Chapter 22: A Senseless Pact

After eight secretarial months, I departed the office environment to rejoin the troops on the front lines. I left the big city and found myself in a northern town called Neubrandenburg. As in every area before, there were hundreds of intertwined events here that, on their own, might have passed for coincidence; collectively, though, they were nothing short of miraculous. Again I found a handful of connections to Hamp’s ministry six decades before; none, however, was so personal as the juncture I found here.

I spoke from the pulpit in my first sacrament meeting to introduce myself to the Neubrandenburg Branch. After the service, an elderly widow named Sylvia Kuropka approached me and – just like Brother Schreiter had done eighteen months before – asked if I was related to a Hampton Price. She began to cry when she saw me nod. She extended a dinner invitation and said she had some things she’d like to show me. We entered her humble little apartment that afternoon and ate a meaty meal, topped with a prized helping of grease that – in Sister Kuropka’s eyes – was certain to ward off starvation for a few more days if the bombs started dropping again. After this heavy dinner she handed me some photographs of the branch members in the 1930’s, including a photo of Hamp.

“Turn it over,” she said. On the back of the photo was an inscription written by Hamp himself. I was struck by the optimistic tone of his note.

“We were all young and idealistic back then,” she added. “I was dating my future husband at the time and we spoke of visiting America on our honeymoon.”

I glanced at the photograph she had handed me; Hamp was younger than me at the time, but his mustache made him seem older.

“Hamp told us he was a tour guide at the Grand Canyon,” she continued, “I have never forgotten the splendid photos he showed us. In fact, I always dreamed we’d go there ourselves someday.” She sighed at the thought and said somberly, “Perhaps things might have been different in another world.”

In contrast with that dream, she told us instead about the dreadful fate of her husband – a fate shared by each of his friends in a close-knit group of LDS youth. When it had become apparent that our two countries were drifting toward war, these teenagers had engaged in a pact together. Being well acquainted with the American missionaries who had served among them, they decided that if it came to war, they would refuse to fight them. Their counterparts – their American “brothers” – made the same pact.

It wasn’t long before the American missionaries were forced to flee the spreading conflagration. The German elders remained and served lengthy missions to try to hold the Church together. With the outbreak of an all-out Blitzkrieg, even their missions ended. They avoided taking up arms as long as they could but were eventually drafted into service by the Nazi war machine. They felt obligated to obey the orders, both to protect their families and to preserve the Church; but these particular boys hadn’t forgotten their pact. If they went to the Western Front, they might risk firing upon their friends; so they volunteered instead to fight on the Eastern Front.

No army is apt to allow its infantry soldiers to pick their preferred battlefront, but in this case, volunteers for the Eastern Front were a unique breed. German soldiers knew that, if captured in the west by Allied troops, they might wait out the war on a British farm or a Georgian cotton plantation. Those taken prisoner on the Eastern Front, on the other hand, if even granted the chance to surrender, were sure to be horribly mistreated. Not only couldn’t the Russians afford to take on the extra burden of caring for POWs, but they were also bent on vengeance for every act of cruelty inflicted on them by the Germans; mercy toward a German soldier was unthinkable. As a result, there were countless volunteers hoping to head west, yet only a handful who wished to head east.

These Mormon brothers-in-arms eventually got their wish; for some, it was a death sentence. As their troop transports ripped across the Polish countryside and they prepared to face the legions of peasant comrades being called up from across the sweeping Soviet empire, most of the German infantry soldiers knew full well that the only reasonable outcomes to the conflict involved either their capture or their death. Secretly, they hoped for a third, less likely alternative: to sustain a serious but non-fatal wound that would land them in the relative safety of a military hospital. Victory was merely an illusion being propagated by the regime – that much was already becoming clear – but, nonetheless, every day they stood tall with their unit and reluctantly mouthed the words to the Hitler Oath, swearing their allegiance to the madman himself rather than to their nation or their army. The words of the oath clearly echoed an unthinkable expectation: They were to choose death over surrender if it came down to that choice. It was truly a no-win situation.

