Sod House

Reconstructed sod house at the Mennonite Village Museum at Steinbach Manitoba.

One hundred years ago today, my grandparents, Johann Heinrich Enns and Anna Loewen, were married in a small church in their remote Mennonite colony of "Neu Samara" on the Russian Steppe near the Ural Mountains. They were 22 and 21 years old, and had just lived through the Great War and Russian Revolution, and were in the midst of the famine that gripped Russia during their Civil War. My grandfather, from age 16 to 19, had served in the Forstei and Sanitaersdienst, the Russian alternative foresty and non-combatant medical service. With others from his village, he was sent to the forest of Tossna. I'm not sure where that is, but I understand that it was essentially a forced labour camp. What was life like for them in 1921, living in a sod house or semlin at the back of my grandmother's parent's back yard? My aunt Susan Suderman has conducted extensive family research and tells a moving story about my grandparents in their first year of marriage:

"My parents' first home was a sod hut with a dirt floor on the Abraham Loewen farmyard. They started their life together in extreme poverty. The people of Neu Samara had know crop failures in 1911 and 1916, but in 1921, mainly due to the extreme drought, the harvest was practically non-existent. The government had taken their seed grains, and the meagre crop that was left was eaten by grasshoppers. Barns, granaries, and secret storage places were now empty -- the Red Army had seen to that! Many villagers died of typhus. With the widespread famine, the bodies of those who had died were lying everywhere as they had gone in search of food. Is is said that during these two years, 1921 and 1922, about 7,000,000 Russians dies of starvation. Inevitably, may of those who were still alive succumbed to outbreaks of typhus, cholera and malaria. Animals, too, were dying, and often their carcasses were eaten by the starving villagers. It didn't take long for the villages to be void of dogs, cats, and mice. My father went gopher hunting to add to their meagre food supply. There was no flour for bread. In later years, as my father reflected on those difficult years, he would often say: 'Eascht kaum de Chrich, dann de Revolution, en dann de Hungasch Not.' (First came the war, then the Revolution, and then famine)."

source: Suderman, S. (2016). The Aron Enns family: History and genealogy 1819-1990. Susan Suderman.