Mennonite Weekly Review

Peter J. Dyck may have owed his life to Mennonite Central Committee, and he repaid the debt many times over.

Dyck, who died Jan. 4 in Scottdale, Pa., at the age of 95, liked to repeat what his father wrote in a journal in 1920: “Little Peter won’t be with us much longer.” This was during a time of war and famine in Russia. Mennonites were starving. Food sent by the newly formed MCC saved him and his family.

That makes a great story, and Dyck, a master storyteller, made the most of it. He had the gift of living well and then making the experience count long afterward. Whether an epic drama or a small detail rich with meaning, he put each memory to good use, inspiring others with the retelling.

And when his listeners might benefit from a second opinion, Elfrieda, his wife, would add, “But Peter, I remember it this way.” He always insisted that Elfrieda, who died in 2004, should get equal recognition for the work they did together.

Dyck’s life was a testimony to the power of story, and to God, the power behind the story. “Deliverance belongs to the Lord,” he and Elfrieda wrote in Up from the Rubble, their 1991 recounting of their role in the rescue of Mennonite refugees from the ruins of World War II, including a narrow escape from Berlin and passage to South America in 1947.

Dyck’s deft telling of a great story made him MCC’s leading ambassador. His voice emerged in the late summer and fall of 1947 when more than 100,000 people in 53 locations in the United States and Canada heard him and Elfrieda speak and show a film they had made of the European Mennonite refugee experience. Over the next 60 years — “at 90 he could still pack auditoriums,” his obituary said — Dyck became the face of MCC, the one whom many people felt truly embodied its spirit of service for Christ.

“Ultimately, we don’t do it just because of the poor,” he said of the motive for MCC’s work, speaking at the agency’s 75th anniversary celebration in 1995. “We do it because of God. We do it because God has made us new people.”

Dyck said his stories’ power came from God, and he showed that they had the impact to inspire and to unify. In Up from the Rubble, he and Elfrieda wrote of being surprised to find that all kinds of Mennonites and Amish spoke of the Russian Mennonites as “our” refugees, regardless of whether they had any ethnic ties to them. All claimed the story as their own.

“Through tragedy, disaster, and the suffering of sisters and brothers in the faith, thousands of miles away people in North America were drawn closer to each other and united for greater kingdom work,” they wrote.

Nothing could have brought these people together the way the story of the refugees did, the Dycks said. And perhaps no one other than Peter Dyck could have so faithfully lived that story and then so skillfully told it. “Storyteller” and “servant” might not be lofty titles to most people, but Dyck made them so.