A Report by Robert R. Schwarz
" True freedom [ is ] …being liberated from
ourselves, our faults and our ego."
(Chiara
Lubich, founder of the Focolare
movement)
This report is about priests and other clergy of different ethnic backgrounds who amazingly survived years of a hellish life behind barbed wire in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. The Dachau camp existed in Upper Bavaria from 1933 until 1945. By the time it was liberated by the U.S. Army on April 29, 1945, it had held 67,665 registered prisoners. A reported 31,95l prisoners had perished there, many from typhoid , others from torture; several were murdered by guards. This report focuses largely on testimonies and published comments of Dachau 's 2,579 imprisoned Catholic priests ( a few were Protestant ), monks, and seminarians . The majority of these clerics were Polish. All were detained inside three of the camp's thirty barracks. An underlying theme of this report tells about eclipses a freedom rarely achieved today (so it seems ) by many individuals of good will who live behind invisible barbed wire are unable or unwilling to say no to what is obviously evil or yes to what to what is obviously good or Godly .
I first began to learn about real freedom as a journalist when imprisoned for ten days during the Cold War in a maximum security penitentiary in Bratislava , Czechoslovakia. I had been seized at rifle point for illegal border crossing; it was an entrapment and documented as such by the U.S. State Department. More life lessons about freedom came from being a volunteer for the National Prison Fellowship Organization and from teaching a series of life skills workshops to inmates at the Cook County Jail in Chicago.
I was motivated to write about Dachau from Biblical accounts of the freedom won by tens of thousands of Hebrews who, by God's grace , fled Egypt in the l3th Century B.C. after their four centuries of bondage. For ten years FREEDOM was often a theme of my blog "Exodus Trekkers" in which I penned many interviews with people with a passion to be free from any kind of bondage. (According to Google-collected statistics, these blog posts have now been read in more than 15 countries. )
FREEDOM:
Implies the absence of hindrance,
confinement,
restraint, or repression (Webster's
New
World College Dictionary)
Note: You can read a scholarly account of the horrors and--yes, glory-- of Dachau in the well-researched book, The Priest Barracks, by Guillaume Zeller (translated by Michael Miller) and published by Ignatius Press (2017 , San Francisco). With permission and with gratitude, I quote facts from this book and also from the online Wikipedia.
***
Various accounts of Dachau survivors indicate that such
spectacular fortitude came from a prisoner's steadfast
disposition to pray, his intention to make sacrifices for other
prisoners, and the capacity for self-abandonment
(that is, a Christ-like passion and willingness to give up his
life to save another's)
“Better to
reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”
(Milton in his "Paradise Lost", with Lucifer
in mind)
 |
| Photo taken in a barrack a few days after liberation |
The
brutality of the camp was intensified by the prevalent anti-religious
mindset of the guards which Fr. Leo saw as a symptom of Satanic
possession. "I had never seen hatred [like that]: eyes blazing
with wickedness, mouths contorted with anger at the sight of a Pfaffe (cleric).
Striking, injuring, even killing a 'curate' seem to be an instinctive
need for some of them."
If a priest in the early morning wanted a
peek at the winter weather awaiting him outside, he
squinted through one of the ice-coated, ill-fitting windows at this five-acre prison yard. The entire camp was
about one square mile, encompassed by a concrete wall seven feet
high covered with barbed wire.
Fr.
Leo had been a Jesuit superior in Brussels and a
professor at the University of Louvain. He was transported
to Dachau with 46 other Belgian
priests on June 18, 1942 after his arrest
in October 1941 for "having given conferences to
clergy…[about] the seductive influence" of Nazism and its
incompatibility with the Gospel. His leadership and influence as the
priests' spiritual director at Dachau is recorded today as remarkable.
In
most camps like Dachau, prisoners were stripped of their own clothing and
forced to wear a uniform. Men were given a cap, trousers and
jacket. On their feet, they wore wooden or leather clogs.
Socks were not supplied; as result, many prisoners suffered from foot sores.
