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Suffering and Hope: The Story Behind the Book
By Ben C. Ollenburger

"For in their own bodies, Christians live existentially the tension of their present uncompleted existence in solidarity with an unredeemed creation, and they must therefore yearn for the consummation of the resurrection, which is nothing but God's triumph over the power of death that poisons his creation. "

My story is a story of very ordinary people during extraordinarily terrible times. Times the like of which I hope with all my heart will never, never come again. It is for all of us ordinary people all over the world to see to it that they do not." The words are those of Miep Gies, who helped to hide the family of Anne Frank in Amsterdam during World War II.¹ No one who reads her story will likely consider her to be at all ordinary. The times she describes were, however, extraordinarily terrible and filled with suffering so immense as to crush all hope. In her story, Miep Gies narrates the experience of suffering and hope, of hopelessness in the face of inhuman cruelty, and finally of humanity in the face of death. She does not reflect on the problem of suffering; she describes its horror.

That horror was known widely in Europe, especially and uniquely by the Jews. Miep Gies witnessed it firsthand in Amsterdam. Others have also borne witness. On the day that Nazis were herding Otto, Edith, Margot, and Anne Frank from their hiding place on Prinsengracht in Amsterdam to board a train for Auschwitz, a young Dutch Christian was hiding from other Nazis in the attic of a house on Stolbergstraat in Haarlem, a few kilometers to the west. Like Miep Gies, he has written a book. This book does not recount the author's experience in any detail; instead, he draws upon it for the theological reflection contained in Suffering and Hope: The Biblical Vision and the Human Predicament.² As J. Christiaan Beker, Professor of New Testament Theology at

Ben C. Ollenburger is Associate Professor of Old Testament at the Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries. A member of the Editorial Council of THEOLOGY TODAY, Ollenburger is a former Princeton Seminary colleague of Professor Beker about whom he writes here. The occasion for this article is the publication of Beker's new book, Suffering and Hope (1987), which is reviewed elsewhere in this issue. Dr. Ollenburger's own recently published book is Zion, City of the Great King (1987).
¹Miep Gies and Alison Leslie Gold, Anne Frank Remembered (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 12.
²Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987. Quotations in this article are from Professor Beker's typed manuscript. I am grateful to him for permitting me to use it.

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Princeton Theological Seminary, tells us in the book's preface, these reflections are prompted by his own experience in World War II as a Nazi slave, a sufferer under the degradation of forced labor in Berlin, the terror of that city's constant bombardment, and the effects of that experience in the following years.

Beker seeks to understand the Bible's views of suffering in relation both to Christian hope for the future of creation and to our present experience of suffering. Especially after the holocaust, Beker says, the human situation is one in which suffering tends to overwhelm hope and leads to cynicism or despair. His concern is with the quality and character of suffering, and of hope, in a world where the question of suffering is inescapable; we witness and experience it in a scope and at a depth that are without parallel in history. Its very intensity has brought about an apocalyptic climate which joins the world in solidarity even as, and precisely because, the whole world seems to be moving inexorably toward its own destruction. Furthermore, Beker claims that suffering cannot be quantified: "suffering means affliction when and wherever it occurs-whether for the distressed housewife or for the starving person in Ethiopia."

While suffering cannot be quantified, neither can it be generalized. A person's suffering is uniquely one's own, no matter how widely shared our circumstances may be. That is perhaps one reason why Beker has been willing to take the risk of speaking in brief but concrete terms of his own experience and its subsequent effects. Beker does not dwell on that experience, though it has dwelt with him, nor does be attempt to exalt it-to say that it is more awful or more significant than what others have suffered. Indeed, he describes his own suffering as "puny" in comparison to that of Jews sacrificed in the Holocaust.

This article describes in greater detail some of the events that lie behind Suffering and Hope, The impetus for such an article was mine, not Beker's. I am deeply grateful to Professor Beker for speaking to me in private conversations of such personal memories, and for allowing me to write of them. To speak of them is to suffer them once more. What follows is based on these conversations and his book. My own words are freely mingled with Beker's; those in quotes are his own, as is the story itself. It is told here in the hope that this story may help to remind us that faith does have real battles to fight against the powers of darkness and death. It may also help to keep alive the memory of events that we cannot comprehend, "extraordinarily terrible" events that took place not yet fifty years ago on the soil of Christian Europe. Because we cannot comprehend them, it is important that we not forget them.

