The dangerous game

“The Mennonite Game” is played when two or more Mennonites meet for the first time — participants cycle through names they might have in common and figure out how they are related. Nobody wins (unless these are the rules).

My family line comes from Russian Mennonite stock. Both my mother’s and father’s families lead back to the first wave of Russian Mennonites immigrating to Canada in the 1870s. I’m fifth-generation Canadian.

It is a possibility I might be of some relation to the Nazi Hamm, but a very distant one.

There were a number of motivations for the first wave. My sense of it is these people weren’t doing too well in the Russian settlements — at a place and time when the Mennonite tribe overall was, for once, generating conspicuous wealth. My ancestors’ dissatisfaction with their social standing dovetailed with a pious disaffection, a feedback loop that polished the allure of British North America.

When the Great War was fought, there were some Canadian Mennonites who fell in for King and Country, but not very many. By the end of the Dirty Thirties, however, attitudes were changing. Mennonite clergy were unequivocal in their opposition to enlistment and conscription; the young men of the community, not so much. The majority plead their case as Conscientious Objectors. If rejected, they either accepted assignment to C.O. reforestation camps (among other government projects) or kept a low profile and hid in the barn. 

A significant minority enlisted — on my father’s side alone I have three great-uncles who volunteered and fought.

Photo: Claude P. Dettloff. Source

One uncle landed with the vanguard on Juno Beach and fought right into Berlin. I’m old enough to have heard some of his stories — if this Nazi Hamm’s boys encountered my uncle’s company, it did not go well for the brothers.

This is a short bit of historical unspooling, and I do it for two reasons. First of all, when I read “The Real History of the Mennonites and the Holocaust” I read: “The REAL History (etc).” This subset of my family history is, I hope, also the real history of the Mennonites and the Holocaust.

The second reason . . .