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

and cut it up for me. I ate the entire watermelon. “Thank you very much,” I said. “Now I am well.”. . . And the fever did not return. She gave me a water¬ melon for Heini. As I walked in the door I thought: “He doesn’t need anything any more. He is so yellow and his eyes have sunken.” He did not move. I thought the poor lad was near death yet he opened his eyes. He remained ill until winter. As young as she was, Marta went to work everyday. It was far too difficult for her, especially with such poor food. We were like the slaves of former days — they worked until they dropped. In the mid-summer heat she complained about her heart. Then the winter returned with its cold and its snowstorms. It was a miracle of God that we survived. A small straw stack was our only source of heating material. The room in which we lived MEMOIRS OFJUSTINA MARTENS 81 was very tiny. The little window was covered in thick ice and the door had a broad thick crack through which the wind blew in the snow. We did not have an oven — there was not enough straw for that. In the middle of the room I made a stove of clay bricks with a hole on top upon which we cooked our soup twice daily. We only burned enough straw to prepare our food and the few small potatoes in the soup cooked quickly. The room never warmed up. The straw fire produced no embers and the walls soon glis¬ tened with frost. I had to walk to the end of the village for water. The snow was deep and the morning icy cold. I preferred to get the water in the evening, but it froze during the night. I kept the potatoes in the neighbor s cellar because they would have frozen in our room. When we went to bed in the evenings we kept on all our un¬ derclothes since the beds were icy cold. It was so fortunate that we had brought a feather blanket from home. I slept in the mid¬ dle and Marta and Heini on either side. We piled on all the blan¬ kets which we possessed, pulled them over our head and breathed under the blanket. In the morning the blanket was covered with frost from our breath. A plague of lice added to all the difficulties. Because of the cold we could not bath or wash during the winter. We could not even wash our face everyday. The lice were espe¬ cially bad at night when we were warm. It was almost worse than starving or freezing. In March it began to thaw. One night a piece of the dirt roof fell on our blanket and we could see the sky above. Since we had neither straw nor clay I got on the roof and placed a pillow in the hole, got some manure from the neighbor and closed the hole. When I think back upon all these difficulties and crises, I see only the wonderful help of God and am amazed and astounded .... When, after thirty-five years, I think back to all that suffering and difficulty it all seems so recent.... Psalm 103 tells us “Praise the Lord O my soul and forget not all his benefits.” Even during star¬ vation I managed to praise God. I also learned