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    Mostly We Walked: The Werners from Russia—One German Family's Story of Immigration
    Mostly We Walked: The Werners from Russia—One German Family's Story of Immigration
    Mostly We Walked: The Werners from Russia—One German Family's Story of Immigration
    Ebook108 pages1 hour

    Mostly We Walked: The Werners from Russia—One German Family's Story of Immigration

    By Shirley Werner

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    About this ebook

    "We must have walked a thousand miles," wrote my grandfather, Ernst Oscar Werner, about his family’s journey from Siberia to Danzig in 1918–1919. This ethnic German family, who had lived in Ukraine and Russia for three generations, survived war, exile, typhus, and privations and immigrated to America in 1920, when they landed at Ellis Island and found a home in southern New Jersey. Their story is told against the background of the dramatic historical changes that were reshaping Russia, Europe, and America.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherShirley Werner
    Release dateApr 23, 2014
    ISBN9781310988004
    Mostly We Walked: The Werners from Russia—One German Family's Story of Immigration
    Author

    Shirley Werner

    Shirley Werner was born in a different place but grew up in the village of Trumansburg, New York, in the township of Ulysses, north of Ithaca. She acquired an education at Brandeis University, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Yale University and holds a doctorate from Yale. She has taught Latin and Greek.

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      Book preview

      Mostly We Walked - Shirley Werner

      Mostly We Walked: The Werners from Russia.

      One German Family's Story of Immigration

      Shirley Werner

      Published by Shirley Werner at Smashwords

      Copyright 2014 Shirley Werner

      First published April 23, 2014

      Last modified May 19, 2014

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      Thank you for downloading this e-book. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or noncommercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy. Thank you for your support.

      Table of Contents

      Legendary Family History

      The German Origins of the First Generation

      Bolshoy Tokmak

      Pop’s German-Russian Parents: Anna Goertz and Adolph Gustav Werner

      Exile and Flight

      How They Came Over: The S.S. Susquehanna Manifest

      The Thiessens and the Mitulskis

      Seabrook Farms

      Education in Russia, Danzig, and America

      The Century Baking Company

      Epilogue: Two German-Russian Families with Their Own Unique Stories

      Endnotes

      Acknowledgements

      About the Author

      Mostly We Walked: The Werners from Russia. One German Family's Story of Immigration

      Legendary Family History

      Ernst Oskar Werner, my father’s father, born on December 5, 1907, is the man whose immigration story always captured our family’s imagination—perhaps because it was the only immigration story we knew in our family, which always assumed (wrongly, it turns out) that most of our other ancestors, both near and distant, were obscure and unknowable. Details of his dramatic story were told again and again around the Werner kitchen table—our family’s gathering place, where all significant conversations occurred—stories told almost always in the same way and with the same particulars, until they became the family legend. I now know that some of these cherished details were the product of my father’s unintentional creation of his own memories. Everything he recounted to us he firmly believed to be true, but his memory, though it is the sharp memory of an honest, intelligent man, was sometimes based on his own unperceived embellishments, misinterpretations, or reconstruction of the facts that he tried to preserve in his mind.

