Maria Toews, widowed mother of twelve, six sons and six daughters, in 1959. 

After we got married and moved to Chihuahua, Mexico, I read a story I never forgot. On a Sunday afternoon in my parents-in-law's house on the Blumenörter Weidesteppe, I found it tucked in among the books on their living room shelf: 

 
"Meine Erinnerungen und Erlebnisse in Canada und Paraguay (My memories and experiences in Canada and Paraguay)," read its unassuming title. And indeed, I found its often mispelled German, mixed with Plattdeutsch and Spanish as needed, to be a most unassuming story told by a person who never looked like a hero in her own eyes. Just an ordinary woman doing what God and her family expected of her. But in her story, written after her husband died and her children got married, I found the ordinary became beautiful -- awesome, in fact -- because of how she lived it, day after day, in peace and humble awareness of God.
 
After my parents-in-law moved to Canada I never saw Maria Toews's story again. But I kept remembering it, and a month ago I located another rare copy. Now I will translate parts of it and share it with you so the witness of her life may keep on speaking in our time.
 
In this first installment Maria tells of her childhood in Manitoba, Canada. By next week, the Lord willing, I will have translated the part where she moved to the Paraguayan Chaco with her husband, her ten children, and nearly two thousand other Sommerfelder and Chortitzer Mennonites seeking to distance themselves from the dangers of an increasingly mechanised and mono-cultural world. 

Meine Erinnerungen . . . 

My parents lived in the village of Neuanlage near Gretna, Manitoba, where I was born 27 February 1889. They had come from Russia to Canada a few years earlier, and when I was three years old we moved from Neuanlage to Neustaedt.

When I was five years old my grandparents came to visit. They had a brown horse hitched to their buggy. Soon after they put the horse into the stable and my father and grandfather came into the house we heard a big commotion out in the barn. The horse had kicked a hole into the wall. It really frightened me and I never forgot it. As a five-year-old my sister and I often rode along with my father to fetch water from Abram Wiebes who lived near Rosenfeld. He was my father’s cousin and lived alongside the railroad. They had a little boy, Abram, whom they always needed to tie up so he wouldn’t run out and play between the tracks with the little stones. One day, during the wheat harvest when his parents were both out in the field, his grandmother came to care for the little boy. She lay down with him, after lunch, for a nap. But he got up quietly and went out to play. The train came and drove little Abram dead.

When I was seven years old my parents dug a well. One afternoon while the men were eating at Vesper time we three sisters went to play on the hill of soft earth by the well. Suddenly the ground began to slide and I scooted into the well. I don’t remember when they pulled me out but the bone-setter (Trajchmäaka) said I had nearly snapped off my neck.

When I was seven I started going to school. My sister Elisabeth had already started the year before and stayed with my grandparents for the winter so she did not have to walk so far.

My father drove us to the school, a mile away at Johann Braun’s place in Neustaedt. They had school in an old house. Jakob Fast was our teacher, and there were eleven of us students. When the teacher called me Maria I told him that was not my name. “My name is Mitschje,” I told him. The teacher said, “At home you are Mitschje, but in school you are Maria.” When Father came in the evening to fetch us I told him what the teacher said. He laughed and assured me, “Yes, yes! In school your name is Maria.”

During that first year, while I learned from the Fiebel, if I did good work the red rooster on the back had a cent on it in the morning. That made me very happy.

One evening Father came very late to get us. Everyone else had gone and we got tired of waiting so we set out walking. It was a clear day but very cold. We had no good footwear and our feet began to freeze. By the time Father came we were all crying because of the cold. As soon as we got home Father and Mother rubbed our feet with snow to ease the pain. From then on we always stayed at Johann Brauns’ place until Father came.

When I was six Mother worked in the field during harvest time, stooking grain. Father hired a man to help her. Around Vesper time a dark cloud came up. Father was on the binder at the far end of the field. Suddenly a stroke of lightning struck the hired man dead. Father quick unhitched the horses and raced off to the neighbours. Onkel Jakob and Abram Braun both came. They helped Father lay the man onto the wagon and take him home to his family. He was a High German and had just come to Canada a short while before. His name was Fürst and he had a wife and three small children. He had a big moustache I always looked at.

