Mennonite Weekly Review

On my desk is In Growing Up in Turbulent Times by Waldemar Janzen, published by Canadian Mennonite University Press, Winnipeg, Man., 2007, 290 pages, $29.

Marlin Jeschke, of Goshen, Ind., is retired from teaching at Goshen College.

Janzen has written a memoir of life as a child under Soviet oppression, as a refugee in Germany and as an immigrant adjusting to a new home in Canada.

He tells the story in four parts: childhood in Ukraine, escape in 1943 to the Russian zone of Germany, a second escape to three years of life in the American zone, and early years in Canada.

Unfortunately, he ends too soon, with his graduation from Mennonite Biblical Seminary, and tells practically nothing of his marriage and family, his doctoral studies at Harvard and his long and fruitful teaching career at Canadian Mennonite Bible College. He offers a few paragraphs about his later career in an all-too-brief postscript.

Born in 1932, Janzen lived his first 10 years in relative innocence. His father was arrested when he was only 3, and the family never saw him again. A teacher and minister, his father survived Stalin’s purges but, unable to get permission to leave Russia, died in an accident in 1957. By that time Janzen and his mother had been in Canada for nine years and had occasional contact with him by correspondence.

By the time of Janzen’s childhood, all Mennonite church life in the Soviet Union had ceased. Only private expressions of faith were possible, until the German occupation from 1941 to 1943.

After that came five years as a refugee. For his strong and resourceful mother and her 10-year-old son, evacuation with the retreating German army in 1943 brought uncertainty and hardship, eased only by the opportunity to escape by train.

The Yalta agreement for the occupation of Germany found Janzen and his mother in the Russian zone. The suspenseful saga of their escape to the American zone is worthy of a movie. Rounded up in a woods by Russian soldiers together with other refugees seeking escape, he and his mother found themselves backed up against a hedge. They found a hole in the hedge, slipped through and made it to the American zone.

Relative freedom from 1945 to 1948 still imposed the harsh economic circumstances of a war-ravaged Germany. Nonetheless, Janzen was able to continue his education and spend many hours as a teenager hiking and enjoying nature.

In 1948 Janzen’s mother found immigration sponsors in Canada with the aid of Mennonite Central Committee. Relatives welcomed them in Waterloo, Ont. Janzen finished high school, went to Waterloo Lutheran University and finished seminary in 1956 at Mennonite Biblical Seminary, located in Chicago at that time.