"When your body is broken, remain under
God's gaze , see him present, living in your soul "
( Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity )
***
After
Fr. Leo and the priests had dressed that morning, they
were given 25 minutes to rush through the barrack's toilet and body -wash
facility. [Generally, computer-generated online documents about these concentration camps describe these
facilities as either abominable or crude and malfunctioning]. Of course there was diarrhea and painfully blocked bowels
and universes of germs and puss-filled lesions.
The essence of true freedom pulsated from
prayers in this chapel, affirming that even
peace and joy could exist in a concentration
camp if one lived as best he could according
to God's expressed rules and wisdom.
(prisoner Gleb Alexandrovich Rahr )
The men then retrieved some of the three-day rations given them by the SS; for breakfast it was a bowl of coffee, and for dinner, mostly potatoes and some meat or vegetables. [We don't know much about lunch]. The food, according to one journalist who wrote an article for The New Republic Daily in 1934, "is not sufficiently sustaining for the hard labor required [in Dachau]."
Fr.
Leo and most prisoners were marched outside after breakfast and harnessed like
oxen to dig ditches and repair camp roads. [Though
my research about clergy in the Dachau camp did not reveal any
suicides or mental breakdowns among the more than nine nationalities of priests,
it did reveal hot-tempered disagreements now and then over a variety
of common human disagreements, such as discord over religious issues. Yet, all of it showed a
strong and admirable desire for peaceful
ecumenism. Considering the several years in which
the men survived this hellish daily living and desperate for liberation, one wonders how any of them kept his
sanity. According to Fr. René Fraysse, who was confined for three and a half
months in a Frankfurt prison cell a few centimeters wider that the average
width of a man's shoulders, prayer was the reason for his survival. Various accounts of
Dachau survivors indicate that such spectacular
fortitude came from a
prisoner's steadfast disposition to pray, his intention
to make sacrifices for other prisoners, and the capacity
for self-abandonment (that is, a Christ-like passion and willingness
to give up his life to save another's).
The passion for freedom was constantly expressed in the prisoners' conversations with each other as well as in their prayers. Fr. Coninck would later write that, "in order to be free, the priests had to practice being free each day. This was achieved , he explained, not by one's personal sense of having a God-given freedom in Dachau, but only by a collective sense of freedom experienced in a group by his fellow priests . It was a dogma of the Catholic church known as "solidarity". As explained in the book, The Priest Barracks, this was of great help to the prisoners' morale because this solidarity made it possible to settle the inevitable conflicts among them .
One of the prisoners, Gleb Alexandrovich Rahr, was a Russian journalist who had been shipped to Dachau for being at the forefront of the effort to reunite the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia and for his involvement in a labor union in Germany in the 1940's. Rahr would survive Dachau and go on to direct religious broadcasts throughout the Soviet Union. He and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Alexander Solzhenitsyn were colleagues.
Help from a Camp Chapel (!)
Likely it will never be
known just how much fortitude these men gained by their attendance in a
chapel which the Nazi high command surprisingly allowed to
be built in Dachau . The clerics actually were allowed to
celebrate Mass in this chapel ! Ironically,
when the Dachau camp horrors of medical experiments began
in late 1940, so did "complex negotiations"
about constructing the chapel. After
discussions between a recalcitrant Nazi official and the Apostolic Nuncio Cesare Orsenigo, a dining hall and a barrack room were merged to become a chapel.
Former
Dachau prisoner, Marcel Dejean, recorded his impression of
this providential event: "We went to meet the One [God ]who held
our lives in his hands [and] we rediscovered the idea of love in the midst of
suffering, hunger, egoism, hatred or indifference, we also [experienced] a
palpable sense of calm and the beauty of the altar, the ornaments, the rites--all
in the midst of our filth and poverty . [There was]….tranquility, recollection
and solitude in the midst of constant overcrowding and all sorts of noises. The
SS were no longer anything but a sad nothingness beside the splendid, immortal
reality of Christ."