I

Beker was born in the Dutch village of Gorssel in 1924. Two years later, his family moved to Stolbergstraat in Haarlem, a city known for its tulip fields and for artists like Frans Hals and Jacob van Ruisdael. Young Chris entered the gymnasium in 1936. He was a promising

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student determined to pursue something other than theology, the predominant vocation in the Beker family. Chris' father was the minister in a Dutch Reformed parish, one of five or six Protestant ministers in the city. His position gave the family a comfortable middle-class life. Their life changed dramatically after war broke out in 1939, Chris' fifteenth year. In that year, Germany invaded Poland under Hitler, and Britain and France declared war. It was a frightening time in Holland.³ Its neighbors to the east, west, and south were now at war. The fear increased with the news that Germany had bombed Warsaw and the Poles had surrendered in September.

The Dutch declared neutrality in a war that was beginning to engulf Europe. Hitler, claiming to respect this neutrality, sent German troops to protect it. On May 10, 1940, as Germany's sixth army moved into Belgium, its air force began dropping paratroops around Rotterdam and The Hague, the home of the Queen. The war with the Dutch lasted five days. On May 13, the Queen left The Hague for England, and, early in the morning of May 14, Germany began bombing. Chris awoke to the sound of anti-aircraft fire aimed at bombers attacking the fortifications around Haarlem. "I thought it was the end of the world." During the day, the city of Rotterdam, thirty miles south of Haarlem, was levelled. More than seventy-five thousand people were left homeless, and nearly a thousand were killed. It was an entirely new form of warfare, and the Dutch were unprepared to defend against it. In order to spare its other densely populated cities, the Dutch army capitulated. The bombing of Rotterdam, which may have been due to a breakdown in German communications, marked the first occasion in human history of "indiscriminate" bombing. It reportedly ended British repugnance to the practice and led to the obliteration bombing later carried out against Cologne, Dresden, Hamburg, and especially Berlin.⁴

On May 14, the German occupation of Holland began. That day, Chris saw German troops in the streets of Haarlem for the first time. They marched through the city in parade, the horrified Dutch lining the streets to view their conquerors. "They looked invincible." Their uniforms, equipment, and armaments made an indelible impression and were unlike anything the Dutch army possessed. The following day, Chris celebrated his sixteenth birthday. School went on as usual, but the tension pervading Haarlem made it difficult to study.

In Belgium, the German army established a military occupation; in Norway and Holland, the occupation was civil. Hitler viewed the

³North and South Holland are provinces of The Netherlands. For convenience, I will use "Holland" to refer to the entire country. Haarlem is in North Holland and is its capital city.

⁴B. H. Liddell Hart, History of the Second World War (New York: Putnam's, 197 1), p. 594. Hart quotes from a directive to the British Bomber Command of February 14, 19429 which "emphasized that the bombing campaign was now to 'be focused on the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular, of the individual workers'." Hart comments, "Thus, terrorisation became without reservation the definite policy of the British government" (p. 596).

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Norwegians and the Dutch as the purest examples of the Aryan race, and it was his ambition to incorporate these lands into the German empire. For that reason, the Dutch did not suffer greatly in the early years of the war. Nazis, both Dutch and German, simply took control of the governmental machinery and attempted to win the hearts and minds of the population. They were not successful. As the occupation government began shipping Dutch supplies to Germany, the Dutch hoarded goods and buried their silver and copper.⁵

The response became much more hostile when Nazi designs against the Jews became clear. Dutch Jews, unlike those in some other European nations, were not segregated in ghettoes, but were an integral part of the population. There was a thriving synagogue in Haarlem, and many of Chris' gymnasium classmates were Jews. In the autumn of 1940, the occupation government decreed that Jews were to be dismissed from official positions. The effect of this decree was to harden opposition to the Nazis and to bring all the Dutch churches into unity in this opposition. The various Reformed churches, the Remonstrants, and the Mennonites signed a letter in October of 1940 protesting the anti-Jewish measures.⁶