      Pop, as my father, Ernie, called him—we children called him Pop Pop, since he was Daddy’s Pop—was born into a German-speaking family who lived in a village named Bolshoy Tokmak, north of the Black Sea in present-day Ukraine. The family had lived in the country they would always call Russia for more than a generation, and they kept their German citizenship by sending their men back to fight in the wars. When World War I came, however, the family were sent as civil prisoners to Siberia. They traveled on cattle cars, and there was hunger: at one point, they were allowed to get off the train, and some people ate grass and vomited. They lived in Siberia until German families were finally allowed to leave. They made a large part of the long journey west out of Siberia on foot. In Moscow, there was a typhus epidemic, and they all came down with the disease, yet all survived; Pop got typhus after his family had mostly recovered, and since there was a quarantine it was forbidden for him to leave the city. But his family hid him in a blanket (says my father) or a basket (as my childish memory has it) and smuggled him out of Moscow. They journeyed to the coastal city of Danzig, then a part of German-speaking Prussia, now Gdansk in modern-day Poland. There, family lore says that they met an American man, C. F. Seabrook, or perhaps met someone who worked for him. Legend has it that Old Man Seabrook, as the workers at Seabrook Farms called him—his colleagues called him C. F.—offered them passage to the United States if they would work for a period of time on his farm in New Jersey. It was this promise that gave them the means to come to the United States, and this is how the family came to settle in the town of Bridgeton in southern New Jersey. When they arrived at Ellis Island after their voyage, my father loved to tell us, Pop was the only one of his brothers who did not yet have a middle name, and he was encouraged to choose one. He chose Oskar, which sounded pleasant in German but comically disappointing when pronounced in English. This particular memory about the middle name tickled my father because he always put it together with the fact that Pop’s brothers grew to be tall men, each of them almost six feet, and they all had impressive names to go with their impressive heights: Wilhelm Siegfried, Adalbert Konstantine, and Franz Vladimir. Pop, on the other hand, reached only five feet eight inches as an adult, and he had the shortest name to match: Ernst.

      It cannot be proven, as a solid and documented fact, that Old Man Seabrook actually made this bargain with my family. His son, John Seabrook (Jack), with whom I talked when he was himself an old man, said that he did not know of his father’s ever having gone to Europe to recruit workers in that early period, and the Ellis Island passenger records also seem to tell a different (but itself probably false) story. It is certainly not true that Pop was the only one of his brothers who was christened without a middle name and that he chose one at Ellis Island. His baptismal certificate from Russia shows that he was named Ernst Oscar Werner by his parents (Oscar with a c, although Pop spelled it with a k when he recorded his German name in his handwritten record of his family’s history; in America, however, he always spelled Oscar with a c). And no middle names for the Werner family were recorded on the S.S. Susquehanna’s manifest, whose image can now be viewed in the Ellis Island archives—so there is nothing to prove that middle names were a particular concern to anyone at that iconic moment in the family’s passage.

      What follows is an account constructed out of family memories, put together with information from historical archives, books, photographs, maps [Map: Russia], interviews, and websites—plus one family recipe. There are probably legends that still linger undetected in this account, masquerading as facts; and there may be items recorded as fact in extant documents that are either deliberate falsifications or innocent mistakes. In family history, I have learned, what is cherished as a fact rarely turns out to be absolutely stable.

      The German Origins of the First Generation

      Martin Goertz (1847–before 1915) and Maria Link (1847–before 1915) were the parents of Anna Goertz (Görtz) Werner, Pop’s mother [Document: Martin and Maria]. Both were born in Marienburg, East Prussia, now Malbork, Poland. On the maps, Marienburg can be seen situated about halfway between Danzig and Elbing [Map: Marienburg, 2 images]; it was considered to be within the greater Danzig region, and so Pop’s statement that the Goertzes were married in Danzig may have been a more general way of saying that they were married in Marienburg. An old image shows the fortress in Marienburg, built in 1274 [Marienburg Fortress].

      As a young man, Martin Goertz had a promising military career. He served as a soldier in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and was awarded the Iron Cross, a military decoration first awarded in 1813 for bravery in the field during the wars of liberation against Napoleon and later reauthorized by Wilhelm I of Prussia on July 19, 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War. Martin served under field marshals Paul von Hindenburg and Helmuth von Moltke and as paymaster under Otto von Bismarck.¹

      Despite his military service, Martin found living conditions difficult in East Prussia after the war. He and Maria Link Goertz therefore emigrated from Marienburg to Orenburg, Russia, in 1871 after their marriage. Michael Link, her mother’s father, originally of Marienburg, also later moved to Orenburg after his son Martin and another son, Fritz Link, who was

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