When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin ordered the deportation of Russian citizens of German descent to Siberia. After his father and uncles were sent off to the Gulag, sixteen-year-old Johann Franz volunteered to join the Wehrmacht as an interpreter. This eventually saw him wounded and evacuated to Austria. He met and fell in love with the young Polish-born Ella Weber in a refugee camp in Germany. The product of more than sixty years of reflection, Mutti and Papa is a family history that traces the love story of the parents of author Bill Franz, Mennonite refugees fleeing war-torn Europe, over the course of World War II. The story is largely told through their love letters to one another, across continents, while his father, Johann, awaits immigration to Canada to join his fiancée, Franz’s mother, Ella. Beyond these letters, a patchwork of fascinating secondary sources is consulted to present a fuller picture of the Franz family history, which, in turn, gestures to cultural legacies of Mennonite migration to Canada and involvement in World War II more broadly. Set against the backdrop of the cataclysmic events of the Holocaust and Second World War, the love story of Ella and Johann is at once a fascinating historical account, a happy romance, and an earnest examination of what it’s like to strive for a future while struggling to cope with life as a refugee. Offering a fresh perspective on the layered and nuanced histories of the Holocaust, Mennonite culture, and love during wartime, Mutti and Papa is sure to interest history buffs and romantics alike.

Never Come Back By: Karen Jensen Never Come Back is a gold mine of anthropological/sociological information about a very distinct social-religious group of people. The determination with which these Mennonites faced and overcame countless obstacles is a wonder and inspiration. -Col. Thomas Snodgrass, USAF (retired); history professor at the Air War College, USA Air Force Academy and adjunct history professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Arizona Follow Karen Jensen as she painstakingly uncovers her Mennonite roots in Prussia and Russia. It is an exciting story, not because it is a well-written novel, but because it is true! -Dr. William Varner, The Master’s University Karen Jensen grew up knowing she was living proof of her family’s miraculous survival. In Never Come Back, she shares her family’s extraordinary tale of deliverance and hope. In 1909, Aaron and Susanna Rempel were enjoying a peaceful life in Gnadenfeld, a Mennonite village in Russia. While wealthy, owning the first car the village had ever seen, the young family personified the Mennonite values of pacifism, hard work, and community. But World War I and Communist uprisings bankrupted the family, forcing them to Siberia. Despite being loyal citizens for a century, the Mennonites were at the mercy of the vicious Cheka secret police, the brutal Red Army, and savage bandits. Desperate to save his family, Aaron agreed to enlist in the Red Army in order to move his family back to Gnadenfeld. The family braved the deadly journey only to discover life in their village was just as brutal – neighbor betrayed neighbor and disease and famine were rampant. The Rempel family struggled to maintain their culture, but under the Bolshevik government, their lives were repeatedly threatened. In 1922, they began the long process of immigrating to America – a land of hope and freedom, but a journey that would be even more dangerous than what had come before. Rich with details of daily life as well as the horrors of war and Communism, Never Come Back is an intimate look at one family’s survival during the catastrophes of war and revolution.

This family history traces the Doerksen family back to their Mennonite roots, and then follows that family’s peregrinations from the Low Countries on Europe’s northern coast, to the Vistula Delta region of modern Poland, to a self-governing colony in czarist Russia, to the Great Plains of the United States, and, finally, to the San Joaquin Valley and then the coast of California. My goal is to provide future generations of the family with an accurate and inspiring understanding of their past.

They were seeking religious freedom and the Second Coming of Christ in Central Asia. They found themselves in the care of a Muslim king. During the 1880s, Mennonites from Russia made a treacherous journey to the Silk Road kingdom of Khiva. Both Uzbek and Mennonite history seemed to set the stage for ongoing religious and ethnic discord. Yet their story became an example of friendship and cooperation between Muslims and Christians. Pilgrims on the Silk Road challenges conventional wisdom about the trek to Central Asia and the settlement of Ak Metchet. It shows how the story, long associated with failed End Times prophecies, is being a recast in light of new evidence. Pilgrims highlights the role of Ak Metchet as a refuge for those fleeing Soviet oppression, and the continuing influence of the episode more than twelve decades later.

War, revolution, and the consolidation of Soviet power during the 1920s prompted 21,000 Mennonites to leave the Soviet Union for Canada. Among them were Isaac and John Thiessen. Left behind was their beloved family: three siblings and parents, Elizabeth and Heinrich, who were tortured and starved under Stalin’s rule. Letters from Home provides a rare, intimate portrait of the Russian Mennonite experience during the Holodomor, documenting in detail this horrific and much-debated period of human history. Between 1925 and 1934, Elizabeth and Heinrich wrote letters from Molotschna Mennonite Colony in Russia to Isaac and his wife, Anna, in Leamington, Canada. Serendipitously, these letters were rescued from extinction by Anna, painstakingly transcribed by Marie Hildebrandt Huebert, and translated into English by grandson Otto Tiessen. They were then gathered into this vital historical manuscript by Otto’s wife Faye and by Sandra Froese Callahan, Elizabeth and Heinrich’s great-granddaughter. Beyond historical documentation, beyond politics, dogma, and deliberation, these letters profoundly express the private, heartbreaking realities of one family’s struggle to survive, characterized by familial love, religious faith, and the descent, day by day, into desperation and starvation.