The protest fell on deaf ears and oppression of the Jews intensified. One afternoon, Chris saw a leading citizen of Haarlem riding his bicycle, a big yellow star of David on his chest with the word Jood inscribed on it. The next day several of his classmates appeared with stars on their chests. It was a horrifying and confusing experience, prompting questions that could not be answered. By 1942, classmates began disappearing. The occupation government had decreed that people between the ages of eighteen and forty were to make themselves available for labor on behalf of Germany. The police rounded up those who did not "volunteer." By the end of the year, 162,000 Dutch men had been sent to Germany.⁷ In response, many students became "divers," the Dutch word for those who went underground, either to hide outside the cities or to join the resistance. Among them was Chris Beker. From November of 1942 through January of 1943, he lived outside Haarlem on his uncle's farm, trying to avoid the razias, the Nazi raids. He was successful, and, thus, returned to his family in Haarlem. Ominously, however, Jews were now required to register and many were sent to Westerbork, and from there to "the east," Auschwitz. The occupation had become brutal.

It was illegal to possess a radio or to publish independent newspapers

⁵Werner Wambrunn, The Dutch Under German Occupation, 1940-1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963), p. 70. Germany took various goods and raw material from Holland, including winter clothing for German soliders in Russia and 100,000 bicycles, for the German military (ibid., p. 71).

⁶W. A. Visser't Hooft, The Struggle of the Dutch Church for the Maintenance of the Commandments of God in the Life of the State (New York: World Council of Churches, 1945), pp. 23-24. In other letters and declarations, these churches were joined by the Catholic Church and the Quakers.

⁷Warmbrunn, The Dutch Under German Occupation, pp. 73-74.

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in Holland, but underground presses flourished. Mimeographed sheets were smuggled through neighborhoods and provided news of the war. In early 1943, the news was good. Russia had turned back the German army in its advance on Stalingrad; many German generals had surrendered. The good news turned to bad, however, when Hitler ordered a full mobilization of resources in occupied territories. Responsibility for this mobilization was placed in the hands of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS. In Holland, forced labor regulations were expanded. In May of 1943, all males between the ages of sixteen and thirty-five were required to register for the labor draft. Exemptions were granted to some, but all exemptions were cancelled for those born in the years 1922 through 1924, except mine workers and students.⁸ Chris had graduated from the gymnasium and had completed entrance examinations for the University of Utrecht, but the universities were virtually closed. Chris was no longer a student. The timing could not have been worse.

Still, there was hope of avoiding deportation to Germany. A friend whose father was in the Dutch revenue service informed Chris that exemptions were being granted to those who passed a written exam for admission to the tax school. With everything at stake, Chris wrote the exam and passed. The reader of Chris's exam wrote that his was "the most enthusiastic essay on the importance of revenue collection" that be had ever read! On a Wednesday in June of 1943, Chris took his certificate to the labor office and showed it to the German commandant, expecting to receive his Ausweis (exemption). The commandant merely shrugged his shoulders and declared the certificate invalid. Chris' friend received an exemption; Chris was told to report to the train station on Saturday for deportation.

The news stunned Chris and his family. His closest friend had found a hiding place and invited Chris to join him there, but no preparations had been made. There were other complications. In February, the Dutch churches had issued a declaration condemning forced labor and deportation.⁹ The declaration and a letter to the occupation government had been read in the Dutch Reformed Churches. In April, Chris' father had been summoned by the SS to Amsterdam for interrogation, apparently reported by someone in his congregation. The very mention of the SS, the "organization of death," struck terror in everyone's heart. In May, the churches had protested new regulations which required that Jews in "mixed marriages" be sterilized. Many ministers and priests had been arrested for their protests; some were in concentration camps. The SS had already interrogated Chris' father. What would they do to him if Chris went into hiding? The question hung unspoken over the Beker

⁸Ibid., p. 75. After March of 1943, employers had to seek special permission to hire anyone under the age of forty. To compensate for the diminished labor pool, the work week was extended to seventy-two hours.

