God's Smuggler

by Brother Andrew

  “Come this way,” he said.

  Professor B and I walked down a long corridor behind the clerk. We passed the department head’s office and kept going. Professor B looked at me and raised both eyebrows hopefully. At last we stopped. The head of the department, the clerk explained, had fallen ill the night before. In his stead the deputy would hear our case.

  Professor B threw me a quick glance. Twenty minutes later we were walking out of the office, free men. I yearned to ask the clerk at what hour the department head had fallen ill. To this day I am certain his answer would have been: 11:35 p.m.

  ———

  The encounter with the authorities ended for the time being the possibility of further meetings in Budapest. Professor B arranged a ten-day speaking tour for me in Eastern Hungary and found an interpreter to go with me.

  When I returned, I went to give a report on the trip to Janos and Professor B. Right away I sensed that something was wrong. For one thing, both son and father were at home in the middle of the day. Yet neither man let on that all was not as it should be. They insisted that I return the next morning to have breakfast with them before I started for home.

  The next morning I sensed again this lingering feeling of disaster. As we pushed our chairs back from the table and stood up, Janos drew a small package from his pocket. It was only later, when I learned what news they were secretly carrying, that the full impact of his words became clear.

  “We have so little way of saying thank you,” said Janos. “You risk much coming to our country. We want you to take this to that girl waiting back in Holland.”

  I had told them about Corry. Inside the box was an antique gold pin, set with rubies. They all laughed at the expression on my face. Janos put his arm around his young wife’s shoulder.

  “We’re praying with you, Andy, that that answer’s going to be yes.”

  ———

  I was halfway across Austria on my way home, camping by the roadside in my little tent, when I woke up in the middle of the night with a terrifying nightmare. I was being chased by a whole squadron of police in red scarves who were all clapping, clapping, clapping. Somehow I knew that it had something to do with Professor B: I was sure that he was in some kind of danger. The next day from the very first town I came to, I sent him a letter.

  ———

  In Holland I didn’t go to Witte but drove straight to Haarlem. At the hospital they told me Corry was working the three-to-eleven night shift. I was waiting for her when she came out the big front door. Under the streetlight her hair was copper instead of gold.

  “I’m back, Corry,” I said. “And I love you. I love you whether the answer is yes or no.”

  Corry looked tired from the hours on her feet. But when she laughed, the weariness seemed to drop away. “Oh, Andy!” she said. “I love you, too! Don’t you see that’s just the trouble? I’m going to worry about you, and miss you, and pray for you, no matter what. So hadn’t I better be a worried wife than just a cranky friend?”

  ———

  Together, the following week, we went to a jeweler in Haarlem and bought two wedding rings. In Holland the custom is to wear the ring on the left hand during the engagement and transfer it to the right at the marriage ceremony. Corry and I carried the rings up to her little sitting room in the top of the castle. There we opened the boxes and each of us placed a ring on the other’s hand.

  “Corry,” I began, not knowing that I was saying for the first time words that were to become a kind of motto for us. “Corry, we don’t know where the road leads, do we?”

  “But, Andy,” she finished for me, “let’s go there together.”

  ———

  When I got back to Witte, a letter was waiting for me from Professor B. He thanked me once again for coming to Hungary. The Church had been greatly strengthened, he said, by this tangible proof of the concern of the members for one another. He hoped I would come again, and that others would follow in my footsteps.

  “But,” he said, underplaying the news in a way that was typical, “I do believe I should share with you something that has happened. Do not think it is the result of your visit—it was coming anyhow. I have been forced to resign from the university. Do not feel sad: Many have given up far more for their Saviour.

  “Especially you must not be sidetracked from this most important work of encouragement. That is your task, Andrew, as we have ours. We pray daily for you, although you will not hear from us any more. This is being carried from the country by a friend. Our mail is censored. We pray that your ministry continue strong.

  “Once again, you must not be downcast. We praise the Lord.”

  12

  Counterfeit Church

  Corry and I were married in Alkmaar on June 27, 1958. Greetje was there and Mr. Ringers and many others from the factory, as well as a whole busload of nurses from Haarlem. Uncle Hoppy came from London with greetings from his wife, who was not strong enough for the trip. There were friends from WEC headquarters, co-workers from the refugee camps, and of course Corry’s mother and my brothers and sisters and their families. For me there were missing faces: Antonin, the medical student in Czechoslovakia. Jamil and Nikola in Yugoslavia. Janos and Professor B.

  It was dark before we could tear ourselves away from so many friends and recollections. For the honeymoon we had borrowed Karl de Graaf’s house trailer. We had talked romantically about driving to France. But setting out, we realized suddenly how tired we were, Corry from her final examinations, just ended, I from the work in the refugee camps, where I had spent most of my time since our engagement. A few miles from Alkmaar we came to a restaurant in that rarity in Holland, a grove of trees. We parked beneath them and went in for coffee. And so cordial were the owner and his wife, so insistent that the trailer was no trouble, that that’s as far as we got. We pulled the trailer a little deeper under the trees and spent our honeymoon right there.

