AR preparation to emigrate

Not long after the death of brother Rudi in late spring, we learned that my uncle Wilhelm and aunt Nargarert Neufeld had returned to Gnadenfeld from America with food to help relieve the famine in our and in other villages of the Molochnaya. Aunt Margaret was my father’s sister. The Neufelds had left Ukraine with their family some eleven years earlier to settle in Reedley, near Fresno, in the San Joaquin Valley of California.

The Neufeld’s stay and their famine relief activities lasted almost six months. Because our family had now lost not only our oldest and youngest brothers, but also our mother and then our father as well, the Neufelds most graciously and most generously offered to take the rest of our family back with them to America!

Before our departure that autumn of 1922, we auctioned off our cow and whatever other livestock there may have been. But the Russian ruble at that time was almost worthless.

Two complications developed before our final departure from Gnadenfeld. My sister Margaret (Greta), then twenty-two years of age, was engaged to Jacob Loewen, a young man who had just returned from the city of Batum, a port city on the Black Sea in the newly created Republic of Georgia. There he had been unsuccessful in his attempt to leave the control of the Bolshevik regime. So, my sister Margaret made her choice to forego the opportunity to emigrate to America and to marry Jacob Loewen and to stay in Russia with him. Their wedding occurred on the 22nd of October, 1922, after which the rest of our family left Gnadenfeld, never to see our sister Greta again. The life of her loving and close-knit family was one of repeated and long-lasting tragedies due to government intrigue and vengeance, complicated in many ways by the invasion of the German army in World War II. These circumstances led eventually to her death in a far northern forest-labor camp, and the subsequent travel of her three younger children to Karaganda, in Kazakhstan, where their father had been banished long ago.

The other complication relating to our departure from Gnadenfeld was the near military age of my brothers Herman and Dietrich. Although they were not actually drafted into the Red army, day after day these two brothers had to participate in military marching drill in a neighboring village. Our uncle Neufeld had brought with him an American brass Gillette safety razor that my brothers’ drill commander took a great liking to, even though it had only one available blade. Perhaps he thought that it was made of gold. So the commander gave them both an extended period of leave, which my brothers used to make many trips on foot to the nearest Russian government officials just beyond the border of the Molochnaya colony to obtain whatever papers had to be acquired before or departure could be undertaken.