⁹The text of the declaration is in Visser't Hooft, The Struggle of the Dutch Church, pp. 52-54).

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household, so on Saturday morning Chris walked to the train station alone, one month after his nineteenth birthday.

II

There were two trains in the Haarlem station. One train, guarded by German troops, was bound for Amsterdam; the other was a "free" train bound for Utrecht. For the remainder of his life, Chris would be haunted by the choice-step across the tracks and take the train to Utrecht and freedom, or board the train for Amsterdam and "destination unknown"? He went to Amsterdam. There, he and hundreds of other young Dutch deportees were put on a German train--"a little better than cattle cars"--and headed east.¹⁰ Chris ate the sandwiches his sister had packed, with cheery aphorisms written on the bags, and wondered where he was going.

The train crossed the German border just before dark; it stopped at the city of Bocholt, then headed into the night. On Sunday morning, it entered Berlin. The city was crowded, people freely going about their business, and Chris was acutely aware for the first time that he was a prisoner. The train continued through the city and stopped in a large open field to the east. The passengers were herded out of the cars and aligned in rows on a large platform. There, foremen from the various industrial plants picked their slaves. When the selection process was over, only forty young men were left of six hundred, deemed unfit for heavy labor; Chris was one of them. He spent two nights in comfortable barracks near the station before being assigned to a factory making navigation equipment for U-boats.

The camp was surrounded by a high fence, but the gate was open at first. It was soon locked, however, when the Germans grew fearful of uprisings. The city of Berlin was filled with foreign workers, hundreds of thousands of them, imported by Germany from occupied countries. Everywhere there were Russians, especially White Russian women, removed from the eastern front. Germans were a minority in Berlin. The vast army of foreign labor was required by the Nazi war machine, but its very size posed a threat. The threat was suppressed by fear. Some of the foreigners were collaborators, prepared to betray a friend.

While the factory was northeast of Berlin, the labor camp was in Mariendorf, south of Berlin near Tempelhof airport. Every morning Chris took the train to the Brandenburg gate, along the boulevard Unter den Linden, and through what is now the eastern sector of Berlin. The trip took an hour and a half each way. In the factory, Chris and a Dutch friend were told to find work to do, but they knew that any work they did would contribute to Germany's war effort and would help prolong the war and their own imprisonment. To their sense of bondage was added

¹⁰In the months of June and July alone, 65,000 Dutch men, most of them between eighteen and twenty years old, were shipped to Germany. See Warmbrunn, The Dutch Under German Occupation, p. 75.

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that of guilt. To avoid working, they hid in one sector of the factory until the supervisors came along, then moved to another. Eventually, having demonstrated no manufacturing skills, Chris was made a translator between French workers and their German captors. That did not last long either.

In August, Chris contracted typhus. He became deathly ill and was moved to the infirmary of the labor camp. There was no medical care, only an attendant. The attendant was Dutch. When Chris became delirious with fever, the attendant doused him with a bucket of water. Chris thought he was trying to kill him. There were more serious threats. Previously, the allies had bombed Berlin only once, but now the bombardments came frequently, day and night.¹¹ Some of the bombs hit the labor camp, but the infirmary was spared. Seriously ill, Chris was then moved by ambulance to a regular German hospital in Berlin. There he finally received medical care. The German nurses were attentive and kind, appalled at the way he had been treated. But it was a German hospital. When a train arrived bearing wounded soldiers from the Russian front, Chris was declared well and put out on the street in his pajamas. Somehow, he managed to find his way back to the camp. There was no longer a camp, however. It had been bombed out of existence"- the ground was completely level." Chris found the place where his room had been and retrieved part of the lock from his bag. Nothing else was left. There were no shelters at the camp, only foxholes. The typhus that was sapping his life had saved it.

