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4/14/24

They Lived in a Concentration Camp Hell Yet Experienced Amazingly Profound Freedom



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

           prisonersand the capacity for self-abandonment 

                     (that is, a  Christ-like passion and willingness to give up his 

 life to save another's)  

             In one of the  barracks assigned to priests, Fr. Leo de Coninck  was, as usual, awakened at 4:30 a.m. by the jarring wakeup  shouts of  a kapo, a despised, privileged, and  thuggish prisoner with authority likened to a road-gang foreman. No matter  how badly Fr. Leo's arms and  back might have ached from yesterday's hard labor,   he obediently  tossed off  the sheet  which covered his straw mattress (barrack sheets were changed every other month) and rose quickly from his bottom bunk as did the  prisoner on the bunk  above him. The nightmare-induced cries and moans of fifty-two men  attempting to sleep after a day of brutal treatment from SS ( a quasi-military unit of the Nazi party ) guards now ceased, and a new day of a living nightmare began again. There were now groans of  bodies reacting to famine, pleurisy, early typhus, and untreated work  injuries.   Fr. Leo was to write years later that the sight of a priest  reaching the limits of his strength  seemed  to intensify the violence of  the kapos, "those  degenerate brutes, worse than  the SS."

                                     “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 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 prisonersand 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 .

                         ( anonymous from the Magnificat publication )

  1.  

The End 


Comments about freedom  from Jane Fiore,  a devout Christian living today in

 Arlington Heights,  Illinois: :   " As we were reading about the horrific suffering of 

these priests and others in  the concentration camps, it brought to light that people suffer

 in the suburbs of Chicago as well.  There are different types of suffering , obviously:

 emotional, spiritual, physical, mental; and it is easier for us to see the physical suffering

 of someone and feel pity and find the need to help them, than to notice the quiet 
    
suffering of a    person    who is lonely   or suffering abuse quietly at the hands   of 
 
 someone  who  is   supposed to love them; or someone who is emotionally suffering 
                           
because of    past hurts or current financial or other needs. Sometimes it seems that the  
    
 quiet , unseen suffering is as tragic . We all need to know that Jesus is here for us to 


  heal and protect us. "        



Freedom is Realized in Love

( from a translation of Pope Francis  weekly 

message to his general audience )

 

 

     Today we will try to understand better what the heart of  freedom is. The apostle Paul affirms that it is anything but an "opportunity for the flesh" (Gal. 5: 13): freedom, therefore, is not a libertine way of living  or following the instincts, individual desires or one's own selfish impulses... no, on the contrary, freedom  leads us to service, to living for others.

            True freedom, in other words, is fully expressed in love. The pandemic has taught us that we need each other , but it is not enough to know this; we need to choose

it in a tangible way, to decide on that path, every day. Let us say and believe that 

 people  are not an obstacle to my freedom, but rather they are the possibility  to fully 

realize it. Our freedom is born from God's love and grows in  
in charity.


On Sunday, April 28: Conversation with a 98-Year-Old Veteran and Very Independent Father of Nine

                                                                          

All comments are welcome

rrschwarz777@gmail.com

© 2010-2022,2024 Robert R. Schwarz

exodustrekkers.blogspot.com

 

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