This is the picture Chaplain Van included in his diaries
After the war, Chaplain Van was not sent home immediately. His stay in Europe extended his opportunities to do a variety of things. He traveled around in occupied Germany, even visited relatives in the Netherlands.
He also spent a great deal of time visiting labor and concentration camps, where he was often witness to what was left of the incalculable toll of human suffering. In just a few weeks, Allied forces had uncovered dozens of camps, not all of them death camps, but all of them careless and predatory about human life, all of them chokingly ugly.
Literature of the Holocaust contains lots of stories in which a survivor--sometimes stories written by a survivor--goes through all kinds of trauma as he or she fears the advent of age--and loss of memory.
What makes memory loss especially traumatic for Holocaust survivors is that those men and women begin to understand that they won't, somehow, remember what they feel they must to make sure that what happened to them should never happen to others.
Chaplain Van has sufficient time to visit a number of death camps, but his telling the tales is often, decades later, similar. Work camps became death camps, discovered by Allied troops who often had no hint of there being death factories anywhere near. Their frequency--like their barbarity--was unforgettable.
That kind of barbarity is difficult to talk about or write about. Yet, to a GI like Chaplain Van, seeing, first hand, what was perpetuated on others--German or not--was something he seems to have felt he had to see. There's more in the diaries than I'm telling you, showing you, mini-tours of horrors.
But I'm going to not tell you all of it, not because I'm sparing you the misery of having to look at pictures or read descriptions of man's inhumanity to man, but because in the many decades that have passed since the end of WWII, just about everybody, somewhere along the line, has seen similar horrific pictures and read similar accounts. Chaplain Van recited the terrors because I'm quite sure his dear ones back home wouldn't believe what he saw.
The biggest camp Chaplain Van visits, as well as the one he sees first following the end of the war, is Buchenwald. I'll share with you his descriptions of Buchenwald. He's obviously now writing for us, for readers who are believers, maybe even readers from his family. These diary entries are less diary than they are reportage, pure descriptions, helped along by wider reading, as well as the stories he must have heard from officers, like him, left behind. They were telling stories they sometimes heard, sometimes actually witnessed.
For the record: history shows that Buchenwald was not classified as a death (or extermination) camp, but it was one of the largest and deadliest concentration camps in Nazi Germany, with an estimated 56,000 to 70,000 deaths.
Here's Chaplain Van telling what he imagined, what he saw, what he heard, what he believed about a place called Buchenwald. It's very clear that he's telling us some things that he couldn't believe, some things that he felt very strongly he had to tell.
May 24:
I visited the concentration camp Buchenwald--perhaps the most brutal and most inhumane of them all. It is located about 100 miles east of Marburg. It is estimated that about 77,000 people were killed or died of malnutrition in this camp. About 5,600 bodies were cremated every week.
When new prisoners entered this camp, they were told "You enter through this gate and you go out through the chimney." On the inside walls of the crematorium, I read, "It is better to be cremated than to be eaten by worms."
When this camp was liberated by American soldiers, the place was littered with dead people. German workers in their hasty departure did not have the time to dispose of the dead (see photo above). When General Eisenhower came to inspect the camp, he was so horrified that he asked Prime Minister Churchill, of England, to come and see it. He also ordered all the people of the community to walk through the camp, so they could see for themselves what their Nazi leaders had done.
It was impossible for anyone to escape from this camp. It was encircled with an electrified fence with guardhouses placed at intervals. In the center of the camp was the crematorium, surrounded by a high stone wall. Unwanted prisoners, the sick and the maimed, were brought to this building at night, and as soon as they stepped inside the wall they slid down a chute into the basement and were killed instantly. An elevator took the dead bodies to the main floor, where they were cremated. I counted five ovens in the crematorium. Human ashes were dumped on a pile outside of the camp. I took a handful of human ashes out of one of the ovens and sent it home to tell the story.
The man who was our guide and an inmate said that the flames of the crematorium shot up five feet above the chimney every night. Every morning a wagon picked up the dead from the hospital and brought them to the crematorium.
Disorderly inmates were hanged on makeshift gallows in view of all the prisoners to keep them obedient. I picked up a whip with five leather straps which was used to beat the disobedient. I still have it in my home. One of the teachers of our local Christian School takes these souvenirs to show them to the students.