While Hamp and his former classmates served in a supporting role, shielded from the actual fight, their German counterparts found themselves having drawn – or rather chosen – the short straw.

As Sister Kuropka related to us, most of these young men never came back from Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s failed attempt to conquer the Reds. Her young husband was one of these unfortunate souls. They had only spent a few precious days together as a married couple. She had never discovered the actual circumstances surrounding his death, but she had heard enough of the unthinkable tales coming back from the Eastern Front to reconstruct his final moments and haunt her imagination for fifty solitary years.

A few days before Christmas, Corporal Kuropka lay shivering in a shallow pit, having frantically tried to dig a foxhole into the frozen ground with the butt of his now defunct Karabiner rifle. His only warmth came from the blood that dripped from shrapnel wounds inside his stiff uniform. His head was ringing wildly; he was nearly deaf from the percussive explosions overhead. His own spent cartridges littered the snow around him. Under constant fire in a frozen wasteland, he finally resorted to a vain attempt at concealment from the approaching enemy, using his empty magazine to scoop snow over himself.

Meager rations had weakened his body ever since his Army Group’s supply line had been cut off weeks before. He faced a constant struggle between fatigue and any remaining survival instinct he could muster. It was a losing battle; for deep inside, he knew there was no hope of reinforcements. The shells finally stopped exploding overhead in a misleading respite; the brief silence signaled to the approaching Red Army troops that the German positions had been softened sufficiently for an infantry charge.

Rifle shots began to echo through the charred tree stumps as thousands of Soviet troops tightened their noose around the stranded, dazed, and purposeless German army battalion. Many of the Russians had initially stormed into battle as cannon fodder, without a weapon of their own, driven by relentless officers, primordial fear, and a powerful propaganda machine that had instilled a pervading eye-for-an-eye mentality. Some had managed to snatch a rifle from a fallen comrade and pressed forward. Having been dragged into this war against their will, they were motivated by rage and the added incentive of well-placed snipers on their own side who had been ordered to shoot them if they retreated. A commandant who placed that little value on individual life within his own ranks was never going to value his enemy’s life enough to spare it at the sight of a white flag or raised hands.

The redundant order to “take no prisoners” had already been standard operating procedure by the time it made its way down from the top in this chapter of the conflict. In dealing with the surrounded enemy soldiers, the only question for the officers in command was whether they could spare a bullet or whether an old-fashioned bayonet would have to do. To the Russians, with their munitions factories in shambles but with an endless stream of peasants joining the ranks, infantry soldiers were replaceable; bullets were not. Because bayonets were messy, risky, and bad for the troop’s morale, however, for this assault the commanders opted for bullets, on the condition that shots be conserved until they could be fired with deadly accuracy at point-blank range. The Russian soldiers obeyed their orders to wait until the last moment; then, seeing the proverbial whites of their eyes, they fired at the cowering enemy soldiers without hesitation.

As the gunshots rang ever closer, Brother Kuropka knew that these were not just random shots fired toward the horizon; each represented a fallen countryman. A hopeless sense of despair overcame him, and the tattered German army all around him awaited its doom; not a shred of the pride that had swept through their rallies a few years earlier remained in their hearts. Their world had been completely overturned, their hopes replaced with the deepest shame and regret. Their fathers had found themselves in a similar quagmire a generation before when – unexpectedly and unbelievably – a Christmas truce was called. This time, however, there would be no troops in opposing trenches singing Silent Night together in a ceasefire. This battle, sadly, wouldn’t break for the holidays.

The young newlywed’s short existence fed his mind memories and expectations. What of the life he had imagined with his new bride? How had that promising destiny jumped the tracks and plunged down this awful chasm? Convulsing with fear, he removed his gloves and put his fingers – blackened from frostbite – together in a fervent prayer. His prayer gave way to a dream in which he saw himself entering his little apartment in Stettin, embracing his wife on Christmas Eve.

