1922 –– After the Polish-Soviet War, fighting finally ended in the Berezna area, so many residents who had fled or had been deported earlier returned. Among these was Justyna Siliwonczyk, who walked back from Turkestan to Berezna, losing all of her family members to typhus along the way. Ironically, one of these family members was a brother who had emigrated to America years earlier, but returned to Europe (with considerable amounts of American money) to try to participate in the Bolshevik Revolution.
Likely some time in 1922, Nikifor Parfomuk married Justyna. He would have been 28 and she would have been 18 at the time. They pooled their financial resources (she had inherited her brother’s money) to purchase land in Berezna. The parcel they purchased was formerly part of the feudal estates of the Szemiot family, parts of which had been sold off in the decades after 1861, the year Czar Alexander II abolished Russian serfdom. The land was situated along a canal on the northern border of Berezna and faced a large, dense forest across the road. Nikifor built a house and barn on the property and began to farm. He grew rye and other crops, and also raised livestock. The farmstead appears as a structure on this 1930 Polish military map (outlined approximately in blue).
It was probably around this time that Nikifor and others in Berezna (but not Justyna) converted to the Baptist religion. Baptist missionaries had provided grain and plough animals so Nikifor and other farmers could resume planting crops and avoid starvation after the prior years of military conflict. Nikifor took this as a true act of God and so joined the faith, eventually becoming a Baptist deacon himself.
Walter Parfomak: An Immigrant Story 