Chris was taken to a new camp, not yet finished. There were no windows in the barracks, and the wind and rain blew freely into the rooms. Having been declared well, Chris was ordered back to work. He collapsed at the factory and was sent back to the camp. The next day, he again collapsed and was finally sent to a hospital for foreign laborers. There were fifty patients with typhus in the hospital, one nurse, and one bathroom. The physician visited every few days. In the German hospital, the patients had been taken below ground during bombardments; here, the patients were left in their rooms while the staff took cover. The bombardments were constant, American bombers by day and British by night. Back in Haarlem, Chris's family had somehow gotten word that he had been sent to Berlin. Early each morning, his mother heard and felt the thunder of American bomber fleets flying over Holland on their way to bomb Berlin, knowing that Chris was there, not knowing if he was alive.

Death came very close to Chris in the hospital. One day the Germans brought a patient to the bed next to Chris, a young black-haired Polish boy so severely injured that he could barely mumble. He had been beaten senseless for picking up a cigarette butt in a concentration camp. Chris had never before been face to face with such brutally inhuman

¹¹The allies dropped 200,000 tons of bombs on Germany in 1943. See Hart, History of the Second World War, p. 605.

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cruelty; its effect was staggering. The boy lay beside Chris for three days and nights; then he died. It was then, while lying beside the wasted body of a Polish boy murdered for less than no reason at all, that Chris determined to become a theologian. But it was not yet clear that Chris himself would live. Convinced finally that he would not, he made his way to the window to see how he would die. The night sky over Berlin was ablaze with search lights and anti-aircraft fire. The city itself was a conflagration, bombs exploding and buildings consumed in flames. Sick with typhus and viewing the apocalypse, Chris confessed that "Only God is real."

God had agents, however. In September, an Austrian nurse befriended Chris and told him that she would take care of things. Inexplicably, she made a deal with the labor office and obtained an exemption declaring Chris to be useless to the war effort. Shortly thereafter, a stranger approached him and told Chris that he was going to receive a pass to go home. Who was the stranger? Chris' uncle knew a man in Holland who was in the National Socialist Party, a Nazi. Had he arranged the pass? Chris never found out. He only knew that he was free to go home. But how? The allies had invaded Italy, and Germany had closed all of its borders. Again inexplicably, Chris was given passage on a military train that could roll through the closed borders. He boarded the train and headed west. On the station of every town along the way was a sign, erst siegen, dann reisen (first triumph, then travel). Chris' brother greeted him at the station in Haarlem. Chris was still wearing pajamas.

There was joy in the Beker household that September, and Chris' father offered a prayer of profound thanksgiving. But Chris was not asked about what had happened to him in Berlin. Indeed, he told no one about it-for twenty-five years.

III

After his return, Chris was permitted to spend two months recuperating on his uncle's farm. Following his recovery, he was given an exemption to complete his long delayed education for the revenue service. From November of 1943 until March of 1944, he was in Rotterdam at the tax school. This exemption, too, was invalidated, but Chris was not altogether disappointed. He wanted to study theology, not taxation. Nor was he about to go back to Berlin. His only option was to become a "diver."

Above the third floor of their house in Haarlem, the Bekers had an attic. A trusted carpenter constructed a hidden door in the attic wall, so that Chris-and then his brother-could hide under the eaves between the attic wall and the roof. In the attic and outside it, Chris prepared for theology. Every day, the gymnasium director, who lived across the yard, came over to read Plato's dialogues (the Phaedo and the Symposium) with Chris in Greek. By himself, he studied Hebrew. The military police came to the door frequently, but only once did they search the attic.

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"They were old Austrian soldiers and were too tired to climb the stairs."

These were dangerous times, however. In Rotterdam, during a two-day raid just after Chris bad left the city, the police rounded up 54,000 men out of a male population of sixty or seventy thousand.¹² While Chris was in hiding, someone in Haarlem pushed a Geman soldier into a canal. In retaliation, the police gathered fourteen of Haarlem's leading citizens to a square on the Houtplein, two blocks from Chris' window. Chris' family was terrified, because his father could have been one of those taken. All fourteen were shot. In the village of Putten, the resistance ambushed a car and killed a German officer. The men in the village were rounded up--more than five hundred--and brought to the church; from there, they were put on a train and never heard from again.

