Jean - Priestblock 25487 A Memoir of Dachau

Preface by Sen Cardinal OMalley

Introduction by Robert Royal

Foreword to the Original Edition

In Prison

Arrival at Dachau

The First Two Weeks

In the Main Camp

First Mass in the Camp

Recollections from the First Few Months

The Good Times Come to an End

Winter Approaches

Christmas 1941

Ten Days Leave and My Return to Dachau

Transport Commando Praezifix

Easter Week 1942

Hunger

Visitors in the Camp

At the End of Our Strength

The Infirmary

Dead End

Renewed Hope

Released

Biographical Note

Contributors

In the darkest times of history the Lord has raised up Saints to be a beacon of Christs redemptive love. The first half of the twentieth century was marked by two catastrophic world wars that changed the course of history. The Holocaust targeted the elimination of the Jewish race within Europe. Hitlers Third Reich was the catalyst to executing millions of Jews. The reality of evil was tangible by the consequence of war.

Most Catholics would be encouraged to learn that several thousand Roman Catholic priests preached against Hitlers motives and personally protected many Jews during the Second World War. These men modeled their lives on Jesus Christ, the High Priest. Consequently, they became a targeted population by the Third Reich. Over 2,000 Catholic priests became prisoners of one of Hitlers earliest concentration camps, Dachau in Bavaria, Germany. These saintly men of pastoral charity are icons of the suffering servant in their zeal for souls. The priests of Dachau were sentenced to the barracks which became known as the Priestblock.

The testimony you are about to read, Priestblock 25487 , resurrects the memory of these selfless men. Each page rebuilds the foundation of the barracks with testimony of their priestly outreach to the prisoners in the camp. These priests struggled with the same horrific conditions as did everyone in Dachau. The shadow of the Cross will come across all our lives at some point with the pain of suffering. The priests of Dachau remind all of us that suffering is redemptive in Christ Jesus. Sacred scripture highlights for us that where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more. Truly, the grace of the priesthood was abundant at Dachau.

Priestblock 25487 will inspire everyone who reads it with a renewed gratitude for the priesthood of Jesus Christ. We live in an age where Hollywood and sport figures are held up as role models. Today, we have before us the lived witness of the priests of Dachau who model virtue and lives of faith.

We give thanks to Almighty God for the heroic witnesses of Priestblock 25487 .

This story is both ordinary and extraordinary. It is ordinary because Catholic priests and religious were regularly rounded up and sent to concentration camps in large numbers during the nightmare of Nazism in Europe. It is extraordinary, as all such accounts are, because they give us vivid and unforgettable indications of both the depths of depravity and heights of sanctity to which the human race is capable. Father Jean Bernard offers a straightforward picture of how Good and Evil played out around him in his imprisonment in the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. He takes great pains to be accurate about the ever shifting conditions as he witnessed them personally. His strict regard for truth, even in such circumstances, is itself an implicit rejection of the violence built on lies that the Third Reich inflicted everywhere it could. If there is any truth missing in this moving story, it is Father Bernards own quiet heroism and holiness, which he is too humble to include, but which we may intuit in his primary emphasis on the plight of his fellow inmates.

People who have not looked carefully at the position of the Catholic Church under the Third Reich may be particularly surprised by this story. The Nazis did not want to exterminate all Catholics, but they most certainly did want to exterminate all Jews, and they nearly succeeded. So the Shoah cannot and should not be described as if the Nazis did as much harm to Catholics as they did to Jews. Yet it is a fact of history that millions of Catholics were murdered in the Nazi camps, and that is something we must never forget.

During and right after World War II, it was commonly assumed that Christians as well as Jews suffered a great deal under Hitler. Jews were grateful to Catholics and others for such assistance as they were able to provide, and especially esteemed Pope Pius XII, who quite probably saved more Jews from the Nazis than any other single person. That was why Golda Meir, one of the founders and later Prime Minister of the newly created Jewish state of Israel, thanked the pope and honored him among the righteous gentiles: When fearful martyrdom came to our people in the decade of Nazi terror, the voice of the pope was raised for the victims. Similarly, Moshe Sharett, the second Prime Minister of Israel, remarked after meeting with Pius: I told him [the Pope] that my first duty was to thank him, and through him the Catholic Church, on behalf of the Jewish public for all they had done in the various countries to rescue Jews. We are deeply grateful to the Catholic Church.

But beginning in the 1960s, following a play entitled The Deputy by the Communist-inspired revisionist, Rolf Hochuth, there has been a massive attempt to deny these facts and paint the Church as all but a Nazi accomplice and Pius as Hitlers pope.

One of the advantages of a memoir like this is its concrete evidence that the anti-Catholic smears are false. Pius was aware not only of the threats to Jews but the widespread persecution of his own priests by the Nazis. Careful study of the records in recent years has even given us some concrete numbers that were not available to the pope at the time. In 1932, for instance, just before the Nazis came to power, there were about twenty-one thousand priests in Germany. By the time Nazism was defeated a decade later, more than eight thousand of these men had either been threatened, beaten, imprisoned, or killed by the regime. In other words, well over one-third of Germanys priests came into open conflict with the Third Reich. We can be morally certain that the number who, seeing the treatment of their fellows, opposed Nazism in more subtle or quiet ways was even higher.