Susie Hildebrand Story

Susie Warkentin Hildebrand: born 1917 in Schönfeld, Russia

My parents were Peter and Susanna Klassen Warkentin. My siblings were Agatha Warkentin Mathies, Peter Warkentin and Margaret Warkentin Konrad. Two brothers died in infancy.

Schönfeld was one of the first colonies to be plundered by the Machno bandits and so my family fled to Tiegerweide in the Molotschna Colony. My father’s sister Maria Wiens’ husband had been accidentally shot and the young widow was left with seven young children. My father and family were asked to come and help out with the farming. It was here that my mother died of pneumonia in 1920, when I was three years old. After two years, my father married Katharina Isaac from the nearby village of Lindenau. We had no horses so my father hitched our cow to the wagon and that is how we went to the wedding and also moved her belongings to her new home with us.

In July of 1924, our family left Russia and came to Kitchener, Ontario. Here we were greeted and housed by a wonderful family, Enoch and Sarah Wideman and their seven children who lived near Hawksville. And it was here that our family learned to Schwetz (speak the Swiss German dialect), which I have completely forgotten now.

In June of 1925, my Warkentin family, minus sister Agatha, her young son Abe and myself, moved to Reesor. We three stayed behind with the Elias Martin family from June until August. Once our parents had built their 24 by 24 foot log cabin, we moved to Reesor as well. Here, the Jacob Rempel’s let us use a room in their house for a classroom until the school was built; the students sat on tree trunks. The enrolment consisted of about 15-20 students. It was a 15 minute walk to school for us; Mr. Heidebrecht was our teacher. We learned to read the English language with German pronunciation, for example, for the word the we said tay.

My father, along with the other men at Reesor, made a living cutting trees for pulpwood. My stepmother Katherine was the only woman there at the beginning of the settlement and had to cook for everyone on an outside stove which had a small roof built over it. Food was difficult to obtain; potatoes grew well in Reesor but there was no storage place to keep them from freezing during the winter months. Flour, carnation milk, lard, and other groceries were ordered from the Eaton’s catalogue. The train stopped at Mile 101, two miles from our house, and we needed to be there to carry our order home. I remember my father carrying a100 pound bag of Five Roses flour from the train stop to our house. Our mother baked bread but we had no butter so the kind Old Order Mennonites sent us apple butter and honey. We became very good friends with the Old Order Mennonites. After 80 years they still keep in touch with us and their children come occasionally to Leamington for a visit.

We spent three years at Reesor, until 1928. Church services were held by turn in the Mennonite homes until the school was built in 1927, where we then held our services. Cornelius Penner and Herman P. Lepp were our pastors. The settlement had two congregations and later, a second school was built, as well.

As children, life in Reesor was idyllic. In the summer we stripped the bark off the logs that our fathers and brothers had felled. In the winter the snow was so deep that we had to wear snow boots to get around. I remember Christmas Eve being very special in that we all walked to the school for our Christmas Eve program and walked home on top of the snow by moonlight, singing all the way.

In 1928 we moved to Essex County and I attended the Inman School, among many others. My family moved every spring because they were share cropping; this brought about endless adjustments.

My husband Jake, who lived in Saskatchewan, later told me that he took sandwiches made of homemade bread and a piece of sausage which he tried to hide from the others while he ate. The English children wanted to trade their store bought bread sandwiches, bananas and oranges for Jake’s sandwiches because they found them very tasty. We carried our lunches in lard pails. In the summer months we ate outside; in winter we sat around the large furnace at the back of the classroom.

Jake and I were married in 1942 at the United Mennonite Church on Oak Street of Leamington. We raised four children: Helen, Edward, Margaret and Paul. Except for the first three years, we lived on Hodgins Street of Leamington; Jake worked at  Ford’s in Windsor.

My husband was musically talented, a gift he had inherited from his father, Cornelius Hildebrand. Jake had a good bass singing voice and led the Sunday School singing for 26 years. He also led the Church’s Junior Choir for many years. Jake died on October 9, 1987; today I live at the Heritage Gardens on Pickwick Drive which I find very enjoyable.