by Marlena Fiol
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the
world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore
all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” —George Bernard Shaw
On June 9, 1941, two years into the second
Great War, as Nazi troops advanced deep into the Soviet Union, a young, single,
adventurous doctor named John Schmidt boarded a ship in New York for the eighteen-day
trip to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a stopping point on his way to Paraguay. The Atlantic
Ocean was a war zone patrolled by Nazi submarines. Because the U.S. was still
neutral, the ship's name and two large American
flags were painted on both sides of the hull. At night, the ship sailed fully
lit. It was a mighty blazing vessel, making its way through dangerous waters,
carrying among its passengers a zealous man on a mission.
After spending a few days in Rio, John boarded
a plane that took him across the vast land of Brazil. He arrived in Asunción, the capital city of Paraguay, on a cold rainy
afternoon in mid-July. Gaunt and emaciated from almost
constant diarrhea and vomiting during more than a month of travel, he deplaned
and breathed in the smoky, sweet, heavy, pungent odors of Paraguay.
A crew of shabby, rather taciturn police at the
airport "dossiered" and fingerprinted him, marking John down as a
potential criminal. The Paraguayan government, headed at that time by pro-Fascist
General Morínigo, admired Germany’s Wehrmacht and expressed unabashed
support for the German cause. Germany’s effective propaganda reinforced the
view that the German military was superior and that the true threats to the
Western Hemisphere were not the Axis powers but Western imperialists. They
viewed John as one of those.
“What
are you doing here?” they asked him suspiciously in broken English. This tall,
thin man with blazing eyes intrigued them.
“I’m headed for the Chaco,” he said, “to be a
doctor.”
They traded loaded looks. “No, hombre,” they told him. “Not the Chaco. No white man can live
there.”
But John barely heard them. He strode through
the heavy double doors into the airport’s grungy waiting room and reached out
to shake hands with the Russian Mennonite leaders of the Chaco colonies who had
come to meet him.
As they drove over the cobblestone streets into
Asunción, John stared at the red-tiled roofs
of what has often been referred to as “the city of yesterday.” In colonial
times, Asunción was the capital of nearly the entire
southern third of South America. Later, because it is landlocked and because of
the tragedy of numerous bloody wars, the city failed to modernize along with
the rest of the world. It has kept much of its traditional colonial flavor,
even today.
When his medical internship in Baltimore had ended
a few months earlier, John began looking for places to practice. “I could have
chosen some places around Baltimore,” he said, “but I was tired of being around
women who painted their lips and men who lived in sin. I wanted to be back
among my own people again.” His “own people” were the Mennonites in Kansas who
had emigrated from Russia in the 1870s.
At about that time, John’s brother Herb, also a
physician, had become aware that a large colony
of persecuted Russian Mennonites had recently immigrated to a territory of
about 3,000 square kilometers in west Paraguay, South America. It was a harsh
desert called the Chaco. Only a few scattered nomad Indian tribes considered it
habitable. The new Mennonite colonists were from the same heritage as the
Kansas clan. They had no doctor and had approached Herb about moving to
Paraguay to care for them. But he was busy establishing his medical career in Kansas. Knowing that his brother John was
looking for a place to practice, Herb sent him a
telegram briefly explaining the situation.
John sat at the edge of his hard bed, the
telegram in his lap. As he read, his back straightened and his muscles tensed.
In that moment, he knew God was calling him to serve in the South American
country they called Paraguay. His grandmother Lena had so often told him
stories about how she and his grandfather Jacob had escaped the persecution in
Russia. “If my grandparents hadn’t come to the U.S. when they did in the 1870s,
I’d be lucky to be a barefoot boy walking behind a plow in Paraguay. For me to
help the Paraguayan Mennonites medically is my expression of thanks that I was
spared the pig mess in Russia,” he said, and then abruptly stopped, noticing
that in his excitement he was speaking out loud to himself.
Little did John know that the trip from
Asunción to Filadelfia, one of the Mennonite villages of the Chaco colonies,
would require another few weeks. First, was the 320-mile riverboat trip up the
Río Paraguay, where he waited four days for a wood-burning steam engine train.
