Remember Us - Letters from Stalin's Gulag (1930-37) Volume One: The Regehr Family

Remember us as we remember you - a plea from a father for his family imprisoned in Stalin's Gulag. Sending his letter abroad is a crime. Yet this letter (and 463 others) travels to a tiny prairie town in Canada. From 1930-37, letters from a nine-year old girl, from her siblings and parents found a corridor out of Russia to the forbidden West. Written by Russian Mennonites, the letters were stored in a Campbell's Soup box. Moving from attic to attic for almost 60 years, they were finally discovered in 1989. The letters in this volume have been written by one family: Jasch and Maria Regehr and their children. Subsequent volumes will include letters written by other prisoners and exiled families.

The world needs to know this story. These letters (the largest international corpus of its kind) are written in the moment; not years later when time has eroded the experience. The smell of the barrack, the noise of prisoners, the taste of watery millet soup, the itch of the bed bugs, and the beauty of the frost on the window are described in actual time. Now we can read these accounts of death and torment, but also of hope and endurance. We can remember. We can honour those who wrote, and we can respond.