A Journey Home: The Inner Turmoil of a Mennonite Hero

By Marlena Fiol and Ed O'Connor

Part adventure saga, part love story, part confessional, A Journey Home is based on true events in one man's journey from stoicism to despair, and ultimately to acceptance, forgiveness, and peace. It's an action-packed tale of survival that invites you to dig deep into an emotional and spiritual exploration of human frailty and strength. Dr. John's journey reminds us that, paradoxically, confronting our fears can be a doorway to finding a place of inner peace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Apr 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666773859

Marlena Fiol

Marlena Fiol and Ed O’Connor are emeritus professors and spiritual seekers whose writing explores the depths of who we are and what’s possible in our lives. They are the award-winning authors of CALLED: A True Story and Marlena’s memoir, Nothing Bad Between Us: A Mennonite Missionary’s Daughter Finds Healing in Her Brokenness. To learn more, visit MarlenaFiol.com.

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Prologue

My name is John Schmidt. Thank you for joining me in this exploration. I’ve shared parts of my story in the past, but I’ve never before divulged the hidden truths behind it. You may have read, and it is true, that I accomplished a great deal with the help of my trusted friend and life partner, Clara. It is also true, as has been written about us, that we overcame great obstacles to undertake and carry out our multiple missions in Paraguay, South America. And through it all, God led the way and protected us until the very end.

Here’s how Edgar Stoesz, former chairman of the American Leprosy Missions, described one of the lasting results of our efforts: Dr. John and Clara’s revolutionary model became the standard for leprosy treatment around the world.

And Dr. Franz Duerksen, the talented plastic surgeon who took over the leadership of our leprosy compound after we left, said this: . . . their joint passion helped overcome many obstacles and misunderstandings, ultimately leading to extraordinary outcomes in leprosy and social work.

Those are stories I told and encouraged others to tell. After all, we faithfully carried out God’s work.

But there is so much more. What has been only hinted at, but never exposed, are my insecurities and my anger and my fear—there, I said it—the fear that lay beneath the surface of my stony exterior like smoldering hot ash in the bowels of a volcano.

Even those closest to me rarely saw cracks in my defensive armor. And now I’m going to explore and maybe even disclose them to myself and the world. Why am I doing this? you might ask, just as I’ve been asking myself, over and over. Why now? I wish I knew for sure. Something compels me. If you stay with me, maybe we’ll discover the answer together.

It was not our way as a family to open ourselves up vulnerably. Even when I was a young lad on a farm in Kansas, when life was hard, we were taught to shut up and fight our way through it. And I was a good student.

This journey of self-discovery with you will be far more challenging for me than all the hardships I ever endured in Paraguay. I will sweep you away with stories of some of my most harrowing experiences. And I will gradually reveal to you, and to myself, the inner truth lurking behind those stories that has until now remained mostly hidden.

Well, as much of the truth as I can muster, including the parts that are hardest for me to face. I always fought tenaciously to convince others of what I knew to be true. Like Nazism does not mix with Christianity and People with leprosy deserve to be treated with the same dignity as anyone else. But when it came to my own inner truths, the wounds deep within me, I tried to keep them hidden. Until now.

To be clear, this is not a confession in the traditional sense. That’s the Catholic way, and it is nonsense—confessing sins to another human being to gain healing for the soul. Shouldn’t have sinned in the first place! But there I go again with my bitter judgments. It’s time for me to journey inward and confront my own dark places. Along the way, I hope you will not judge me as harshly as I will surely judge myself.

For those of you who are deeply disappointed that I, someone you believed to be a hero, am a man haunted by demons of fear, anger, and self-loathing, I dedicate this book most especially to you.

PART I: BREAKING AWAY

1916–1943

To progress in our inner work, we need to be willing to observe our resistance to reality, our attachment to our self-image, and our fear.

—EnneaThought, April 24, 2022

Chapter 1

My first vivid memory is from the age of five, so the year must have been 1916. I was charged with keeping an eye on our horse-drawn wagon, which was tied to a post in front of the general store in Goessel, Kansas, several miles from our family farm. My pa was in the store buying the weekly supplies of rice and sugar and whatever else Ma told him to buy.

I patted the restless horse. Sie stell, I said in our native Plautdietsch (Low German).

Several men appeared behind me. They yelled something in English I couldn’t understand, repeating the word Hun several times. I stared wide-eyed as they surrounded me, continuing to spit out Hun . . . Hun. One of them stood taller than the others and twirled a whip in his right hand.

Why were they so angry, I wondered? And why were they calling me a dog? My ma had warned me to never, ever speak a word in public. But even at five I knew that sometimes you had to take things into your own hands.

Wot ess? I asked, staring at the man with the whip.

My father came out of the store just as the man stepped toward me, holding his whip high in the air. Pa said nothing. He just grabbed me, threw me on the back of the wagon along with his supplies, unhitched the horse, jumped up on the wagon, and took off, leaving a cloud of dust.

Dee sede etch wea een Hund—they called me a dog, I said.

Hun is not dog, my father muttered, whipping the horse harder than I’d ever seen.

I remember wanting him to say more, but he clamped his mouth shut, the way he often did when my ma yelled at him. And when Pa flattened his lips like that, I knew there was no point in trying to get him to talk.

Sometime later, I learned why I was not allowed to speak in public as a child. My parents were trying to hide our German identity. Until I went to English school, I spoke only Plautdietsch, the Low-German dialect of my Mennonite ancestors who traveled from Germany to Russia in the 1700s, and then immigrated to Kansas in the late 1800s. Our community experienced severe harassment during WWI in response to our assumed ties with Germany. In fact, I remember hearing about a Mennonite who was tarred and feathered on the main street of Canton, a town not far from Goessel, because he would not buy war bonds. We were often derogatorily referred to as the Hun, which as a young lad I understood as Hund, the Plautdietsch word for dog.

