2005–2009 Attacks in the Molotschna Colony

The 2005–2009 Attacks in the Molotschna Colony are the prolonged violence that precipitates the women’s meetings and their debate over what to do next. The assaults recur across several years, affecting girls and women in their homes and leaving many unsure of what had happened to them. What the community first treated as a supernatural mystery is eventually identified as the work of eight men from the colony, a revelation that turns a seemingly unknowable threat into a human and communal crisis.

A recurring crisis

The attacks began in 2005 and occurred at night, while families slept. Victims woke in pain and disoriented, often without understanding why. The anesthetic used against them was Belladonna Veterinary Spray, a farm-animal product made from the belladonna plant. The attacks were not isolated incidents: the narrator calculates that more than three hundred girls and women were made unconscious and attacked between 2005 and 2009, an average of one attack every three or four days.

The victims included women from the Friesen and Loewen families who later gathered for the meeting, with three generations represented in each family. They had been victimized repeatedly. The breadth and recurrence of the assaults make the crisis larger than any single household: nearly every female member of the Molotschna Colony had been violated by the group of eight. The women’s shared experience is also reflected in their accounts of dreams. What first seemed like separate dreams gradually came together as a shared understanding that the experience was not a dream at all.

From supernatural explanations to discovery

Before the perpetrators were identified, explanations for the attacks included ghosts and demons, punishment by God or Satan, and the possibility that the women were lying or imagining what had happened. These explanations displaced attention from the assaults themselves and from the possibility of human perpetrators. The eventual discovery overturns the supernatural account: the so-called demons were men from the colony, many of them close relatives of the women they attacked, including brothers, cousins, uncles, and nephews.

The breakthrough came when Leisl Neustadter forced herself to remain awake night after night. She caught Gerhard Schellenberg at her bedroom window with a jug of Belladonna Veterinary Spray. Leisl and her adult daughter restrained him with baler twine. Peters was brought to confront him that morning, and Gerhard named the other seven men involved. The discovery thus depended not on an explanation supplied by the colony’s authorities, but on a woman staying awake, catching a perpetrator, and holding him until he identified the others.

Consequences for the women and the colony

The identification of the eight men prompted hastily organized meetings arranged by Agata Friesen and Greta Loewen. The women had to consider their response while the men were away and while ordinary colony work still had to be done. Some women chose not to attend the discussions, marking an X beside their names and contributing instead through the necessary chores. The crisis therefore produced different responses among the women rather than a single, uniform decision.

The attacks also shaped the risks considered in the meetings. Ona Friesen was pregnant, and the elders treated her as beyond redemption because of her Narfa and the circumstances of her pregnancy. Attempts were made to marry her to Julius Penner, but Ona refused, arguing that he should not be burdened by marrying a woman regarded as non-virginal. The elders planned for her unborn child to be raised by another colony family, possibly even the family of one of the perpetrators. Her situation shows how the consequences of the assaults extended beyond immediate harm: the community’s rules and stigma threatened to determine both a woman’s status and her child’s future.

The women also debated which boys could safely leave with them. The distinction between boys under thirteen and those aged thirteen and fourteen became a question of both age and responsibility: the latter were old enough to raise concern as potential sources of harm, yet were still children who could be taught. The attacks thus force the women to consider not only how to protect themselves, but how violence and the colony’s gender expectations might shape the next generation.

Historical frame and continuing significance

The novel’s fictional crisis is set in the Molotschna Colony, while its prefatory note identifies the real events that prompted it as assaults in the Manitoba Colony in Bolivia. Between 2005 and 2009, women and girls there were attacked after being rendered unconscious with an animal anesthetic. Eight men were eventually convicted in a Bolivian court in 2011 and received lengthy prison sentences. Reports in 2013 said that similar assaults and other sexual abuses were continuing even while the convicted men remained in jail. The distinction matters: the novel responds to historical events through fiction, while its imagined colony and characters give the crisis a separate narrative form.

Within that form, the years of repeated attacks are not merely background to the meetings. Their duration explains why women have struggled to understand what was happening, why supernatural and accusatory accounts could take hold, and why identifying the perpetrators does not by itself settle what safety requires. The period’s decisive reversal—from demons to recognizable men, including relatives—makes the community’s response part of the crisis itself. It is this long accumulation of violence, disbelief, discovery, and unequal consequences that gives the women’s deliberation its urgency.