Return of the native
The Soviets took his father and evicted his family, but when a window opened, Harry Giesbrecht returned to do business. Now nearly 80, he still keeps up a feverish pace to help repair and restore his homeland.
The train still rumbles through Lichtenau, Harry Giesbrecht’s birthplace in the heart of Ukraine’s historic “Mennonite region.”
It carries passengers and freight, but not nearly the throngs of the 1920s. Then its cargo was Mennonites. Lots of them.
The mainline station on the edge of the village holds a mystical grip on the memories of Mennonites who gathered there in droves to escape the unfolding Bolshevik tyranny. That was where thousands clambered aboard with their few possessions, leaving behind homes, farms, and relatives as they headed for a new life in Canada.
You can still watch the train come through, but today there are no teeming crowds of emigrants, no tearful farewells, no mournful hymns and prayers.
Harry Giesbrecht never made it onto one of those trains. By the time he came along, the flow of emigration had ebbed. When he left, it was on foot.
Evicted by the Bolsheviks
Lichtenau was one of the first villages in the Molotchna colony, settled by Mennonites from Prussia in 1804. It was located a few miles south of Halbstadt, a larger administrative and educational centre. For more than a century Mennonites flourished there.
But that ground to an excruciating halt. At the age of four, Giesbrecht was sucked into the swirling conflict of the Bolshevik Revolution. His father, who had been a bank manager and worked for a trade mission, was arrested as a political prisoner, dispatched to a prison camp, and forced to work on the Trans-Siberian railroad. Giesbrecht’s mother and her seven children were ordered to leave.
“We were thrown out of the house,” says Giesbrecht. “We were allowed to take only what we could carry on our backs. So we walked. We walked for three days, sleeping in the ditch at night, to Melitopol, and spent a year there before moving to Nikopol.”
That was home until 1943, when they and many other Mennonites managed to get to Germany during the Second World War. The years were hard and hungry. “I never knew the feeling of a full stomach until I got to Canada in 1948,” Giesbrecht says.
His father was eventually released from prison and rejoined his family. “But he was never the same after that,” says Giesbrecht. “He was broken in spirit when he came back.”
The years of flight and scrounging to exist were like something out of a refugee novel. Giesbrecht describes the gritty struggles in an accent thickly gravelled with Russian, his first language.
The scars have not made him bitter nor dampened his lively wit. Instead, the memories seem to fuel his irrepressible spirit as he enthuses about the many projects he now carries on as a refugee who returned, who “made good” and now “does good.” There aren’t many folk around who do more business in Russia – or more mission. Stories abound of his free-flowing generosity: sending supplies to orphanages, replacing a furnace at a village clinic, or digging deep to rescue a struggling business.
He doesn’t hesitate to point out the shortcomings of the system that nearly wrecked his family, but nor does he gloat. He has chosen a higher road – to share, repair, and show a better way.
“What, after all, is life all about if you cannot give, and only take,” he says.
Canadian shores
When Giesbrecht reached Canada, it didn’t take long to find outlets for his work ethic. He found a job at a Winnipeg sausage company, but soon saw opportunities as an engineer and worked for Manitoba Hydro designing substations for the emerging electrification of the province.
Later he joined a growing construction company which eventually morphed into a partnership with two other members of Giesbrecht’s Mennonite Brethren church. Called Central Canadian Structures Ltd., it would grow to become a premier international contractor of grain elevators and dryers. When traditional grain handling facilities were supplanted by large regional terminals, the company moved into other types of construction – factories, warehouses, schools, and hospitals.
Back in the USSR
In the mid-1980s he was invited “out of the blue” to the Soviet Union to participate in a “technology exchange.” For three days his hosts picked Giesbrecht’s brains.
“They took everything out of me that I had, and then I asked them to give, too.”
But there was nothing forthcoming.
The plainspeaking Giesbrecht told them, “‘This is not an exchange of technology, it’s a transfer of technology.’ So I went home.”
Six months later he got a letter from the Trade Union, the biggest organization in the Soviet Union with 16 million members.