He lit the candles on the advent wreath, felt the warmth of the hearth, smelled the Christmas tree’s boughs, heard the sound of familiar carols, and tasted the savory, home-cooked meal. His diverted senses were at home, but in the snow, his arms crossed around his weakening body and squeezed tightly. In his heart and in his mind – with every emotion his soul could stir up – he embraced his wife and hung on for dear life. Through his tears, he tried to picture their unborn children opening presents one day at the foot of the tree: chocolates, a nutcracker, or perhaps a hand-carved manger scene. It was a vision of what might have been; it was – devastatingly – the last dream he ever had.

Sister Kuropka’s eyes told the end of the tale, unalleviated by the passage of time. The single bullet that had ended her bridegroom’s dream hundreds of miles away had in the very same instant sentenced this unwitting widow to fifty years of loneliness. We shook our heads in silence, unable to think of any words that would do justice to the moment; she continued with the fates of his cohorts:

A few of Brother Kuropka’s friends had managed to survive the slaughter and surrender to Russian soldiers who had run out of bullets. Little did they know, however, their trials were only just beginning. When the long-awaited V-E Day signaled the official end to fighting in Europe in the spring of 1945, German POWs held by the Western Allied forces began returning home to help rebuild what was left of their country. For Germans being held in Soviet captivity, however, the war was far from over. They were sentenced by the dreaded NKVD to indefinite “corrective labor” in a Gulag and incarcerated alongside forcibly repatriated Soviet POWs and civilian refugees.

Stalin truly lived up to his adopted man of steel alias in dealing with post-war Russia. When the Western Allies liberated German prison camps, they found Russian soldiers and civilians alike who had been captured by the Germans and enslaved in support of the war effort. They proposed to send these people back to their homes now that Germany had surrendered, but the people begged the commanders not to deport them. “Stalin will kill us,” they said.

Caught up in their victorious euphoria, the American, British, and French commanders simply couldn’t imagine that sort of cruelty. The war was over, after all; what would Stalin stand to gain by executing his own people? Besides, Stalin had asked the authorities for the return of his people and had personally guaranteed that they would be treated justly. Little did the commanders know, however, the justice to which he referred included facing accountability for the charge of treason: They should have chosen death over surrender, he reasoned; having aided Germany in her war effort, they were nothing but traitors in his eyes.

As Stalin ordered German factories under his jurisdiction to be dismantled, shipped east, and reconstructed behind the Ural Mountains, the Western Allied commanders unwittingly loaded up rail cars with Soviet citizens and likewise sent them east. But Stalin never let the trains stop when they got to Moscow; they kept rolling much farther east – straight to Siberia. Upon arrival in the cold frontier, some were summarily executed as traitors and others spent the remainder of their lives in the frozen tundra doing penance for having survived the war.

With this little regard for his own people, Stalin placed the German POWs even lower on the ladder. Only one in twenty German POWs survived Siberian internment; most were never heard from again. Even the few survivors would never have seen German soil again had they not been saved by Stalin’s death in 1953.

By the time Khrushchev turned on his predecessor and granted the POWs amnesty to return home, the returning soldiers had spent a full eight years after the so-called end of the war – more than twice the time span of the entire U.S. involvement in the war – in an intolerable prison camp. Solzhenitsyn’s journals recount the atrocities and hardships they withstood: systematic torture, random executions, debilitating disease, forced labor, frostbite, starvation, and even cannibalism. They arrived back in post-war Germany emotionally stunned and physically stunted, scarred forever in both mind and body. Once finally reunited with their families, many kept silent and reclusive about the almost unbearable ordeals they had endured; but their pain-stricken eyes divulged the austerity of their experience just the same.

