a four- or five-story electric mill driven by two large water-powered generators, and employed about 20 people there during peak times (after 1917, it was destroyed by Bolsheviks). Sinner was involved in banking and owned other mills and businesses. People were suspicious that it was a scheme to further enrich Sinner through selling electricity and voted the measure down after considerable debate.
In the early 20th century, many were employed by the Faiglers’ tannery, where workers were generously given a hearty noon meal and schnapps breaks. Another major business was the Pauli brickworks with rows and rows of hard-fired bricks. Of the mills, the Giebelhaus mill was the most beautiful, but as it ran on wind power, it produced less than the Sinner’s water-driven mill. Another mill just outside town was owned by the Schreibers. Millers were paid with a large scoop of flour for every Bout ground (~40 lbs.) Brill related. The men wore leather coats to keep the dust from their clothes, and unscrupulous millers cheated clients by loading an extra scoop into their sleeves. A man known as Lammed Armige (lame-arm) Hohnstein was charged, dismissed, and publicly whipped for that.
Girls frequently couldn’t marry the mate of choice. When a girl reached a marriageable age, their godfather would selection her future groom, sometimes to a man they’d never met. As many women died during childbirth, a widower, often in his 30s or 40s, would marry a young 15- or 16-year-old girl to care for him and his children, who might be even older than she was. If a girl returned home telling of abuse and the husband complained to the council, the girl would usually be forced to return to her abuser. Although public whipping was the punishment for beating one’s wife, rarely would a man be punished for abusing a wife or child.
Trespassing and theft were also punishable by public whipping. And there were even a few cases of murder.
A hired man who worked for the Schnel family was once hired by an elderly Russian to help drive the cattle he’d purchased to Saratov. In Kosack Wald, the hired man slit the old man’s throat and stole about five rubles from his pockets along with the cattle, which he sold at market. Having feared robbery, the old man had hidden most of his money in his leggings. Upon discovery of the body, the perpetrator was easily identified, sentenced, and deported to Siberia to work the mines in the summer, cut ice each winter, and permitted to visit Norka three days per year. Later he and others sentenced under the tsarist government were pardoned by the Bolsheviks.
A time of mass celebration was the fall Kerb festival with music, dancing, and revelry held after the harvesting and butchering were done. It lasted three days to a week and is thought to have pagan origins in Isenburg and Hessen. Conrad Brill recalled that although he heard of alcohol-free festivities, the one held at Dicker (fat) Helzer’s house was raucous and began with the windows being removed to the barn for safekeeping. Liquor was sold, and dancers paid the live band after each set. Helzer kept at hand a piece of wood roughly the size of a baseball bat and was known to use it when things got unruly. Following the Sunday church service, the celebration began with marching and singing in the streets. Church leaders disapproved and refused the use of public buildings, perhaps in part because it led to unplanned marriages the following winter.
Children were required to go to school, but parents could pay a fee so that they didn’t have to attend past the age of 15. They also worked as best they could to help out around the house, in the fields, or at other jobs. In the winter they played hockey and had sing-alongs. Like youngsters everywhere, boys would get up to pranks, such as putting sparrows between the panes of a double-pane window. Grabbing some ripe fruit from a tree or berries was common. Once a foreman in an orchard decided to teach some boys a lesson and invited them to come get some pears. When they got up in the trees, he threw stones at a beehive on the next tree causing the boys, who were quickly covered with welts, to flee.
With the 1871 decree repealing all the privileges granted by Catherine II, emigration soon began. Two men, Johannes Krieger and Johannes Nolde, were sent to the United States to search for land for friends and family members. In 1875, 85 families, most from Norka, sailed to America, where many would settle in Colorado; Iowa; Nebraska; Fresno, California; and Portland, Oregon. Other Russian German families would end up in Canada and even Argentina. But not all wanted to leave Russia or liked the US once they got there.
It might be that a loved one would refuse to leave, so another would also remain in Russia. And some, like Sashja Spady, complained so much about the hard work and blisters he got as a hod carrier for Portland Electric Power and Light, that his family sent him money for the return fare. Or like George Schwartz (who returned from Portland to Norka, bringing his family and money for a mercantile store) who said that, “America wasn’t the place for a guy 65-years-old, starting over. In Russia, the father was head of the family, his boys farmed and he bossed. In America, it was a woman’s world. The man got a job, she handed him a lunch bucket and he went to work, while she set [sic] on the front porch swinging on the porch swing, comparing notes with her neighbor ladies. When the husband got home, she might have supper ready and again, she may not, but either way there wasn't much he could do about it. If he hit her, like he could in the old country, she would take him to court, get a divorce, and take away all of his possessions.”
While many supported the Tsar, wanting to believe that the government would continue to uphold past promises despite the erosion of their rights since the 1850s, some poorer residents supported the Bolsheviks. The majority, preferring to farm and be left alone, were called members of the “Green Army”.
