On September 12, 1943, Agatha Loewen, with her mother and two sisters, left her home in Gnadenfeld, Molotschna for the last time. Her family was among thousands of Mennonites who joined a caravan of horses and wagons many miles long on a refugee trek westward from Ukraine during the Second World War. As a historian who has explored and reflected upon these events for a number of years, I wish I'd been there to really see what it was like.

The 'great trek' out of the Soviet Union in 1943-44 followed two years of wartime German occupation of the 150-year-old settlements of southern Ukraine. Families like Agatha's had already experienced over a decade of Stalinist terror that saw churches closed, property seized, and many individuals - mostly men - arrested, executed, or exiled. By the summer of 1943 the Red Army was advancing rapidly from the east to reclaim its territory and punish its citizens that sympathized with the occupiers. The German army was ordered to retreat and to take with it the remaining population of Soviet Germans, numbering approximately 350,000, of which about ten percent were Mennonite.

Agatha and her family were given barely two days to prepare for their refugee journey: they baked and roasted zwieback, butchered any remaining livestock and packed the meat in lard, and heaped their wagons to overflowing with chests, sewing machines, bicycles, cooking pots, and whatever else they could fit. Many villagers were ordered to fill their houses with straw before they were torched by the army. I wonder how it felt to leave one's home, knowing that family members, especially fathers, husbands, and brothers, were left behind in exile, possibly alive, but probably never to be seen again.

For the next four months, the refugees moved slowly westward, hoping each extended stop would be permanent but continually urged onward by sounds of the advancing warfront. I wonder what it would have been like to eat, sleep, and indeed live outdoors in incessant rain and the cold of approaching winter. As a mother with a cupboard full of snacks for my two growing boys, I wonder what it was like for mothers who had so little to feed their children, especially as the journey dragged on and the food supply diminished. I wonder how the refugees managed the ever-present fears - of airplane strafing, of a broken wagon, of rape, of capture, of not making it to the west.

Agatha and her family were among the lucky ones to make it far enough to the west and eventually immigrate to Canada. Thousands of others were not: many died on the warfront or were overtaken by the Soviet army and sent back to labor camps in their country of birth. In recent months, images of refugees fleeing their homes in Afghanistan or languishing in camps in Pakistan have reminded me of the many photographs I saw and stories I heard of Mennonite refugees fleeing their homes in 1943. The pictures, both visual and verbal, are remarkably similar. And the despair and suffering represent patterns of history that are too often repeated. As a historian, I wish I'd been on that 'great trek'. But really, I'm very grateful I was not.