Chapter 20: The East Bloc

As time moved on, I left Halle for other areas but found them all facing similar issues. I traveled through Karl Marx Stadt, which had just recently been renamed back to Chemnitz. Lengthy, politically derived street names – like the often-mocked “Street of German-Soviet Friendship,” of which every East German city had at least one – were being reassigned to their pre-war designations. Lenin Alley became Landsberg Street, the Street of Liberation became Main Street, and the Place of the Socialist Youth became Central Square; as was the case in Halle, there was public momentum to do away with all of communism’s relics. On my way through Chemnitz, I spotted an imposing statue of Karl Marx’s head. I snapped a picture of the city’s former namesake through the window of the bus just in case it disappeared before I returned; sure enough, it was gone the next time I passed through.

My next stop was Freiberg, where President Hinckley had dedicated the temple just five years before – with the Iron Curtain still fully drawn. Though the ambient curiosity appeared to have died down since our family visit in 1985, there was still enough interest in the temple to warrant the presence of a makeshift visitor’s center comprising a few backdrops housed within the adjacent stake center. An elderly missionary couple served as tour guides, but one day each week – on their P-day – we would relieve them. We hosted school groups, politicians, tourists, and curiosity seekers; it was quite a treat to let the people come to us for a change.

The most awe-inspiring visitors, however, were the Church members who arrived from the east. We met some of the first groups of LDS Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, Yugoslavians, and Russians arriving in chartered buses for the newly translated temple sessions. In some cases, these sparse busloads represented the entire active membership of the Church in their respective countries. Each group had faced challenges over the years – some similar to the East German Saints, and some uniquely their own.

Hamp’s own L.D.S. High classmate Wallace Toronto – the Church’s longest-serving mission president – had continued operating as the Czech mission-president-in-exile after his arrest and deportation from Czechoslovakia in 1965. The fruits of his 32-year labor seemed to be dwindling when he passed away – still serving in the capacity of mission president – three years later, but if Wallie and the rowdy Toronto boys could have witnessed this moment, they certainly would have been astounded at this re-ignition from the ashes.

New Polish members from Wroclaw, Gdansk, and Zelwagi – formerly known as Breslau, Danzig, and Selbongen – had in the meantime taken the place of their German counterparts in their respective cities. Having now pioneered branches of their own, they built on the remnants of the foundation laid in Silesia and East Prussia by Hamp, Elder Widtsoe, and so many others and now took the long trip to the temple as a new body of Saints.

The people of Freiberg – both members and non-members alike – referred to the edifice as “our” temple; city postcards even included it as a landmark. There had been so much publicity surrounding the construction of the temple that the entire town had taken the tour during the open house. In stark contrast to the situation in Halle, all of the people on Freiberg’s streets seemed to recognize us. The Freiberg Cathedral’s organist, for example, waved to us in passing one day and invited us in to the massive Lutheran church to hear him rehearse on Freiberg’s famed Great Silbermann Organ. It might as well have been a private concert; his performance was flawless. I stood in awe as the sound penetrated right through us.

It seemed odd to have a thriving ward in such a small town, when some cities with even ten times its population had only a handful of members, if any at all. The flip side of this was that everyone in town seemed to have already made up their minds about the Mormons; we decided to focus our efforts on the dwindling stack of referrals that took us out into the small Dorfs of the Erzgebirge – the Ore Mountains – to villages that had served as the foundation of so many worldwide Christmas traditions. On these “Dorf Days,” we would haul the rattling bikes out of the cellar or board country trains or buses bound for obscurely nestled villages. Like Hamp’s visits to the Silesian Beskids, we were transported back in time with each trip. As we searched for secluded addresses, we found water wheel-driven carpentry shops, hand-powered community laundry presses weighed down with rocks, and bakers with brick ovens inherited from their grandparents.

