Arthur Kroeger

Arthur Kroeger worked in Canadian External Affairs before serving as a deputy minister in several other federal government departments. He was chancellor at Carleton University until his retiremen...

Hard Passage
A Mennonite Family's Long Journey from Russia to Canada

Arthur Kroeger

In the 1920s, 20,000 Mennonites left the newly formed Soviet Union and emigrated to Canada. Among them were Heinrich and Helena Kroeger and their five children. After living for 120 years in the comfortable surroundings of a Russian Mennonite community; having struggled through World War I, the Communist Revolution, a civil war, and widespread famine, experienced war, revolution, a typhus epidemic, and hyper-inflation in quick succession. Heinrich and Helena Kroeger decided to uproot their six children and leave behind their home and community for a foreign land. Hard Passage follows the trials and tribulations of the Kroeger family as they cross the vast Atlantic Ocean in search of tranquility, opportunity, and a good life in Canada. Based largely on family diaries and other personal documents, Hard Passageis a social history that speaks to the indomitable spirit of Mennonite immigrants to the Canadian West.

Reviews

"The Kroeger family settled initially near the southeastern Alberta community of Naco (now a ghost town) and moved frequently from one abandoned farm to another, trying without much success, to make a living as farmers in an area known as the Palliser Triangle, a vast swath of heart-break territory across the three Prairie provinces that has inferior land and less rain than surrounding grain-growing areas. Crops were bad in the late 1920s in southeastern Alberta. The situation grew worse during the drought of the 1930s Depression. Meals at the Kroeger home were often boiled wheat, beet peelings or lard sandwiches....facts of the stories, from the persecution of Mennonites in Russia, to their escape, and then their early deprivations on the Prairies, are mesmerizing and often brutal. The story of the discrimination they initially faced in Canada is timely and instructive." - The Ottawa Citizen

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"Imagine a story about a middle-class family who suffers through famine, disease, racial intolerance and the assault of Russian revolutionaries and you might begin to understand where the Kroegers' steely determination comes from. Hard Passage is interesting as a family memoir and it is well researched....a testimonial to the hard work of all immigrant families and their contribution to this nation."
- Susan Jones, St. Albert Gazette