Mennonites and Ukrainians: The Healing of Memories

I am at a loss of what to say in the face of such terrifying video coming from Ukraine (March 4, 2022).

The Ukrainian people are the historic friends, hosts and neighbours of the Mennonites since our arrival in 1789.

It is a rich, unique relationship. For the first eight decades, relationships between Mennonites and their neighbours in Ukraine (or earlier South or New Russia) were largely prescribed by the colonial policies of Greater Russia. Each “foreign” people group was regulated by their unique privileges negotiated with the crown, each with mandated expectations and responsibilities (e.g., model farming), and required to live in closed, culturally specific colonies in order to “keep the peace.” It was a larger police state in which movement outside the colony was strictly regulated.

That was the historic context of our neighbourliness, our mutual learnings, respect, love, but also inequalities, suspicions, prejudices, negotiations, barriers to language learning or intermarriage, and at times anger and acts of reprisals too. Being neighbours was complicated for our ancestors. Our inherited memories too are complicated three or more generations later.

Our desire to love the neighbour however is real; the desire to rebuild past, broken cultural bridges strong. Many Canadian Mennonites have travelled to Ukraine. All who have done so have rekindled a deep love and connection to that land and to the Ukrainian people.

For those of us whose parents or grandparents left Ukraine, our families shared in the famine of the 1920s with Ukrainians. For those families who stayed longer like my own, “we” shared in the injustices of collectivization, we shared the man-made famine (Holodomor) of the early 1930s. Ukrainians and Mennonites together suffered horrific repression under Stalin. Our grandfathers’ arrest and execution files sit together in vast archival collections in Zaporizhzhya and Dnipro. After 1938, Mennonites still in school learnt Ukrainian.

What clouded and hurt our relationship most was German occupation. At this point all our people and communities had been severely broken by Stalin—though that is no excuse. Mennonites were ethnic German, of course, a favourite target of Stalin and now one of favour and privilege and designated for new responsibilities under Nazi Germany. To escape their hardships, almost all Mennonites sided with the German occupiers, whose plans for oppression of Slavic peoples to a slave existence--and extermination of Jews in Ukraine was shocking for Mennonites as well. But we were complicit. And in retreat behind German lines we feared and then also protected ourselves with arms against "Ukrainian partisans”.

We are working through that complicated history in discussion groups, for example, with a strong commitment to rebuild friendship. In war now, the desire to help and love this “historic neighbour” is authentic.

We are all saddened by current events; MCC is the historic Mennonite relief agency that was in Ukraine in 1921-2 and is ramping up to help today. For most Mennonites in Canada, that will be our trusted partner to get the aid out, and our way to walk with this "old friend" in their time of need.

I want to point in closing to Germany. Their border is open to Ukrainians today. Train travel is free. Doors in homes are open to refugees. This makes me proud too (many of us have a complicated connection to Germany as well).

This blog represents in part the desire of many to piece together our Mennonite stories, but more: we have the opportunity to re-narrate events in such a way as to "heal memories.” History can be leveraged to help us walk better, and more authentically with our old friends and neighbours of Ukraine. And to this end, it can help us to be/ become a better people of peace –which of course was our original rationale for arriving in Ukraine en masse so many years ago.

---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

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The End of Schardau (and other Molotschna villages), 1941

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Mennonites in Danzig's Suburbs: Maps and Illustrations

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Russia: A Refuge for all True Christians Living in the Last Days

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1929 Flight of Mennonites to Moscow and Reception in Germany

At the core of the attached video are some thirty photos of Mennonite refugees arriving from Moscow in 1929 which are new archival finds. While some 13,000 had gathered in outskirts of Moscow, with many more attempting the same journey, the Soviet Union only released 3,885 Mennonite "German farmers," together with 1,260 Lutherans, 468 Catholics, 51 Baptists, and 7 Adventists. Some of new photographs are from the first group of 323 refugees who left Moscow on October 29, arriving in Kiel on November 3, 1929. A second group of photos are from the so-called “Swinemünde group,” which left Moscow only a day later. This group however could not be accommodated in the first transport and departed from a different station on October 31. They were however held up in Leningrad for one month as intense diplomatic negotiations between the Soviet Union, Germany and also Canada took place. This second group arrived at the Prussian sea port of Swinemünde on December 2. In the next ten ...

Mennonite-Designed Mosque on the Molotschna

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Fraktur (or Gothic) font and Kurrent- (or Sütterlin) handwriting: Nazi ban, 1941

In the middle of the war on January 1, 1942, the Winnipeg-based Mennonitische Rundschau published a new issue without the familiar Fraktur script masthead ( note 1 ). One might speculate on the reasons, but a year earlier Hitler banned the use of the font in the Reich . The Rundschau did not exactly follow all orders from Berlin—the rest of the paper was in Fraktur (sometimes referred to as "Gothic"); when the war ended in 1945, the Rundschau reintroduced the Fraktur font for its masthead. It wasn’t until the 1960s that an issue might have a page or title here or there with the “normal” or Latin font, even though post-war Germany was no longer using Fraktur . By 1973 only the Rundschau masthead is left in Fraktur , and that is only removed in December 1992. Attached is a copy of Nazi Party Secretary Martin Bormann's official letter dated January 3, 1941, which prohibited the use of Fraktur fonts "by order of the Führer. " Why? It was a Jewish invention, apparent...

School Reports, 1890s

Mennonite memoirs typically paint a golden picture of schools in the so-called “golden era” of Mennonite life in Russia. The official “Reports on Molotschna Schools: 1895/96 and 1897/98,” however, give us a more lackluster and realistic picture ( note 1 ). What do we learn from these reports? Many schools had minor infractions—the furniture did not correspond to requirements, there were insufficient book cabinets, or the desks and benches were too old and in need of repair. The Mennonite schoolhouses in Halbstadt and Rudnerweide—once recognized as leading and exceptional—together with schools in Friedensruh, Fürstenwerder, Franzthal, and Blumstein were deemed to be “in an unsatisfactory state.” In other cases a new roof and new steps were needed, or the rooms too were too small, too dark, too cramped, or with moist walls. More seriously in some villages—Waldheim, Schönsee, Fabrikerwiese, and even Gnadenfeld, well-known for its educational past—inspectors recorded that pupils “do not ...

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 ...

On Becoming the Quiet in the Land

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What is the Church to Say? Letter 4 (of 4) to American Mennonite Friends

Irony is used in this post to provoke and invite critical thought; the historical research on the Mennonite experience is accurate and carefully considered. ~ANF Preparing for your next AGM: Mennonite Congregations and Deportations Many U.S. Mennonite pastors voted for Donald Trump, whose signature promise was an immediate start to “the largest deportation operation in American history.” Confirmed this week, President Trump will declare a national emergency and deploy military assets to carry this out. The timing is ideal; in January many Mennonite congregations have their Annual General Meeting (AGM) with opportunity to review and update the bylaws of their constitution. Need help? We have related examples from our tradition, which I offer as a template, together with a few red flags. First, your congregational by-laws. It is unlikely you have undocumented immigrants in your congregation, but you should flag this. Model: Gustav Reimer, a deacon and notary public from the ...

History of the Russian Mennonites

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