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

pecially meaningful to her and she participated in the local choir until 1930, when such activity was no longer sanctioned by local communist authorities. Justina, though she was only able to complete six years of formal educa¬ tion, was also intellectually gifted, combining a lively imagination with the ability to precisely recall events and happenings. While in exile in a remote village of Asiatic Russia, she imparts a cultural and religious identity to the children of other exiles through story and song. Equally remarkable was her ability to orally relate her own story at the age of eighty-five. Perhaps the secret of her vital¬ ity is contained in a single line: “All my life I have always counted myself as belonging to the young.” (p. 12) Justina was also a remarkable woman of faith. Her implicit acceptance of Providence was not only evident during the era of revolution, civil war and banditry, but in the difficult and lonely years of exile which followed. There was the day to day care of a body weakened by starvation and overwork and threatened by the long Siberian winters. And what of the hostility of host families who resented your presence and forced you to live in earthen huts and chicken barns, or stole your last suitcase of clothing? You con¬ front severe illness without access to medical care or painfully watch an ailing niece steadily decline and die. Amid impossible circum¬ stances you continue to affirm a God who not only watched over the sparrow but finds a lost key and locates a missing kerchief. Justina had little understanding of the political and economic constellations in the 1920s and 1930s. The politics of the first Five-Year Plan will eventually claim the life of her brother Peter. JUSTINA 51 Naturally she feels the personal pain associated with family and village tragedy but has no understanding of the magnitude of the revolution engulfing the Soviet Union. Similarly the death of her brother Heinrich in the wake of the great purge of 1937-38 deep¬ ens her suffering but offers no perspectives on what was really happening. Finally one event brought final separation from home, loved ones and village: the German invasion of Russia in 1941. Disaster now enveloped Justinas Kleefeld. In the neighboring Mennonite settlement of Chortitza bridges clogged by retreating Red Army troops prevented a large scale deportation of civilians. The front passed before the majority of the residents could be forced across. The Molotschna residents were not so fortunate for there were no Dnieper bridges to delay evacuation. Most of the villages in the northern half of the settlement nevertheless escaped mass deportation. The German Army crossed the Dnieper to the north of Chortitza and invaded the northwestern borders of the Molotschna settlement in an attempt to encircle the retreating Russian forces. As a consequence villages in the northern half of the settlement escaped mass deportation, w