First we were entranced with
Children of the Danube, a
story of the Lutherans and Reformed
who came to Hungary to seek their
fortune. Just recently another book
joined Children of the Danube
on the bookshelf. This time it was
Remember to Tell the Children,
A Trilogy Book One: The Pioneers.
Hello Henry . . . All of us on the
DVHH List know of your great skills
at translating and have appreciated
your efforts in helping us
understand the history of our
forefathers as they became members
of the Banat and the Batschka
communities; some of us have read
your books, but a good number of us
do not know much more about you past
that. So, here is our opportunity
to meet and get to know another one
of our “Canadian Cousins.” First of
all, where were you born?
I was
born in Kitchener, Ontario where I
began my career growing up Canadian
in little Swabian Hungary better
known as 23 Oak Street. I attended
various public schools and high
school in Kitchener and following
high school I began a career in
bookkeeping because the idea of
going to college and university was
beyond my family’s means; at that
time they were operating an
underground railway into Canada at
their new home at 122 Breithaupt
Street through which some 75 people
passed through as refugees after the
Second World War. I then later took
the plunge and went back to school
and attended Waterloo College and
the University of Western Ontario.
That’s interesting! But, I
thought you were a Lutheran
minister!
I had
two conflicting dreams: journalism
and theology. Theology won and I
became a Lutheran pastor but
continued with my writing
interests. I was trained to be a
youth worker and ended up—up to my
neck in senior citizens. After
serving a large church in Waterloo,
I was sent as a “missionary” to the
city of Oshawa, east of Toronto, to
attempt to establish a new
congregation. The church sent the
wrong man, to the wrong place at the
wrong time—with a combination like
that the Lord can’t miss and He
didn’t. I did establish a new
congregation after worshipping and
meeting in temporary facilities for
18 years. The kids in the
congregation thought that the
basketball hoop over my head in the
gymnasium of the Grandview School,
from where I preached, was actually
a halo. Instead of building a
“church” we constructed a 12-story
high-rise senior citizen’s complex
in downtown Oshawa with 186
apartments and special units for
physically challenged adults living
alone. There was also a daycare
center for 60 children including
infants, commercial space, and a
community center on the first floor
that was called Augustana Hall where
the congregation gathered to worship
and where the church office was
located.
Was your ministry always in
Canada?
I
also spent time and served in Bethel
just outside of Bielefeld, Germany
where I worked with the Nazareth
Brothers and became one of the
deacons of the Lutheran Church of
Wesphalia and also studied at their
seminary there. You studied
theology and doctrine in the morning
and emptied bedpans or diapered
epileptic children and led Bible
studies for developmentally delayed
adults who were referred to as being
“relationally advanced” in the
afternoon. Evenings were spent at
the different group homes where I
was assigned as the Brother in
charge. It was these brothers and
sisters I met there that taught me
how to love. When my brother-in-law
sought treatment for his cancer in
Athens, Greece some years later I
accompanied him for six weeks during
which time I began preaching in the
lobby of the Perli Hotel and people
from all over the world who were
seeking the same treatment gathered
each Sunday afternoon. I could go
on forever, but that should give you
a taste of my life.
Are you still a practicing
pastor?
I
retired from the pastorate in March
of 1996 and became the executive
director of InterChurch Health
Ministries, an organization I
co-founded with two nurses and
introduced Parish Nursing Ministry
to Canada. For the next ten years I
traveled, preached, taught, mentored
and administered this growing
ministry that has now spread across
the country among eighteen different
denominations. I am now retired.
The focus of my life now is my four
grandchildren and my writing,
researching and genealogy as well as
watching my old classic movie
videos. When I retired the second
time, our grandson Evan asked me
what I was going to do now that I
was retired. I told him I was going
to do whatever I wanted to do
whenever I wanted to do it as long
as his grandmother said it was all
right. His only comment was, “Well
it’s always been like that Ota.”
That’s our family version of Opa.
Tell us a bit about your family,
Henry.
I met
my wife Jean in public school; only
she has little memory of that. We
went to the same church and
“officially” met at Luther League,
the youth group we were both part
of. She lived next door to my
parent’s best friends and she was
one of the Vogt triplets. Other
guys went on double dates, but I had
to arrange triple ones. When I
officially became part of the family
at their Wilker family reunion, they
asked me to do some research on
their family history because they
heard I had an interest in that kind
of thing. When I had finished the
work I discovered that they came
from Grebenau in Hesse in Germany in
1868 and that village was about
twenty kilometers away from where
almost all of my ancestors who went
to Hungary came from. Small world
isn’t it? We were blessed with two
sons, Stephen who is a High School
teacher in Stratford, majoring in
English literature and history, and
has two sons, John and Luke, and a
wonderful wife, Sonya, who is of
German descent. David, our second
son is an allergist and lives in
Barrie with his wife Krista, who is
also a physician, and our
grandchildren Julianna and Evan.