When the Americans liberated this camp, dead bodies were stacked five feet high against the outside wall ready to be cremated. I have pictures in my album of all the things mentioned above.
In the hospital of this camp the doctor had a private room. Here he injected medication into an unwanted prisoner under the pretense of giving a treatment for some disease. In a short time the prisoner was dead and was then pushed into a hole in the floor where he fell into the basement. The following day the dead bodies were brought to the crematorium. The papers referred to Buchenwald as being a death house. A book has been printed on The Hell of Buchenwald.
As far as I can tell, while there are countless books about Buchenwald, there is not a book titled The Hell of Buchenwald. I'm going out on a limb here, going to guess that the book Chaplain Van is talking about is The Theory and Practice of Hell by Eugen Cogon, which was published in Germany (and German) in 1946, then again in English is 1949, a book commonly considered a very fine diagnosis of the mind that created places like Buchenwald. Interesingly, Mr. Cogon was himself a political prisoner in Buchenwald. He was asked by the Allies to try to help the world understand the mind that created death camps.
2 comments:
Well, I had an inkling this is where we would end up. I’ve taken some time to circle back to your first two blogs in connection with your series on “Capt Van (CV)” 1968. You were 20. CV, I surmise, was somewhere in his 60’s. His generation was colored by the Depression of the 30’s, the Second World War of the 40’s, and the Cold War of the 50’s. Your boomer generation was colored by post-war American exceptionalism and material prosperity. But what a different world in 1968. The divide between yourself and CV had reached a breaking point as the difference in generations became unbridgeable politically, culturally, and in some ways theologically as the matter of justice (JS) collided with an unbending commitment to hermetically sealed spheres (CV). The 1968 divide is tellingly evident in a riveting and at times bombastic debate between Gore Vidal and William F Buckley documented in the film “The Best of Enemies” (well worth watching if you want to understand the roots of our current political and cultural divide today).
As a Christian, I understand divides due to age and perspectives, and I also understand that you need to put your feet down somewhere and make stands. But I have also learned the beauty of grace - a grace that comes with age and an appreciation of those I once differed with once I discovered their personal stories.
Was CV a riveting preacher and lecturer? Not really. Was he the kind of writer whose prose engaged his readers? Not exactly. Was he personally formed and theologically trained in a different age culturally, ecclesiastically, politically, and pedagogically (when instruction was not so much to be discussed as simply received?) Indeed. And so, there we have it: Mister Magoo. Old. Dated. Out of touch in 1968.
But grace also makes me see someone else. CV’s life story makes me see someone else. Thanks to your labours in unveiling CV’s story, I see a caring shepherd. I see a dedicated counselor. I see emotional and relational investment in the souls he tended. I see the kind of conviction and intestinal fortitude that compelled a man to leave a rural Demotte ministry and throw himself (in his 40’s!) into a cauldron of misery and death. Despite all his faults, I see a man who, in my opinion, left his sphere sovereignty approach and entered the spheres of generals, privates, and even concentration camps where the injustices he witnessed as well as the denials he heard among the general German populace must have made him ill. Who knows how this all affected him in the long term or what subtle or overt forms of PTSD he may have experienced?
All of this prevents me from drawing too many negative conclusions about CV from a classroom incident in 1968. I guess I see in CV a man like myself: a fragile vessel who this side of heaven sees many things through a glass darkly, but sees them clearly now.
The point is: we don’t always know how and from where the water in a person’s life has flowed, and how its currents have shaped him/her. If we did know, our assessments and concluding judgements might be somewhat tempered. As you said in your opening blog, “Had I known his stories, I might have better known him.” So true - not just for you but all of us.
Thanks again for all the time you invested in sharing Capt Van’s captivating story with us. It has made me do a lot of soul-searching, and through such soul-searching I have found myself repeatedly going back to fountain of grace - not only God’s grace toward me, but what should be my grace toward others.
At your best, your blogs are a balm to the souls of your readers. Keep writing, good doctor.
Singlehandedly, you make all this work worthwhile. I really wanted to do this--who knows why? Maybe I just thought I'd owed him as much. It's been a long haul--thirty-five blog posts, an amazing number; but when I read your wonderfully thoughtful comments here, I couldn't help thinking that if you were my only Van Schouwen reader, it would all have been worth it. Thanks!!
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