Unlike their fellow prisoners, the LDS POWs who had engaged in the earlier pact knew they had chosen their own fate. I met several of these survivors, including one elderly member of the Neubrandenburg branch. Perhaps their survival was mere luck, or perhaps a higher purpose gave them the will to survive, knowing that their sacrifice was sanctified; in any case, as far as I could tell, none ever regretted their decision.

Hearing these stories, though, I for myself couldn’t help but to question the logic of the pact these boys made. Why? Why make such an arbitrary agreement? Why not just go to the west and try to specialize in something non-combative? And if you are somehow forced to shoot an American in the process, how is that any more or less moral than shooting a Russian? Had hatred of the Russian people seeped in during the years of Aryan indoctrination, even among the Mormon ranks? Did they feel that the Russians were somehow inferior to the Americans or that the Americans were somehow more innocent? How is a Russian soldier who was drafted into the Red Army to defend his country any less innocent than a U.S. soldier who happens to be LDS and fights to liberate France? Neither of these opposing armies began the war as an aggressor; each could be considered an equally innocent defender.

How easy it would have been to rescind the pact! If I had naïvely made such a consequential agreement as a teenager and then found myself years later trying to support a family, I think I could easily have argued my way out of it. I might have even convinced myself that rescinding the pact would be an unselfish act, intended to protect and secure a future for my wife and for my children.

This lonely old widow was nearing the end of her days in a meager box of an apartment. The other families in this little branch were now thriving; her line would end with her death. Now I waltz in, having lived a life of comfort and speaking of my grandfather: a grandfather who was part of the force her husband had been unwilling to fight. Her fifty years as a widow had begun with that practically suicidal decision. Had it all been worth it? It seemed absolutely senseless to me. What a stupid thing to die for, I said to myself. Though further questions and doubts raced through my mind, given the burdened look in Sister Kuropka’s eyes, they seemed entirely inappropriate to ask; I held my tongue.

She went to the kitchen to fetch us another helping of rye bread with lard spread; I stood up to look at the framed photos on the wall: pictures of old Stettin, Breslau, Danzig, Königsberg – cities adorned in their earlier splendor that had subsequently been leveled to the ground.

“That was my hometown,” she said as she re-entered the room and caught me looking closely at the detailed ornamentation of Stettin’s famous fountain at the Berliner Tor. “It’s all gone now, but we cobbled together what was left of our old branch right here in Neubrandenburg.”

Her own plight as a refugee didn’t sound like all that much of an improvement over the hardships of the soldiers. In Silesia and in East Prussia, everything that might define a culture had vanished. I had met many Silesians and East Prussians in Bavaria when I was younger; I always assumed they were still parts of Germany, but I could never find them on a map – I had no idea at the time that they had actually ceased to exist. It wasn’t just the masonry that lay in ruins after the war; each of these cities had been stripped of their German population as well. Gone were the people along with their entire cultural identity: traditional dress, cuisines, dialects, holidays, architecture – all were obliterated as the residents were hunted down before the advancing troops of the vengeful Red Army.

She told us absolutely horrible stories: families forced by sergeants to play Russian roulette with each other; systematic rape; infants stripped from their mothers’ arms; bodies strung up from the light poles for all to see – the scenes she described would have made the devil himself proud of his work.

Those who managed to beat the Russian advance found themselves facing the incendiary bombs of the Americans coming from the opposite direction. Caught in the crossfire, with nowhere else to hide, the remaining survivors dug in and awaited their fate.

In the eyes of most Americans, this annihilation may have been a deserved reward for the collective guilt of the Nazi war crimes. But when you face one of the victims directly, it is impossible to cast any judgment.

“What can I say?” she asked, “We were all duped by a lunatic who made lots of promises.”

