80 years ago, in the town of Tiegenhagen, a child was born. He was the only child of Fritz Maximillian Nass & Irmgard Johanna Hamm. As the tale was told to me by Irmgard’s elder sister, Margarete and my mother, Irmgard was from a well to do family and lived on the family estate. They were German-speaking Mennonites living in Prussia. (My mother has since corrected some of my understanding since the first time that I posted this.)
Irmgard’s mother, Elise Dueck, was from a wealthier family and the family estate had been in the Dueck family.
Over the years, the border of Germany changed numerous times in various ways. Various locations have been known as Germany, Prussia, Poland depending on the year starting in the Middle Ages. From the Brittanica Encyclopedia:
Prussia, German Preussen, Polish Prusy, in European history, any of certain areas of eastern and central Europe, respectively (1) the land of the Prussians on the southeastern coast of the Baltic Sea, which came under Polish and German rule in the Middle Ages, (2) the kingdom ruled from 1701 by the German Hohenzollern dynasty, including Prussia and Brandenburg, with Berlin as its capital, which seized much of northern Germany and western Poland in the 18th and 19th centuries and united Germany under its leadership in 1871, and (3) the Land (state) created after the fall of the Hohenzollerns in 1918, which included most of their former kingdom and which was abolished by the Allies in 1947 as part of the political reorganization of Germany after its defeat in World War II.
The estate was in East Germany and when the lands were divided again, the family decided not to stay.
Fritz was a non-Mennonite from a neighboring German community. He was the farmhand. A month after the beginning of World War 2, Irmgard married him at Ladekopp on November 18, 1939.
I don’t know what that life would have been like during this time of political unrest, but 2 years later, on March 6, 1941, Hans-Georg Nass was born. My father didn’t talk about his childhood. I don’t even know what/if he remembered much of his time in (what is now Poland) the Old Country.
By 1944, his parents were divorced. It is my understanding that this was a big deal/scandal for various reasons; 1. the era (40s), 2. religious/cultural practice did not agree with this 3. the reason for the divorce
According to Tante Margarete, Fritz was not in it for love, but more for the money, the stepping stone to greater status. He had married a woman with property that was lost. So after the divorce, he married another woman and had a daughter with her.
As his maternal grandfather, Hans Jakob Hamm, had died in 1935 from lung cancer, my father was raised by the women of the Hamm/Dueck family: his grandmother, Elise; his aunt, Margarete, and briefly, his mother. (Irmgard died of leukemia in 1951. I can’t remember if the details that I was told about her death, in terms of the location or situation. ) The remaining women were Displaced and decided to head to Canada. Margarete told me that she petitioned a judge and requested permission to take her mother and nephew to Canada, and that she had been so persistent that his reply had been something like “if it will get you to leave me alone, go now before I change my mind.”
So on February 8, 1952, the Beaverbrae arrived at Saint John, New Brunswick from Bremen.
From there, the 3 went to Manitoba and lived in Selkirk ( I think). The women worked at Bethania Personal Care Home as nurses aides. According to their website, Bethania Mennonite PCH was founded in 1945 by the Mennonite Benevolent Society. Its first location was about 5 miles north of the village of Middlechurch on the banks of the Red River. At that time it provided care for 62 people.
My mother said that my father was sent to a private school and boarded with a local family. I assume it was because the women were working all the time and they thought that it would be better for him.
It is my understanding that he hated it the boarding part, staying with another family, rather than his own. He attended University of Manitoba and earned a BSc. He married my mother on June 6, 1964 in Winnipeg, Manitoba before they moved to West Lafayette, Indiana where he earned his PhD at Perdue University. Dr. Hans Nass put out hundreds of resumes before he was offered a position in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada. While his original study/work was with corn, his focus was changed to winter wheat.