The train trip of nearly 100 miles took another full day. Finally, he rode on horseback
with guides the remaining forty miles through the bush to the dusty little
village of Filadelfia.
They rode up to a small single-room hut with a
sloping thatched roof that he was told had once been an Indian hospital. Birds
had made nests in the roof and the mud brick exterior walls were eroding. The
shutters leaned down unevenly from broken rusted hinges.
“Welkohm
– welcome. We hope it is good for you to live in this house, Herr Dockda,” said the stooped, thin
Russian man who opened the door for the new doctor. “An Indian has died in it
so people refuse to use it.”
All John heard was his beloved Plautdietsch (Low German), the language
of his Russian Mennonite people. He felt his
heartbeat quicken. He had arrived.
I once asked John to tell me about his years as
a young doctor in the Chaco.
“You were fresh out of your internship without
even your medical books (it took his crate of books six months to arrive in
Paraguay). And you were trained as a general practitioner, not a surgeon, but
you had to do it all when you were out there alone?”
“Mostly I was just grateful the Lord sent me
there,” he said. “Before I arrived, many of the Mennonites had died. They died
of malnutrition, typhoid, even child birth.”
“But you didn’t have any medical facilities, no
nurses,” I said. “How was it even possible to practice medicine?”
“Ach…I
managed,” he said, shrugging. “I built my surgical team with what I had. For my
anesthetist, I trained a grade school teacher from one of the Mennonite
villages. For my I.V. fluids, I set
up a crude still to make distilled water from collected rainwater. For iron, I
went to the blacksmith and heated rusted iron red hot. Then I put it in a
mortar and pestle. I used this to treat anemia, which was common because of
hookworm infestation.”
“Did it ever scare you that you were so far
from home in a wilderness where the white man supposedly can’t live?” I asked.
“Najo,”
– there is no direct translation for this word, which roughly translated means
“oh, well” or “well maybe” – he said, closing his eyes to remember. “Until the
first time I walked into the hospital kitchen for a lunch. There sat a plate of Russian
ammonia cookies, just like we used to have at home on the farm in Kansas. Here,
thousands of miles from home and after many warnings of coming to ‘no man’s
land’, I landed right smack into my Grandma Lena’s kitchen.”
“I can tell you I never became homesick because
of strange customs in the Chaco,” he added. “After the sinful atmosphere of
medical school and the hospital in Baltimore, I was back with my own people.”
John was the sixth of twelve children, or the
way it is listed in the Schmidt genealogy, he was the fifth of eleven living
children. No one in his family ever talked about the embarrassing firstborn,
conceived before John’s Mennonite parents were
married in 1902. This first son died when he was very young and the Schmidt
family records don’t even acknowledge his existence.
Late in his life, I asked John to give me a
tour of his childhood homestead near Goessel, Kansas. As we made our way to the
old barn, he walked ahead of me, briskly, as though he needed to rush to get to
something important. His faded brown polyester pants, shiny from wear in the
back and at the knees, hung loosely on his slender frame.
“From when I was the age of eight, my older
brother and I were each responsible for hitching up our five-horse outfits
right here in this barn,” he said in his somewhat stilted English. Plautdietsch always remained his
preferred language. His arm waved in the direction of the fields behind the
white-shingled two-story house where he grew up. “We tilled those fields with
sulky plows.” He tenderly stroked the scarred post where the horse harnesses
had hung. “I pulled the binder with my five horses. After cutting the wheat,
which came from the binder in twenty- to thirty-pound bundles, it had to be
shocked or piled up in stacks that resembled small tepees. This was so the
grain would dry before it was threshed.”
John’s eyes took on a far-away look. “After the
wheat stayed in the shock to dry for a few weeks, we bundled it. When we
stacked the bundles, they were so slick that sometimes the whole stack would
come sliding down and fall apart. We’d have to start all over.”
“And you hitched up your own plow and binder
all by yourself at the age of eight?”
“Sure. And we often stayed home from school to
get the wheat seeded. On rainy days I would fix the harness and repair all of
the machinery … the binder, gang plow, harrow, and drill.”
“Weren’t there child labor laws?”
My question pulled him out of his reveries.
“Child labor laws?” he growled, turning to stare at me in disbelief.