After this Peter Dyck was my teacher for two years. One day we learned German, the next day English. Then we had Peter Siemens. During April the water was so high we could not get to school but in May we had some school again. Teacher Siemens took us across the border into North Dakota where we had a picnic under the big oak trees along the Pembina River where there was good shade. I saw a squirrel for the first time and the teacher taught us a song about the birds:

Alle Vögel sind schon da,
Alle Vögel, alle.
Amsel, Drossel, Fink und Star,
Und die ganze Vögelschar
Alle Vögel sind schon da,
Alle Vögel, alle!

We played ball under the trees and skipped rope. We had such a wonderful time.

When I was twelve I got up early on the first day of Christmas and made a fire in the tile stove to put the coffee water on. I set the water onto the oven compartment to stay warm, but because it was still dark I could not see what I was doing and the kettle tipped, spilling hot water over my left foot. I was wearing knitted stockings and shoes. By the time I got them off it was badly burned and I missed a month of school because of it.

After I was twelve I helped at home on the farm because we were first four girls then four boys. I drove the horses in the field a lot. By this time we had moved back to Neuanlage where my parents bought the Peter Abrams farm.

My school years and childhood were the best years of my life. Then one is so carefree with the loving parents and family. How blessed are those children that still have their parents!

Another song I learned in my childhood was

Du lieber Gott ich bitte dich,
Ein frommes Kind lass werden mich;
Gib mir ein Herz so klar und rein,
Wie’s Tropfchen Tau im Sonnenschein.

Hab ich dann auch nicht Geld und Gut
Bin ich doch reich und wohlgemut,
Denn höhern Wert als Blink und Erz
Hat doch ein kindlich frommes Herz.

Du lieber Gott, ich bitte Dich,
Mit diesen Schatz erfülle mich;
Dann führen die lieben Engelein
Mich einst in Deinen Himmel ein!

Dear God, let me be a good child, with a heart as pure as a drop of dew in the sunlight. Even though I may not have money or goods I may then be well satisfied, for a pure heart is of much greater value than glittering treasure. Fill me with what is of lasting value, God, so the angels may lead me into heaven to be with you!

I spent my youth quietly and simply in my parents’ house. Beside us in the village lived Diedrich Harders. They had eleven children. We were seven girls and five boys in our house. An old widow, Mrs. Johann Klassen, lived in our village with two single daughters my mother’s age. We often went to visit them in the evenings. Or we went to evening meetings and Singstunden (Song Hours) in Gretna. The town of Gretna was only a mile from our village. Sometimes we went to church meetings in Edenburg, two miles away.

We belonged to the Sommerfelder Mennonite congregation, twelve miles away, but we also had regular meetings in the schoolhouse in our village, and in Silberfeld at old Peter Rempels’ place. In the summer we often went to meetings in Gruenthal, only three miles away.

The Mennonite West Reserve, in southern Manitoba, where Maria Toews spent her childhood. All German names are Mennonite villages (not nearly all villages shown). French names are Metis settlements along the Red River. The green and tan parts are the US states of North Dakota and Minnesota. My wife, Susan (Krahn), spent her childhood years between Schanzenfeld and Friedensruh, south of Winkler.

During this time my mother suffered from cancer in her right ear. My parents took her to Winnipeg to see a woman that could burn it out. My sister Elisabeth went along to help care for the baby, because it was only a few months old.

After a short while the cancer came back. Mother went to Winnipeg again, but it didn’t help anything. Then we sent her to Kansas City, in America, by herself. She was there for seven weeks, and got better. But three years later the cancer came back and she had to go again. Once again she came back healed, and lived another 32 years. But all this had cost us much money and we were always poor. My sister Elisabeth was sickly too, and worked more in the house, but thankfully I was always healthy and worked a lot in the stable and on the fields.