In contrast to the rustic, backwoods charm, the area was also home to a number of abandoned uranium mines that the Soviets tried hard not to publicize. The market for uranium had crashed with dropping demand, and the mining work had halted without the slightest hint of a cleanup plan; perhaps we should have kept a Geiger counter in our rucksacks... I did not realize it at the time, but as we went about our teaching efforts, the Soviet Union was perched on the verge of collapse. The last of the occupying troops were being recalled, and from Freiberg we saw endless convoys and long trains of tanks being sent east to Russia; given the nature of our mandate, I was entirely unaware and disinterested in the fact that we were actually watching history unfold.

~~~~~~~~

My next assignment – continuing in Hamp’s footsteps – took me to Dresden, where I found that it was not just military personnel being recalled; civilians were affected as well. A few of the people that I met in Dresden embodied the human component of this unfolding historical saga particularly well. In the recent past – with the Iron Curtain securely in place – other communist nations had felt comfortable exchanging university students and providing a supporting labor force for East Germany’s primary industries. The Soviets and their Comecon council partners – dubbed the “Commie Con” countries by the Western powers – had arranged cooperative exchanges for people from every imaginable walk of life, be they mill workers, masons, or miners. The larger industrial cities even had rows of apartment blocks in specially zoned areas designated for these foreigners.

In the face of the changing political scene, however, many of the foreigners on student or work exchange programs were beginning to find their visas being revoked. To their native nations – some still stalwartly communist – the breach in the Wall now represented a significant threat. Alarmed at the prospect of losing their brightest minds and their most productive skilled labor forces to the West, the respective governments quickly issued paranoid orders demanding that these students and workers return home. The longer these temporary visitors remained in Germany, they figured, the greater the risk that they might be exposed to the capitalist agenda.

Some of the students and laborers ignored the warning completely, sure that their own nations’ paradigm shift couldn’t be lagging far behind East Germany’s. Others felt compelled to heed the warning, however. The Cuban and North Korean workers, in particular, didn’t dare defy the evacuation order. Within these nations – and well beyond their borders thanks to an intact, international espionage network – Big Brother was still watching intently, staunchly defiant of any pending global change in ideology. In former days when the Wall stood strong and impenetrable, fleeing to the West would almost certainly have resulted in reprisals against their families. Now that the West had overrun the former border and enveloped them in the process, the potential repercussions of defection were less clear but equally threatening.

With their time quickly expiring, some of the Gastarbeiter – or guest workers – desperately sought an avenue of escape, be it through political asylum, a sponsor, or some other means to free themselves from the grip of their own immigration departments. Any passport-bearing U.S. citizen represented a potential freedom train, and rumors spread among them that there were Americans roaming the streets. We were instantly recognizable in our missionary attire; whether we were grocery shopping, traveling in the streetcars, or just walking down the street, some of these foreigners began to seek us out.

In response, our mission president had placed a ban on proselyting efforts within the foreign worker housing projects. As the East Germans had become more cautious since the reunification, the prospect of “easy” baptisms among the foreigners had apparently been motivating some concerted missionary efforts within the walls of the projects. When missionaries would set foot inside one of these buildings, a trail of people would follow; as they sat down to teach a lesson, the audience would typically grow before they even finished. One lesson would tend to lead to another with friends down the hall; that lesson would, in turn, lead to another; and so on. At the very least, the growing interest made leaving before curfew a challenge.

The visits generally began with a gospel lesson, but often became interspersed with questions about America and how one might get there; genuine interest in the message of the Restoration was difficult to discern. Many Gastarbeiter had joined the Church after the Wall had collapsed, but the changing economy was resulting in rapid transfers between factories. The flux quickly resulted in logistical nightmares for ward clerks who could not track the whereabouts of their new members. There were no easy answers, but the mission president had sought to curb the problem by refocusing efforts on German families. How could the migrant workers possibly be expected to function as Church members upon their return, we were asked, when the Church had absolutely no foundation and no official presence in their native countries? What chance did the newly converted, returning Gastarbeiter realistically have to remain in the faith? Armed with these arguments, we complied with the guidance to avoid the foreign worker housing areas unless specifically invited.

With this protocol in place, we were approached by a couple of foreigners one evening and naïvely followed them back to their apartment block to teach a lesson. As we had been told would be the case by other missionaries, people flooded into the room and we had quite an audience coming and going. I arrived back at our apartment, however, with a clear understanding of the nature of the interest that night: my passport was missing from my backpack. My heart sank, since I knew obtaining a replacement would be difficult; it soon became even more of an ordeal than I could have imagined.

By the time I traveled to the U.S. embassy in Berlin to get a new passport, the Persian Gulf War was in full swing. Anti-American sentiment had been growing and had reached a flashpoint. The Mormon Church, adopted by many Germans during this time as a symbol of American imperialism, became a prime target. Demonstrators marched to the Siegessäule – the Berlin Victory Column – directly past the adjacent LDS Tiergarten Chapel. The marchers were burning Old Glory and shouting anti-American slogans; on any other day this scene might have been mistaken for a street in the Middle East. Molotov cocktails were thrown at the chapel; rocks and bottles shattered the windows. Word made it to the mission office that missionaries were being threatened. The order came back that we were to get off the streets as soon as possible.

