This is the seventh and final part of an essay on the Schulz Clock by Liza Kroeger that we are publishing in instalments. Read the introduction here, and find previous instalments on our blog.

And ultimately, both Anna Schulz and her nemesis, Nestor Makhno, too, would be forced to leave their beloved homeland. He in 1921, defeated and forced into exile. She in 1927, crushed and driven to migrate. Both losers in that merciless civil war.

And so, in 1927, Anna, four children, a daughter-in-law and a one-year-old grandchild would leave Osterwick and the Chortitza settlements. Tragically, Anna’s son-in-law, Peter Kroeger, my paternal grandfather, and with him her oldest daughter Anna, my paternal grandmother, and their two children, including my father, Arthur Kroeger would be barred from leaving with them.

Peter and Anna Kroeger had originally petitioned to leave Russia together with Anna Schulz and the rest, but the Communist authorities, by then securely ensconced in the towns and villages of the Chortitza settlements, held him back to keep him on as a consultant to the recently expropriated Kroeger Motor Works. My father, though only five at the time, told me once that he could never forget the look on his mother’s face when his father came home with that news.

Anna Schulz would never see her daughter, Anna Kroeger, or her family again.

Anna Zacharias Schulz’s Entry Papers, 1927

In one of her last letters that would get through to her daughter, by then entrapped in the iron claws of the Stalin regime of the late 1930s, Anna Schulz would enclose a small card, hardly larger than a stamp, with the Bible verse, ‘Euer Vater weiß, was ihr bedürfet. Matth. 6.8’ (‘Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Matth. 6.8’) The letter was too late to reach her son-in-law, Peter Kroeger, who had already been taken in the Great Purge, one of an estimated 600,000 people killed or trucked off to prison camps, never to be heard of again, a horrific persecution that stripped communities of able-bodied men, leaving many Russian Mennonite women, Anna Kroeger for one, to struggle on alone.

In Canada, Anna Schulz and her flock would reunite with the Zachariases. But only a few short months after arriving Anna would lose her second son, Dietrich. Starting anew, first in Dundurn, Saskatchewan, then in Vauxhall, Alberta, as a widow and without the support of her three eldest children, would be challenging. And to make matters worse Canada would soon sink into the Great Depression. Many of the Mennonites who were allotted lands in Alberta, where Anna and her children would ultimately settle, came to find that they bore mainly dust.

But the support the two families gave each other was undying, as tenacious and reliable as the ticking of the Schulz clock Anna had taken with her in her sea chest.

Forty years later, dancing to the Beatles in my parents’ basement, safe and sound in suburban Canada, I am as oblivious to that clock glinting down on me, as I am to the story of its incredible journey and to the story of the perseverance of my great-grandmother. I am a teenager, absorbed in my own world. But teenagers become adults. And adults come to see that the past defines their present and sets the stage for their future.

Part Seven - A New Life

Anna Schulz would never see her daughter, Anna Kroeger, or her family again.

But the support the two families gave each other was undying, as tenacious and reliable as the ticking of the Schulz clock Anna had taken with her in her sea chest.