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

In the evening I cooked my food. The [brigade] women cooked lunch. They were MEMOIRS OFJUSTINA MARTENS 83 alloted a certain number of food staples and made a soup from them. If something was left over I received a portion, but natu¬ rally without bread. One day my landlord said he needed the room where I lived with the children. He had spoken with the village soviet. I was to go to the chicken farm at the end of the village and live there. Suddenly the future seemed very dark to me. My fever had re¬ turned because I always slept on the moist ground. Then a letter arrived from Neta. There was no hope that she would be home by winter. When I thought of the future, I was in complete despair. In my frustration I wrote her a letter telling her I did not know what to do if she did not come home. After I sent the letter I thought about it during the night. Instead of giving her courage, I had heaped my own problems on her. I prayed to the Lord for forgiveness and asked Him to rectify what I had spoilt. The faithful Lord did this in a wonderful way. Neta was freed because of this letter. When she returned to her barracks in the evening, totally exhausted, she found my letter. After reading it she lay down on her bunk and wept bitterly. She didn’t even eat her soup. The brigade leader came and asked why she was crying. Neta told her everything I had written. She said the [medical] commission met the next morning. All sick persons were to be sent home and Neta should make an application. Neta was to sign and the brigade leader promised to support her application. She was not to go to work the next day but she went anyway. She was recalled from work to appear before the commission. She was so nervous that her heart pounded excessively when the doctors examined her. One doctor asked her if she had a heart problem but the other doctor interrupted, “Can’t you hear how her heart is pounding. She has a heart problem!” The secretary prepared a form and the doctor signed it and gave it to her with the words: “Go home!” She accepted the certificate with quivering hands and almost collapsed from excitement. She walked back to the barracks like one in a dream and did not know whether to be happy or not. It was all so surprising and unexpected. The thought of not going back to her hard work, of seeing her children again — all this over¬ whelmed her and she cried. But how could she make the trip? She had no money and no food! When she received all her travel docu¬ ments, however, she also got money and a few pieces of bread for the journey. She traded some of her clothes for bread so that she JOURNEYS could bring some to the children, who no longer knew what bread looked like. Her return journey took fourteen days. At some stations she waited for two days for a train. She begged for food. From one of the stations she sent a card to the children: “I’m coming home to you.” The children brought the card to me