Fear of betrayal or discovery was constant, but sometimes danger was courted. Chris emerged from his hiding place one evening to take a walk with a friend. Around a corner, an SS officer confronted them. Rather than ask for their papers, he ordered them to push his stalled car. When the officer had climbed behind the wheel, Chris and his friend ran. The officer got out of the car and began shooting, but the two of them managed to escape with bullets whizzing past their ears.

The terror was more drawn out during the "hunger winter" of 1944-45. The Germans cut off all food rations to the Dutch, who were left to find whatever food they could. At first, there was a soup kitchen in Haarlem. A ladle of soup for each family member was poured into a bucket. But there was no soup for divers. They did not exist. When the soup kitchen was closed, the family's staple was tulip bulbs. Chris was sick with hunger and his nerves were shot. More distressing even than the gnawing hunger were the random explosions that racked Haarlem. The Germans were firing V-I and V- 2 rockets over Holland to England. The rockets were hastily and poorly made, and they frequently fell short of their targets or were crippled by anti-aircraft fire. It was unbearable torture for Chris, hidden half-starved in his attic, to hear the rockets screaming overhead and then blasting into the ground.

IV

Then, on May 5, 1945, the war in Europe was over. Chris came out of hiding to enter the University of Utrecht. But there was one final episode of the war to endure. The German occupation of Holland had been aided by Dutch Nazis and other collaborators, whom the Dutch were anxious to identify and prosecute after the war. Since he had been in Berlin, Chris was suspected of being a collaborator. Finally, he was cleared.

Chris studied theology at Utrecht from 1945 through 1949. Then, on a World Council of Churches scholarship, he went to Chicago, to Seabury-Western Theological Seminary. In Chicago, he met Amos

¹²Warmbrunn, The Dutch Under German Occupation, p. 76.

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Niven Wilder, a New Testament scholar who had suffered in the First World War. At Wilder's invitation, Chris did his doctoral studies in New Testament at the University of Chicago. He has remained a sojourner in this country.

Physically, Chris left both the war and Holland behind. But the time spent in Berlin and then hiding in Haarlem was not merely an episode, a discrete set of events once experienced and then committed to memory. As with others who have suffered similarly, these events had continued to work their effect as if in a timeless, private present. The impact on Chris's relation to his family was painful and profound; it is hidden in his book's poignant dedication, "To my brothers and sisters in Holland! Hein, Nolda, Else, Ernst and Diesje." From these and all others, Chris kept his suffering private. It was only when he was beaten by an American superpatriot while demonstrating against the Vietnam war in 1968 at Fort Dix that it became possible for Beker to speak of it.

Beker has borne witness not to his own remarkable experience of suffering and struggle for hope, but to the God whose singular reality was perceived against a horizon of inhumanity and destruction. In an earlier book, he wrote that "God's final triumph is already casting its rays into our present world, however opaque those rays often are and however much they seem contradicted by the empirical reality of our present world."¹³ Out of experience darker than most of our own, Beker can speak deeply and personally about the opacity of those rays and the realities that contradict them. Perhaps for that reason, his talk of hope has an uncommon passion and honesty. He is quick to remind us that "I am no Elie Wiesel or Anne Frank," and he is right. Because Beker was not a Jew, he recovered from typhus in Holland. Because she was a Jew, Anne Frank died of typhus in the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. But bound up with this honest reminder is a passionate commitment never to permit death to speak the final word. "A biblical theology of hope views the present power of death in terms of its empty future and therefore in the knowledge of its sure defeat."

Beker's writing and teaching is the testimony of one whose call to a theological vocation came in the presence of death, and whose character as a properly apocalyptic theologian is rooted in his call. As Beker himself has written: "For in their own bodies, Christians live existentially the tension of their present uncompleted existence in solidarity with an unredeemed creation, and they must therefore yearn for the consummation of the resurrection, which is nothing but God's triumph over the power of death that poisons his creation."¹⁴

¹³Paul's Apocalyptic Gospel: The Coming Triumph of God (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), p. 58. While this is offered as a description of Paul's gospel, few who know him or his work would doubt that it serves also as an abiding motif in Beker's own interpretation of the gospel.

¹⁴J. Christiaan Beker, Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980), p. 179.