he never recovered. Fourteen years later, the Trading House business was in ruin; a hard blow to my parents and the whole family. I was sixteen years old at the time, and newly baptized.
My parents had planned for my brother and me, as soon as we finished school, to start training to work with the family in the business. For that reason, I attended our local school in Altona. Then came the collapse that changed my life.
Unfortunately, Altona was not considered a good enough school to prepare me for acceptance into a university so I would have to set my sights on something less lofty. My thoughts turned to become a clerk, a lawyer, a priest, something I could do to support myself.
The closest good school for me attend was Ratzeburg, a respectable, 700-year-old Cathedral School, located on an island in the middle of a lake, but whose students are welcomed at most German universities. Johann George Russwurm was the school’s principal and a tough teacher of religion. His son, Carl, was and is my best friend.
After I finished school at Ratzeburg, I attempted to study mathematics at the University of Copenhagen. It didn’t take me long to realized math was not going to be my life’s mission. I knew that Carl was studying at Berlin University, so I decided to transfer there to study what I felt was my true calling, theology. Carl and I soon crossed paths and decided to share a rented flat.
We discussed religion almost every evening. Although he eventually decided to get re-baptized, he would never be an active Anabaptist. Besides our mutual viewpoint on religion, we were both members of the student fraternity Burschenschaft Arminia, active in many German universities.
The group was considered radical because of its belief in the social and political ideologies of freedom, brotherhood, equality and, most dangerous of all, nationalism inspired by the French Revolution. The group was prohibited by the authorities and, therefore often forced met in secret and under a disguised name like the Reading Circle.
Although nationalism was fashionable in all of Europe, it was most notably so in German universities. Carl wore a German tricolor ribbon of black, red and gold pinned under his vest. Carl was a nationalist and it was causing him a lot of problems.
Perhaps a bit of background is required here: After the Napoleonic Wars, the emperors of Russia and Austria along with the Prussian king formed a Holy Alliance. Their agenda was simple: To preserve absolute monarchy and silence all nations in their realms.
Nationalism, to them, was a terrible idea. The world, they felt, didn’t need independent countries, but only big states with as many subordinated ethnic groups as possible. These autocrats couldn’t see anything positive, for example, in Polish nationalism. They had just divided Poland between each other.
Carl made a big mistake by agitating the Germans. He was ordered by the university to be under a house arrest that went on for months. Eventually, he got fed and abandoned his studies.
The university authorities, however, were not satisfied with this. They were angry enough to consider taking legal action that could lead to a prison sentence. To be on the safe side, one night Carl sneaked over the border into Denmark.
To me, the whole thing did not mean much, but then, I wasn’t a German. Our family came from Flanders and, officially we were citizens of Denmark.
In those days, it wasn’t hard for an unsuccessful student to find work as a tutor. The mansions of noble Baltic German families were scattered all over the Russian states of Estonia, Livonia, and Latvia. Because public schools were usually far away from these countryside manors, private teachers were often hired to teach their children.
Carl was offered a job teaching the off-spring of Baron Von Ungern-Stenberg at his manor, Echmes, in western Estonia. I traveled with him and found similar work nearby.
All things considered, we were not exactly happy. Our jobs were acceptable and the salary was good, but young men need a social life and we had none.
When the nobility feasted, we poor teachers were not included. Besides that, we didn’t exactly consider drinking vodka with manor’s taskmasters’ enjoyable entertainment. It was almost impossible to mingle with the opposite sex. The daughters of the manors were too far above our sphere, and the peasant girls spoke only the common folk’s language of Estonian. Out of desperation, Carl swore to learn it.
The small, but cozy former Hanseatic Town of Reval, Estonia’s capital of 15,000 people, was nearby so we decided to seek work there. We applied and were successful in securing posts at the local Cathedral School. I was to be a teacher, and Carl the director of the Cathedral’s boarding house.
In March, I received a letter from my father in Altona. He wrote that mother had died and the funeral had already been held. And, he said, although the family business no longer existed, many debts still remained. Their creditors, he said, were becoming impatient, and soon the family would be without a roof over their heads. Even their last refuge – the estate of Hanerau – was going under the hammer.
My father had ten children: three sons and seven daughters. Unfortunately, only two of the girls were married, although all of them were old enough to be. There were too many children left at home for my father to support, so he asked if my sister Catharina and foster-sister Hanna could come and live with me. I naturally agreed.
For transportation of girls, my father chose a ship named Rode Tulp. It belonged to the skipper named Simon Friesen, whose services our business had used in the past. Catharina and Hanna arrived safely in Reval in June.
My apartment was located in the Domberg Hill area of Reval, in a high-end residential part of town. Considering my modest income, I felt I didn’t belong there, but the Cathedral School owned furnished flat there and it was rent-free for a teacher. My place wasn’t huge, but there was room enough for the three of us to live comfortably.
Hanna Claes was an orphan who had come to live with our family at the age of eleven. Hanna’s extended family had escaped from Eindhoven to Schleswig-Holstein during the religious upheavals in the 1570s. They settled down in the town of Friedrichstadt. It was known as “the city of tolerance” for offering refuge to so many of those who suffered from religious persecution.
Hanna’s family, who were brewers by trade, resettled in Altona. They belonged to the same Mennonite parish as my family, and our two families became close friends.
Then horror struck and Hanna, along with her ten other brothers and sisters, became orphans overnight.
Hanna’s parents were visiting her father’s brother, an old bachelor who lived in Friedrichstadt. It was a cold night and the fog was rising off the Eider River so they lite a fire in the hearth.
Sometimes during the night, a glowing coal must have dropped to the wood floor and begun to smolder. In the morning, neighbors saw smoke rising from the house, but it was too late. All three were already dead.
The Mennonites have always taken care of the orphans. The eleven Claes family children were placed with different families around Altona. Our family could only take one.
I have always regarded Hanna, who is ten years my junior, my little sister. Sometimes Catharina would say she thought I liked Hanna best. I knew she was only teasing.
Captain Friesen was a big, strong-featured, clean-cut man with skin chapped by the sun and sea. He had blue eyes and blond hair that he wore a bit too long. He was in his thirties, I guessed, and very well mannered. Like most Mennonites, he wore all black except for his white collarless shirt.
I felt a distinct sense of déjà vu upon meeting him. He seemed so familiar,
