It was a dinner conversation that the members of both families would never forget. Neither family had met the other before, but prayers had been answered for both as they sat down together. The Hartman family prepared the meal, which however, took place in the Masenko home, however, a house the Masenko family was seeing for the first time.
The Carl and Hazel Schild Hartman farm family of Houston County, Minnesota, after the devastation in Europe during World War II, wanted to make a difference in a war-torn world. As faithful and active members of the Hokah Methodist Church, they applied to the Methodist Committee on Overseas Relief to host a family of misplaced persons.
From a world away from Houston County, Minnesota, the Masenko family would continue to be completely dependent on strangers, but strangers who welcomed them after paying their passage.
Life would now be immeasurably better than their existence in war-ravaged Europe.
Carl Hartman had gone to meet their bus on an autumn evening in 1950. It was already dark when the newcomers trudged through the snow to the house, carrying everything they owned in a “small bag, a cardboard box and a battered suitcase,” described adult married daughter Anita Hartman Palmquist, who observed them to be “tired and dejected.”
After an obviously long journey to southeast Minnesota, they were almost too exhausted to eat.
Katherine and her oldest daughter Larissa spoke English. Youngest daughter Yaraslava spoke no English. Stephen and his son Orest “communicated well but more slowly.”
Much of the conversation occurred after the meal as the dishes were cleared and washed. Then Carl and Hazel as well as their five adult children left the Masenkos to explore their new home and rest after their long and obviously arduous journey.
After receiving word that a family would be sent from Europe, the entire Hartman family began to prepare a house on a neighboring farm Carl Hartman had previously purchased. They painted all of the woodwork and the bedroom floors in the five-room farmhouse. New linoleum was purchased for the kitchen and living room floors. New wallpaper adorned every room and hallway. Appliances were acquired; draperies and curtains were hung, and the dwelling was completely furnished.
“As I look back,” wrote Anita over four decades later, “it was quite a project to completely equip a household for five people.” The Hartmans searched their own supplies to come up with bedding, towels and cooking utensils. Hazel, having been an only child, had inherited all of her parents’ belongings. “All of our surplus feed and flour sacks were made into towels, sheets and pillow cases. We pieced tops and tied them into comforters.”
Other items were purchased at auctions. Groceries filled the pantry. Shortly after the refugees arrived, the Methodist Church organized a shower that supplied an electric iron, a toaster, bedding, dishes, rugs and food. “Not all of the items were new, but when they arrived, they had as many comforts in their house as any of us did.”
Stephen Masenko had been raised in Ukraine, which was under the control of the Russian empire during the Russian Revolution of 1917 when Stephen fought against the Bolsheviks. On the losing side, he was among many who fled to Poland, which with the large influx of refugees, placed them into what Stephen termed concentration camps.
Stephen and two other men escaped the camp and walked three days through the Carpathian Mountains down into Czechoslovakia, where he met his future wife Katherine, who it appears was also Ukrainian. Life went well in Czechoslovakia with Stephen graduating from the University of Prague with a Doctor of Philosophy degree.
Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks were expanding their communist rule. When fiercely independent Ukrainian farmers objected to having their privately-owned small farms absorbed into state-run soviet collectives, dictator Josef Stalin confiscated all grain and food supplies of those who failed to meet impossible grain quotas. Stalin closed Ukraine’s borders to prevent starving peasants from fleeing in search for food. During that 1932-33 forced starvation, an estimated 3.9 million Ukrainians starved to death, including Stephen Masenko’s father.
Good times would end in Czechoslovakia when Nazi Germany invaded and occupied that nation in 1938-39. Stephen was taken to Germany where he worked as a slave laborer in a brick factory.
When his health declined, his university education likely led to his being sent to teach in Nazi-occupied Poland. He and Katherine were there, in the 1940s, when the United States bombed
strategic Nazi industrial targets, such as oil refineries. Two-weeks-old Yaraslava was buried under debris of a demolished brick building but was alive when they dug her out.
The family became separated during the bombings with Katherine in possession of the baby while older siblings Orest and Larissa were with their father. Mother and infant were placed in a “camp,” where Katherine heard there were plans to send them to Siberia. She fled with the baby and hid out among farmers who provided shelter and food.
Through an organization, described as similar to the Red Cross, the family was reunited and taken by the Allied Forces to post-war Germany, where they spent nine years in a camp for displaced persons, established by the Allied authorities (United States, France, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Soviet Russia) and the United Nations. During World War II, between 40 and 60 million people had been displaced. Two years after the end of the war, 850,000 people lived in displaced persons camps across Europe.
The Masenkos lived in one room along with two other families, 20 people altogether. Stephen was not in good health. Selling handwork, Katherine was able to earn some money with which she bought eggs and fed them raw to Stephen in an attempt to restore his strength.
To be continued …
Source: “The Masenkos,” a memoir by Anita Hartman Lee Palmquist, 1995
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