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

ren had fallen asleep during the drive. The ox cart stopped in front of a building and we had to get out. All thirteen of us were dropped off at an old school. The locals stood at the door and gawked at us, almost as if they had never seen such people before, at least not Germans. The Russians in the region all thought we were ‘Hitlers' and feared us. This was especially true of the children who had been told, “watch those ‘Hitlers.' They are responsible for the war and re¬ sponsible for the fact that your fathers have died in the war.” Later they realized that we had nothing to do with the war, and that we and our men had suffered more from the war than they, who could live quite peaceably. That first evening after we had unloaded our things they brought us a pail of milk and several slices of bread. We were very thankful because we were so hungry. Our beds were placed on the floor and we laid down to rest. We were finally at our destination. In the morning a man came and brought us to a yard, if it could be called that, a few houses down the street. A woman lived here MEMOIRS OF JUSTINA MARTENS 73 with her two children, a boy aged 18 and a girl aged 16. They were resettled Ukrainians from near the Polish border .... [They had] a small room, a small adjoining kitchen, a small corridor and a small low barn. We were given the kitchen which was so tiny that one could not even set up one bed. On one side stood the Pietsch as the Russians called it, and of which we had heard. It was like a bake oven made of brick with room for two cooking sur¬ faces. It was heated with two or three manure bricks and a little wood. When the fire died down the ash was removed and the bread placed on a pan and pushed in the oven .... When we came with our baking the woman began to curse and swear and did not want to let me inside, “I need the kitchen for myself,” she said. “You could have stayed with Hitler!” She also accused me of many other things. “Dear lady,” I said to her “I did not come here of my own free will. We would have much rather stayed where we were and would have accepted you if you had come. We know that you need the room for yourself, but we were brought here forcibly.” It was now mid-November and winter was approaching yet we had no heating material, not to mention a stove .... The local people kept one or two cows and the manure from these was care¬ fully processed, placed in forms and dried. In winter they also burned wood if it was available. They had never used coal. We, of course, had no fuel. There was a great deal of un threshed grain on the field and so we Germans were immediately put to work. As long as it didn’t snow things were not too bad. We had come out of the warm south where we needed few warm clothes and had never seen the felt boots they wore here. In the evening we used straw for cooking. We managed to bring some of our clothes as well as dried fruit, which was a rarity here.