At first glance, it looks like a simple child’s apron and a modest wall hanging. But in the curator's room at the Mennonite Heritage Village Museum (MHV) in Steinbach, these newly donated artifacts are telling a remarkable story of survival, war, migration, and resilience.
“So this was a donation that just came to MHV at the end of last month,” says Andrea Klassen, Senior Curator at the museum. “It’s our most recent one, and the history of it dates back to the Mennonite migration that came to Canada after World War II.”
Local family donates 100 year old items
The items belonged to Maria Braun Friesen, a Mennonite woman whose life spanned war, revolution, and the long journey from Ukraine to Manitoba. One item, a child’s apron, was stitched by Maria when she was just 11 years old in 1926 during a summer camp in what was then the Soviet Union.
“She embroidered ‘Sei fleissig’, which means ‘be productive’, along with her initials ‘MB,’” Klassen explains. “There are little scissors, a spool of thread, a thimble, all embroidered with such care. You can tell even then, embroidery was a passion of hers.”
The history of Maria Braun
Maria was born in 1915 in the Chortitza Colony, present-day Ukraine, into a land-owning family. Her childhood and young adult years were marked by political turmoil, famine, war, and upheaval. Still, she found time to stitch, to create beauty, and to build a home.
“She married Isaac Friesen in 1937, and they lived in a primitive house with a dirt floor. That’s where the wall hanging comes from,” says Klassen, pointing to the second donated item. “It says, ‘Sleep happily without worries. Greet the morning with joy.’ Which is just amazing, considering what was happening around them at that time.”
By 1943, the couple and their two young children, one just six weeks old, joined the "Great Trek" of 350,000 ethnic Germans fleeing westward from advancing Soviet forces. Among the few personal belongings they packed were that apron and the wall hanging.
“That detail sticks with me,” says Klassen. “They’re fleeing a war, with two tiny kids, and they choose to bring these. The apron from her childhood. The wall hanging from their first home. It makes you ask, what do we carry with us, and why?”
The family ended up in Germany during the final years of the war, where they lived in refugee camps and worked with MCC, the Mennonite Central Committee. In 1947, they immigrated to Canada, settling first in the Arnaud area and eventually buying a small farm near Niverville.
Name changed due to arrival in Germany
There are layers to this story: Maria’s strength and creativity, Isaac’s resilience, and the small decisions that reveal so much. One such detail: Isaac, whose birth name was Jewish-sounding in a dangerous time, changed it to Arthur during their years in Hitler’s Germany.
“That was something a lot of people did,” Klasen explains. “Names could be a liability. The donor, Maria’s daughter, said her mom believed the fact that her husband had a leg amputated in 1941 actually saved his life. He wasn’t sent to the frontlines. And it also meant she wasn’t alone with the kids on the trek, which was incredibly dangerous for women.”
The beautifully hand-embroidered headboard covering
And then there’s the wall hanging or headboard covering. It's a stunning piece of embroidery, not only for what it says, but for how it was made.
“When I turned it over, I couldn’t see any loose threads,” notes Klassen. “It’s clean, no loops. Like, where did she put everything?”
Continuing, she adds, “You can tell how careful she was, how much she cared about it. It speaks to the patience and pride in her work.”
Mennonite family history goes into MHV archives... for now
Though the items won’t go on public display immediately, they’re already being cataloged and preserved. Klassen says they would have fit perfectly in a past exhibit, "Mennonites at War", but for now, just sharing the story is powerful in itself.
“It speaks to the resiliency of people at that time,” she says. “To the creativity of women making beauty in very hard circumstances. And honestly, to the quiet strength it takes to carry your past across oceans, not just in memory, but in thread and fabric.”
For now, these pieces, tucked away for decades, have found their place. Not just in the museum’s collection, but in the story of a people who made a home, stitch by stitch, in a new land.