The last year we lived in Neuanlage we were just winding up the oats harvest. My sister Anna was driving the team with the last load of sheaves. It was almost dark and the horses got frightened and bolted. They ran as fast as they could. The sheaves fell off on both sides and we fell off too. I landed on my arm and broke it. The horses ran through the fence and one of them broke his leg so Father had to get someone to shoot it. I did not sleep much that night for the pain and for thinking of the poor horse. The next morning, Sunday, Father took me to Jakob Kruegers in Neubergthal to have my arm set. I wore it in a sling for three weeks.

The work, however, could not stay standing. That week we hauled all the barley together, and we also did our threshing.

In the fall of 1906 my father travelled to Swift Current, Saskatchewan, to look for land. We had too little to support ourselves in Manitoba. Father took a homestead of 160 acres for ten dollars, and bought another 160 acres for four hundred dollars. My grown sisters were all working for other families at this time, Elisabeth for David Wiebes in Rosenfeld, Anna for my uncle Peter Abrams in Rosthern, Saskatchewan, and Aganetha for Heinrich Abrams in Edenthal, so I was at home to help get everything ready to move.

In March, 1908, my sister Elisabeth got married to Aron Dyck’s Peter from Schoenthal. On the second of April, my parents left Gretna station with nine children and a box car loaded with furniture, food and machinery, for Saskatchewan. In another car they had the horses and cows, the chickens and the feed.

I had my first train ride the next day from Gretna to Rosenfeld, Manitoba, to begin working for my uncle David Wiebes. I wanted to stay in Manitoba to go through instruction class and get baptised because out in Saskatchewan there was no church yet, only a bunch of bachelors getting things ready, thirty miles out on the prairie, south of Swift Current.

So, the next Sunday my uncle took me and my cousin Bernhard Wiebe to Schoenthal to begin classes for baptism. There were 22 boys and 22 girls in the class. It was a very large church and many of the people were strangers to me. On the second holiday after Pentecost we were all baptised by elder Abram Doerksen, on the confession of our faith that Jesus, the Son of God, died for our sins, that he is our Redeemer, and we were all taken in as members of the Sommerfelder Gemeinde.

In Rosenfeld and Schoenthal I got to know many young people, one of them a boy named Heinrich Toews from the village of Weidenfeld. That spring he became my Verlobter (promised one).

After the baptism we wrote to my parents to ask for their permission to get married. They were agreed, so we rode with Jacob Siemens and his wife, and his daughter Tina to Winnipeg to get what we needed to start housekeeping. There I said goodbye to my promised one at the train station where I left for Swift Current, Saskatchewan to visit my parents yet before the wedding.

I got to Swift Current on a Friday in the beginning of June. Nobody was there to meet me, even though I had sent them a letter telling the time of my arrival. I asked the station master if any Mennonites lived in the town. He said, “Go down to Cooper’s store. That is where a lot of them come every day.” But it was too late in the evening. They had all gone home to the colony, south of town.

At the store I asked for my parents’ mail and sure enough, the letter I had written was still there. So I asked the storekeeper if he knew any Mennonite people in town. He said there were two families and sent an English boy with me to find them. He took me to Gerhard Buhlers’ place. They were total strangers to me but very gladly took me in and I was so grateful. Onkel Buhler went up to the station to get my trunk, and the next day I rode with Isaak Heinrichs out to the villages. I had known him well from Manitoba.

The Heinrichs lived six miles south of town. I stayed the night with them, as I learned that my parents lived another seventeen miles further south among the Old Colony people. The next day, Sunday, Isaak Heinrichs took me down there and we had a most joyful reunion.

My parents had rented ninety acres of ploughed land there, in the new village of Schoenfeld. They had put up a two room shed in which they could live for the summer and had planted sixty acres in wheat along with thirty acres in oats and barley. But it rained little and the Chinook wind came and dried up what was left. There was only a little feed for the animals and nothing to thresh.

