Scenes from the life of Dorothea Strachan (née Taenzer): As a young woman, left; on a ship to Canada in 1955 with mother Amalia Taenzer, top right; and with granddaughter Deirdre Olsen, the author, in Vancouver when she was a child.All photos courtesy of Deirdre Olsen and family
Deidre Olsen is a writer living in Berlin.
In mid-October, I boarded a train in Berlin’s Central Station bound for the town of Bitterfeld in East Germany with my dog, best friend and distant relative. We were headed to my grandmother’s ancestral home in the nearby small town of Zscherndorf. Built in 1936, the house has remained in the family for 84 years and is a place where many have been born, lived and died.
My grandmother was born here on Sept. 24, 1940, the first of five children and the only girl. She was a breech birth, delivered bottom first by an inexperienced midwife, after a doctor was too afraid to travel for fear of dying in a bombing. She remembers the huge garden full of greens and potatoes surrounded by berry bushes, apple and pear trees, and pigs, geese and chickens that her own grandparents used to feed three generations of loved ones.
Her parents, Alfred and Amalia Taenzer, later moved into a three-bedroom rental in Bitterfeld attached to a restaurant and two-lane bowling alley. Alfred would smuggle goods in from the west and make a living serving Russian soldiers. But after he refused to join the Communist Party, the authorities kept their eyes on him – eventually arresting him, confiscating his business, throwing his children into a halfway house and him into jail.
Amalia Taenzer, the author's great-grandmother, sits in the snow with son Michael.
Seventy years ago, uncertain if she would see her husband again, Amalia took it upon herself to get her family into the west. In two separate trips, she would sneak her four young children across the border by night. Her fourth son was born in Canada.
In her first trip west, Amalia snuck her two young sons, Michael and Reinhardt, through a large hole in the fence separating east and west. It was pouring rain and the boys were soaked to the bone. After making it past the border with only the clothes on their backs, Amalia took her children to an orphanage in Bielefeld. She told them she’d be back, but she wasn’t sure when. They wailed for their mother, uncertain if they’d ever see her again.
But they would – and their siblings, too. My grandmother Dorothea and her brother Klaus would make the journey with their mother. This time, Amalia waited until the fields had been freshly plowed and it was raining so she and her children would be hard to see. The three hid behind mounds of earth to evade spotlights and guards until they made it to Braunschweig. From there, they boarded a train, ready to make their family whole again.
Eventually, Alfred was able to get himself out of jail and make his own way into the west. The family of six was reunited and would spend several years struggling to keep a roof over their heads and feed their children, saving what little money they could and hoping for another country to accept them.
Amalia and Alfred submitted immigration applications to Australia, the United States and Canada, the first two rejecting them based on their young son’s heart murmur.
In 1955, at long last, the family boarded a boat that would take them to Canada. They would settle in Toronto. Dorothea’s own family would later move to Vancouver, after her husband got a job at BC Tel.
Dorothea and Amalia Taenzer enjoy a day at the shore of Lake Ontario in 1955.
I’ve made the opposite trip from my grandmother. Growing up in a suburb outside Vancouver, I longed to see more of my country and the world. I moved to Toronto for five years to expand my horizons and pursue educational and professional opportunities. But when the pandemic hit, everything I loved about the city seemed doomed.
Everywhere, small businesses were closing and being bought up by fast-food chains or condo developers. My industry was in a wave of mass layoffs and I’d only just managed to secure my second journalism job, which I lost in April. My rent remained high and at the time, there was an end in sight for the Canada Emergency Response Benefit. As my prospects crumbled, I decided to take my own leap of faith and leave everything behind for a better life.
In Berlin, a city with affordable rent, food and public transit, I knew I’d have options. I’d heard from friends that if I wanted to join the thriving startup scene, many people work an average of 30 hours a week, get five weeks vacation and have health care. If I wanted to do my own thing, there’s a fantastic freelancer visa that helps you work toward permanent residency. I could even get a tuition-free master’s degree if I wanted to, instead of adding to my substantial student loan debt.
Most of all, I was excited to connect with my family history.
This fall, upon my arrival in Germany, my grandmother passed along the e-mail of her late cousin’s son Thoralf. I reached out and he got back to me right away. A few short days later, he welcomed me into his home, where he showed me beautifully preserved family documents and photographs, including my great-great-grandfather’s passport, military record and cover letter.
German passports from Ms. Olsen's family: At left, the document for Andreas Wedmann (the author's great-great-grandfather) and at right, Dorothea Strachan's from the 1960s.
Dorothea's childhood home in Zscherndorf, Germany, was built in 1936 and has remained in the family ever since.
Thoralf put me in touch with his older sister Marion, who has held onto the family home in Zscherndorf, after her father and grandmother had done the same for decades. Some of Marion’s most cherished memories from childhood and with her grandmother Frida, Amalia’s older sister, were spent there. We hit it off immediately after meeting one another for the first time, and just like that, I was invited to the house. A week after contacting my distant relatives, I was headed for my grandmother’s ancestral home, filled with gratitude and wonder at being welcomed with open arms by people I’d only just met.
In Zscherndorf, I could feel my grandmother with me everywhere. On two different evenings, Marion and I had Zoom calls with my grandparents and my great-uncle Michael and his wife. They recalled their memories of their childhoods spent in the house with joy and tears. I listened as my Canadian and German family members shared stories of their deceased loved ones.
Sometimes, when people choose to leave everything they know and love behind for a new life, the tie between them and their homeland becomes severed. This was true for my grandmother, whose mother told her to forget her friends, family and language. Today, she cannot speak German, even though it was her mother tongue. The journey to North America was filled with trauma and turmoil, but most of all, forgetting.
We all make decisions for ourselves that ripple into the future with ramifications for our descendants. I am in the process of remembering, a conduit reuniting worlds. A family long-separated by an ocean can be made whole again. A grandchild can learn the language their grandmother forgot. You can find salvation in the country your ancestors fled from only a lifetime ago. No matter how much time and space there is between us, it’s never too late to reach out and find each other again.
My grandma recently wrote to me via e-mail: “It’s like you’re bringing my life full circle and filling in a big gap that I haven’t been aware exists in my centre. I’ve never had a sense of belonging here in Canada and it feels as though I’ve gone home through you.”
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