The Bargen Family, Part 2

Now onto part 2 of the story of the Bargen family as told by my grandfather George Harald Martens (and remember when he refers to HIS grandfather, that would be my great great grandfather). On a cautionary note, it is strongly recommended that the reader is not eating while reading this entry.

The night most remembered is November 29, 1919. Many people fled when they heard that Makhno's bandits had been reported as coming toward the 15 villages of the Sagradowka [Zagradovka] Settlement. Everybody was deathly afraid and many fled to escape this encounter. Grandpa Peter told his family to put on a 2nd layer of clothing and get into the buggy while he harnessed up their fastest team, then they fled as fast as the horses could run. When he met his cousin's family at a crossroad, the cousin said,
"I am going to my parents' house at Munsterberg!" Grandpa said,
"I'm going to the Russian village about 20 miles away!" Peter's dealings and reputation with his Russian neighbors were good, and he had many friends there. That day Makhno's bandits started their three day plundering spree by killing 99 people at Munsterberg, one of the Zagradovka settlements. This included Peter's cousin and family. The warning came just before noon,
"Makhno's bandits have been seen coming toward the Mennonite settlements!" Everyone was fearful, but none anticipated the hellish viciousness with which Makhno would strike.

Maria Martens (nee Peters) feared for her husband's life, so she covered him in the compost pile behind the garden. Maria did not return to dig him out, so when things quieted down, Willie Martens (who was a first cousin of my great great grandfather Wilhelm Martens III) worked his way out of the compost pile and returned to the house. There, Willie found his hired hand, his wife Maria, and his 6 children: Willie, Johann, Anna, Helene, Jakob, and Mariechen, all sitting around the dining room table. Their heads were placed upon the window sills around the room. It is believed that the only people to survive this Munsterberg massacre were Willie, two older boys that hid out of sight under the floorboards of an almost full outhouse pit, and a family that was able to hide in their fireplace chimney.

Johann Martens, a middle aged man, was not well. He was also in deep depression. Johann had a premonition that today he would die. His family and his closest friend, his minister, were not able to console him. I've been told that the bandits went to his house and many of them raped his 16 year old daughter. When the bandits approached Johann in his upstairs bedroom with knives and sabers swinging, he raised his arms as if to protect himself. His limbs flew around the bedroom like cordwood as they were severed from his body. Here, he bled to death.

During one of Makhno's Ukrainian village raids, it was said that he lined the men of the village up on one side of a narrow village street opposite their wives and daughters on the other side of the street. Then, as a vindictive act, Makhno then selected his infected men to rape the wives and daughters of the men who had been his employers prior to his imprisonment.

The raiders were a filthy bunch of inhumanity and always seemed to need fresh clothes, so they simply took what they wanted. This time, one of the bandits wanted the village minister's clothes, so the minister was dragged to the center of the village and stripped of all his clothes. Then the fiendish devils decided to have some fun with him, so they tied his hands behind his back, tied weights to his genitals, and turned a pack of attack dogs on him. While the naked man was running the length of the village's only street with the weight banging against his knees, the dogs were tearing him apart and the fiendish bandits kept taunting and hollering,
"Look there, you religious Germans, there goes your Holy One!" He almost made it to the end of the village street before the dogs killed him.

Grandpa's cousin, Peter Bahnman, about 30 years old, was trapped in his house. When the fiendish bandits started swinging their swords, cousin Peter raised his arms to protect himself, and his hands rolled under the table. Then they proceeded to cut him to pieces.

Grandpa's uncle, Johann Martens, was 70. He was stripped of his clothes, led to the top of a manure pile, and used for target practice. He was murdered November 29, 1919. Johann's 59 year old brother Peter Martens was murdered the same day, too.

One bandit observed a large rat running into a short length of pipe. With the rat trapped in the pipe, he went looking for a suitable victim. After they had tied the victim to a tree, they put the pipe with the rat against the poor man's stomach, and inserted a red hot poker partway into the other end of the pipe. The highly motivated rat immediately clawed and chewed his way into the screaming man's stomach. He did not live long with the large rat chewing and digging around his stomach and heart cavity.

During the November 29, 30, and December 1, 1919 raids, Makhno's bandits murdered over 229 people in the Zagradovka settlement. Other casualties included the hundreds of survivors who were injured, raped, mutilated, and plundered. The Bargens and Martens families had much hardship and lost many relatives (39) to this Makhno massacre, and later, lost many more to the starvation from 1922 to 1932 and the Holodomor Genocides, and more to Stalin's midnight callers during the Great Purge. The Bolsheviks and bandits were also suffering because of the man-made famine, so eventually they took almost all of the peasants' farm animals, grain, next year's seed, and all the feed and food as needed to fill their empty stomachs. My aunt Sarah, who grew from 6 to 13 during that time and approaching 80 [as of 1992] asks me not to ask her about that part of her life, because those memories often generate nightmares. Mary Bargen, my mother, was 19, and Sarah was 13 when the Peter Bargen family escaped to Canada in 1926.