“Yeah, you were
just a kid.” He said nothing and I dropped it. I learned later that regulations
to abolish child labor in the U.S. appeared in 1904. But they did not
apply to agricultural employment, allowing children to work an unlimited number
of hours on a farm even when school was in session. John’s Mennonite heritage
blended nicely into the child labor practices of early Twentieth
Century. Within the Mennonite culture, it is of paramount importance to fulfill
one’s duty to God first and foremost, then to parents, to the family as a whole,
and to the larger community. And it is the obligation of children to work hard
and responsibly toward these ends.
John led me into the rear part of the old barn
that had begun to cave in. “I often helped my father here late into the night,
turning the fan for his blacksmith fire. We
would heat pieces of wrought iron or steel over the hot coals until the metal
became soft enough to shape into farm implements, using a
hammer and a chisel.”
“Were you and your father close?” I asked.
“He once called me his follower,” he mused.
“But he also gave me more beatings than any of the other kids,” he added,
shaking his head as if to rid himself of the memories.
Although John went to High-German grade school
(with some English in the weeks after Christmas), his family spoke only Plautdietsch at home. One warm spring
day in 1923, the lanky twelve-year old jumped effortlessly from his beloved
horse. John was tall for his age. His thick dark brown hair was brushed back
severely from a prominent forehead. His intense dark eyes narrowed as he
spotted his twenty-year old brother Herb sitting with his father on a bench
next to the barn. They were both smoking. John knew how much his mother hated
those cigarettes and he wished they would stop.
“I just passed my final exam in Geography. Dot’s aules – that’s all,” he announced.
“No more school for me. I’ll be your helper on the farm now, Pa.” John expected him to smile in
agreement, but his father said nothing, just pulled hard on his cigarette and
glanced over at Herb. Herb was teaching in a small high school in Plains,
Kansas and had come home for a few weeks during a school break.
“You’ll do no such thing,” Herb said sternly,
as though taking over the role of his father. “You’ll enroll in English high
school.”
John did. And a number of years later, he followed Herb into college and medical school at the
University of Kansas. He wished he weren’t always following in his brother’s
footsteps. And he wished he weren’t always in his shadow. But going to med
school like Herb did seem like the logical thing to do.
He finished medical school at KU and began an
internship at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Baltimore. During a visit back to Kansas
where Herb was now practicing medicine, John and his oldest brother exchanged
notes about their medical experiences.
“How’re you doing at St. Joe’s?” It sounded to
John like Herb was quizzing him.
“I’m fine,” he said. “But hospitals on the east coast sure are
more conservative than hospitals here in the Midwest.”
“What do you mean?” Herb asked.
“Well, just take the intravenous anesthesia
Pentothal Sodium you’re using, as an example. It’s not something St. Joe will
touch until it undergoes a lot more trials.”
“It is a controversial drug, John. You know it
was tested for the first time on human beings not long ago.” Herb grinned at
his brother. “Want to take some back with you?”
John was intrigued enough with the drug’s
promise that he carried some back to St. Joe’s.
“This drug is just what we need,” he said to
two other interns on his shift one night. “It reaches the brain and
causes unconsciousness within less than a minute.” His colleagues looked at each
other with raised eyebrows and then nervously glanced around the room.
A few days later, the Chief of Surgery called
an emergency medical staff meeting. He was a stern, no-nonsense man who never
said much. When he spoke, it usually meant someone was in trouble. Staff
members filed anxiously into the meeting room, wondering what was about to
happen.
The Chief sat at the head of the long
conference table. “Some scheister is bringing potentially dangerous
experimental medicine into our midst and I want to warn you to beware,” he
said, turning his intense gaze on each person around the table. When his eyes
met John’s, the young intern did not waver. The meeting ended without
confession or exposure of the guilty party.
Clara rushed down the hall and around the
corner on the Obstetrics floor of the Bethel Deaconess Hospital in Newton,
Kansas. Her crisp white apron effectively covered up her shapely body fitted
into the blue-gray fine-striped uniform of a nurse in training. She needed to
empty the bedpan and have evening devotions with one more patient before she
went off duty. It was early June in 1941, one of those perfectly clear summer
evenings, and she couldn’t wait to get out for a walk.
