Volendam, a steamer of the (Dutch) Holland-America Line of 15,434 tons gross, built in 1922, scrapped in 1952, named after the small Dutch town of Volendam in North Holland, was used for the transport of Mennonite refugees, and is particularly known for its transport of Mennonites from Europe to Buenos Aires in 1947 (known as the Berlin Escape). C. F. Klassen, then the Mennonite Central Committee representative in Europe, who organized the journey, chartered the ship. Some 650 Mennonite refugees embarked at Rotterdam, Netherlands, on 28 January 1947; in Bremerhaven some 450 others from a refugee camp at Gronau, Germany, joined them. Then they waited for a large group from Berlin. Because Klassen gave a financial guarantee to the Holland-America Line for a possible delay in sailing and this warrant was accepted without the usual bail, the ship waited for the Berlin group. This was a group of some 1,100 Mennonite refugees from Russia who after much trouble and danger of life had reached Berlin and even in Berlin had a narrow escape, for only at the last moment did the Russian authorities give the necessary permission to travel through the Eastern Zone of Germany, occupied by the Russians. Packed into railway freight cars they were transported to Bremerhaven, from where the Volendam sailed on 1 February 1947, with the 2,306 Mennonites. The emigrants were led by Peter and Elfrieda Dyck, who had come with the Berlin group. During the train journey a woman died, and a baby during embarkation. Two aged persons and a baby died at sea, and four children were born on the boat: one was named Peter Volendam (after Peter Dyck and the ship), and one Elfrieda (after Mrs. Dyck). Upon arrival at Buenos Aires further transportation was difficult, and for a large number of these immigrants impossible until October 1948, because a revolution had broken out in Paraguay. About 1,200 of the passengers of the Volendam settled in Eastern Paraguay, giving to their new colony the name of Volendam after the ship which had brought them to the new world and to liberty. Of the remaining 1,100, 870 founded the Neuland Colony in the Paraguayan Chaco, 162 remained in Buenos Aires, and the rest joined their relatives in the Fernheim or Friesland colonies or settled in Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay.
A second Mennonite transport of the Volendam was that in 1947 of 1,640 (including 635 infants) Old Colonists from Quebec to Buenos Aires, who were also to settle in Paraguay, and a third transport by the Volendam was in October 1948, that of a group of 751 West Prussian and Galician Mennonites (the Danzig Refugees) for Montevideo, Uruguay, and a number of Mennonites from Russia, who intended to go to Paraguay, and who disembarked in Buenos Aires. The International Refugee Organization paid about $160,000 for the cost of the first chartering of the Volendam and assumed the full cost of the third transport as far as Asuncion.
Thus the name of the Volendam is well known in Mennonite history.
Fretz, J. W. Pilgrims in Paraguay: The Story of the Mennonite Colonization in Paraguay. Scottdale: Herald Press, 1953: 39-41.
Logbooks of the Volendam.
"Peter Dyck's Story." Mennonite Life III (1948): No. 1, 8-11.
Reimer, Gustav E. "Von Danzig nach Uruguay." Mennonite Life IV (1949): No. 3, 12-14.
|Author(s)||C. A. W Bos|
 Cite This Article
Bos, C. A. W. "Volendam." Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. 1959. Web. 29 Nov 2015. http://gameo.org/index.php?title=Volendam&oldid=85839.
Bos, C. A. W. (1959). Volendam. Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Retrieved 29 November 2015, from http://gameo.org/index.php?title=Volendam&oldid=85839.
Herald Press website.
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