With Russia and state brutality on my mind, and also International Women's Day, I thought I'd share a story of a remarkable woman who wanted to be a doctor: Greta Bergman, born 1916 in the village of Dolinsk on the Russian Steppe near the Ural River. This story is taken (and quotes liberally) from a 2016 book that my amazing aunt Susan Suderman wrote on our family history. Greta was my grandfather’s niece, and came from the same German-speaking Mennonite settlement in Russia as my grandparents.
Greta grew up in the aftermath of WWI, the Russian Revolution, Civil War, and collectivization of the Soviet Union's agricultural areas under Stalin, which led to mass starvation, imprisonments, and resettlement for all who resisted. Collectivization death toll = c. 12 million. From a young age, Greta was determined to become a doctor. At age sixteen, in 1932, she left Dolinsk for medical school in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) 2000 km away. By this time, my grandparents and many others from her community had escaped the Soviet Union and moved to Canada.
Greta wrote to my grandparents, describing what life was life was in Leningrad -- scarcity and poverty -- and asking for any bit of help they could provide. They were farmers in the middle of the Great Depression in the Saskatchewan, and could not offer her much in return. In her letters she described the difficulty, at first, of learning and speaking in Russian, her lack of warm clothing, the outrageous prices paid for black market goods, and having to do autopsies on old stinky cadavers. She would have her picture taken, and would send that soon. Greta lived on a stipend of 19 rubles per month, plus a pound of bread per day, and a kilogram each of oats, fish, and sugar per month. When she could afford lunch, she woud buy oat porridge and a bowl of cabbage soup for 80 kopecks (.8 ruble). A pair of shoes cost her 80 rubles.
Greta had some help from her parents, but they were also very poor. She wrote of being incredibly homesick, and of her fond memories of Dolinsk. Greta graduated from medical school and worked at a hospital in Leningrad, and was able to return home at least once during summertime. During a visit home in 1940, Greta married a childhood friend, Abram Janzen, who taught in a nearby village. Their wedding in Dolinsk was the last time she would see her parents. Greta and Abram moved back to Leningrad just a few months before Nazi Germany invaded the USSR. Greta continued to work and study at the Leningrad Medical Institute, while Abram was employed there as a teacher. In August 1941 they had a daughter, Ljudmila, who they called Milotschka. On Sep 8th 1941, the Siege of Leningrad began, one of the longest and deadliest in history.
Hitler’s goal was to starve the population of Leningrad. Hundreds of thousands would die of hunger, lack of water and heat, and bombing. During the cold winter of 1942, Greta, Abram, and Milotschka lived on a ration of a quarter pound of bread per day. When the siege was partially broken in 1943, Greta was able to send a letter to a friend and fellow medical student, who had managed to leave Leningrad. The letter eventually came to my aunt in 2005, and tells the story of Greta’s “deep and uncurable wounds.” Early in the siege, Abram was conscripted but developed a fever and was demobilized, after which he took a job as an orderly at the hospital. When he and Greta were both out, thieves broke in and took all of their remaining food - some rice, powdered eggs, crackers, and herring.
They tried not to eat so that their daughter would not starve. Milotschka receved a bit of milk each day, but it was not enough. Greta writes: “I did everything I could to save the life of our little daughter. But that was impossible... she looked up at us with her big, wise eyes as though to blame us and question us: ‘why have you given me this terrible life?’... On January 26, 1942, she fell asleep forever. The only thing she had left were her big, brown eyes.”
At this point, Abram was bedridden and Greta close to death as well. Getting a coffin or proper burial for Milotschka was not possible, so Greta sewed a clean sheet around her and carried her, “light as a feather... out to the botanical garden where there was a mound of corpses.” As Greta arrived at the moment a vehicle came by to load the bodies, and at her request, “they also took my Milotschka with them, so at least she wouldn’t have to lie in this hell of frozen and half-naked corpses.” She was buried in the Piskariovskoye mass grave near the city. Within a few days, the bakery had closed, no bread was available, and they went without food. Abram grew more gaunt by the day, began hallucinating and screaming out for their little Milotschka. He died 12 days after his daughter, and was buried in the same mass grave.
In the wake of this unimaginable hardship, Greta writes: “That was it. That ended my present life and darkness set it. I left Leningrad on March 17, 1942, and am still struggling and in agony. This will probably continue until the day I die.” After the Siege, Greta was sent to the Igarka Gulag in the Central Siberian Plateau, north of the Arctic Circle. Along with other German-speaking peoples from Leningrad, she was exiled to Russia’s far north for forced labour. However, Greta was given work as a doctor on a ship. Greta petitioned successfully to continue studies at Krasnojarsk in Central Siberia. As a German-speaker, she was under constant surveillance, but was able to practice medicine in Siberian hospitals. She met a Russian man, Ivan, as they worked together and studied radiology. In 1947, Greta married Ivan, and they had a son Sergei, who became an engineer and still lives near Krasnojarsk in Siberia. Despite being “professionals,” Greta and Ivan remained in poverty for their entire lives, and lived without plumbing or electricity.
In the 1950s, Greta was allowed to visit her family home in Dolinsk. She attended her brother’s wedding, but was not allowed to see her mother as she was under “communist command.” Her father had shared the fate of so many former land-owning peasant “kulaks” during the war. Many families from Greta’s home village were torn apart when the men were conscripted during WWII and did not return. The women were left behind to attend to crops and livestocks, haul water, try to keep their children from starving, or were sent to Kazakhstan for forced labour. My grandfather, who alone in his immediate family fled the Soviet Union, had 3 brothers and 5 brothers-in-law, one of which was Greta’s father. All but 1 of these were falsely arrested by the NKVD (pre-cursor to KGB) and sent to Gulag detention camps for hard labour and torture.
In the winter of 1942-43, a year after Greta’s husband and daughter died in the Siege of Leningrad, her father and the rest of her uncles either died in prison or were dragged out to the banks of the Ural River to be tortured and shot. Her father died in the Orenburg Gulag. None of this was known to Greta; the family only learned the fate of their men when in 1989 some government officials showed them a document that acknowledged the false arrests and the nature of their deaths. Even then, they spoke of it to no one until decades had passed.
After the war, Greta’s remaining relatives were left alone to contunue their lives. My grandparents were able to send some relief packages to relatives in Dolinsk, which apparently saved them from starvation. Greta and Ivan remained in Siberia. Ivan lived until the year 2000, and Greta until 2003, passing away at 83 in Krasnojarsk, Siberia, hopefully with some peace, but also with the heaviness of someone who was witness to the horrors of two wars, a genocidal dictatorship, and immense personal loss. I wish I could know more about Greta’s work as a doctor, and could reach across the divide to offer comfort, but also grateful that through my aunt’s dedicated research, I have been able to know something about this remarkable woman.