It seemed that
despite the camp's lethal bondage, the prisoners when in this chapel could focus—sometimes
for an hour—on noble thoughts and a superior level of freedom that was human and divine. The essence
of true freedom , according to ,Gleb Rahr, pulsated from prayers in this chapel
affirming that even peace and joy could
exist in a concentration camp if one
lived as best he could according to
God's expressed rules and wisdom.
He
has sent me] to bring good tidings to the
afflicted;
…to bind up the broken hearted;
to
proclaim liberty to the captives, and the
opening of the
prison to those who are bound.
( Isaiah 61:1 )
|
Freedom and Liberation ! |
 |
On April 29, 1945, prisoners for hours heard the exchange of nearby weapon fire. Then, in late afternoon, some
elements from the 42nd and the 45th American military divisions—among them some soldiers of Japanese
descent nicknamed "the Samurai"—breached the barbed-wire enclosure. A
tremendous murmur ran through the camp. According to several later testimonies,
the first three Americans to enter the camp were a Jewish soldier, Samuel Kahn;
a woman journalist, Margaret Higgins; and a military chaplain, who soon was
reciting the Our Father and encouraging
detainees to pray for their former executioners!
An American flag soon
was flying in Dachau. The priests
noticed it while exiting from a Sunday service in their chapel; all
day Masses followed one after the other. On May 6 (the day of the Russian
Orthodox Easter) in a cell block used by
the Catholic priests to say daily Mass, several Greek, Serbian and Russian
priests and one Serbian deacon, all wearing
makeshift vestments made from towels of the SS
guards, gathered with several hundred
prisoners to celebrate Easter. The prisoner, Rahr, described the event
this way:
" In the entire history of the
Orthodox Church there has probably never been an Easter service like this one. Greek and Serbian priests adorned themselves
with makeshift 'vestments' over their
blue and gray-striped prisoner' uniforms. Then they began to chant, changing
from Greek to Slavic, and then back again to Greek. The Easter Canon, the
Easter Sticheras, everything was recited from memory, even the Gospel. And finally, the Homily of
Saint John, also from memory. A young Greek monk from the Holy Mountain stood
up in front of us and recited the Homily
with such infectious enthusiasm that we shall never forget him as long as we
live. Saint John Chrysostom himself seemed to speak through him to us and to
the rest of the world as well!"
Finally, the
last stanza of the traditional Te Deum (God, We Praise You) was sung:
For we put our trust in you.
In you Lord is our hope:
And we shall never hope in vain.
Within hours of Dachau's liberation by the
military, there were several incidents of
slaughter of guards by liberated
prisoners. Despite these incidents,
liberated prisoner, Kazimiez Majdánski,
recalls, "The shouts of the prisoners, made with joy, continued to
rise from the camp, while on the roof tops of the barracks fluttered the flags
of the nations that had sons present here."
Fr. Alexandre Morelli years later wrote in a memoir, "I remember as one of the most
vivid joys of my life that unprecedented moment when, for the first
time in two years, a few minutes after the liberation of the camp in Dachau,
the large gates were opened, and, inebriated with freedom, I could walk
freely on the ground of the surrounding countryside, thinking that I
was dreaming, striking this land of Germany with my foot to make sure it was
not a dream."
Wrote
author Zeller, " The experience of being in a concentration camp bore much
fruit of many kinds, four of which clearly emerge: the importance of ecclesial
unity, the concern for ecumenism, the urgency of our apostolate for the future, and the
on-going fight for the dignity of the human person. Perhaps
the loftiest expression of freedom lies not in any freedom for the
benefit of any individual, but in how this freedom will benefit others and bear
fruit beyond that. "
Fr. Leo de Coninck
had Zeller's reflections in mind when he summarized his stay in Dachau: "Three
years of experiences that I would not have missed for anything in the world".
His bold words surprised
and even shocked many after the liberation despite the
fact that his statement recurs in the testimonies of
many priests who passed through Dachau, leaving behind a
legacy of glory.
As the Apostle John testified while in exile on
an island, Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth
and dies, it remains alone; but if it
dies, it bears much fruit.
Freedom is the ability to live, knowingly and willingly
according to God's wisdom and to embrace happiness .
