Facing the past

Film documents life of immigrant who fled religious persecution, eluded death and now shares story of hope with local students

Retired Lawrence psychologist Henry Remple, 98, was born in the Ukraine in 1908 to a German-speaking Mennonite family and escaped the Russian Revolution by immigrating to America. His story is the subject of a documentary, Henry

Henry Remple’s life is a story about bouncing back.

About war, religious persecution, illness, starvation and death. But also about escape, endurance, hope, courage and survival.

At 98 years old, Remple still recalls in vivid detail his family’s 1922 journey from the Ukrainian Mennonite village of Alexanderwohl to Batum, an international port city on the Black Sea where they hoped to negotiate passage to America.

They weren’t the only ones. More than 250 Mennonite refugees waited for months in Batum (now Batumi). Many never made it out, succumbing to malaria, typhus and starvation.

One by one, Remple’s family members died around him; he narrowly avoided death himself. By October of that year, six of his siblings and both of his parents had passed away.

Henry and his two older sisters – Agatha, 19, and Agnes, 15 – were orphans.

Decades later, Remple dug up his boyhood journal at his Lawrence home and translated from German to English the penciled memories he had captured as a 13-year-old forced to grow up too fast.

He turned his story into a book, published in 2001. Now it’s the subject of a documentary by Lawrence filmmaker Linda Haskins, of Take Ten Inc., which is celebrating its 20th year. “Henry D. Remple: Finding Hope in Troubled Times” will be shown at 2:30 p.m. today at the Lawrence Public Library, 707 Vt.

The film shows Remple, a retired psychologist, visiting Lawrence classrooms, sharing his experiences with students and stressing positive ways to deal with life’s most difficult hardships.

Lucy McAllister, Remple’s daughter, learned those lessons firsthand. When she was very young, she knew just that her father had a rough start in life.

“Getting the depth and breadth of it came later,” she says. “But even so, it was a remarkable way to grow up, knowing that you could really handle anything. It was a good model.”

The change

Remple’s early childhood was a happy one. He was born Nov. 25, 1908, to Dietrich and Aganetha Rempel. His father was mayor of Alexanderwohl, and his mother came from a wealthy family.

The Rempels were descendants of German Mennonites who, in the late 1700s, emigrated to the fertile lands in southern Russia at the invitation of Catherine II. They enjoyed religious freedom and exemption from military service.

They prospered – developing a model agricultural community – and became the envy of native Russians.

“And then, of course, the war came,” Remple says, “and everything began to change.”

Russian trust in the Mennonites eroded, partly because many of them spoke German – the language of the enemy. When the Communists took over, they began nationalizing property, seizing food and prohibiting religious teachings. Then civil war broke out – pitting the Red Army against the White Army – and bandits entered Mennonite villages, plundering and burning homes, killing men and raping women.

The Rempels decided to flee.

‘Back to life’

On May 31, 1922, they arrived in Batum in the Russian state of Georgia, hoping to leave for the United States in a couple of months. The wait stretched to nearly a year.

“There were a lot of people in the same situation, so there was a lot of competition for whatever food might be available,” Remple says. “So we spent a good bit of time not having enough to eat.”

Remple became seriously ill and was hospitalized. An infection from an unsterile needle left one of his legs wizened, and doctors wanted to amputate. Agatha refused and carried her brother from the hospital. Using hot compresses, she and Agnes nursed Henry for several months.

“Gradually, I began to come back to life again,” Remple says.

In the meantime, Americans and Canadians with the Mennonite Central Committee started sending food to the refugees and arranged for sponsors willing to pay the $200 per person required to bring them to America. Remple and his sisters traveled to Constantinople to wait their turn under the U.S. immigration quota system.

That’s where Remple started his diary.

Six months later, the siblings set sail for New York aboard the Saxonia, following their father’s advice to “always go forward.” They arrived at Ellis Island early the morning of Oct. 27, 1923.

Remple recalls seeing the Statue of Liberty and thinking, “We’ve actually made it.”

Life of service

Much to their disappointment, the siblings went to separate families. Remple ended up in Henderson, Neb., where he began learning English.

“I decided I wanted to forget about Russia,” he says. “I wanted to become an American as quickly as possible, so I never talked about my past.”

He also changed the spelling of his name from Rempel to Remple because Americans tended to mispronounce it.

Remple later attended Tabor College in Hillsboro and the University of Minnesota, eventually receiving his doctorate in clinical psychology from Kansas University.

He met his future wife, Mariana, at Tabor, where she was the daughter of the school’s first president. During World War II, Remple joined the U.S. Army, using his language skills to interrogate German prisoners of war. He did this despite being a Mennonite, and a pacifist.

“After what I went through in Russia, there was no question what I would do,” he says.

Following the war, Remple worked for the Veterans Administration in Leavenworth and served on the board of directors for Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center in Lawrence for 14 years.

‘Wonderful’ life

His family finally convinced him to start telling his story in the 1970s; Linda Haskins began filming in 2003. The documentary includes interviews with Remple, his family and experts, as well as photos and historical footage. An accompanying Web site provides interview transcripts, resources and curriculum tools for teachers.

“We ended up with a product that continues his professional legacy,” says Lucy McAllister, Remple’s daughter. “Because of him, we have pulled together a whole variety of techniques that parents and educators and other people who work with kids can read about or watch and learn to use with their own kids.”

Remple couldn’t be more pleased. Although he initially had difficulty telling his story, talking about his childhood has become easier over time. And, he says, he has a lot to be grateful for.

“Since that time, my life has been quite a wonderful thing,” he says. “I’ve had some problems, but most of them were unimportant compared to the things that we had gone through before.”