Elvera Ziebart Reuer – A Distant Promise
The long-awaited sequel to The Last Bridge, this biography opens as Eva Friedt Ziebart’s daughter Elvera and her husband Erwin celebrate their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary with immediate family members gathered in Arizona. Through conversations among relatives present at this commemorative, Ziebart family history after 1949 unfolds. Those familiar with Elvera’s first book will appreciate that she here refreshes the reader’s memory of the most significant events before immigration. Especially welcome are prints of more than 100 vintage photos from Elvera’s personal albums that substantiate her poignant recall.
Not surprisingly, Eva’s strength and values clearly reflect in Elvera. Through this daughter’s vivid memories, the reader sees how Russian military advancement forever alters her precious childhood in Bessarabia. Elvera contrasts her native customs to the Nazi indoctrination that she and her siblings stoically tolerated as refugees under close scrutiny. And, at last, the fates of two half-brothers and two elder sisters complete the Ziebart exodus story.
Elvera begins the story by recounting her initial landing in New York when scarcely 19. Two years later, Elvera encourages blossom on the family tree, when she marries a U.S-born German, and together they nurture their own farm in South Dakota, where they raise six happy children and share an all too familiar Ziebart tragedy, the untimely loss of one precious son.
Elvera inherits her mother’s hand skills, a welcome means to supplement the family farm income. Only recently does she discontinue offering custom upholstery services to devote her skills to exquisite tailoring and designing and crafting accurately detailed ethnic dolls and heavenly angels. Notably, Elvera’s Depression Babies™ are part of a handmade doll collection at the Smithsonian Institute.
When eligible, Elvera joyfully chooses United States naturalization, a status she has cherished ever since. For two decades, numerous veterans’ and ethnic organizations in Arizona, California, Canada, the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Wisconsin have relied upon Elvera to fill their programs with heart-rending speech and slide presentations that reveal the personal experiences of displaced Germans during the last world war.
Throughout the first half of her adult life, Elvera was unable to verbalize the horrific wartime nightmare long harbored in her memory. But realizing that her mother’s imminent passing would forever seal the fading details of their miraculous escape, Elvera began probing and recording her mother’s recollection. Readers are fortunate that this may have precipitated an emotional cleansing that freed Elvera to commit her family biography to print.
The biography closes on an upbeat note as, after 56 years, Elvera comes full circle in a cathartic first revisit to her former Russian home—now a part of Ukraine.
Elvera Ziebart Reuer – The Last Bridge
The protagonist Eva Friedt Ziebart is one of 93,000 Germans displaced from Russia when political upheaval overtook their peaceful lives in 1940. Under the auspices of Hilter’s invitation and Stalin’s blessing, the quiet, industrious people of Arzis, Bessarabia—now Ukraine—abandoned their well-maintained homes and productive farms to endure years of hunger, motionless hiding through frozen nights and terror-filled flights by horse-drawn wagon from enemies behind, before, and above them.
Eva Ziebart’s nine-year stretch of homelessness is not unique to the history of Germans from Russia. However, her indefatiguable will and astute perception of human nature are exceptional and make this biography a soul-moving experience.
Born in 1893, an orphan at 14, later a grieving mother of five children meeting premature death, and still later a widow solely responsible for two small daughters, two teen-age daughters, a teen-age son, and two young adult stepsons, Eva Ziebart defied all that challenged her course across a war-ravaged continent and half the globe in search of safety and freedom for her family. Eva’s tenacity often brought her nose-to-nose against the most powerful men of her era: the illogical Russian military, the cold, calculated Nazi personnel, and the Allied forces.
In 1939, plain-clothed Germans visited Arzis to host youth games and dances in order to re-ignite and fan flames of German pride and hope in a future united Germany. Then in May 1940, Red Russians advanced into Arzis and subjected the gentle German population to physical and psychological abuse. During this period, a Russian officer usurped the Ziebart parlor, made it his headquarters, and demanded the then-fatherless Ziebart family to provide his meals. Comparing the bleak option of enduring growing Russian hostility to Hitler’s suspicious promises, 47-year-old Eva hurriedly loaded family and no more than 50 kilos of belongings—the family limit—into a crowded military truck destined for Germany. Eva’s two stepsons, intending to join the family later, remained behind to harvest Arzis crops.
Arrival in Germany brought bitter disappointment and confirmation that Eva’s skepticism was justified. Hitler had not prepared accommodations for the thousands of returning Germans. The Ziebarts subsisted on diluted vegetable soup and stingily rationed food served to them in a squalid school house cum refugee camp for 450 individuals. Separated by only sheet draperies, multiple families cohabited the classrooms. All-night blackouts and split-second sprints to cellar air-raid shelters became daily events. Soon, all too clear was Hitler’s true motive: the sturdy, hard-working Germans were lured from Russia to further displace Polish families, revitalize neglected Polish farm soil, and feed the emerging Nazi army.
The Ziebarts dedicated two and a half years to breathing life into a listless Polish farm, only to realize that the ruthless Russians were about to disrupt their existence again. In the middle of the night, the family left their precious earthly possessions to embark upon the final, most life-threatening portion of their European journey. Permanently engraved upon Eva’s daughters’ memories are bone-rattling wagon rides through active war zones, clearing the end of bridges seconds before they were detonated, watching red Xs being swabbed onto family farm wagons—the silent signal of an agonizing and surely doomed return to Russia—and witnessing unspeakable atrocities committed against innocent men, women, and children.
The Ziebart family survived all this only to face an uncertain future in the American zone when a final miracle materialized. Already living in the United States, Eva’s sister Katherine offered to host the Ziebarts’ emigration to America. In 1949, with only a single $100 bill and their clothes, the Ziebarts arrived in New York, exhausted, tearful, but profoundly grateful to be alive together.
Were Eva’s victories a result of keen human intuition or divine intervention? Each reader must decide. Regardless, everyone will leave the final page of The Last Bridge feeling undeniably uplifted and much better informed of this infrequently detailed and often misrepresented piece of World War II history.