  ———

  The dark and dank little room above the shed wasn’t dark or dank at all! How could I ever have thought so! With Corry, sunshine and warmth came into the place and made it home.

  So we didn’t have a kitchen. So there was no plumbing in our home. So the roof did leak a bit here and there, and never two nights in the same place. What did it matter as long as we were together?

  The only problem of any size was the clothing bundles. I had talked in churches all over Holland about the need for clothes in the refugee camps and suggested my address as a place where things might be sent. I never dreamed how much would come! It came by mail, by train, by truck, load after load deposited in the tiny front yard in Witte. Eight tons were delivered that first year, and the problem of storage was acute. Maartje was married now and living with her husband’s family, but Arie and Geltje had a second child, and Cornelius and his new wife were living in the loft. There was no place for the clothes but our own room. Corry and I had literally to scramble over bales of clothing each time we went in or out our door.

  The worst of it was that so much of it came unwashed. We would scrub the dirtiest things in a tub in the backyard, and brush and spray the rest, but our room was never without fleas.

  Transporting such a quantity of stuff was another problem. I packed the car as full as I could each time I left for the camps, but for all its advantages the Volkswagen made an unsatisfactory truck.

  I was eager to go again, this time with Corry at my side. I wanted her to see the camps for herself, not only so that she could meet these people for whom she was washing and packing so constantly, but because I knew what a nurse could mean in places like those. And so, that fall we piled the backseat to the roof with sweaters and coats and shoes, and set out for the camps in West Berlin.

  ———

  We delivered the first load to the Fichter Bunker. This was an old circular military barracks used by the Nazis during the war and now converted into “homes” for refugees. It was Corry’s first glimpse of the squalor of the camps, and that night she could not
eat.

  I purposely saved the Volksmarstrasse camp for the second day, because it was even worse. This old factory building must have held five thousand people. Conditions were so desperate that a girl would sell her body for 50 pfenning—about 15 cents. As we carried our bundles of clothing to the distribution center, a group of youngsters leaned out of a window and dumped garbage over us.

  “Don’t be angry at them,” I said to Corry as I brushed rotting lettuce leaves off her coat. “They have literally nothing to do here but think up mischief.”

  But to me the saddest of all the camps was the Henry Dunant. Corry and I went there last. This camp, named after the founder of the Red Cross, was where so many professionals—especially teachers—were sent. The camp made me sad not because it was physically any worse than the rest, but because the people in it tried harder to retain their traditions, and this made the inevitable failures more poignant.

  I came out of the director’s office that afternoon to find Corry talking with a gray-haired East German lady who said her name was Henrietta. There was something in her manner that reminded me of Miss Meekle. We found a relatively uncrowded corner and sat talking for an hour. Henrietta told us that she had been a teacher of thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds in Saxony, and that this was where the trouble lay.

  “If I had been teaching six- or seven-year olds, I might have been able to close my eyes,” she said. “But no, I had them right at the time of the Jugend Weihe.”

  “The Jugend Weihe?”

  “Yes. You see,” said Henrietta, “I’m a Lutheran. In our church, confirmation is a very big thing in a child’s life, perhaps the biggest single day. There are gifts and speeches and congratulations and new privileges, like long pants for the boys. It’s a religious day, above all. Vows are taken, promises made.”

  And then Henrietta told us about the Jugend Weihe—the Youth Consecration. I could see right away that it was an extremely clever attack against the Church. The government substituted a ceremony of its own for the Christian confirmation.

  “In the Jugend Weihe it is the State rather than God to whom vows are made,” said Henrietta. “And the State makes a very big thing of the solemnity and binding quality of these promises. Teachers are expected to spend a year preparing students to take part in it.”

  I could see what had happened before Henrietta spoke. “And you refused,” I said.

  “I refused.”

  “That was a brave thing to do.”

  Henrietta laughed. “No,” she said. “I certainly am not brave. I was just a schoolteacher about to retire. I’m not a martyr. But I just could not bring myself to teach these wonderful young people that the State was God.”

  It was expected that 100 percent of eligible students take part in the counterfeit ritual. From Henrietta’s class there were 30 percent.

  At first, she said, the pressure on her to conform was low-keyed. Party officials took to paying her friendly visits about once a week. Naturally it was expected that each teacher do his best to bring all of his students to the Jugend Weihe. Next year, they were certain, things would be different.

  Well, next year, things weren’t different. “And then I was really pressured,” Henrietta said. “The weekly visits became nightly visits. Different people each night for a week—week after week. Round and round we went over the same old subject. Where was my loyalty? Did I realize I could be accused of holding back progress? That was a serious crime in the People’s Republic.”

  Night after night they stayed in the apartment until late, stirring her up, frightening her until she could not sleep. Henrietta’s temper grew short. Her work suffered. And in the meantime pressure was being put on the children, too, so that they began to ask why they weren’t ready for the Jugend Weihe as everyone else was.

  “And so you see,” said Henrietta, and she was crying now, “I fled. I couldn’t take it. I ran away. And that,” she said, sweeping her arm to include the whole camp filled with teachers who, like her, had fled, “is why you must not think of me as brave. Maybe we started out to be brave, but we gave up. Every one of us.”

