Visit to Soviet Union Brings Disappointment : Bessarabians Find Changed Homeland

For 46 German emigres from this land once known as Bessarabia, a long-awaited return to the hamlets of their youth has brought both bitter disappointment and peace of mind.

“I didn’t find it like I had it in my dream,” said Alois Kopp, a retired mechanic from Ander, West Germany, after a visit to the Bessarabian village of Ammantal.

“We are happy we came here because we have more freedom in the backs of our minds,” Kopp said. “We are now free from the homesickness and free from the dreams.”

Bessarabia is part of Moldavia, a fertile agricultural region on the northern end of the Black Sea. The area was under Romanian rule from 1918 to 1940, when it was annexed by the Soviet Union.

Lured by Land

Thousands of Germans had lived in farming enclaves in Bessarabia since the mid-18th Century when their ancestors were lured there with promises of land by Catherine the Great of Russia, who wanted to expand her empire.

When the Soviet Union took possession of Moldavia, the Germans were given the choice of staying or going to Nazi Germany. The option was one of the stipulations included in the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact of 1939.

About 89,000 Germans left just before Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June, 1941. Many of those who stayed behind were deported to Siberia or the central Asian republic of Kazakhstan because they were suspected of being potential collaborators with the invading Nazis.

The visiting emigres said their families made the right decision when they decided to leave.

Escaped From Communism

“We left because the Russians moved in,” said Gabriel Hershey, a retired contractor who was born in the village of Krasnoye and now lives in Kelowna, Canada.

“We didn’t want to live under a communist system, and we had the opportunity to leave. We lived here as Romanians and we were free to learn our own language and to practice our own religion,” Hershey said.

Hershey and his fellow travelers said that when they were away from Bessarabia, they thought of gentle rolling hills that stretch from the Dniester River to the Carpathian mountains, of fertile land roamed by Gypsies and farmed by able peasants.

What they found were fields of tobacco, grapes and vegetables tilled by brigades of Soviets who live in huge collective and state farms.

Impoverished Homeland

The group came together through West German social clubs started decades ago to organize reunions of Bessarabians twice a year. The emigres traveled by tour bus from West Germany to Bessarabia in early September.

Hershey, who like his fellow travelers was a teen-ager when he left Bessarabia, said he found his former countrymen impoverished and the land neglected.

Rosa Mueller, a 59-year-old housewife from Remagen, West Germany, said she was “happy but also very disappointed” to see the home in Ammantal where she was born.

“The house hasn’t seen paint for ages and everything was run-down. There are no more yards and our farm is grown over with wild bushes,” she said.

Shops Lack Diversity

Ammantal is near Kishinev, the regional capital of 640,000.