I participated in the Mennonite Heritage Cruise of 1999. I wanted to go to Schönfeld, northeast of Zaporozhye, where my father, K.G. Toews, had been born and raised. The trip to Schönfeld involved a private charter, as there were not sufficient participants to warrant putting Schönfeld on the regular tour schedule.

The tour organizers arranged a bus, driver and guide, Nina Plutalora, for myself other tour participants who had Schönfeld connections. I had the good fortune to make the trip with four pleasant ladies; the weather was fine and we had a very good day out.  The tour organizers were not familiar with Schönfeld and organizer, Olga, said that we were being “pioneers”. Nina candidly admitted that she had not been to the Schönfeld area before.

We started out from Zaporozhye in the morning and drove east for a couple of hours to the village of Novo Nikolayevka. Then the bus turned south towards the village of Zalivnoye. Just north of  Zalivnoye we passed a church on the east side of the highway. I asked to stop. Nina’s guide indicated that it was an Orthodox church from the mid 19th century, but the architecture was not what I associate with an Orthodox (Byzantine) church. The church was brick, in (kind of) Gothic style, two stories high and appeared to have a gallery around three sides. I spoke to a passing local lady in my almost nonexistent Ukrainian and tried to ask her about the church. She explained something, at length; but the only words I recognized were “Njiemietski” (German) and “stary” (old). I took photos of the church but, alas, they did not turn out. The church seemed a bit “grand” for a Mennonite church – perhaps it belonged to one of the Lutheran or German Catholic communities that were scattered among the Mennonite villages that constituted the Schönfeld Volost. If any subsequent visitor has information on this church, I would be interested in hearing from them.

The village of Zalivnoye straggles along both sides of the highway, with the Tersa River meandering north/south on the west side of the village. When our bus arrived in Zalivnoye, Nina, our guide, asked among the local people for information about Mennonite buildings. Local people also directed us to a well from the pre-revolutionary time,

and also to a house, which was slowly being demolished for its bricks. Both were at the south end of the village, just north of an eastward bend in the road.

One of our participants had a map showing were her family’s farm equipment factory had been. Sure enough, the buildings were there – three buildings on a site at the south end of Zalivnoye. They are located on the east side of the highway, just north of an eastward bend in the highway. The three buildings appeared to be being used for storage and were in relatively good shape. They are identifiable by the decorative brickwork around the windows. I was intrigued by the arched, cast iron window frames still in one of the buildings.

These buildings had been the site of one of the many tragedies of the revolutionary period. Anarchists interrupted a wedding being celebrated in the village, took one of the men (the uncle of one of our group) behind these very buildings and hacked him to death. He could only be identified, later, by a nametag inside his shirt. Apparently those same anarchists returned the following day, to say that they had killed the wrong man.

We drove a few kilometres south to the site of Schönfeld village. This was the village, itself, as opposed to the scattered estates which, collectively, made up the Schönfeld Volost. The village lies along a road  which branches east from the highway. There are a few post revolutionary houses along the south side or the road, which leads to a state or collective farm. There is only one Mennonite era building left: on the north side of the road. It is identifiable by the decorative brickwork around its windows. It appears to have been converted to a garage, with a big wooden door cut into what had been the front wall. The building appeared to be vacant, so it is anyone’s guess when it will be pulled apart for the bricks.

One of our group remembered family stories about Schönfeld folks picnicking by the side of the Tersa River.  Our driver drove along an overgrown trail that ran straight west of the Schönfeld junction. We arrived at the river and had a pleasant time standing around in the sun, eating the fine lunches with which we had been provided. The Tersa River was, after one of the hottest and driest summers on record, just a collection of stagnant, alkaline pools.

There was an overgrown cemetery nearby. We poked around it looking for old graves, but found only a few, recent, grave markers.

Almost all the municipal archives of Schönfeld were burned up during the revolution.  I did not know the exact location of my father’s family’s estate, but my father had spoken about the Solonaya River, part of which had constituted the northern boundary of the estate. He had fond memories of swimming in it and catching crayfish. I expressed a desire to wade in the Solonaya, so Nina and the driver agreed to try to find an access spot as we returned from Schönfeld towards Zaporozhye. The Solonaya “flows” east/west, just south of the Zaporosche/NovoNikolayevka highway and joins the Tersa River, just southwest of Novo Nikolayevka. I say the river “flows” because it is dammed up at intervals along its course and is a series of reservoirs (as it had been during the Mennonite time). We did find a road, a few kilometres east of Novo Nikolayevka, just east of a collective farm.

The road leads south from the highway past a pumping station (that pumps water from the reservoir for irrigation) before coming to a bridge across the Solonaya. It made a pleasant scene, on a sunny day: the river was dotted with ducks and white geese. In the distance, two men were wading along the reservoir, pulling a net between them – a scene straight out of Gogol! Nina told me that such fishing was, in fact illegal, so I felt very much at home: in northern B.C., where I live, folks are constantly embroiled in disputes about what constitutes legal and illegal fishing. I walked down, into the bulrushes, and waded in, a bit, while the group took photos for me.

We returned to Zaporozhye, arriving about 3:30pm. I was very satisfied with the trip and hope the others were, too.

Note that we visited only a few sites of what had been the Schönfeld Volost. Schönfeld also included the villages of Blumenfeld and Silberfeld (south of Zalivnoye), Rosenhof (west of Zalivnoye) and Kronsberg, Blumenheim and Eichental (east of Zalivnoye). Potential visitors with connections with those villages may wish to refer to the Mennonite Historical Atlas (Schroeder and Huebert).

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