Born for the USA
By Chris Funnell | July 4, 2017, New Boston Post
Now summer is in full bloom, and due to abundant rains, gardening
has become a game of catch-up, weeds need pulling, and the
mosquitoes are ferocious. Whenever I feel like giving up on a job
like that to plop on the couch with a bag of chips, instead I have
been inspired to persevere by the autobiography of an amazing woman
and true patriot.
Elly Matz immigrated to America more than sixty-five years ago from
Ukraine, realizing her childhood dream to come to the land she first
heard about on her father’s knee. Her ancestors had gone in the
other direction, migrating in the 1760s with many other settlers
from Germany to the fertile farmland south of Russia. Born in 1920,
three years after the Russian Revolution, Elly saw the demise of her
people’s way of life as the farms were being taken by the
communists and divided up.
Not long after age 6, when she first stated her intent to move to
America when she grew up, life began to get very hard and starvation
became a daily threat. The German farmers who were once welcomed in
to farm the black soil were now enemies of the communists who
starved and imprisoned them. Elly knew no real childhood because,
being strong and healthy, she was needed to work when her father
grew too weak. Eventually, her father was taken to prison never to
be seen again.
She married at 16, and on a visit to her family’s village when she
was a young mother about to give birth to her second child, she
discovered her Babushka, mother, and little sisters had all been
taken to Siberia, along with whole villages of Germans born in
Ukraine. She was treated like a stranger in her own land during
World War II, not accepted by Russia or Germany, but useful as a
translator. She was on her own after her husband was killed at the
front, and she determined to leave what she knew would be certain
slavery at the hands of the communists to run for her life with her
5-year-old son. (Her second child had died soon after birth.)
Elly’s autobiography It Was Worth It All is a
great remedy for the times we live in, when the framers of our
Constitution are seen on college campuses as “dead white guys”
and the foundational writings they sweated over in the summer of
1787 in Philadelphia routinely go under the judicial activist’s
knife. If you want to find refreshing and unabashed patriotism, talk
to an immigrant who has escaped the Red Army’s (or other despots’)
assault on freedom.
Elly survived starvation, disease, beatings, bombings, labor camps,
and concentration camps. She even survived her own attempt to take
her own life to escape the misery she had known so long during the
war and its aftermath. She figures she was destined to make it here
to the land of her dreams to tell us how wonderful freedom is and to
warn us about what can happen to a nation that forgets God.
Elly died in 2012, so she is no longer traveling and telling her
story at schools, churches, and conferences, and to whomever will
listen. America has what she and others have longed for – freedom.
Stories like Elly’s need to be told and retold to generations who
take our freedoms for granted. A passionate immigrant and grandmother
gave her all because, in her words, she “wants to know what hands
this country is gonna be left in.”
Chris Noonan Funnell is a local
columnist. An earlier version of this article appeared in the July 4, 2003
edition of The MetroWest Daily News and in
the third printing of Elly Matz’s autobiography.