The embassy was on its highest security alert. A very suspicious U.S. official began to question every detail of the alleged theft. He told me that selling a genuine U.S. passport on the black market could have netted me $5,000. He then had to assure himself that I had not taken my eyes off the backpack deliberately in an attempt to profit from a staged theft. He scrutinized my response to his interrogation and finally convinced himself that I was just a sucker and not an enemy of the state. He gave me a look of absolute consternation; his parting shot came in the form of a guilt trip about having compromised the security of the United States with my carelessness. Had I just granted a terrorist direct access through our doors? I felt like a traitor as we left the embassy and boarded the train back to Dresden.

Although from that point forward I questioned the motives associated with any invitation to the housing blocks, we did return a few more times when the intent appeared sincere. As it turned out, a handful of migrant workers used their last precious moments of freedom – quite possibly the only taste of freedom they would ever experience – to seek out the gospel with no political motives whatsoever. A student from North Korea and an iron worker from Cuba each went through the discussions. Their baptisms were certainly memorable, but deeper questions surrounded their future as their visas were revoked. We were definitely concerned about the lack of a Church structure in their country, and I never knew what became of them after they were repatriated. But I imagined an irritated Kim Il-sung or a fuming Fidel Castro pounding on his desk, having found out that he had managed to snag a few newly baptized Mormons in his trawling efforts.

These were turbulent times in many nations; among the new members adding to the colorful diversity of the Dresden Ward were students from Ghana and Nigeria, nations that had found themselves under military governments while awaiting a return to democracy. These students were unsure whether the promised regime change would occur. Would another military coup threaten their friends and families? Would they even have a country to return to? Would their passports be revoked, leaving them as political refugees without any valid citizenship? They received periodic news from home with much interest, but seemed to accept the uncertainty as just another part of life. We were expatriates just the same, but our perspectives were completely different. I tried to imagine how it might feel to wake up each morning unsure whether one’s government back home still exists. As an American, I found it nearly impossible to apply such a temporary viewpoint to my own government; and I began to clutch my own passport a bit tighter.

Meanwhile, new marching orders arrived, and I was pulled out of the trenches and into the relative comfort of HQ; I was assigned to the mission office to serve as the personal secretary to President Peters, a former military officer. Never mind that his military experience came in an army that is constitutionally forbidden from fighting; that certainly hadn’t stopped him from taking his job seriously. He dictated letters with precision; transfer orders moved from the inbox to the outbox like clockwork, and his staff scuttled around his bunker beneath the Dresden chapel at an insane pace. His office was like a war room, and the transfer board could have passed for an army’s situation map. Stories of how President Peters and his hand-picked band of eight missionaries had penetrated the Iron Curtain were already becoming legendary. Their success was due largely to his handle on the complex logistical issues they faced. Given my vice of keeping things in a constant state of relative disarray, I certainly had a lot to learn from him.

We office missionaries got a special treat one weekend when the Tabernacle Choir passed through, accompanied by Elder Russell M. Nelson. My companion and I had the unique task of carrying the suitcases for the organists so they wouldn’t strain their high-prized fingers and forearms. We attended the concert along with a sold-out audience of thousands in the Kulturpalast, nestled between the Frauenkirche, the Hofkirche, and Dresden’s other famously fire-bombed landmarks.

The iconic Frauenkirche, having deliberately been left in ruins since the closing weeks of the Second World War, still served as a memorial and a tomb for those who sought shelter and solace within its supposedly impenetrable walls. Meanwhile, the meat locker in Slaughterhouse-Five – where the author Kurt Vonnegut and other American POWs were beaten and imprisoned, but in which they also survived that horrible night – had reopened as a tourist trap.

The city certainly didn’t possess the splendor apparent in Hamp’s photographs from 60 years before, but despite an obvious lack of maintenance, Dresden was nonetheless a beautiful city. Restoration efforts were beginning on the famous Zwinger museums, and the Semperoper opera house was receiving a constant dose of sandblasting. The crew would steadily move around the edifice, sandblasting the soot to expose a lighter sandstone. But with coal-fired furnaces still being Dresden’s prime heating source, the blasting crew would start the process anew each time they finished a round. I wondered if the losing battle stood any chance at all.

In serving in this amazingly historic setting, full of culture and contradiction, I managed to meet some likewise amazing people whose own stories were intricately intertwined with this history. While our ministerial time was split between teaching and organizing new units of the Church, we also served as secular servants, feeding and visiting with the invalids in nursing homes, some of whom could still readily and vividly recall life in the 1800s.

~~~~~~~~

The clock was ticking on my two-year tour of duty, and time was flying as my “hump-day” approached. The momentum of the gospel’s spread seemed to be accelerating; hundreds of new members were joining the Church. Salt Lake certainly took notice, splitting the mission in two and sending sixty new missionaries to each half. With this split, I was asked to move to the newly formed Berlin Mission, as office manager and personal secretary to the newly called mission president, a man by the name of Hartmut Schulze.

~~~~~~~~