Stories seldom told

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This article was published 18/10/2023 (1008 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Monica Reis’s mother hardly talked about it. Neither did Waldemar Ens’.

After emigrating to Manitoba from villages in the former Soviet Union, both preferred to keep their tales of displacement to themselves, revealing only a faint outline of the lives they left behind.

In the absence of a complete narrative, tenuous family legends and lore were stitched together to fill in the blanks.

“My mom lived in the present and didn’t revisit those memories very easily,” says Ens, whose mother, Anni, arrived in Canada after the Second World War.

“My mother shared not the whole story, but bits,” says Reis, whose mom, Helen Peters, was one of approximately 21,000 Mennonites who came to Canada during the Russlaender migration, fleeing Stalinist rule in search of religious freedom and safety.

That wave of immigration began 100 years ago, an anniversary that provided Winnipeg Mennonite Theatre with a compelling prompt for its most recent playwriting competition. Ten works were submitted for consideration, with Reis’s Wherever You May Be coming in first and Refugees 1948, co-written by Ens and his daughter, the award-winning poet Sarah Ens, placing second.

Both plays are running Thursday to Sunday at the Université de Saint-Boniface’s Salle Martial Caron Theatre as part of WMT’s MennoFest 2.0. Each debuted last summer in Steinbach to a sold-out crowd, says WMT president Catherine Enns.

In developing their plays, Reis and the Enses gathered whatever bits of information their matriarchs divulged, digging into their family histories and setting the action within the confines of a one-act play.

It wasn’t easy, says Waldemar Ens, because his mother’s harrowing story — like most stories of wartime immigration — could easily be the basis of a TV miniseries.

Anni Ens’ father was arrested by Soviet police during Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, and her dreams of becoming an engineer were dashed by the outbreak of the Second World War, which forced her family to constantly uproot itself according to the whims of the ruling government.

The once-complete family was fractured — one brother was conscripted into the army, another tragically drowned — leaving Anni, her mother, and her younger sister to fend for themselves in occupied Yugoslavia.

After the German loss, the Soviet Union sought to repatriate the displaced Mennonite population and send them to dreaded Siberia.

“But luckily, my oma overheard this while working as a translator,” says Sarah Ens, whose award-winning poetry collection Flyway also explored her grandmother’s story. “They fled across the border on bicycles, bringing with them a sewing machine, an accordion and homemade wine to bribe the guards (of the refugee camp).”

Many of the less magical details in Refugees 1948 were drawn from research done by Ens’ brother Gerhard, while others came from an interview a teenage Sarah conducted with her grandmother.

“She was very open and enthusiastic about sharing certain parts of her story, but used cryptic, understated sentences for others,” she says.

While their family’s journey has been documented in non-fiction formats, Ens feels there’s inherent value in exploring real-life events creatively.

“What a play or poem can do that maybe a historical account cannot is open up some space for emotionality of that experience,” she says.

In Reis’s case, the emotionality came through quickly and fiercely when she sat down to write. “My motivation was that I had the story in me,” she says of her first-ever play. “I wrote it in an eight-hour burst.”

A retired English and drama teacher who has been active in the Mennonite theatre since the 1970s, Reis has spent the majority of her life contemplating her mother’s immigration story, which started in 1930 at the age of six when her family was forced to leave their Ukrainian village of Steinfeld.

But rather than focus too much on the start of her mother’s story, Reis’s play, which she classifies as a light drama, is set toward the end, set inside a personal care home, where an octogenarian named Hilde is visited by her children. Like the playwright’s mother, upon whom the character is loosely based, Hilde is witty and acerbic, using humour to mask the pain she still feels when reminiscing about her time in a refugee camp.

Over the course of the play, Hilde comes to terms with what happened there, including the deaths of close family members and the loss of her childhood innocence. Reis says she owed it to her mother, a longtime home-economics teacher who died in 2013, to share this narrative.

“My mother was very sharp and witty, but also big-hearted toward the misfits,” she says. “She knew everybody had a story to tell.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com