Over the years, I heard various things about his work. He was a “wheat breeder” or “seed grower” and worked for the federal government in a 2 story brick building that locals referred to as “the research station”. It wasn’t until I was in my 20’s that I heard it called “Agriculture Canada”. I have memories of going to the greenhouse to see his seeds. There was a lily pond near by that had frogs in the summer, and froze over in winter to become our free ice rink. I loved to go there and see the seeds in brown bags under the orange heat lamps. There was a tunnel that was low (for us tall folk – dad was 6’1) and led to the office building. There I could go to another lab where the seed counters, scales and other equipment were. The best was getting into his office chair and spinning. My father worked there since 1970 until 2005. In that time, he was numerous committees, wrote articles for journals and bred 18 different varieties of wheat that are/were grown on the Eastern coast of Canada.
My father was a quiet man, an introvert. He didn’t talk about himself much and his silence intimidated most of my friends. It took a while for people to get to know him. He had a dry sense of humor and was the king of “dad jokes”. He and my husband would have gotten along well.
Dad also was a workaholic. At least that is the term that I use. I used to joke that my father’s priorities were “God, Work and Family”, or “Work, God and Family”. But I realized that he was just passionate about his work. I have memories of my father shoveling the driveway so that he could get the car out, only to have the roads be unpassable. One winter, he trudged down our street in snow up to his hips because he had to get to the greenhouse to check on the plants. Even though he was in charge of his team, he felt it made more sense for him to go, as he only lived a 5 or 10 minute drive away, then for his teammates/assistants to go, who lived on farms further out of town.
Perhaps it was the fact that my parents grew up in Mennonite church/culture, but it seemed that we lived at the church. At least as a child, that is how it seemed. My parents were active in any church that we were attending. My father was a member of the choir, an elder (aka deacon), and my mother was on various committees. It seemed that we spent a lot of time in a church that I remember saying that I considered the Church to be my second home. When I was asked about my life’s calling and what Church meant to me, the answer I often gave was “I was born in the Church, raised in the Church and I will die in the Church”. My parents taught us that our faith isn’t just something that we believe, it is an integral part of our lives; it is what we are and how we live. This is part of the legacy that my dad left.
In 1993/4, my father became ill. He had grown up with Hemophilia Type B, also known as Christmas Disease. Luckily, he did not need blood infusions too often. My mother believes that when he had a root canal, that is when he got the tainted blood with Hepatitis C. In 1997, he had a liver transplant. I was living with my parents that year — working to save money for my masters degree (and I had applied too late), and remember the day that he got the call. He had an hour to decide if he wanted it or not. My mother called me up the stairs to her room where she was packing a suitcase and explained that they were leaving to catch the ferry (from Borden to mainland NB) to go to Halifax and that dad was going to get a liver transplant. I would be home alone for a few weeks. I was 22.
After the surgery, he was on a cocktail of antiviral and anti-rejection drugs. He still continued to work when my mother finally let him go back to work. Dad had a lot of vacation time and sick leave saved up, because he hated taking vacations. (“Why sleep in some strange bed when you have a perfectly comfortable one at home?”) He ended up taking half a year off and didn’t really return to the office. I don’t think that he “retired”. He was dedicated to his work and I always thought that he would die while still working.
I have many a memory of Sunday drives that ended with us waiting in the car while he waded through some field of wheat. There is a photo of him in the field with 2 of his colleagues. I think that my mom was given this when my father died.
I didn’t realize until his death that he had contributed so much to the wheat/grain industry. He would get teased by his colleagues about the “boring” names of his varieties. Dad named them where they were grown, whereas I’m told that others would name them after their family members. So he named one after my mother. In those Sunday drives, he would often take photos of the wheat fields. Some would have white, wooden stakes with the names on them. In sorting through the photos and a LOT of slides, there were a lot of wheat fields. To me, they all looked the same. One day, I came across an odd photo and asked my mother about it.
“Mom? Why are YOU in the middle of a wheat field?”
The photo was my mother posing with a huge smile in the front of plot of wheat near a sign that told you the plot was called “Helena”. Mom told me that one day they had gone for a drive and he was taking pictures. “And I said, wait! and jumped in the field because that was for my name.” (or something like that.) When he died, she asked for a stalk of that wheat to bundle and dry.
In the end, my father died on April 7, 2005 at the age of 64 due to hepatatic cancer.
It has been 16 years since he left us. Today, he would have been 80.
That ASD Mom 