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Volendam and the Arrival in South America, 1947

The Volendam arrived at the port in Buenos Aires, Argentina on February 22, 1947, at 5 PM, exactly three weeks after leaving from Bremerhaven. They would be followed by three more refugee ships in 1948.

The harassing experiences of refugee life were now truly far behind them. Curiously a few months later the American Embassy in Moscow received a formal note of protest claiming that Mennonites, who were Soviet citizens, had been cleared by the American military in Germany for emigration to Paraguay even though the Soviet occupation forces “did not (repeat not) give any sanction whatever for the dispatch of Soviet citizens to Paraguay” (note 1). But the refugees knew that they were beyond even Stalin’s reach and, despite many misgivings about the Chaco, believed they were the hands of good people and a sovereign God.

In Buenos Aires the Volendam was anticipated by North American Mennonite Central Committee workers responsible for the next leg of the resettlement journey. Elisabeth Klassen Reimer wrote in her diary:

“It was beautiful to see, … to arrive in a region with green trees after only three weeks. We could not believe our eyes. And so many cars arrived, and very different types of people stood at the port until late in the night and observed, as we also did from the ship. The children were very excited that we finally landed.” (Note 2)

MCC had made arrangements for visas and an orderly immigration through Argentina to the land-locked country of Paraguay—but even these arrangements fell into place late; a week before the Volendam’s arrival, the Paraguayan Foreign Ministry made MCC representative and Canadian businessman C. A. DeFehr a special envoy of the government to expedite the process (note 3).

All of the refugees spent their first night in Argentina on the ship. Already the next morning, one group of 400 were put onto steam powered riverboats and another group of one-hundred onto train cars for the 1,300 kilometre journey to the Paraguayan Chaco. On February 24, 1947, my grandmother Helen Bräul (age 43) and her three surviving children (Walter 18, Sarah 16, and Käthe 9), together with the remainder of the passengers, were also allowed to disembark.

The MCC team had set up a temporary tent camp in Buenos Aires where they received the remainder of the passengers and assisted with their needs until they too could go on. Käthe remembers the barbed-wire fencing and the long lines for food and toilets. On February 25, Helene noted in her journal that another hundred people were able to leave that day, and that this group was destined for eastern Paraguay and the Mennonite Colony of Friesland, which had been established in 1937. The majority, however, were destined for the Chaco, where the two original Paraguayan Mennonite colonies, Menno and Fernheim, were located. On February 26, Helene wrote a letter from Buenos Aires to relatives in Canada and also a letter to friends in the Netherlands, reporting that they had now arrived safely in South America.

On February 27, another 150 individuals were designated to leave the tent city for the Fernheim Colony—and the Bräuls were among this number. The group first travelled by train to the harbour where the long journey upriver began. The boat trip across the bay took four hours, and then the boat sailed north, up the Paraná River and deep into this strange new continent towards Paraguay.

The vessel arrived in Asunción—Paraguay’s capital—on March 1, 1947. “Everything looks so different; donkeys loaded as baggage-carriers and then women ride them to the market”—these were the first impressions of one refugee mother (note 4). Thoughts of missing loved ones, and fears of having to start anew were almost overwhelming. Elisabeth Klassen Reimer expressed that well in her diary:

“May God also bless us as well, that we too might see each other again. The children are growing up without a father. I have gone through so much with the children. Burying mother—oh, how painful. And now completely alone without siblings nearby. Dear God, give me the necessary strength to carry the load ---" (Note 5)

In Asunción, Helene and family were met by Peter Teichrob from the Fernheim Colony who would be their guide for the remainder of the journey. The next day the group boarded a flat riverboat for the three-day journey up the Paraguay River.

At 1:30 AM, March 5, this group of 150 refugees arrived at Puerto Casado (today Puerto La Victoria), some 400 kilometres upstream from the capital. Here they disembarked and later that same morning they boarded the narrow-gauge train cars owned by the Casado Company Railway that took them 145 kilometres westwards into the Chaco. They arrived at the terminal station (“Fred Engen Station,” named after an American pacifist who helped settle the first Mennonites in 1927) later at 5 PM, where they were met by other Mennonite settlers from the colonies of Fernheim and Menno with a meal of familiar Russian Borscht (cabbage soup). “The newcomers ... noticed that some Fernheimers had substantial girth, and took comfort that their days of hunger had ended” (note 6). The elderly and infirm were transported in two Fernheim trucks; the rest (including the Bräuls) were taken on horse-drawn wagons through “bush and more bush” to the temporary host villages in the Menno Colony, eighty-eight kilometres away (a 15 to 24 hour trek).

The first group of 299 refugees had arrived just two days earlier. Helene Bräul and her children were temporarily brought to the village of Neu-Einlage in the Menno Colony by a Mr. Funk who had come from Canada to Paraguay in 1927—in all likelihood a not-so-distant cousin whose grandparents left the Bergthal Colony in Russia for Canada in 1874.

