Lexington, KY - It was the last place I would have chosen to spend an afternoon, but my wife very much wanted to go and after considerable resistance I gave in. It was, in fact, the last afternoon of a vacation trip to Innsbruck, Vienna, and Salzburg in Austria, ending at Munich in Bavaria. We were to fly home the next morning.
From the subway station in Munich's Marienplatz we took a train to a suburban station and then a bus to the site of the infamous Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. Many thousands were imprisoned there and many thousands murdered, outright or indirectly through overwork, malnutrition or disease, because of who they were or what they believed or just because.
The visit was everything I feared. The holocaust museum in Jerusalem had been tough. This was worse; this was where the unspeakable was done by an educated, Christian and, the world assumed, civilized people. And what they did was hardly challenged by the church and by other civilized people.
At the end of the day, choked with emotion, at a far corner of the camp we sat for a while between the cremation ovens and the place where the ashes of the dead were disposed. Flowers were blooming in the early spring sunshine. And there were butterflies. I want to remember the butterflies.
On a cold spring day over half a century earlier, American soldier John H. Boyle was at Dachau shortly after the camp was liberated. He saw boxcars piled high with the corpses of inmates who had been machine-gunned to death "in a last-gasp frenzy on the part of the guards when they heard that American forces were coming. I stared in horror and disbelief at the carloads of carnage, the inhumaneness of it all, confirming beyond the shadow of a doubt the rumors we had heard about such places of detention and death," he said.
As he stood there in the camp, out of the corner of his eye he saw someone walking toward him, and instinctively he reached for his pistol. It was no enemy, but a freed prisoner with tear-stained face who in German and broken English was saying, "Thank you, thank you. Danke, danke."
The man was a Lithuanian Jew who had been a prisoner for more than three years, living without hope of ever being freed, saved. "Out of his pocket he slowly brought forth a dirty-looking crust of bread and held it out to me." Boyle took it. On the day before the man's friend had given it to him as the friend was being led off to execution. Bread was precious and the friend would need it no more. Now the man was passing it along to Boyle in gratitude.
I'll let Boyle, now a Presbyterian minister, tell the rest of his story as he told it in a sermon at Chicago's Fourth Presbyterian Church.
"I thanked him and put the crust of bread in the pocket of my field jacket, where it stayed for several weeks. From time to time I would finger it, as though it were a talisman of some sort. It soon was reduced to crumbs. Then one day, as I sat on a bench before the cathedral in Salzburg, Austria, the site of our divisional headquarters after the war had ended, I emptied the crumbs into my hand, stared at them for a minute, and then fed them to the pigeons gathered round my feet.
"Over the course of nearly 60 years in ministry, I have officiated at and participated in and partaken of the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper more times than I can remember. What I do remember is that whenever I have done so, I remember that survivor of the Holocaust, that Lithuanian Jewish man, and a dirty looking crust of bread. It was not much, but it was all he had to give and with which to give thanks. I have been feeding on the 12 baskets full of the leftovers ever since.
"It was enough. It was more than enough. Danke. Danke."