“Miss
Regier, where are you off to in such a hurry?” A man’s voice boomed from the
other end of the hallway.
Clara cringed. She didn’t know why Dr.
Herb Schmidt, one of the most prominent surgeons at the Bethel Hospital, had
been singling her out from even much more senior nurses and it wasn’t clear to
her why he even knew her name. A few weeks earlier he had informed her that he
knew her uncle Peter Andres. “I’ve long been impressed with the special breed
of cattle he is raising,” he had told her, his eyes flashing. She was sure that
the twinkle in his eyes must be because he was making fun of her.
“Uh … good evening, Dr. Schmidt,” she
stammered. “I’m just going in to see this patient … uh …”
He approached her with long confident
strides and she tried not to notice his tall fit body, his strong square jaw,
and the intense eyes that were now focused on her. He laughed in that loud,
gruff way he had.
Clara’s face flushed a deep red and
she nervously fingered the little white New Testament in her uniform pocket
under the apron.
Dr. Herb didn’t seem to notice. In his
clipped staccato, he rattled off what he had mentioned to her before, but this
time with less preamble and more determination. “I have a brother. He’s a good
Mennonite. His name is John. He’s going to Paraguay. Do you know where Paraguay
is? He’s a doctor. I want you to meet him.”
Clara looked over her shoulder, hoping
no one was nearby to hear. “Uh, that’s good … no I don’t know where Paraguay is
… excuse me … I really do need to see this patient.” She ducked into the room.
Clara was twenty-seven. The prior
year, in 1940, she had entered a new class of thirteen girls to begin nurses
training at Bethel Hospital in Newton, Kansas. She had occasionally daydreamed
about marriage and family, but things didn’t seem to be going that way. The
oldest of four children, Clara had been responsible for her younger siblings at
an early age because her mother had “nerve problems.” For several years of high
school she had to stay at home, somehow managing to finish with correspondence
courses and to start college.
Her strict Mennonite father had controlled her
every move. Until just a few years earlier, she had still been living at home
on the farm east of Newton. Her father had not allowed her to mingle with young
men. He hadn’t even allowed her to stay up late in her own room, studying. So
she made the bold decision to stay on campus at age twenty-five for her last
year of college, working at a farmer’s cooperative office to pay her way. It
nearly broke her parents’ hearts.
As Clara hurriedly finished the
evening devotions with her last patient, she thought about what Dr. Schmidt had
said and wished she had some idea where Paraguay was. She made a mental note to
look it up at the library.
A few days later, the nurses were all abuzz
when Clara entered the staff lounge.
“Dr. Schmidt’s brother is in town and
he’s making the rounds with him today,” they said, eyeing her with barely
concealed excitement. Without a word, Clara grabbed her clipboard and walked
out of the room, wondering how she could escape this embarrassing situation.
Just outside of Room 239, she heard
Dr. Herb bellow, “Nurse Regier, Nurse Regier. There is someone I want you to
meet.”
There was no mistaking that they were
brothers. The same inflections when they spoke. The same dark wavy hair combed
back from prominent foreheads. The same squared off jaw. And the same dark,
intense, fiery eyes.
“Pleased to meet you. I’m John,” he
said.
“My wife and I are taking John to
Wichita tonight to see a moving picture,” Dr. Schmidt said. “Can you join us?”
“I … uh … I don’t know,” Clara hesitated. She wished Dr. Schmidt wasn’t so
imposing. She just didn’t know what to say. “Well … Okay, yes, I guess I can.”
As she rolled her thick brown hair
into a mass of curls that framed her face, Clara tried to convince herself that
she was simply doing Dr. Herb a favor by going. She wore her very best Sunday
dress that exactly matched the light blue shade of her eyes.
The evening was uneventful except for
John reaching for Clara’s hand in the back seat of Dr. Herb’s Ford. She
snatched it back, thinking he was rather fresh.
It was the first week in June of 1941. John
Schmidt left the next morning for New York to begin the eighteen-day boat trip
through the war-torn Atlantic Ocean to Rio de Janeiro, a stopping point on his
way to Paraguay.
On a still starless night in December of
that year, in the stifling summer heat of the Chaco, John Schmidt sat at a
rickety wooden table, a kerosene lamp casting shadows across his one-room shack.
