“blessed protector”

My family moved to the Ukraine in 1869. Daddy said that it would be a better life for us. I didn’t really know much about the life we had before, except that we had skipped lunch for quite a while; and the men in uniform had been taking the older boys away to learn how to shoot a gun and fight wars. They had taken my oldest brother Christoph and I hadn’t seen him in what seemed like years. But, we had arrived in Ukraine and things moved very quickly, and I had no time to dwell on him.

            My name is Burkard Benedikt. It’s my Father’s name and he said that the day I learned what it means I would have to live up to it. It wouldn’t be long before that happened.

            My family included my Father, Mother, two younger brothers, Hans and Dieter, and my three younger sisters, Emilie, Franziska, and Heike had left several months earlier in our horse drawn wagon. We had to leave a lot of things behind in Germany. But we continued going east. We arrived at several small villages, but continued to go east until Daddy decided we’d gone far enough. We arrived in the late winter of 1869, in the town of Saratov in Volga. We had no friends and no family with us, except each other. We had no place to live; only the tent we carried in the wagon. That couldn’t even hold all of us. Daddy would sleep outside in the wagon, when it wasn’t raining, and used all of our coats as a blanket. Every day, my Mother, brothers and sisters, and I would work in the local farm fields as hired hands while Daddy went into the village and looked for work. This went on for several months with no jobs making themselves available to him. Eventually, he came out and worked with us, learned how to farm, and, after we had earned enough money, he bought his own farm in 1870, one year after we had arrived in Ukraine.

            But this was not to last for us. In 1871, we lost our independence as colonists. We were now part of Russia. This made people angry. I remember when the first Russian soldiers moved into the new barracks in the village. The night they were there someone had tried to light the building on fire but they were caught. It turned out it was the neighbor’s son, and Father said that we would probably never see him again. There was some cold place called Siberia that he said where people like him were sent, and if we weren’t careful, we could end up there too.

            With the presence of the Russians now in our community, we had trouble making a living. The Russians were enforcing new and bigger taxes, and sometimes the soldiers were very cruel to those who couldn’t pay. There was more than one occasion when I was walking to school and passed a freshly burned out house that had been fine the day before. I just prayed every night that the soldiers would never show up at our door with anything more than a tax notice, but the chances of that occurring were very small. I was doing well in school; I was even considering going to a university. But the farm and family needed me for at least another two or three years more so college would have to wait.

            It was when Father didn’t come home one day from his run into town that we knew something was terribly wrong. He’d been late before, but we’d just seen the new decree in town a few days before of a decree making military service a requirement, and we knew it was risky to even talk to a Russian these days. We later received news that he had been “recruited” and shipped away up north.

It was a blow to our family. He was the strength in our family, and without him, we had nothing. My mother ran the home and the farm with our help. We worked so hard, but the money just kept trickling away. We had to find something else.

It was almost a year after Father had been taken away that I saw it. In a local shop in the village there was a notice about “The Homestead Act” from America, I asked the shop owner about it and he said it was an act that invited immigrating people to have an abundance of land to farm for very little if no money. I thought about it the whole two-hour walk home. My eighteenth birthday was coming soon. We already knew that the soldiers were likely to come get me someday and take me into the military just like my father (of which we still had received no word).

I told my mother about it. She was still very reluctant to go anywhere without Father, but she knew that it was the best thing for our family. After all, from all the stories we had heard about America, where could there possibly be a better place to go? We were no longer safe, nor welcome here in Volga, and America was offering us safety, land, and opportunity to live the life that Father had hoped for us to live all these years. I told my mother that it would do him a disservice to stay here and suffer. As much as I wanted to see him again, I knew this was what he would have had us do. My name is Burkard Benedikt. It’s my father’s name, and I will not do it a disservice by letting my family suffer here. America here we come.

Bibliography

“German-Russian settlement map”, http://www.rollintl.com/roll/grsettle.htm.

“American Historical Society of Germans From Russia” http://www.ahsgr.org/.