Letters From Home: The Elizabeth and Heinrich Thiessen Story

During the 1920s, war, revolution, and the consolidation of Soviet power prompted 21,000 Mennonites to leave the Soviet Union for Canada. Among them was Isaac Thiessen. Left behind was his beloved family: his parents, Elizabeth and Heinrich, and by his siblings, who were tortured and starved under Stalin's rule.

Letters from Home paints a rare, intimate portrait of the Russian Mennonite experience during the Holodomor, documenting in detail this horrific and much-debated period of human history. Between 1925 and 1934, Elizabeth and Heinrich wrote letters from Molotschna Mennonite Colony in Russia to Isaac and his wife, Anna, in Leamington, Canada. Serendipitously, these letters were rescued from extinction by Anna, painstakingly transcribed by Marie Hildebrandt Huebert, and translated into English by grandson Otto Tiessen. They were then gathered into this vital historical manuscript by Otto's wife Faye and by Sandra Froese Callahan, Elizabeth and Heinrich's great-granddaughter.

Beyond historical documentation, beyond politics, dogma, and deliberation, these letters profoundly express the private, heartbreaking realities of one family's struggle to survive, characterized by familial love, religious faith, and the descent, day by day, into desperation and starvation.