On a sheet of paper he began to write:
“Before
I left the U.S. to come to Paraguay, I felt the need to look for a life
partner. Since my interest was to find a Mennonite girl and I did not find
those in Baltimore, I asked my brother Herb to look out for one in Kansas. So
this is what he did. He helped me get acquainted with you. I have a special
purpose in mind for this letter. Especially at my age of thirty years it must
be obvious to you what interest I have in our correspondence …”
And in another letter dated March 30, 1942, but
which Clara didn’t receive until May in the same mail as the previous one, “I haven’t had any letter from you since the
one written at Christmas. I’ve sent three since then … but better briefly
repeat. In one, I made a potential proposal, active if you agree with it.”
He enclosed a small black-and-white photo of himself.
Clara dropped both letters into her lap and looked
at the photo. John’s dark eyes stared back at her. She had been lonesome. She
did like his letters. And she had made a commitment to God to serve Him as a
missionary. So she wrote back:
“Dear
John. I hadn’t really thought about it. But I will surely consider this
indirect proposal ... I must, however, give you an idea of the things I look
for in a companion for life.” She went on to write that he
needed to be a devout Christian, that he needed to live a clean and vice-free
life, that he needed to be mission-minded … the list went on.
To her surprise, John wanted the same things.
He wrote that he would be home by Christmas of 1942.
In 1942, the Atlantic Ocean was under the
control of German U-boats, so John began his journey home from the Chaco by making his way west over the Andes Mountains.
There he boarded a Chilean ship, Copiapo,
a mixed freight and passenger ship that came up the Pacific Ocean and through
the Panama Canal. When they docked in New Orleans, John sent Clara a telegram,
asking her to meet him at the train depot in Kansas City.
The train was very late. Loud-mouthed soldiers
and sailors were carousing around the station. Clara sat on a bench, staring at
each person stepping off the train and rushing past her. She was in suspense to
see John’s face, thinking she might be remembering him all wrong. After a time,
she began feeling dejected. Of all the people coming out, she saw no one that
looked like the little photo she had of him.
As she was about to leave, a tall thin man with
a decorative wooden cane, wearing a long black coat and black hat, and carrying
two jaguar pelts under his arm, approached her. He looked like a bum, not
having shaved or washed for days.
The man saw her rising from the bench and
asked, “Are you Clara Regier?”
Then he stood before her, shaking her hand,
mumbling some sort of greeting and at the same time apologizing for how he
looked. His gaucho-style pants were filthy. Under the tattered black coat, his
wrinkled shirt was only partially tucked in. Part of it was hanging unevenly
down the front.
“I’ve been standing on a military train for
days,” he muttered.
He looked outlandish, a traveler from a faraway
place, someone she certainly needed to be cautious of. But he was somehow
intimate too, because of what they had shared in their letters.
Clara smelled an unfamiliar sweaty male odor
and shuddered. She had grown up on a farm just a half hour’s drive from John’s
family homestead. But their homes were worlds apart. She was from the uptown
High-German Mennonites who had emigrated from Prussia about the time John’s
people emigrated from Russia. Plautdietsch
Mennonites from Russia were considered less sophisticated than the Prussian
High-German Mennonites. And his guttural mostly-unwritten Plautdietsch was highly challenging to learn to speak if one did
not grow up with it.
Now, faced with the real live Plautdietsch John, rather than his
High-German letters, Clara began to think she had made a very big mistake. When
he pulled her toward him to kiss her a few days later, she withdrew in
revulsion. Was this vulgar man who dared to try to kiss her on the mouth the
same man who had written her those beautiful letters from that faraway land,
Paraguay? The letters had sounded so refined and sophisticated. This man seemed
somehow much more boorish and ordinary than she had imagined him. She began to
back away.
Until she heard him sing. She and John
and one of John’s sisters attended a church together the
following Sunday. As they rose to sing and Clara heard his tenor voice, so
clear and true, she knew in that moment this was the man she would love for the
rest of her life.