“They owned every hotel and every resort, and now they wanted to know if they could host foreigners,” says Giesbrecht, who instantly saw this would be impossible without massive upgrading or rebuilding.
So they invited him to build a brand new 13-storey 365-room hotel in Leningrad (since renamed St. Petersburg), the second-largest city in the country.
That $10.5 million project was Giesbrecht’s first job there, and “I stayed ever since.”
The venture gave him media exposure as the first western company to work in the Soviet Union. “It’s almost a case of revenge in reverse, of turning the other cheek,” he told the press at the time. “We have decided to forgive and help out because we believe the Soviets are sincere.”
The hotel project was anything but easy. Conditions were far from western standards.
But Giesbrecht relished the challenge – and the irony – of working back in the homeland where he had once been unwelcome.
Over time he erected apartment buildings in Moscow, the Canadian embassy in Kiev, and a huge grain handling complex in Dnepropetrovsk.
For years he travelled back and forth 16 times a year.
“Now I go only about 10 times; I’m supposed to be retired,” he says.
A few years ago he turned over Central Canadian Structures to his son, but he still handles the Russian work, which represents about 30 percent of the firm’s business.
An honourary citizen
Giesbrecht has mastered the art of getting things done in a peculiar environment where da can mean nyet. Seasoned by years of operating under Soviet and later mafia clouds, Giesbrecht can tell eye-popping stories of surviving in a murky climate where “you don’t get a dog licence without paying a bribe.”
As a man who knew his way around, Giesbrecht fielded countless requests from mission agencies that flocked to take advantage of the new openness of the early 1990s. He was always willing to help. He found quarters for staff members of MB Communications (now Family Life Network), MEDA, and Mennonite Central Committee. He opened doors for Campus Crusade and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
His heaviest lifting would be for ventures closer to home – his original home.
Like Lichtenau, which today has a population of 900. Giesbrecht singlehandedly refurbished its school system with computers and sent the teachers for special training. He bought a school bus to serve surrounding villages. He established a clinic so the elderly would no longer have to walk three miles for medical care.
He is now an honourary citizen of the same community from which he was expelled in 1932.
The Mennonite Centre
His eyes glow brightest when he speaks of the Mennonite Centre in Molochansk (once known as Halbstadt). It’s located in the old Mennonite Maedchenschule (girls school) which his elder sister attended. He and Winnipeg architect Rudy Friesen renovated the rundown building and restored its original glory. It now houses an active spiritual and humanitarian ministry, including language and computer training, and help for the elderly.
Although his return to his homeland was ostensibly to do business, Giesbrecht’s charitable ventures outnumber his commercial enterprises. Each has its own reward.
His eyes mist when describing a kindergarten and summer camps with nice beds and clean sheets.
“Your heart smiles when you see that,” he says.
Giesbrecht’s work is seen locally as a witness of forgiveness and reconciliation. At one public meeting, the mayor of Zaporozhye, a city of a million people, declared publicly, “You Mennonites have been persecuted. You’ve been sent to jail. You’ve been sent to Siberia. And now you come back and are helping us, in spite of being wronged.”
Another project in Moscow
His current project is building the campus of the Russian-American Christian University in Moscow. The first of its kind to receive state approval and full accreditation by the ministry of education, it seeks to equip young Russians for leadership in business, church, and civil society. It has 450 students and 25 faculty.
Up to now it has rented space in the former Patrice Lumumba University, but work began three years ago on its own campus. The main building, an $18 million project, is on the verge of completion.
“It’s beautiful,” he says. “Every time I come, and see it growing, my heart leaps a little.”
Harry Giesbrecht will turn 80 this fall. He says the university project will be his last.
“After this job I’ll be out,” he declares.
Still, it’s hard to imagine him saying no if another worthy project appears. And whether it’s a commercial or charitable venture may not make a difference.
For Harry Giesbrecht, business and mission are mixed together.
“It’s all in one,” he says with a grin.
“Like borscht.”
—Wally Kroeker
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