It is easy enough to condemn the compliance of everyday German citizens with the aid of 21st century hindsight. At the time, however, when the whole world was caught in a depression, there was no way to know which system would prevail. Had President Roosevelt been tempted with grand delusions of power, FDR himself might have gripped a struggling nation and secured authority that would have completely undermined America’s constitutional freedoms. Had Hitler been replaced by a more sensible figure head, his replacement might have mobilized the nationalistic and patriotic sentiment of the day toward something positive that would have swept the world in a different form and been a model for good. Had Stalin been blessed with an ounce of humanity, he might have transformed the Soviet empire into a prosperous, model society of his own. In hindsight we wonder why the people didn’t stand up and fight the injustice and the tyranny, why they didn’t have a crystal ball. Guilty of nothing more than a laissez faire attitude, countless Depression-era Germans sat unwittingly and complacently teetering on the edge of a great abyss. Little did they know, their inaction would be counted as a vote for Blitzkriegs and KZ camps.

Seeing history personified in this humble little apartment, I was dumbstruck by the senselessness of it all: it was a calamity that did not have to be.

I kept thinking about the pact and eventually came to the conclusion that, whether or not it made any sense, it boiled down to the simplest loyalty: honoring a personal promise. Like the people of Ammon in the Book of Mormon, these friends lay their lives down for the sake of a promise. When the Sons of Helaman found the situation overwhelming – and self-defense entirely justified – they had been ready to rescind their pact and take up arms again. Though Helaman may have questioned the wisdom of making a pacifist pact in the first place – particularly during a defensive war – he stood by them and convinced them not to break their oath, fearing they might otherwise lose their souls in the process.

The Ammonites adhered to their word even when it meant sending out 2,000 of their own sons – quite possibly – to their deaths without the additional protection they might have provided by fighting alongside them. As far as the German boys unwilling to fight their American brothers, in the end, I felt oddly inclined to side with Helaman. I may not have understood their original intentions, but having made the covenant, I cannot question their integrity in adhering to its terms. If I had been there myself as they shipped off to an unwinnable battle, in some strange way I felt like I would have stood by them to defend their right to die.

Initially, the pact seemed to represent a foolish thing to sacrifice oneself for; war is war, after all. Any military death on the offensive side absurdly avoidable, and people will die whether you’re shooting one direction or another. But as I thought about the survivors I had met among the rest of the German population, the cause of these brethren-in-arms took on a new meaning for me. Twentieth-century warfare had left Germany with four million widows, many of whose husbands had been inspired in their cause by hatred, fear, bigotry, arrogance, or some combination of related factors. Well here was one widow whose husband had deliberately died for love. He loved those who had come to serve among his people – my grandfather among them – and come what may, he could not bring himself to shoot in their direction.

When a war ends, some names are spoken for good, some for ill, and most not at all. I had always been proud that my grandfather had served his country and fought for our freedom; that pride is typical of a whole generation of Americans. In Germany, on the other hand, war monuments, veteran’s days, and other reminders of the conflict represent – understandably – just the opposite; they are to many a source of shame. In stark contrast, this band of elders represented one small fragment of meaning in an otherwise meaningless conflict.

Hearing about the pact cleared up another long-standing question for me as well. Hamp knew every inch of Berlin, of Dresden, and of so many other Allied bombing targets. I had often wondered why he – armed with an intimate knowledge of Germany’s cities and their people – wasn’t stationed in Europe during the war. Why was a lieutenant colonel in the Army Air Forces who spoke fluent German and had a ground-level perspective of German life sitting out the war at Pearl Harbor’s Hickam Field? Shouldn’t he have been a formidable force in directing air operations over Germany?

Heinz “Henry” Kissinger, in contrast, was using his knowledge of his own German hometown, the culture, and the language to direct intelligence activities that helped win the Battle of the Bulge. Even junior officers like the author J. D. Salinger used their knowledge from previous travels abroad to help predict the German tactics, knowing the subtle geography of the land before them. Having seen it first-hand, they provided valuable insights to the other soldiers who blindly forged ahead.

