Elisabeth: Excerpts from the diary of a Mennonite girl in the Gran Chaco

Elizabeth-a girl in the Gran Chaco-tells about her life in a diary. Having been born in Russia, she tells about the founding and the building of her village in the Chaco of Paraguay, with all the inherent difficulties in a wilderness settlement and growing up in conservative provincialism, with the conflicting priorities typical of a Mennonite society of long standing-societal norms on the one hand, and Christian commandments and rules on the other. The political world at the time motivated her flight from Russia, and continued to play a decisive role during the Second World War with its widespread fallout and reper­cussions.

Peter P. Klassen was born 1926 in the Mennonite village of Chortitz on the Dnieper. Together with his parents, they fled Russia via Moscow, arriving in Germany in 1929, and departing from there to settle in Paraguay in 1931. He and his parents pioneered in the founding and development of the Fernheim Settlement in the Chaco; it was here that he attended public and high school. Klassen subsequently continued graduate work in Germany and in Switzerland. In addition to his profession as a teacher and his work in pedagogical training, he was the editor of the Mennonite German paper Menno Blatt for decades. Moreover he wrote a series of historical books, too numerous to mention, on the Mennonites in Paraguay and Brazil.