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

sued internal passports which granted them freedom of movement. They were nevertheless pro¬ hibited from returning to their former places of residence and were not compensated for the confiscation of their property. Freedom of travel nevertheless meant a search for family, friends and fellow Christians. Life for the German minority changed significantly after 1956. As Annas and Justina’s memoirs so graphically illustrate, spon¬ taneous revival frequently spawned small groups of Christian house fellowships. Surviving ministers and teachers returning from the 14 JOURNEYS camps helped to organize such groups into churches, or by their preaching and teaching, generated new ones. Some found nur¬ ture in scattered Baptist congregations and were eventually assimi¬ lated, others sought to structure new congregations along what they felt to be Mennonite and Mennonite Brethren principles. Family reunification, revivals, the search for fellowship as well as a longing for a sense of peoplehood brought hundreds of Mennonites to known “gathering centers.” In Karaganda, Kazakhstan for ex¬ ample, dissidents left a Baptist congregation late in 1956 to form a “German Mennonite Brethren Church.” In two years their mem¬ bership grew to 900. Ironically exile or prison camp offered fairly equal chances for survival. The mass arrests of the 1930s by and large targeted the male population. By 1938 the penal system began to exhibit some concern for the survival of its inhabitants but by then mistreat¬ ment, disease, cold and hunger had claimed many victims. De¬ portation and resettlement in 1941 mainly involved women and children, the aged and the infirm. Eastern Russia and Central Asia had few facilities capable of housing such a sudden and mas¬ sive human relocation. Lack of food and shelter, inadequate cloth¬ ing and epidemics often claimed a larger death toll than the camps. Similarly the mass induction into the Work Army generated a high mortality rate among the female population and among chil¬ dren left without parents. Some knowledge of the extent of the tragedy might well emerge from the reconstruction of the family histories of this period, the examination of regional secret police files or the chance survival of actual prison camp records. Eventu¬ ally it may be statistically possible to ascertain who perished and who survived. TRAINS AND TRANSPORT Berg and Warkentin make a number of references to the rail¬ way cars used for transporting prisoners. In the prisoner language of the 1930s these cars were given several names. A railroad car used for transporting prisoners was in abbreviated form, referred to as a zak car. Such prisoner cars came in two models. The first, probably initially used under the tsarist minister of the interior, Peter Stolypin (1862-1911), was an ordinary passenger car with European style compartments. Adapted for prisoner transport they usually had diagonal iron gratings on t