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Book Review
Priest shares Dachau memoirs
Reviewed by Andrew Junker, The Catholic Sun
April 3, 2008
There has been a spate of memoirs written in the past few years that first became very famous because of their supposed realism and gritty truth telling.
And then they became even more famous because it turned out the authors made up whole parts of their memoirs.
It makes you wonder why the authors didn’t just write their books as novels, but then the potential answer comes — that the public likes stories that are billed as true. It makes the books seem more important in a way — more serious and authentic.
Of course, there are other reasons to write a memoir instead of a novel. There is a sense that some cataclysmic events need foremost to be remembered and catalogued.
Fr. Jean Bernard, in his book “Priestblock 25487: A Memoir of Dachau,” demonstrates the necessity of a brutally truthful recounting of his time at the Nazi concentration camp as a way of remembering the sin and grace that lived there.
First published in 1960, Fr. Bernard’s book was recently republished in paperback, bringing renewed interest to his account. “EWTN Live,” a program on the Eternal Word Television Network, will also be broadcasting a special on the book April 16 at 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
“We must never forget what happened there and in many similar places,” Fr. Bernard writes in the foreword.
Forgetting would do a disservice to the Germans, in whose name the unspeakable acts were committed; it would do a disservice to those who suffered and it would be “turning a blind eye to similar events taking place today, in full view, in many other parts of the world,” Fr. Bernard writes.
Arrested in his native Luxembourg on mere pretense in May 1941, Fr. Bernard joined a large group of other priests and Protestant ministers who had been detained for their anti-Nazi sympathies at Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria.
The priests’ lack of information on the world outside the barracks created a strange universe for them, where rules and punishments were arbitrary and there seemed to be no grand plan beyond the guards’ latest sadistic amusement.
The effect might have been a savage beating from the S.S. member, but the cause was anyone’s guess: Rarely, it seemed, the guards ever needed a reason for their cruelty.
In opposition to the camp’s evil, Fr. Bernard and his brother priests found strength in the Eucharist, which was often smuggled to the non-German priests who weren’t allowed to say Mass.
The kinship many of the priests felt with the early Christians is striking in “Priestblock 25487.”
At one point, after an imprisoned Polish bishop blessed the barrack, Fr. Bernard wrote, “His blessing lets us share in the graces and comforts and sources of strength that fed the first martyrs. O miracle of the communion of saints, which becomes our experience here!”
Granted, many of Fr. Bernard’s fellow prisoners failed to share his spiritual outlook, especially as they suffered a harsh winter, near absence of food and backbreaking work. Many came close to despairing, especially when the older and infirm began disappearing into the crematorium.
Fr. Bernard spent much of his time at Dachau buoying the spirits of one priest always on the verge of despondency. As conditions worsened and the two grew sicker and sicker together, a portrait develops of beautiful and simple charity, the stuff of saints.
The mad evil that came from places like Dachau is not something that’s going to be easily explained by any book. Maybe that’s why simply remembering is the best course to take, as Fr. Bernard writes in his foreword.
He wrote the memoir in a few fevered days after leaving Dachau, and its attention to detail and fact leave the reader with a historical document detailing what it means to be persecuted for the faith.
It also recalls the power of the risen Christ, who makes all things new and brings forth good from evil. Or as St. Paul — who was also a prisoner — wrote: “Where sin increased, grace overflowed even more.”
Andrew Junker is a staff writer for The Catholic Sun. Comments are welcome. Send e-mail to letters@catholicsun.org.
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