Grete Petre.Courtesy of family
Grete Petre: Survivor. Immigrant. Mother. Cleaning lady. Born Sept. 7, 1929, in Nakovo, Yugoslavia; died March 2, 2019, in Mississauga of medically assisted death; aged 89.
As a German-speaking teenager at the end of the Second World War, Grete Reichardt survived three hellish years in a forced labour camp in Yugoslavia. She was so famished she stole a single potato from a farmer, knowing she would be shot if she was caught. There was one bright spot – while working in a coal mine, she fell in love with Joe Petre, a fellow prisoner. That camp was the defining experience of Grete’s life.
Stripped of their home and possessions by the Communists, Joe emigrated to Toronto in 1953 and Grete followed nearly a year later with their daughters, five-year-old Katy and five-month-old Heidi. Besides the clothes on her back, all she brought was a red enamel cooking pot. The family started from scratch in a new world, struggling to learn a new language and culture. But a few days after her arrival in Toronto, she suddenly stopped on the sidewalk and declared, “I like this place. I’m never leaving.”
Grete worked hard as a cleaning lady and Joe as a bricklayer, and within five years the family owed their own car, TV and house in the west end of Toronto, where Joe could breed his award-winning racing pigeons in the backyard. A classic immigrant success story.
She made her young daughters attend German school, which they hated because it meant missing Saturday-morning cartoons. But when they got older, Katy and Heidi were happy to retain their mother tongue.
Because of the deprivation of the camp experience, good, nutritious food became essential to Grete’s world. She raised chickens for their fresh eggs and loved cooking, making cakes, cookies, preserves and homemade wine. She also needed to keep moving. She possessed a legendary energy and drive and was always using her hands: cleaning, gardening, knitting, crocheting or playing cards with friends.
Grete was never comfortable with emotional or physical vulnerability, but she came by it honestly. That’s something her children came to understand. But if there’s ever a Cleaning Lady Hall of Fame, Grete would be the first inductee. As her daughter, I scrambled to clean my own place in advance of her visits.
As a couple, Grete and Joe enjoyed dancing to German polkas and, in midlife, spent some of their hard-earned money taking annual winter vacations in Mexico. In her 80s, Grete worked as a volunteer making sandwiches at a local seniors centre, where she was older than some of the seniors she served. That’s why her rapid decline over her last months was so challenging. She could no longer do the things that mattered most to her and felt she was no longer of use to anyone. She had lost her purpose and meaning in life.
Fourteen years before, she watched the slow decline of her husband Joe, and she wanted to be spared the same torturous experience – and spare her family as well. When her cardiologist said the end was around the corner, Grete was granted an assisted death. She was grateful for the opportunity to be relieved of her powerlessness and suffering, an inescapable echo of her war trauma.
Our mother always liked to be in charge of her life and the family honoured her wish, as difficult as it was. It was what she wanted. “Enjoy your lives," she told us that day, "and keep the family together.”
Grete was a force of nature.
Katy Petre is Grete’s eldest daughter.
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