Both of our sons speak German as I
always have. Even though I was born
in Canada, it was my first language
that I had to learn to clean up when
I studied German in university. My
sons accompanied me on a trip “home”
to Hungary after my mother’s death
because that was her last wish that
the “boys would one day go home and
know where they came from.” It was
a memorable occasion for all three
of us and a special bonding time for
them as adults. Jean and I live in
Oshawa, which means we are about an
hour away from David and his family
and two hours away from Stephen.
What got you started in doing
genealogical research?
Ever
since I can remember I wanted to
find out where I belonged. Growing
up in little Swabian Turkey in
Kitchener, Ontario during the Second
World War was a rather traumatic
experience and my brother and I were
the Krauts on Oak Street—we had to
run the gauntlet home from school on
many occasions. I always listened
in on adult conversation and was
fascinated in hearing about home,
this place where I was supposed to
be and had never been. Up until the
spring of 1941, my parents were
still sending money to my
grandparents in Hungary to buy more
land. The stable had just been
built and construction of our house
was to begin when Hungary entered
the war, which meant my parents had
to start out all over again, and we
realized we were going to stay in
Canada after all, much to our
relief. My older brother John and I
continued to go to German school on
Saturday mornings and spoke German
in the house, but we would never
answer our parents in German if we
were in public. The trauma of not
knowing who I was in what was an
“alien” society for my parents,
resulted in my stuttering because
when I started school in September
of 1939, I could not speak a word of
English. I learned fast but was
always afraid people would find out
I was not “one” of them. I
stuttered so badly that by the time
I got to Grade Three I was
incomprehensible when I spoke
English. I was in special speech
classes and the British lady who
taught me would always begin by
asking me, “And what did we have for
dinner last evening?” I didn’t
remember her eating with us, nor did
I know any equivalent English words
to describe chicken paprikasch and
the other culinary delights my
mother made. So I had to make menus
in my head and they were hardly
balanced meals as I remember back
now.
As a former teacher, I shudder at
the way you were treated in the
school system.
A big
change came into my life in Grade
Three when I met a teacher who
forever changed my life and helped
me understand that I could be who I
was and did not have to pretend to
be someone else, that I could be
proud to be a Swabian. She even
visited in our home. Then I had a
teacher the following year who
assured me that, if I changed the
spelling of my name, I could become
a real Canadian. All of these
childhood experiences have
determined who I have become and
were the incentive in finding the
answer to the questions my parents
did not have answers for. Why were
we in Hungary if we were Germans?
How did we get there? Why would
they have ever gone there? When did
they go there? And so on. On the
50th anniversary of my
parents wedding, I made a short
presentation on our family and its
origins on the basis of what I knew
and had been told at the time; when
the dinner was over, my mother took
me aside and said, “Promise me that
you will remember to tell the
children.”
[Ah, the inspiration for your book
title.] From that point
on I was determined to find out the
answers to the questions I had
always asked but I discovered so
much more: my own identity; my
spiritual roots; my place among the
Children of the Danube and what that
could mean in my life as a
Canadian.
Was there a special moment when
you came to realize you would start
genealogical research?
Strangely enough my first venture
into genealogy took place in 1948
when my father took me with him when
we went to the immigration office to
begin the process of bringing my
grandparents, aunts and uncles,
cousins and friends to Canada. I
was about 13 at the time and I had
to draw up charts to prove that all
of these people were related to us,
even though most of them were not.
At the end of the war, when we first
heard what had happened to our
people, my mother discovered that
every girl she had gone to
confirmation class with had been
taken to slave labour in Russia and
my father’s friends and classmates
were POWs in Russia as well. They
committed themselves to anyone who
called on them to help them—as a
result they brought numerous
families to Canada or assisted them
in getting to Australia or the US.
But
the real turning point in my
research was when I was put in
contact with Johann Muller who lived
in Bietigheim-Bissingen in Germany.
He came from the same village as my
mother in Hungary; when he
discovered who I was, he flooded me
with information and sources, and
most importantly, shared his
personal transcriptions from the
church records in over forty
villages in Tolna, Somogy and
Baranya Counties, most of which I
still have in my possession. He
also told me that his earliest
childhood memory was the day when he
joined the villagers, led by the
village band that escorted my mother
to the railway station outside the
village, sending her off to Canada
to marry my father. He wondered why
all of the people were crying at the
time and he wondered why on earth my
mother would ever want to leave
Bonnya. From there I was later
introduced to the internet and, by
accident one night, I found my way
to Rootsweb and noticed a message
about the Bitz family, my paternal
grandmother’s family name and got in
contact with Susan Cole in Oklahoma
who then got me in contact with the
Hrastovac Group—my life has never
been the same since. Then I became
part of the Gyorkony and Bikacs site
and I was introduced to the List.
