Pilgrims Searching for a Home

Famine
The unreasonable requisitioning of livestock and farm products by the various passing armies and marauding bands, and the plague of grasshoppers, combined with the extended drought of 1920 - 21 to make a widespread famine of tragic proportions. The famine reached its worst in 1921 and 1922. Cornelius F. Klassen made a trip through the settlements in December of 1921 to arrange for American Mennonite Relief. He found that there was no bread left in the Volga region. His biographer reported:

In the Samara Guberniya (state) he found nothing but famine and death. Many villages were deserted, their thatched roofs torn off in an attempt to keep livestock alive…. Some people had tried to flee the villages but had died along the roadsides. Many were forced to eat tree bark, straw and various wild animals like rats, gophers, and crows or even domestic pets like cats and dogs. The starving hordes would beg from house to house crying for "bread in God's name" (Klassen, p.52).

The village of Ischalka got some relief, as Nicholas N. Friesen recalls in correspondence with Elizabeth from his home in British Columbia:

We were plagued by grasshoppers in 1921. Whether it was the "volosts" or the churches who helped out I do not know, but father (Nikolai Friesen, the minister in Ischalka) and his brother-in-law Jakob Stobbe went to Siberia, where the harvest was plentiful, to obtain wheat. They returned with three railroad cars full of grain.

At this time, we had no stable government with little or no communication. While away Father contracted typhoid fever. He was ill for more than three months and meanwhile we starved a home. How delicious was the first slice of bread we enjoyed after his return! I still think it sinful to waste precious food (Some Stories About My Father, Nikolai).

Baby Jacob Peter, or "Jake", was born into the Friesen home on February 10, 1922. He soon had a starvation belly. Yet he learned to walk at nine months. Justina talked of surviving for months on a diet of potatoes only, until spring brought new growth. It hurt so deeply not to be able to give your children something to eat.

Sometimes Jacob would go out to the fields to trap gophers to feed his family. Little Elizabeth would play with those he caught and then cry when he took them away to dress them. One day his unmarried brother came by and begged to borrow one gopher until he could catch some because he was very hungry. He took that gopher and walked away eating it raw and finished it before reaching his house which was just a short distance down the street.

One day Justina saw a Russian man they knew out digging by himself. They went out to him and found him trying to bury his wife who had died of starvation. Someone else had offered to care for the man's child, but it was so starved that they over fed it, and it also died.

Some people took advantage of the hardships of others. The family traded for or bought a bag of beets. On the top they were good, but further down in the bag they were poorer, and, in the bottom, there was just dirt.

Relief
It was in answer to the cries and prayers of these desperate people, that God moved the hearts of North American Mennonites to organize a “Mennonite Central Committee” (MCC) in 1920, to send food shipments from more than 6,000 miles away, to relieve the hunger of their brothers and sisters in Russia in 1921-23. And God moved the hearts of thousands of Christ followers to pour out a torrent of generosity, contributing food and clothing and other relief goods that saved the lives of thousands of starving Mennonites and other Russians.

And it saved the lives of the Jacob Friesen family, including the little girl, Elizabeth, who was to become my mother. MCC also negotiated with the Canadian Department of Immigration, the Canadian Pacific Railroad (CPR) and the Russian Government to arrange for those Mennonites who wished, and were qualified, to immigrate to Canada.

The first relief food to reach Russia was distributed in New Samara in mid-December 1921. The village elders chose someone to distribute this food. There was much discontent and suspicion about the fairness of the distribution. Some hoarded while their neighbors starved. One man boasted, "See how my children are blooming!" The neighbor replied, "Mine have about finished blooming."

MCC also sent fifty Fordson tractors and plows and seed to the Volga region to help them get started again as the horses were mostly gone. Those tractors plowed 17,500 acres of land the following year, between five to ten acres per family.

Others demonstrated the spirit of Christ in sharing the little they had with those less fortunate. A certain neighbor lady would save a little bit of her food and bring it over for little Elizabeth and would sit and watch her eat it all and marveled how she picked up every speck and crumb.

Elizabeth recalls from her childhood memories:

Another time I came to Grandma's and there was a man at the door asking for something to eat. Grandma told Aunt Maria to "Give him a chunk of bread!" She gave him a chunk of bread and he sat right there on the step outside the door eating this bread and I stood there watching. When he was done, he got up and left. This is the only vision, in memory, that I have of that grandmother, "Give him a chunk of bread!"