Carillon Flashback June 25, 1948: Paraguay is new home for 1,500 Mennonites

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/06/2024 (341 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

About 450 Mennonites, last of the group of 1,500, moving to Paraguay, boarded a special Canadian Pacific Railway train at Niverville, for the first lap of their long journey to their new home in South America.

Others left from Winnipeg, Letellier and Plum Coulee in Manitoba and another group of emigrating Mennonites were from the Herbert, Saskatchewan district.

All will board the Dutch steamer Volendam at Montreal, which will take them straight to Buenos Aires, Argentina. From there, some will go by rail, others by riverboat, to Villarrica, Paraguay, their point of disembarkation.

From Villarrica, they will move along a new 65-mile road, just recently built by the Paraguay government, in an easterly direction, to arrive at the site where a new Mennonite colony will be located.

Heartbreaking scenes marked their departure; a young girl, weeping and sobbing, was helped onto the train. A young man, who was the only family member to remain in Canada, fainted after bidding farewell to his parents, brothers and sisters.

In the huge crowd of friends and relatives who had come out for the last farewell, there was hardly an eye that was tearless. While the emigrants bid their friends good-bye and boarded the train, Reverend P.F. Wiebe led the prayers and singing of solemn hymns.

While the big trek moved along on schedule, there were some little hitches that prevented a few from leaving with the group at Niverville.

Rev. Cornelius W. Friesen of Niverville remained behind, while his wife was recuperating from an illness.

The Abram T. Doerksen family had a young child in hospital, seriously ill, who died on the scheduled day of departure. One girl got stuck on the road and arrived after the train had departed, while a young couple was visited by the stork that morning.

These five families will go by plane in about a month, so they will arrive in Buenos Aires at the same time the ship docks.

The movement to Paraguay started in 1926. The Canadian government then had started a gradual enforcement of the Schools Act and Mennonites found their agreement with the government regarding their own private schools was “not worth the paper it was written on.”

Fathers who refused to send their children to the public school system were threatened with jail or fines, and so they began looking for a new home.

A group of Mennonite emigrants moved to Mexico in 1922 and 1923. In 1926 and 1927, about 1,700 moved to Paraguay. Other Mennonites, content with the school system at the time, remained in Canada.

Now, in 1948, a new danger was seen as a threat to the Mennonite way of life. This time, the threat came from within. The young people in their own congregations were leaving their own communities and were taking jobs in factories, shops and cafes, losing their own identity in a modern world. Many had even volunteered to join His Majesty’s forces in the Second World War.

The only solution for the Mennonites, it seemed, was another emigration to a land farther away from modern civilization, where they would be free to live in communities with the least outside interference.