History of the Russian Mennonites

A deadly epidemic broke out in MCC’s new settlement in Fernheim, Paraguay in 1930. Settlers had been present for less than a year, and had recorded 20 births and 88 deaths by December 31 ( note 1 ). Health care remained a significant concern in Fernheim even after the epidemic was halted with the emergency medical intervention of Paraguayan military doctors. Mennonites were wholly responsible for their own health care. In 1933 and 1934 there was a malaria outbreak with 31 deaths and 30 deaths respectively, compared to 11 deaths in 1932 ( note 2 ). My father born in 1932 almost did not survive 1933: "He is very thin. It often seems to me that we will not be able to keep him by our side. He was such a happy and lively boy, but the illness has gone so far," my grandmother wrote family in Canada ( note 3 ). Early in 1934 the Fernheim Colony reported in the Germany Mennonite denominational paper that “the state of health leaves much to be desired. Malaria still hits the villages b...

In January 1930, the Mennonite Central Committee was scrambling to get 3,885 Mennonites out of Germany and settled somewhere fast. These refugees had fled via Moscow in December 1929, and Germany was willing only to serve as first transit stop ( note 1 ). Canada was very reluctant to take any German-speaking Mennonites—the Great Depression had begun and a negative memory of war resistance still lingered. In the end Canada took 1,344 Mennonites and the USA took none born in Russia. Paraguay was the next best option ( note 2 ). The German government preferred Brazil, but Brazil would not guarantee freedom from military service, which was a problem for American Mennonite financiers. There were already some conservative "cousins" from Manitoba in Paraguay who had negotiated with the government and learned through trial and error how to survive in the "Green Hell" of the Paraguayan Chaco. MCC with the assistance of a German aid organization purchased and distribute...

My father was born less than a year after these 1931 wedding photos. Jacob Fast and Helen Janzen had been in Paraguay less than 8 months—see the MCC telegram—and tragedy had already struck both refugees families. Jacob’s first wife and a daughter became victims of the epidemic that ravaged the new colony of Fernheim in those first months. He was now a widower at age 39—with an infant and other children without a mother. Helene was single and 29 years old. Her mother too had died from the same epidemic; her father was partially crippled. They had come from southern Ukrainian community of Spat, Crimea; Fast was from Ural Mountains area in Russia where South Russian Mennonites had created a “daughter colony” a generation earlier.   Each had siblings who fled to Moscow in 1929 with them and who were accepted by Canada in 1930. My grandparents however were rejected—she was a single woman with frail parents; he was a man with an ill child. Perhaps in contexts like these the falli...

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 ...

In January 2020 I received information from the German Federal Archives on the fate of my father's oldest brother, Jakob Fast, 1918-1944 -- a WW2 German soldier and Mennonite from Paraguay. Jakob was among the first group of young men from Friesland, Paraguay who "returned" to Germany in May 1939. Their families had all arrived in Paraguay in 1930 via Germany and Moscow from the Soviet countryside. These young men were promised an apprenticeship in Germany with the hope their families might be able to follow.   Only a few months later the war started. There would be no return to Paraguay for 11 of the 28 Friesländer , including my uncle. The three little file cards from his record indicate that Jakob Fast, Jr. was first conscripted in Oldenburg in April 1942. Some of the 28 young men from Friesland had volunteered earlier. Fast's unit reached the Dnieper River in south Ukraine according to a letter an aunt received--the area their grandparents left in the 1890s in sea...

In Fall 1929 some 10,000 Mennonites attempted to flea the Soviet countryside for Moscow in a last ditch attempt to leave. Ultimately Germany's intervention was salvation for 3,885 of that group, and Mennonite leader Benjamin Unruh—stationed in Germany--was their shepherd, with American aid through Mennonite Central Committee. Ultimately it was because of Unruh that the German government had put economic and diplomatic pressure on Stalin to open the gates out of Moscow to the west, if only for a short period. Germany in turn could only be a transit country, and Canada refused to take more than 1,000 (in the end it was 1,344). The remainder were assisted to migrate to Paraguay (1,572) or Brazil. Not surprisingly family clans were split. Some of the young people who had arrived in the Paraguayan Chaco “had attended communist schools in Russia,” leading to “undesirable” dynamics and “unpleasant occurrences” in some of the villages, in the estimation of the younger and charismatic teach...