Walter Bräul, who only had a few years of formal schooling himself, was shocked to realize that many residents of the Menno Colony were “almost illiterate.” His host was convinced the world was flat and, in all seriousness, asked Walter if he had seen any mermaids on his travel! When Walter told him that mermaids were fairy-tales, his host disagreed strongly, because there was an item on mermaids in the Steinbach Post.

MCC had arranged in advance that each refugee family would not only be transported, but also hosted by an established family in either Fernheim or Menno without charge for three months until basic homes in the new colony could be built. Helene was deeply comforted to know that she would be coming to family: she had an elderly uncle living in Fernheim—David Thiessen (b. 1867)—whom she last saw when she was four years-old (1908) when Mennonite life in Russia was in its “golden era.” Old David Thiessen, with his wife Margareta, and extended family lived in the village of Ohrloff, Fernheim (also called Village No. 15).

While the European Mennonites were struck by the exotic Paraguayan wilderness, the established Mennonites were struck by the fashions of the Europeans dressed in donated American and Canadian clothing.

“We had waited a long time for the refugees whom we had imagined as pitiful, emaciated figures. Finally the horse-drawn wagons which brought the first refugees arrived in the village. All the residents hurried to the street in order to see them. ... After the restful boat journey ... they looked well fed and fresh. They all wore pretty clothes which they had received on the boat as MCC donations; and all had open hair that was permed. These new fashions were quite foreign to the hard working village residents who had long been distanced from city life.” (Note 7)

Residents of the conservative Menno Colony who hosted many of these refugees in their homes for five months, discovered that these Mennonites who valued education, sang in four-part harmony, and dressed in bright and colourful clothes “could still be genuinely committed Christians” (note 8); indeed, some even found this attractive! On the part of the refugees, “none of [them] neglected the Sunday worship services, which they had been without for so long.”

The Thiessen relatives in Fernheim also had a most fascinating odyssey of escape behind them. In 1908, David and Margareta Thiessen left the Molotschna Colony in Russia and pioneered a new Mennonite settlement along the Amur River in Far Eastern Russia on the border of Manchuria (note 9). Then in 1929 as Stalin’s grip on power tightened, the community chose to flee en masse and in the dark of night across the frozen Amur River and into China (note 10). In China they stayed for a time in the city of Harbin (Heilongjian) hoping to find a safe country, before a select number received visas to travel to the United States of America. Most however, with the assistance of the League of Nations and MCC, travelled via Shanghai, Hong Kong, Paris, Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo and Buenos Aires to Paraguay, where they arrived in 1932.

In the Menno Colony, Helene Bräul and family were met by Hans Kroeker, the son of Helene’s cousin Greta (Thiessen), who took the Bräuls on the last leg of their long journey. Though the Kroekers already had a large family with five children, they took these relatives under their roof. Helene with daughters Sara and Käthe slept in the sitting room, while Walter slept with the other four boys in their room. The Kroekers had another small building across the yard which served as a kitchen and eating area for this large family.

The village of Ohrloff, Fernheim, would be home for the next five months. While “Ohrloff” sounded like home (the Molotschna village of the same name hosted three generations of Bräul teachers), “Fernheim” loosely translated means “home far from home,” and indeed this was the case. Yet in this very foreign land Helene was deeply grateful to be embraced and welcomed not only by the larger Mennonite community, but also by long-lost members of her own extended family. 

            ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast




---Notes---

Note 1: Cited in Ted D. Regehr, “Anatomy of a Mennonite Miracle: The Berlin Rescue of 30–31 January 1947,” Journal of Mennontie Studies 9 (1991), 11, https://jms.uwinnipeg.ca/index.php/jms/article/view/326/326.

Note 2: “Diary 1930–1971 of Elisabeth Klassen Reimer (1910–1994),” 1971. In author's possession.

Note 3: For fuller story, cf. Walter Regehr, ed., 25 Jahre Kolonie Neuland, 1947–1972 (Karlsruhe: Schneider, 1972), 13f.; Cornelius A. DeFehr, Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben (Winnipeg, MB: Christian, 1976), sec. 5.

Note 4: E. Reimer, “Diary 1930–1971.”

Note 5: E. Reimer, “Diary 1930–1971.”

Note 6: Edgar Stoesz and Muriel T. Stackley, Garden in the Wilderness. Mennonite Communities in the Paraguayan Chaco, 1927–1997 (Winnipeg, MB: CMBC Publications, 1999), 73.

Note 7: Fernheim resident, cited in W. Regehr, 25 Jahre Kolonie Neuland, 104.

Note 8: Titus Guenther, “Ältester Martin C. Friesen (1889–1968): A Man of Vision for Paraguay’s Mennogemeinde,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 23 (2005), 185–211, https://jms.uwinnipeg.ca/index.php/jms/article/view/1044/1043.

Note 9: Cited in W. Regehr, 25 Jahre Kolonie Neuland, 105.

Note 10: For story, see Stoesz and Stackley, Garden in the Wilderness: Mennonite Communities in the Paraguayan Chaco, 59–66.

For MCC video of some of these events, see: 


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