Surely Hamp held enough knowledge and influence to inflict greater damage on Germany than the thousands of fresh new recruits steaming their way across the Atlantic to fight the unknown Hun. It is not something he left any indication of in his journals, but I am left to assume that Hamp remembered that pact as well.

Somehow in the process of rising through the ranks, he must have miraculously managed to convince his superior officers that he would be better suited for service in the Pacific Theatre rather than in Europe. Perhaps his commanding officer came to the conclusion that conflicted feelings toward the enemy would be a liability rather than an asset: better not to risk appointing a leader who would hesitate to pull the trigger or drop a bomb on a friend. Whatever the case may be, Hamp never had to fight his former companions, and they never fought him. To the end, they were true to their word.

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As my own time in Germany ticked on, I met other veterans and widows, but the image of Sister Kuropka’s sorrow stayed with me long after we left her sparse apartment. Her loss was driven in even deeper by the rustic charm and authenticity of the Christmas season that surrounded me with all of its accompanying sights, sounds, and smells. As I spent my second Christmas away from home, the traditional German Christmas markets, wood carvings, candles, and other elements took me back to my childhood in Bavaria; it seemed to stand in stark contrast to the consumerist kitsch of the American holiday season.

Hamp had had this same impression as a missionary decades before; the home-spun German Christmas he experienced after only a few weeks abroad – with the deep-rooted traditions that had spread around the world from their German origins – helped him to shed his homesickness and adopt a love for Germany. The warm scenes he witnessed as a guest were representative of millions of similar settings around the German nation – scenes that in the decades to come would have made a Christmas spent at the front or in bombed out, post-war building shells that much more difficult for German families to swallow – and particularly for those who would have known that this was what they had sacrificed for their pact.

Each conversation with another war veteran or survivor – of either the Great War or its sequel – stirred up perplexity at the tragedy’s magnitude. The initial shock of their stories became somewhat tempered through repetition, but I also found the disbelief coupled with increased amazement at the manner in which these people had actually overcome their trials. I couldn’t begin to imagine starting over, having lost absolutely everything. How could you build your life up again from scratch? How could you ever let your mind return to normal thought processes after having witnessed some of the horrific scenes that had accompanied these wars? Yet we found so many humble survivors living their lives and graciously giving of themselves to help a couple of homesick strangers with nametags experience Christmas like we were part of their family. It certainly was mind-boggling.

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For six more months, I traveled around to each of the branches in the State of Mecklenburg. My companion and I were lucky enough to have the only Church vehicle north of Berlin, so our itinerary included the far-flung villages and farm towns out of the reach of public transit. There were early mornings, long days, and a few scattered miracles like the emergence of newly committed souls from the Baltic Sea in the freezing rain and crashing waves. With the approach of spring, the lakes and villages around Neubrandenburg underwent a transformation. Soon the canola fields bloomed a vibrant yellow, and the coastal towns transformed into Spartan seaside resorts.

My time as a missionary was nearing an end, but it seemed anticlimactic from a numerical perspective. I had emerged from the mission office to find a whole new nation before me. The scene had evolved completely; the people’s initial curiosity had been largely stifled. In contrast to my first few weeks – where we had more teaching appointments than we could possibly handle – by the end of my time we were spending all day, every day knocking on doors or approaching people on the street. In some cases we would go weeks on end without setting foot inside a single apartment.

The 5,000 new Amway representatives had doubled their forces and dutifully made their rounds – sometimes on a weekly basis; 10,000 new Jehovah’s Witnesses had gone out before us, having placed their visible marks on the doorways again and again; insurance salesmen had hawked non-existent policies; pyramid marketing schemes had enjoyed a flash of success before consuming themselves again, taking out the entire bottom rung on their way down and leaving those at the helm to count their money. Having no practical experience to discern a scam, many East German people had been duped by one fraudulent enterprise after another. Word eventually spread that nobody on your doorstep could be trusted. The tide had definitely turned against the missionaries, and growth in Church membership had effectively ceased. We didn’t want to focus on the numbers, but it did seem a sour note to end on.