My parents’ homestead lay thirty miles south of Swift Current. Just the night before I arrived in Schoenfeld my father and my brothers Heinrich and Peter had come back from there. They had been ploughing and picking rocks in preparation for planting. They had cleared the grass from a spot where they wanted to build a house. So, on Monday morning, I went down there with them. We got everything ready the night before, enough food for a week, and my sister Justina went along to keep me company. She was nine years old and a big help already.

A spring of good water flowed not far from where we started building the house on the homestead. A quarter mile from there was a ravine with a creek in it. I liked the good water but the prairie was so strange. It was rolling and rocky land, not like Manitoba, cut through with deep ravines, and not one tree in sight.

Seven miles from our homestead, in a ravine, we found some poplar and wild cherry trees. My brothers fetched brush from there to burn. Besides that, we had plenty of dried manure for fuel, because the range cattle came down to the creek to drink every evening. I really liked to see the large herds of cattle going by.

The area south of Swift Current, Saskatchewan, settled by Sommerfelder and Old Colony Mennonites in the early 1900s. My wife, Susan's, grandparents, Bernhard and Helena (Braun) Krahn, lived in Rosenhof, near McMahon, from where they moved to Durango, Mexico, in 1924.

From Swift Current my father brought enough wood for window and door frames and shingles for the roof. But we had no money for anything more, and fall was coming so we had to hurry and get our house built. My brothers cut sod strips with a twelve inch plough and divided them into two foot lengths. We mixed mud with our feet and I handed Father the strips as he built up the walls.

That first week we drove two miles every evening to sleep in an empty shed. But as soon as our walls were high enough we set boards up against them and slept there. Many times I was sad as I thought of how it all looked and of how poor we were. But my father and brothers were in good spirits and teased me about being a bride in these humble circumstances, my clothes dirty, and my hands and feet in the mud. Every Saturday we drove seventeen miles across the prairie to Schoenfeld, and by Monday noon we were back. As soon as we had the roof on the house we moved in.

Once the whole family was there my father and brothers made a loft of eight inch boards on which the five boys could sleep. The rest of us slept and ate in two rooms downstairs. We also had a little pantry with a wooden floor.

Mother, my sister Aganetha and I, also began right away to plaster the walls. My brothers mixed the mud and we smeared it on.

Once in a while we had to drive the thirty miles to Swift Current for flour and other supplies. My brother Gerhard and I drove along on one of these trips to the Old Colony village of Chortitz to Jakob Heinrichs’ place. They had a big hill there where we dug out several bags of white clay. With this we painted our house inside and out, so it looked really nice.

From Manitoba we had brought four good horses. But my parents had already sold two and bought a yoke of oxen to plough the sod. The horses could not stand the heavy work, and we had only poor feed. With these oxen my brothers kept on ploughing at the homestead in hopes that we would get a crop the second year, and sure enough we did. We also had just enough potatoes and flour to get us through the winter.

All this summer my promised one wrote to me every week but in September three weeks had gone by without word from him. I was getting concerned. Then, on the 22d of the month, my brothers saw a buggy coming in the far distance. We thought it must bring guests to our place. But the buggy passed and headed off toward the south. My brothers recognised the horses as belonging to David Rempels from Reinland.

In the afternoon the buggy reappeared. This time they drove onto our yard and sure enough, my bridegroom was along! They had gotten directions to our place and were told we lived in a sod house. When they saw our nice white house they did not recognise it as such and drove seven miles past to where a bachelor told them where we lived.

We stayed for two weeks with my parents as a bridal couple. Then, in the beginning of October we left them, with my brothers and sisters, to begin our journey back to Manitoba where we planned to have our wedding. My parents came along to the station in Swift Current and wished us the best for our life together.

Back in Manitoba we had our wedding on 5 November 1908 at Heinrich’s parents, Bernhard Toews’s place, in Weidenfeld. We invited sixty families to our wedding and the minister Abram Bergen married us with Mark 10: 6-9 as his text.

* * * * *
 
Click here for the next installment.
 
Peter
 
P.S. The Low German family name Toews is pronounced Tifes (rhymes with the English word wife's) but most non-German speakers pronounce it Taves (rhyming with caves).
 
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