John and Clara married on August 25 of the
following summer. Just one day after their wedding, John took his young
Mennonite bride back for another three years to the Chaco, the land “where no
white man can live.” Clara’s parents were torn between feeling disappointment
that their oldest daughter had married a Plautdietsch
descendant of Russian Mennonites, and pride that she would now be a doctor’s
wife. They would have preferred for the newly-weds to settle near them in
Kansas rather than to travel to that heathen country called Paraguay. But they
no longer controlled their oldest daughter.
Most
everywhere the young couple traveled on their way to Paraguay, people gave
priority to soldiers and sailors, so it took them six weeks to get to Asunción. The newlyweds didn´t mind. There
was so much to discover about each other.
“I
brought this book that I thought we might read together,” John said on their
first night on the ship as they were preparing for bed. “It’s called Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living.”
Clara
blushed. She felt shy about her body and she wasn’t used to the way her new
husband talked about sex so freely and openly. It just didn’t seem like the
Christian thing to do.
Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living was published in 1919. It was
written by and for medical professionals. The author wrote this dedication in
the front of the book. “To my fellow
members of the medical profession into whose hands this book may come, and to
all who may read it under their direction, this volume is most sincerely
dedicated by The Author.” And in the Forward, the author wrote. “As we all know, many of the most serious
and complicated cases we have to deal with have their origins in these delicate
relations [read: sexual problems] which so often exist among wedded people, of
all classes and varieties.”
That
night, the brash young doctor and his small-town Mennonite nurse wife sat on
the hard bed in their tiny ship compartment with just curtains separating them
from other compartments, on their way to no man’s land, reading about sex
together. One of the chapters, titled “Coitus
Reservatus,” states, “In this act,
the lovers simply drift, petting each other, chatting with each other, visiting,
loving, caressing … the hands wander idly over the body… it is the most natural
thing in the world that the sex organs should tumesce, and that there should be
a flow of both prostatic and pre-coital fluids … and when the organs are
properly enlarged and lubricated, let the wife come over into her lover’s arms …
and the organs be slipped together easily… and then let them stay so, fully
together, but do not go on… just lie still and enjoy the embrace.”
“Can
we try it?” he said hoarsely, barely concealing his lust.
“The first class needs to be on Nursing
Procedures,” Clara suggested, beginning to outline the content of the class on
the notepad in front of her. “They need to learn about
safety procedures, infection control, and patient care skills like bathing,
dressing and feeding patients, and making their beds. We should also cover
steps in checking vital signs and providing medication.”
“You want to spend an entire class on teaching
them to make a bed?” the doctor growled. “I can’t wait that long to get some
medical support around here.”
Clara nodded in seeming acquiescence, but continued to make detailed notes about basic nursing procedures.
Their first volunteers to take the classes were
seven girls from the very poor farming community around them, so they were not
bothered by the primitive conditions of the hospital. Three of them could
neither read nor write. The others had barely completed sixth grade. Only the
ones who’d spent relatively more time in grade school were fully fluent in High
German. The less schooled spoke mostly Plautdietsch.
Three evenings a week, after seeing a full day
of patients, John and Clara lectured (he in Plautdietsch
and she in High German) from the notes they had created. John,
especially, was finding it hard to get through to the girls.
After one of his lectures on the Human Anatomy,
he and Clara were squatting on their front stoop, eating slices of watermelon.
The setting sun was a bright ball of fire in the horizon. Flies were buzzing
around them, drawn to the sweetness of the juice dripping from their hands.
They were taking a short break while their helper was putting their two-year-old
son and newborn daughter to bed.
“They just sat there looking at me all dazed
and bewildered,” he said, leaning wearily against the adobe front wall of their
house
“Let’s figure out how to make it more basic,”
Clara said, always seeing the positive side of every situation.
“Ich
verspreche bei Gott, dem Allmaechtigen und Alwissenden das ich nach bestem
wissen und Vermoegen … I vow to God, the Almighty and
All-knowing, that I will to the best of my knowledge and ability…”
Marlena
Fiol, PhD, is a world-renowned author, scholar, speaker, and a
spiritual seeker whose
writing explores the depths of who we are and what’s possible in our lives. Her
most recent essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Summerset Review, Under the Sun and The Furious Gazelle, among others. A sampling of her publications
on identity and learning are available at marlenafiol.com.