To add to these concerns, we began hearing dismal statistics about how few of the newly baptized converts were actually still attending church services. The bubble had burst; what had been gained? Accompanying these doubts for me were thoughts questioning my own effectiveness as a missionary. How many opportunities had I missed? After all this time, was there still someone out there whom I needed to find? I wanted very much to end on a high, but I did not see much cause for hope. With one week to go and no one to teach – barring a miracle – there would definitely be no one to baptize.

The relationships I had formed and the examples of loyalty that I had seen – especially among the Church members – had certainly impacted my life forever. I would always have that in my heart; perhaps that was the message I was meant to take home from the experience.

As I attended the sacrament service on my last Sunday I hurriedly greeted each member of the congregation as they arrived. I barely noticed an elderly man pass me by until I shook his hand. The missing fingers in his handshake nearly floored me. It was my old Adventist friend from Halle whom I had met during the Messiah recital. I was astounded to hear that Brother Gerhardt, as he was now known, had visited the Halle branch after I left, was taught by a missionary who happened to be a childhood friend of mine, had been baptized in the Roman baths there, and had now moved to Neubrandenburg to live with his son. The next stop would be the Freiberg Temple to be sealed to his beloved, departed wife. I was overjoyed to see him. Something felt complete as yet another circle had completed its round. Someone snapped a photograph of us, and I found myself enlightened as I left the meeting.

The photo went into a memory book that a branch member prepared as a parting gift; I stopped by to pick up the book on my last day in the field. After the rest of the day’s work, we returned to the apartment a bit early so I could pack my things. Armed with that book, with Brother Gerhardt’s photograph, and with his testimony in particular, I felt any regrets about missed opportunities being washed away. If this were the only experience I took from my entire two-year endeavor, I felt like I would have done it again in a heartbeat.

The feeling of peace was short-lived, however; as we pulled up to the apartment, there was just a bit of daylight left. I still had a nagging feeling inside: Was there one last person searching for what we had to offer before I called it quits? I could always pack later; I talked my companion into heading back out on the street. After an hour of tracting, though, we hadn’t had any better luck than on any other evening. The sun set and it was growing late; a knock on one last door gave me my final chance to finish with a bang. An old, tough-as-nails woman opened the door. Shockingly, she let us in. We began to introduce ourselves, but she interrupted us.

“Show me your hands,” she said. Curious, we extended our hands. She proceeded to take our hands into hers, turned them over and stroked our palms. My companion and I glanced at each other with a cringing look that said, Weird! She threw our hands down in disgust. Wrinkled and calloused, she showed the signs of a life of poverty, hard labor, and unending struggles.

“You’ve both got girl hands,” she remarked snidely, “Soft as a baby’s bottom!”

I looked at my hands. They had long since lost their calluses from my summer stints shoveling manure and loading palettes – were they really that soft, though?

She shook her head and sat back down on her couch. “You’ve never worked a day in your lives,” she mumbled.

My companion and I looked at each other again, not knowing whether to laugh or to get defensive about the accusation. But the old lady spoke up, never giving us the chance to voice an objection.

“And you’ve come here to tell me something about life?” she shouted, “Get out of here!”

So that was it: the final contact before my return to civilian life; if nothing else, at least my ministry had ended on a humorous note. If she had seen me cleaning out my suitcase that night, however, perhaps she might have changed her mind. I went through my belongings and threw out my worn-out items: my suit pants with dismembered socks sewn into the crotch as makeshift patches, my smelly shoes with holes worn right through the soles, my pit-stained rags that in a former life had been crisp, white dress shirts at Mr. Mac. If she had taken a peek at these souvenirs of service and the other relics filling the wastebasket that night, she might have understood something about the labor of love. Despite my baby-butt hands, I felt confident that I had “fought the fight, finished the race, warred the warfare,” and – ultimately – “kept the faith.”

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