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:
- 1948 original, "Exodus": https://youtu.be/IH_nb-5zEWg --without narration (1:03; uploaded by J. Thiesen, Bethel College); 1970's version with Peter Dyck retelling the story in three parts:
- Part I: no original footage; only Peter Dyck the orator https://youtu.be/5jjYVy-OzF8 (56 min. uploaded by MCC);
- Part II: original footage from 1947/8 with Peter and Elfrieda Dyck narrating the story https://youtu.be/TMYzwKd3z3o (32 min);
- Part III (cont’d): "New Beginnings," https://youtu.be/XiOqwJ6Q6sY (33 min).
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