Volga Germans were squeezed by both White and Red army troops who forced them to provide whatever was requisitioned, with little hope they would be reimbursed. Horses were taken, although especially at first, tired, skinny horses were left in exchange. Some would hide their horses, or at least the best ones. Conrad Gosshorn Derr would lead his four best mounts to a small corral disguised a hay stack when troops came. This worked until once a horse sneezed, whereupon as punishment all his horses were seized and none left for exchange. Nuznossiger (walnut-nosed) Helzer tried hiding his in a brushy area outside town. But one of the horses he’d hidden was the colt of a mare that was taken. The colt, smelling its mother, whinnied, the mare answered, and all were lost to the troops.
Once the villagers who’d remained in Norka, heard cannon fire and were informed that they would receive orders from a Bolshevik commissar in nearby Dufka. When Vorsteher Fink and some of the Gemeinde sent a delegation of young men to go meet with him, other villages refused to participate. When the conversation with the commissar quickly turned ugly, the son of Miller Hahn grabbed a pitchfork leaning against the commissar’s house and repeatedly stuck the man in the stomach, resulting in the man’s agonizing death. The young man who’d killed the commissar fled Norka with his father before the Bolsheviks figured out who’d done it. Vorsteher Fink and a man named Spoe, who’d been instrumental in sending the young men, left town.
Then one morning, the villagers were summoned by church bells to find the village surrounded by troops and artillery. The guilty parties were ordered to step forward. One by one the young men did until there were seven of them. When an eighth started to join them, the interpreter softly said, “Das langt schon, die suchen nur sechs nebst dem fuhrman.” (That’s enough. They are only looking for six besides the driver.) They were driven to the rock quarry and shot. Brill wrote that Adam Mikkels, wasn’t killed instantly and managed to crawl home where he died trying to crawl over the fence. The troops spent three days searching for the miller’s son, Fink, and Spoe. When the troops gave up, they took 300 of Norka’s best horses, loaded all the wagons they wanted with grain, and took three wagon loads of guns and ammunition. The Bolsheviks returned several weeks later to publically whip Fink and Spoe.
The Red Army decreed that young men of draft age were required to report for service in Saratov. A sandstorm hit as they were walking to the boat from Schilling, requiring them to get medical care and return afterward. Instead they sailed home, where they were rounded up. When they received orders that they were to attack White Army troops the next day, 18 of them, including Conrad Brill, snuck back home. Eventually they were rounded up and sent for trial in Saratov. Brill said they caught a lucky break, because instead of being shot, an old career soldier who told the tribunal that “he was more familiar with these cases concerning the young Volga Germans and army life, because he had tried to train so many of them as they were drafted from about 1900 and they were all dumb farmers, who didn’t speak the Russian language, had never been away from the farm enough to know anything or need to know of Russian laws up to now. He recommended we be re-trained and serve in a labor force rather than be trained to be foot soldiers. They shipped us to Katharinenstadt for assignment handling supplies.... I remained in Katharinenstadt until all hostilities were over in 1920, then returned home to Norka.”
Growing jealousy over Norka’s prosperity and the amount of land that had been allotted to and purchased by the Germans came to a head. Norka’s potato fields were miles from town, but just across from the Russian village of Rebinske (Rybuschka), which was short of arable land. In 1918, officials in Saratov informed Norka’s Gemeinde that the land was to be surrendered to Rybuschka. Norka residents went to farm it anyway, only to discover that three of their own pro-Bolshevik villagers had informed officials in Rybuschka. After an axe attack on Norka villagers and a shootout in which both sides participated and wherein a Norka man and woman were shot, the land was relinquished.
The Gemeinde then formed a home guard to protect Norka’s land from seizure. As Alexander Sinner had served in the Russian cavalry, he was nominated to train and lead it. A Bolshevik sympathizer in Norka called der Krimmel Kaiser informed the authorities, whereupon Sinner was arrested by the Bolshevik Army, taken to Saratov, and reportedly shot.
To protect his grain, Brill’s brother-in-law, Heinrich Leihl, the leather coat maker, maker) built a concealed wheat bunker into a hillside, and covered it with straw. It was quite effective until water filtered through the hay causing the grain to ferment and compost, producing a cloud of steam just as a Russian cavalry troop rode into the yard where the women were making bread. The troops threw all the dough, flour, and grain onto the ground and trampled it all with their horses. They arrested him for hoarding and confiscated his farm equipment. At the time, a person was legally permitted to serve another’s time in jail, which one of Lehl’s sons opted to do for his father, despite the jailer trying to shame the young man out of taking the place of a “hoarder” when so many were starving.
Another man, a well-to-do farmer named Albrecht, constructed a grain storage bin beneath the rock and dirt of a nearby stone quarry. It worked until the Probst brothers tracked a rabbit to it through freshly fallen snow. The boys returned with a wagon and bored holes through which they drained several hundred pounds of grain, then pegged the hole, intending to return for more. Afraid to go home, they sold the grain at the market. When Albrecht heard of the other hoarder’s arrest, he went to check his own stash. He, like the boys tracking the rabbit, traced their wheel tracks to the Probst home. As Albrecht began to lecture the parents, they reminded him that the law was harsher on hoarding than thievery, and he dropped the matter.
