Salome Friesen's Scythe Attack on the Assailants

Salome Friesen's Scythe Attack on the Assailants was a turning point in Molotschna Colony's response to the assaults on women and girls: it helped end the elders' attempt to manage the accused men through local confinement and brought the police into a crisis the colony had been policing internally.

Background and Trigger

Molotschna Colony was self-policed. After the accused men were held in a shed, Peters initially planned to keep them there for decades. Salome Friesen's attack followed her discovery that her three-year-old daughter, Miep, had been violated on two or possibly three occasions. Peters had denied Miep medical treatment, fearing that a doctor would spread news of the attacks beyond the colony. Salome walked twelve miles to another colony to obtain antibiotics from a Mobile Klinic temporarily stationed there for repairs.

The account presents the scythe attack as a response to the repeated harm to Miep, not as an isolated confrontation. When Salome learned what had happened to her daughter, she went to the shed where the men were being kept and attempted to kill them all. An earlier account describes her attacking one of the men with a scythe; together, these accounts establish both the weapon and the wider scope of her attempt.

Attack and Intervention

The attack took place while the accused men were confined in the shed. Salome's action made clear that the men could not safely remain under the colony's informal custody. Separately, a group of drunk male relatives hanged another accused man from a tree branch; he died after they passed out in a nearby sorghum field. The scythe attack and this separate killing exposed the danger of leaving the matter to local self-policing.

Peters and the elders consequently called in the police, and the accused men were arrested and taken to the city. The narrator describes their removal as presumably intended for their own safety. The scythe attack was thus a catalyst for an institutional shift: a crisis contained within the colony became a matter for outside authorities.

Claims of Forgiveness and Wider Consequences

Salome later claimed that she had asked to be forgiven for her outburst and that the men had forgiven her. The narrator cautions that nobody witnessed this exchange, including Peters, so it remains Salome's uncorroborated account rather than an established event.

The arrests reshaped the choices facing the women. The other men of the colony went to the city to post bail for the imprisoned attackers, hoping to bring them back while they awaited trial. Peters said that, once the men returned, the women would be expected to forgive them; refusal, the women were told, would mean leaving the colony for an outside world they scarcely knew. The attack therefore stands at the beginning of the sequence that made the women's meetings and their decision about whether to stay, fight, or leave urgent.