Mennonite Weekly Review

NORTH NEWTON, Kan. — Perhaps the most amazing thing about the letters from Stalin’s Gulag is that they exist at all.

Siemens

Ruth Derksen Siemens has made it her mission to tell the largely forgotten story of the Stalinist purges in the Soviet Union in the 1930s through a collection of letters written by imprisoned Russian Mennonites.

The letters have become the basis of a book, “Remember Us”: Letters from Stalin’s Gulag, 1930-37 (Volume 1, The Regehr Family) and a film, Through the Red Gate.

Siemens, an instructor in rhetoric and writing at the University of British Columbia, visited Bethel College in early October to talk about the book and to show Through the Red Gate.

The book includes 131 of the 463 discovered letters from Mennonites exiled to the Gulag, the Soviet system of prison labor camps.

The letters in “Remember Us” came from the Jasch (Jacob) Regehr family. Regehr, his wife, Maria, six children and younger brother were sent in 1931 to a prison camp in Siberia, where the average survival rate was one winter.

The first obstacle to letter-writing, Siemens said, was a lack of paper. Writers used cigarette paper, Soviet propaganda postcards and newspapers with the ink rubbed off.

Second was getting the letters past Soviet censors. Since her discovery of the letters, and then interviews with survivors of the Gulag and their descendants, Sie­mens has learned about various ways letter writers coded their messages.

For example, one letter refers to conditions in the prison camp being “as nice as in 2 Cor. 4:7-9.” The writer knew intended readers would get the reference, while the Communist censors didn’t know Scripture and didn’t dare consult a Bible. The passage says, in part: “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.”

Even if the letters got past the censors, it was illegal to send them to the West. Siemens doesn’t know how the letters got out. She speculates that sympathetic prison guards and postal workers along with an underground network of dissidents managed to pass the letters on. Many went to relatives in Ukraine and from there to Canada and the United States.