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Through Paraguay to Canada: Jakob and Erna Fast Barwich
Erna Fast and Jakob Barwich, unacquainted with each other at the
time, were passengers on the same ship, Volendam 2, with escorts Peter
and Elfrieda Dyck, when they sailed as refugees to Paraguay after World
War II. Erna was born in 1938 in a village near the border of Poland and
the Soviet Union, and was of Mennonite Brethren extraction. Stalin’s holocaust
was in full stride: her father was “disappeared” into the gulag, and her
mother briefly imprisoned. The German invasion into the USSR hence came
as a relief. “The Germans were our friends,” says Erna. Mennonite children
would visit the German barracks for candy, and Erna’s sister landed a job
there for a time. When the German army was forced to retreat, however,
Erna, her oldest sister and brother “chose” to become refugees rather than
face Soviet reprisals, and boarded a train headed west. She remembers travel
on an open train car, fields littered with corpses, plane escorts, and
finally a series of refugee camps. In the Buchholz camp the family tragedy
intensified: her brother was drowned. The family would have chosen to emigrate
to Canada, but her mother didn’t pass the health test, and Erna was considered
too young. Paraguay, however, was accepting Mennonite refugees, hoping
to settle them in the “green hell” of its backlands, and it was here that
Erna and Jakob would find their new homes.
Jakob was born in 1930 in Beresowka, near Ufa, in 1930, but his
old lineage was Danziger. Out of the desperation of poverty, his grandparents
had emigrated from post World War I Germany into the Soviet Union, where
Jakob’s father Johann met and married Anna Voth. It was soon obvious that
their move into the USSR was a horrible mistake, and Jakob’s grandparents,
and later his parents, used their German passports to return to the west.
At the age of three, Jakob was playing in the grainfields of his grandparents’
farm, when the long blades of the harvester mutilated him severely, slicing
off a leg and several fingers. Not expecting the mangled child to live,
his family placed him on the kitchen table and waited for him to die. Jake
miraculously survived, however, and a local orthopedist ingeniously crafted
him the necessary prosthetics. “The wonder has not ended,” writes Jakob,
“... many countries I have seen, and often, where others could not go,
I went right on” (22).
His family was living in Stolp (now Slupsk, Poland) in eastern
Germany when it was overrun by the Russian army. The atrocities began.
Adults, and even children, were deported to labour camps, crops were seized,
and the rape of women was unceasing. Amidst these horrors, the Barwich
family was reunited with Jakob’s father, who had been conscripted into
the Soviet army. And Jakob’s childhood accident now allowed a flight to
the west: in the eyes of the authorities, his disability made him expendable
and he was granted permission to emigrate. Throngs of refugees, the Barwich
family among them, were loaded onto a train like a herd of cattle. Many
died enroute. In West Germany, Jakob spent some time behind the barbed
wire of refugee camps, until the Arbeitsamt (work authority) assigned him
to a leather shop where he learned his trade. But although he had relatives
in Germany, Jakob was looking for a homeland. He sailed on the Volendam
2 in the late 1940s for Paraguay.
Mennonite immigrants achieved what seemed nearly impossible, carving
colonies out of the Paraguayan wilderness. Of the 1948 wave of refugees,
Erna belonged to the forty percent of households headed by single mothers,
as fathers had so frequently been sent to the Soviet gulag, and her family’s
life was excruciatingly difficult in the beginning. Mennonites had to learn
the hard way that Russian agricultural methods were not transferable to
the “green hell.” The Fast family cleared the land bit by bit and engaged
in subsistence farming. At one point her mother traded a clock for a cow;
“at least,” says Erna, “I got my milk.”
Meanwhile, as there was a great need for saddle and harness in
Paraguay, Jakob made a decent living in the leather trade and soon married
Käthe Fast, Erna’s oldest sister. Their honeymoon was an enrollment
in Bible school.
But Jakob was still looking for a better life than was possible
in Paraguay, where Mennonites frequently felt like strangers in an alien
land. Canada was opening its doors to immigration, especially of relatives,
and, as Erna says, “a chain reaction began.” Jakob’s parents had preceded
him to Canada, and in 1957 he followed them to Toronto and then British
Columbia, despite being forced to pay his new government a hefty disability
fee. Jakob lived in Vancouver and worked briefly for Midway Shoes of Abbotsford.
One day he hitched a ride to Yarrow and attended an MB Conference session
at the sanctuary there. Ironically he understood almost nothing; his mother
tongue was German, and church meetings had just made the switch from German
to English. A Yarrow resident befriended Jakob and connected him with someone
who was selling a local shoe shop. After much agonizing, a private loan
was arranged and Jakob moved his family into the dwelling at the rear of
the shop. Nonetheless he wondered how he could make a living until one
day a soldier walked in with a pair of boots for repair. Jakob did the
job, and the returning soldier pronounced the work “A1.” The soldier reappeared
with a truck and dozens of boots, and thereafter Jakob, a pacifist cobbler,
was guaranteed a steady business.
Erna, on the other hand, emigrated to Canada in 1961 against her
wishes and only for her family’s sake. She was in nurse’s training in Paraguay,
and “didn’t go gladly.” Learning a new language in Canada was traumatic
for a woman rendered painfully shy by all the uprootings in her life. Two
months after her arrival in Yarrow, further tragedy struck. Käthe
was killed in an Easter Sunday accident when a flatbed truck driven by
three young joyriders rolled backwards into the car Jakob was driving.
Jakob walked towards the boys in the truck, “wanting to smash, but then
I was released. I didn’t become a killer” (105). He was devastated but
found new comfort in his marriage, on December 31 of the same year, with
Erna. His shop became a central part of Yarrow life, becoming a gathering
place for a vibrant and talkative group of Mennonite men.
And Erna, who had always found school “exhilarating and terrifying,”
doggedly overcame her low self esteem by learning English and achieving
her Grade 12 certificate. She landed a job at Tabor Home, the retirement
facility in Abbotsford, tutored ESL in Chilliwack, and participated in
Literacy BC, including appearances on radio and TV. Together, Erna and
Jakob raised a family of six boys, engaged in poultry farming, and eventually
travelled back to Paraguay, as well as to Germany after the fall of the
Berlin Wall. These two remarkable individuals survived with resilience
a series of traumas that might have destroyed others. “The fact that Mennonites
have learned to work and pray together,” writes Jakob, “made things possible”
(69). Certainly true, but Jakob and Erna Fast Barwich seem to possess a
particular incandescence of lives hard won.
References: Jakob and Erna Fast Barwich, Interviews.
Chilliwack Times, June 1, 1993, 15.
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