JOURNEYS Mennonite Stories of Faith and Survival in Stalins Russia, John B. Toews, 1998

like I was. The law did not condemn him and he could leave. I and my family had to stay behind .... The same day on which my former group left, the foreign ministry advised me that I could not leave and suggested I pack up and begin my return trip home as soon as possible. I nevertheless re-applied with an¬ other group in the silent hope that as a new adherent I might be processed without incident. But we plan and God leads. For me and my family a lengthy pathway of suffering lay ahead. On the last evening before my arrest in the following night, the grown children of those families whose fathers had already been arrested by the secret police, sang at the window of our sum- 148 JOURNEYS mer home. It was the beautiful song “No Brother You are Not Alone.” I felt very much alone and I began to doubt my God. That made my difficult situation even more difficult .... No I could not understand the Lords language. After my arrest my wife and children were alone in a strange, large and cold city. I prayed and agonized day and night — as much as this was possible in a prison populated by all kinds of people. Heaven seemed pitiless. I was restless and impatient. It was the famous prison Lyubyanka, so crowded that we had no room to move. The prison food was so poor we thought we would die of hunger. I was interrogated three times while in prison. They were terrifying walks. Each time we passed through deep and sometimes narrow passages and through many heavily guarded iron doors. We were always accompanied by a heavily armed guard. Finally we reached the interrogation room. Thank God I was never physically tortured. I would have been too weak physically, mentally and spiritu¬ ally to endure much pressure. They wanted to know who the organizers of the German emigration movement were, especially the leaders among the Mennonites. I always felt that the interro¬ gators did not consider me as one of them. They simply refused to believe that a movement of some ten thousand people could emerge out of nowhere without some planning and orchestration and so they arrested several hundred people like myself. Had they believed our stories the authorities would have investigated and regulated the affairs in our own villages and settlements. They saw an enemy of the state in the ordinary citizen. The German people with their diligence, order and industriousness should not have been treated with such severity. It pained our very souls that we, as law abiding subjects of the land, together with our fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers, were considered to be enemies of the state. During my first interrogation I tried to demonstrate how peo¬ ple in my situation, unjustly treated as aliens, really had no future in Russia because we were not wanted. I simply asked that we be allowed to leave Russia because people who had been disenfran¬ chised could not live here. During my second interrogation I had not heard fr