  ———

  Talking with Henrietta and other refugees, I was gradually forming a picture of the Church as a whole, as it existed under Communism. In my mind I began to think of an Outer Periphery, countries where according to my own experience and the reports of others there was still some degree of religious freedom: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and East Germany. Beyond these, according to those who had escaped, was an Inner Circle, where the attack against the Church was strong indeed: Rumania, Bulgaria, Albania and, Russia itself. I had visited all but one of the Outer Periphery countries. Now, I knew, I had to visit East Germany.

  Here in West Berlin was the obvious point of departure for such a visit. But when I proposed the trip to Corry, she looked at me with stricken eyes.

  “Oh, Andy!” she said. “How can I leave the camps? There’s so much to do and no one to do it! How can I go?”

  I looked at her more closely: Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes had an unnatural glaze. I wondered if I had not been wrong to plunge her into such need and deprivation. It was hard enough for me to see the suffering, but for a nurse—trained to see what should be done but without facilities to do it—it must be torture indeed. She was moving from camp to camp like a woman beside herself: setting up a class for mothers here, a tank for boiled water there, at one place simply trying to get the dishes of those who did not have TB handled separately from the dishes of those who did. In the afternoons she held an impromptu clinic wherever she was, painting feverish throats, cleaning old sores, washing infected eyes, even on occasion pulling teeth.

  For her own sake I began to want to get her away from this environment. But she refused. “You go,” she said when the visas for East Germany came through without delay. “What good would I be there? I can’t preach. I can’t speak German. I can’t even drive a car. But I can spot a toilet crawling with germs when I see one.” She picked up the kit of disinfectant that was never far from her side in those days. “Tell me all about it when you get back,” she said.

  And so occurred the first separation of our married life—not because of my ministry, but Corry’s.

  ———

  I crossed over from West to East Berlin at a checkpoint near the Brandenburg Tor.

  The difference between the two halves of the city was observable even as I drove down the streets. I had been prepared for the slightly shabby clothes, for the shops in which large vases of flowers filled the space where suits should hang, for the lag in reconstruction after the war.

  What I was not prepared for was the silence. Nobody talked in the streets. There was an eerie quality about it, as if the land were in mourning.

  Or in fear. As time passed I came to feel this fear myself. There were police everywhere. They stood at the bridges, at factory entrances, at public buildings—stopping people at random, searching briefcases, shopping bags, pocketbooks. And no one complained at this arbitrary treatment. No one protested. The lack of protest was part of the dreadful silence that hung over the city like a poison-filled smog.

  In sharp contrast to the silence of the people was the loud voice of the government. It was everywhere. On the radio, on loudspeakers, on billboards. Slogans were painted on walls, rooftops, telephone poles; there were posters in the kiosks, in stores, hotels, railway stations. Propaganda everywhere.

  I was astonished at the baldness of the line. East Germany was just then going through a devastating food shortage. The enterprising German farmer had not taken at all kindly to the collective idea; he had quit the land in such large numbers that that fall there had been no one to harvest the crops. The government had pressed production on mechanical harvesters, accompanied by a massive propaganda campaign. There was going to be plenty of bread because socialism was superior to the enterprise of individual farmers.

  There was only one trouble. To be harvested by machine, the wheat had to be dry; a cou
ple of days more sunshine were required than for hand reaping. And of course that year it rained. It rained every day, right at the time of the harvest.

  And then suddenly, all over the country, posters appeared carrying this little verse:

  Ohne Gott und Sonnen schein

  Holen Wir Die Ernte ein

  Without God and without sun

  We will get the harvest done

  I could see that this slogan had really shaken the people. It was a brazen duel between the new regime and God Himself. The rains continued, and the harvest did not get in. Overnight as suddenly as they had appeared, the posters vanished—all except for the sodden few that you could still see clinging to lamp posts.

  And now what did the government do? New signs appeared, along with announcements on the radio and advertisements in the newspaper. “Don’t let anyone tell you there is a bread shortage. There is plenty of bread. This is another example of the victory of socialism over the forces of nature.”

  Only there was no bread.

  I myself went into grocery stores and found none. Even restaurants didn’t have any.

  The saddest part of the story to me is that no one talked about the duplicity. The missing bread was never mentioned. The people were silent.

  ———

  The part of East Germany I was most interested in centered around the southern tiers of Saxony, because I had heard from Henrietta and other refugees that there the Church was alive. I was not prepared for how alive. Germany was a land of contradictions. On the one hand, it was by far the hardest country I had yet penetrated; indoctrination and police coercion were rank. And yet, at the same time, there was more religious freedom in East Germany than I had found in any other Communist country.

  The man whose name I had been given in Saxony, Wilhelm, was a full-time youth worker for the Lutheran Fellowship. The village where he and his wife, Mar, lived was in a hilly, wooded section of the state. Their front yard commanded a view to bring envy into the heart of every lowland Dutchman. A small motorbike stood outside, a bike, I was to discover, that carried Wilhelm all over East Germany in sun, snow, and rain.