It was through the encouragement of
many of four fantastic people I
"met" in the Hrastovac Group that I
proceeded with the publication of my
first book Children of the
Danube.
How has your research gone?
I
have been able to trace back the
origins of three of my grandparent’s
families back to villages in Hesse,
Germany. Ironically the only one
that eludes me is the Fischer
family. But I made all kinds of
other interesting discoveries. One
of my families originated in
Switzerland prior to migrating to
the Odenwald in Hesse. I have
Waldensian and Hugenot ancestors who
fled to Hesse to escape persecution
in France and Savoy and their
descendants later moved on in the
Swabian Migration into Hungary. But
I also found that my mother’s family
is connected to the Heidebauern who
were the descendants of Bavarian and
Franconian settlers brought to
western Hungary to help defend the
eastern frontiers of Charlemagne’s
Empire in 970 or so. They were
later joined by Lutheran refugees
from various parts of Austria and
Upper Swabia from around Ravensburg
during the Counter Reformation. So
you see there is a real crazy
patchwork quilt and mosaic in my
family history including a special
Slovak connection as well.
Who of all your ancestors has
made the biggest impression on you,
Henry? Why?
Probably my grandmother, the former
Elisabeth Defner (Tefner) who was
the storyteller in her family; she
passed the skill on to my mother who
then passed it on to me. So in a
sense it is Konrad Tefner who I
wrote about in my first book and
also my new one. There was also a
George Mossberger, one of my
Heidebauern ancestors, who was the
emergency teacher in Pusztavam in
Feher County who left quite a
spiritual legacy to our family. But
what made the greatest impression
upon me was the spirit of adventure
I discovered among all of them and
their willingness to take risks
while continuing to maintain their
identity, character, heritage and
traditions in the face of all kinds
of pressures despite the odds
against their survival, and above
all, their faith that sustained them
through it all.
What has been your most remarkable
find in your roots research? Have you
had an opportunity to visit your
Donauschwaben Village?
I was
amazed that the oral history I was
told was more accurate than I had
supposed would be possible. In
addition to that I was overwhelmed
by the historical documentation I
found and researched this “footnote”
to history as I once put it. I
continue to be amazed that so many
people are in search of themselves.
They come in all ages and sizes.
And there are resources and people
out there who are willing to help
you and support you in what you are
doing. I have visited Hungary four
times and I have been to every
village associated with my family in
Tolna, Somogy and Baranya Counties.
I remember the first time, when I
drove into Bonnya where my mother
was waiting for me. She was
visiting her youngest sister at the
time. When I got out of the car,
she said, “I always told you that
some day I would bring you home.”
Later I went and climbed the “Spitze
Kippel” of her childhood and as I
stood there and looked out into the
horizon for the first time in my
life, I knew what it meant to be at
“home” and “belong” even though all
of the rest of our families had been
expelled from Hungary in 1948,
except for my one aunt. I took my
sons up the hill, too, in 2001; when
they were there they knew they were
in touch with something. Hopefully
in 2008 I will be taking my
grandchildren there with me to stand
on that spot where so many of my
ancestors stood as they looked into
their past and looked forward to
what the future offered them—because
long ago our forbears had boarded
rafts, barges and boats at
Regensburg and headed out into the
unknown down the Danube River. For
that reason, it became the
inspiration for the cover of my
latest book.
Do you have a motto you live by?
Will you share it with us?
Our family motto is: Gott ist
Getreu. God is faithful. Our lives
and history are a testimony to
that.
If
you were confined to only one tip
you might give a fellow researcher,
what would it be?
Find a mentor and be a mentor to
others.
A good number of us are familiar
with the books you have written.
What motivated you to use this
format to write your family history?
The advice of my son Stephen and the
realization that all history is a
story. Flesh and blood people and
their stories is the best vehicle to
tell the history. All history is a
reflection on our personal
experience.
Thank you, Henry, for this marvelous
insight into the fine man who has
written beautiful stories about his
family who lived, loved, and
labored in the land he called
“home.”
Henry
& the DVHH ...
Henry
served as a
member of the former DVHH Administration Team, which focused on decision
making and planning for the DVHH project. He currently
serves on the DVHH Editorial Committee and is the
Swabian Turkey Regional Coordinator.
See:
The Collected Works of Henry A. Fischer
Thank you
Henry for your contributions to the DS community
and the DVHH
Project!
[Published at DVHH.org
- 07 Sep 2006]
Movers &
Shakers
Correspondent: Rose Mary Keller Hughes
- date: 07 Sep 2006
