History of the Russian Mennonites

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 the last century, tens of thousands of Mennonites were homeless, stateless refugees at the mercy and generosity of others. In Fall 1929, as many as 10 to 13,000 Soviet Mennonites left all behind to flee to Moscow in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to escape the USSR. The German government played the crucial role in a high stakes, international confrontation with Stalin in those months. They successfully extracted 3,885 Mennonite, 1,260 Lutheran, 468 Catholic, 51 Baptist and 7 Adventist "German farmers" in November and December 1929, and served as a transit nation and assisted refugees not accepted by Canada to settle in South America. The experience of Christmas 1929 was a stark contrast to Christmas (1928), which had been a nightmare for Mennonites: “The conditions which existed in Russia at that time had the effect of practically destroying all the traditional joys of Christmas for our children,” for whom “all public participation in the celebration of Christmas wa...