Hope as the healer

We have seen the power that hope has brought to countless others in human scenes of grief, of agony in the past. The comforting presence and healing efforts of American soldiers in Buchenwald Concentration Camp in Germany restored that hope, and in the events in which the 120^th Evacuation Hospital participated in April, l945 was documented by a reporter, namely Time reporter Percy Knauth, in the May 14^th issue of Time Magazine. How many lives were brought back from the brink of death and in such a short period of time cannot be ascertained, especially from this distance. However, the condition of the patients with typhus, amebic dysentery, tuberculosis was such that nearly 10% of the prison population of 55,000 died on the first day the 120^th arrived at the camp. By the third day, according to Percy Knauth, only two patients died! That near miracle, that powerful example of the force of hope on the mortally sick is remarkable, indeed. It is an example of the power of hope, and humane treatment unparalleled with such numbers, and in such a short period of time. It is a story that must be told, and can be told only by those who brought that story into history, the participating member of the 120^th Evacuation Hospital, whose intervention as medical personnel, and interaction as human beings in the lives of the miserable prisoners of Buchenwald brought that near miracle about.

How can we humans understand the power, the force of hope in the presence of such profound misery as existed in Buchenwald? From the perspective of an America soldier, I respond in this way: Our country sent us, ordinary citizens, there to Buchenwald, because our sense of history and our faith in ourselves as Americans told us that we had to resist the forces of evil that was raging across Europe, that was reducing proud nations to rubble, and worse, subjecting its people, some of them our forebears, to conditions unacceptable to the lowest of animals, and many to ultimate and ignominious extinction.

We were trained to do a job, to fight that evil with whatever special talents and training we had, and combine those talents into a machine to combat as well as heal. It was faith that took us across the ocean to the home of our forefathers. We carried with us that love of country, of family, and of humanity that motivated us, that remained always the shield before our eyes in the face of great danger. But we carried something else, that none of us could have known; we carried hope with us. When we saw the conditions of humanity at Buchenwald, it was that love of mankind that prompted us to hold out our hands, it was that love for humankind that moved us to comfort, to try to heal, to wash and clean, and restore as much of the blessings of life as we could. At the same time, we offered hope to those we met; and their responses were seen in the expressions of hope in emaciated, fleshless faces that shone with a radiance resembling, at time, a kind of transfiguration.

Many of us have never been able to eliminate the memories of those experiences, especially the reality that we confronted a condition of life created by men, not nature, not disease or natural catastrophe. A special kind of sub-humanity had brought this Concentration Camp into existence. The odors of death and silence of death that hovered over the camp remain permanently in our memories. But the power of hope, the power that restores life, that defies death and disease, that overcomes tribulation and renews faith also lives in our awareness, and brings us together each year from distant cities across the nation to renew our bond with one another as members of the 120^th Evacuation Hospital, however unspoken that bond has been in our lives at this time. It is my hope that that same power will move us to gather again with a resolve to tell the story of our experiences in Buchenwald, however irrelevant or meaningless it may have seemed to us in the past.

I believe the more universal reason for the return to Buchenwald in 2000 has also to do with the new millennium, at a time when we look back on where we have been, and forward to where we want to go as an international society. We look back on all the beautiful gifts we have lived by from our founding fathers, as well as from the thinkers and religious leaders of the more distant past. In our century, the 21^st, we have the powerful influences of a small number of people, including Gandhi, Martin Luther King in this country, and Nelson Mandella in South Africa, among the more prominent influences. Each of these men borrowed heavily from the past, from the Hebrew-Christian philosophy, and applied the teachers of Jesus, and the Buddha, and wove those lessons into their political philosophy, of “Conquest through Love”of Gandhi, to “Redemptive Power of Love”, and “non-violence” of King, which was brought directly into South Africa most successfully by Nelson Mandella. I believe these messages have now become universally applied in the conduct of our relationships, not only at the local level, but also at the international level, and we make judgments about international behavior based on the acts of these three men. Witness the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” passed in 1947, as still the basis for the persecution of those who violate them, like the Nurnberg trials of the Nazis, and the more recent Hague Prosecutions of the criminals in the Bosnia massacres, and the Uganda Massacres, and now our efforts to stop “ethnic cleansing” in Koszovo.

I believe a return to Buchenwald would have powerful international appeal, if we carry with us the admonishment of Lincoln that he made to a woman who was

critical of his conduct with a woman from the Confederacy, one of the “enemy” of the Northern States. Lincoln replied to her, “Madam, when I have made my enemy my friend, have I not defeated my enemy?” Lincoln was applying the “redemptive power of love” of King even then. It was that characteristic of Lincoln that has made him our most beloved president, even today.

There is one more powerful reason for a return to Buchenwald, a justification that is especially relevant to our schools and classrooms. One of the great thinkers of the 19th ^Century, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born in Weimar in the year 1750, and wrote his opus magnus, Faust, throughout his lifetime. In this work he tries to discover the true meaning of happiness, makes a compact with the devil, and engages in all the human activity that men seek for that “ultimate”pleasure, the true measure of happiness when, as Goethe has Faust say, “Bleibe, du bist so schoen”. Faust found that true happiness he sought in his old age, in community service, and in the realization that “Feeling is everything”. Goethe wrote much of his poetry under a tree located on the site of Buchenwald Camp. Although the tree is long since deceased, the stump remains, and is a Mecca for those who honor Goethe’s contribution to human understanding. The celebration of the 250^th anniversary of his birth will take place in Weimar in 2000. What a fitting gesture for American Citizens to pay homage to his philosophy, and how the irony of the location of the Camp and Goethe’s summer home might be assuaged by our presence!