Hard on the heels of war-time confiscations, came drought and the famines of 1921 to 1923, and 1932 to 1933, and complete confiscation of grain. It was not allowed to use any grain grown, it had to be purchased. And in an effort to break well-to-do farmers who were perceived as an impediment to the socialist ideals, confiscation grew until even the seed for the following year’s crop was seized.
“When the villagers wrote about the confiscations to their families in the United States,” Brill wrote, “they naturally formed the idea that we were going through the ordeal completely innocent ... we always thought that being Volga German farmers, we could stay immune from most of the internal Russian problems, but with as many of our people who burned grain or destroyed it to keep the Russians from getting it, we had other poor Germans who had also been victims of the greed [perpetrated] by fellow Volga Germans, who were as handy at fleecing their fellow man as they were at taking advantage of a strange Russian peasant. There were hundreds of people right in Norka, whom the hoarders and crop destroyers could have given grain, asking that maybe next year they might repay it, or do some work for it. Instead it was wasted and soon all, or most, would suffer hunger for themselves and their families.”
Norka families wrote to their relatives in America complaining that all their grain had been taken, leaving them without enough to even bake a loaf of bread, they were starving, and conditions were unimaginably dire. As even the seed for crops had been seized, a famine was guaranteed to ensue. When relatives sent money, they were told not to send more, because they were being persecuted because of it or that the money never arrived. While some grain was sent by charities, it was insufficient and transport poor. The letters that did arrive in the US told of unspeakable horrors like the minister who’d rushed to a home where he’d heard the mother was preparing to eat her own child. Then for many, the letters stopped altogether. Roughly 1/3 of the Russian German population, died before it was over.
Under Bolshevik pressure, Norka voted to close their church in 1935.
THE END OF OUR JOURNEY
Our elderly Russian guide told us of her youth, walking from her village to her aunt’s in Norka during WWII, past the bloated bodies of those who had starved to death. By then there were only a few German women who’d married Russian men in Norka. The rest of the Volga Germans had been unilaterally accused of treason, loaded into unheated boxcars, and shipped to prison camps in Northern Russia, Siberia, and Kazakhstan, following Joseph Stalin’s Decree of Banishment, on August 28, 1941.
It’s known that 198 persons from Norka were shipped to the Urals, to the Usol’lag Corrective Labor Camp for logging, because this was listed in Gedenkbuch – A Memory Book of the Germans in Labor Army Usollag NKVD/MVD the USSR 1942-1947 (published 2006). Even there, some, like Alexander Schreiber’s platoon, kept up their history of hard work and were awarded a handmade certificate signed by the camp’s commander and People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs and the Secretary for the Communist Party Bureau for “successful implementation of a production plan that increased labor productivity during WWII. Usol'lag camp Commander and People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs and the Secretary of the Communist Party Bureau ementation of a production plan that increased labor productivity during the Great Patriotic War (Russian term for World War II). In February 2013, former employees at Usol’lag—with some of the highest mortality rates of any in the gulag—cheerfully celebrated the 75th anniversary of its founding and its “proud traditions”, with songs, dancing, balloons, and toasts.
Our guide related that Jewish refugees from Ukraine had been moved into the German houses in Norka after the war. They would live in one half and burn any orchards and the other half of the house for fuel. When nothing remained, they’d move on to the next until there were no German houses left.
Norka is now known as Nekrasovo, perhaps for the Russian writer, Nikolay Nekrasov. Nekrasovo is apropos in that it also may mean not beautiful or ugly. As my father gazed sadly at the remaining houses, many crumbling and uncared for; at a drunken group stumbling toward an old German brick house—“We’ll sell it to you, cheap!”—and at the poorly stocked food shop, which appeared to be the only business, he shook his head sadly, “Even if we could figure out where the farm was, I wouldn’t want it.”
But my thoughts were on my father’s grandmother, my great grandmother, Katie (Helzer) Giebelhaus, who’d complained about her husband, my great grandfather, saying she should have stayed in Russia and married her other suitor instead. But then she’d never have settled in Portland, with other families from Norka who bought homes near one another, would never have gone to the Lutheran church to listen to services in her dialect, and kept many of the ways of the “Old Country”. She wouldn’t have admonished the butcher in their clean and tidy section of Portland not to put his thumb on the scale, and wouldn’t have confronted the grocer’s daughter who didn’t know my great grandfather was married with five children and not the widower he claimed. And if she’d stayed, she would never have held me up when I was a baby, proudly proclaiming, “Dat’s da blue eye!” The first one born with blue eyes, like her, in three generations.
Source
This article is used with the permission of the author, Kari Rady (2015).
Last updated April 22, 2016.