I suspect this early experience left a mark, but I don’t yet understand what it was.

*

I was the fifth of eleven children who survived. Ma often reminded me that she wanted only four children. Maybe that’s why she rarely smiled. Life was serious business for my mother. Despite birthing far too many babies, she worked tirelessly to eke out a living on our poor Kansas farm, making up for Pa, who didn’t really have the constitution to be a farmer.

My father was always congenial and generous to a fault—with outsiders. I remember him sitting around with friends, smoking cigarettes, and telling stories of the good old days. But behind closed doors, he whipped me like being born was my fault. He didn’t believe in the coddling that seems to be today’s way of raising children. Sure, that made me mad, but it also made me tough enough to take on whatever life threw at me.

*

Being tough was in our family’s genes, I suppose. I remember the stories my grandmother, Groosmau Lena, told and retold when I delivered milk to her every morning before sunup—including her memories of their trans-Atlantic journey when they emigrated from Russia. The story that particularly stands out in my mind is that one night, Groospau Jakob, a tall strong man of twenty-seven, jerked up from the lice-infested hard bunk where he slept. Thick clouds of smoke had filled the cargo hold. He reached protectively across to his young wife next to him.

Lena, Du motstt fuats oppstohne. Doa ess een Fiea—get up quickly. There is a fire, he said urgently in Plautdietsch. We must make our way to the upper deck.

Mostly blind due to trachoma, an eye disease acquired as a young girl in Russia, Lena stumbled awkwardly along beside Jakob. Her ragged long black skirt got tangled at her ankles as he pulled her along. All around them, people in similar coarse dark clothing were rising and quietly moving toward the ladders. Rows and rows of bunks, made of rough boards, were set up along both sides of the ship’s cargo hold. The ceiling was less than six feet high, and there was only a small corridor between the bunks. To get to the upper deck, the passengers had to use narrow, steep ladders. Despite the rugged conditions and the apparent danger, the crowd around them seemed strangely calm as they all made their way to the upper deck.

Groosmau Lena recalled that by the time they reached the main deck, the crew had extinguished the fire. As though on cue, the passengers all fell to their knees. After a few moments of reverent silence, their elders led them in a song of thanksgiving.

Groospau Jakob and Groosmau Lena were among over 300 Mennonite men, women, and children on the S.S. Cimbria that late-summer night in 1874, immigrating to America. Entire colonies had emigrated from Holland to Germany in the 1500s, and from Germany to Russia a few centuries later. They moved each time the respective governments reneged on the promised exemption from military service and/or religious freedom previously granted as enticements in exchange for their renowned Mennonite work ethic and wheat-farming skills. This time they were fleeing because they again were soon to lose their agreed-upon exemption from the military. They also faced the loss of freedom to worship in their traditional German Mennonite churches and to educate their children in their own German Bible schools.

My people were successful wheat farmers who settled on the desolate prairies of Kansas. With almost reverence, Groosmau Lena used to read me an article she’d saved from a faded, partially torn newsprint from the Topeka Commonwealth, dated sometime in 1874. I no longer remember exactly what that article said, except for this part of our Mennonite lore:

. . . in three years the ocean of grass in Kansas will be transformed into an ocean of waving fields of grain.

Dot, mien Tjind, is your heritage, my groosmau would say. You must never forget it. God protected us, and we must always obey Him and give back for the privileges our people have enjoyed.

What I can tell you is that the transformation from an ocean of grass to an ocean of waving fields of grain took much longer than three years. Even forty years later, when I was a young boy on that Kansas farmland, it was only fierce tenacity and a kind of madness that kept my family alive. And if any of my ten siblings or I didn’t shoulder our share of the farm labor, our father beat us with a long strip of tanned cowhide that hung in the barn.

I must have slacked off more than any of the others, because I received the lion’s share of Pa’s beatings. I remember standing in the corner of the barn, shivering, my head high, waiting for the first blow against the cold skin of my bare back. He swung the strap again and again until my back was bloody.

I tried to never let on that it hurt. I don’t remember crying when my pa beat me. In fact, I was proud of my stripes.

*

From the age of eight, I was in charge of a two-mule team, which I hitched up to a sulky plow during planting seasons and a binder during harvest. The heavy harness hung so high on a pole in the middle of our barn that I had to climb up on a bale of hay to reach it.

My mules and I played constant games of who’s-in-control. I learned early on that controlling their heads was the best way to direct their body movement. Because one of my mules was stronger than the other, I used a crossbeam attached behind two wooden bars, attaching one bar closer to the side of the stronger animal to even out their work.

I remember being quite satisfied that I was fully in command of my team of mules. This all changed one late summer evening after a long day of harvest. I was nine. After cutting the wheat with the binder, my brothers and I piled it up in stooks (sheaves of grain stood on end) so it would dry before it was threshed. The wheat bundles were so slick that sometimes the whole stack would come sliding down and fall apart and we’d have to start all over.

By the time we finished for the day, it was dark. One of my mules was limping. I led it into the barn. The last thing I remembered was lifting the mule’s front hoof to inspect it. The next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground in a pool of blood. I stumbled across the yard and threw open the back door of our house.

Do not forget to wipe your boots. My mother stood at the kitchen basin with her back to me.

Ma, I—

Wot! She wiped her hands on her apron and crossed the room toward me.

I explained that I thought I’d been kicked in the forehead by my mule. I hoped it would get me some sympathy and maybe even a day off, like Sundays, which were the only days