Opa’s Dachau suitcase

This summer, my family and I spent the better part of a day at the former Dachau Concentration camp in Germany, now a memorial site, museum and archives. It was a terrible and important experience. Among our reasons for going was a personal connection: Francois Guillaume – the grandfather of my wife Elizabeth – was imprisoned there from September 4, 1942, until the camp was liberated on April 29, 1945. Of the six of us (my wife, our three teenage children and Elizabeth’s sister Joylene Vette-Guillaume), I was the only one not a direct descendant of a Dachau survivor.

To enter the site of the former concentration camp, you have to go through the same passageway that the prisoners would have – many of whom never walked back out. I found it took a real act of will to go beyond the passageway’s wrought-iron gate, knowing what it represented to so many in the past. I could not read the words above the gate, but my mind immediately jumped to the passage from Dante’s inferno where an inscription at the gate of Hell reads, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

No one could blame a prisoner who did indeed lose all hope upon entering Dachau, but that is not the story of Francois Guilluame. Reverend Francois Guillaume was a minister in The Netherlands during the Nazi occupation who committed an act of resistance: during a church service he led, he prayed for the well-fare of the exiled Dutch Queen. This may seem trivial to us, but the Nazi leadership knew it for the dangerous act that it was, for it was an act of hope. Praying for the Queen meant that you were keeping hope alive that she may one day return and be restored. Nazi commanders trying to bend the country to their will realized that giving the population hope for a different outcome was perhaps the biggest threat to their success.

Facing the darkness 

Someone decided, for reasons of their own, to report his prayer to the Nazi occupying power, who decided Rev. Guillaume was to be arrested. Incredibly, warning came to Francois and his wife Maria Johanna Guillaume-Hagt of his imminent arrest. Perhaps not realizing the full implications of this decision, rather than going into hiding they packed him a small suitcase and waited. I have no doubt they hoped and prayed while waiting for the dreaded authorities to arrive. He was arrested on May 14, 1942, and imprisoned at Dachau on September 4 alongside other political prisoners, people of ethnicity the Nazis deemed inferior, and homosexual men.

Visiting Dachau this summer was gut-wrenching. It’s remarkable, however, that despite the awfulness, there were ways in which some light shone through the cracks. It was almost as if God’s good grace was more evident in the face of, well, evil, though I hesitate to name it that. One of the ways that we experienced grace was in the respectful way that all the staff and volunteers approached the truth of the subject of Dachau. There are such hard truths to be faced, both for the families of victims and survivors, and also for the ones who enabled it to happen. For many years after the war, the site was ignored and the buildings torn down, the evidence ignored, hidden, lost or removed. Not so anymore: now there is a willingness to face the darkness. 

Another was in the way that we were immediately treated with interest and respect once they realized most of the group were descendants of a Dachau survivor. There was no question of us paying the usual modest fee for the guided tour: they did not even want to consider the hint of making money off the hardship that prisoners faced. The archivist made an appointment to see us, being careful to accommodate his schedule to suit us. When we arrived, he had pulled up a file of all the records they had related to Francois Guillaume, having already made copies of everything for us to take home and keep. And he was happy to communicate it all in English for us.

Defiant hope

Among the records that the archivist had pulled up was a list of everything Francois Guillaume had with him when he arrived, including the small suitcase and the itemized contents there-of. He also had one record that puzzled him: a receipt signed by Francois’ wife Maria about a year after his arrival. We explained, to his fascination, that for unknown reasons, the suitcase had been returned to Maria in the Netherlands, and somehow her signature acknowledging receiving it had made its way back into the records of Dachau. And then we had a gift for the archives: the family was donating the very suitcase in question. 

Upon a previous visit from Elizabeth’s parents, the head archivist, now recently retired, had in polite German style made it clear that if the family could ever see clear to donate that suitcase, it would be most welcome. The suitcase had been preserved in the family, not simply as a keepsake-reminder, but had, in the most poignant act of defiant hopefulness in the face of evil possible, deliberately been used to store the family Christmas decorations for all these years.

We were also reminded of the stories of hope and God’s grace that Francois Guillaume later told about his time in Dachau. He survived. He survived unspeakable conditions, a starvation diet, illness nearly unto death and God only knows what other horrors. And somehow he came through it with faith, hope and love intact. (Although the family does report that it had scarred and marked him: the ability to be frivolous or completely carefree was understandably gone from his persona for the rest of his earthly existence.)

One of the things he shared was how all the clergy imprisoned there were kept together in two of the 34 barracks; perhaps the authorities wanted to keep them segregated from the general population. (Who knows what sort of dangerous ideas they might inspire?) On one occasion the German clergy were granted some special privileges to worship. They refused, until their fellow clergy prisoners were allowed to be included as well.

The photo in the koek

At another point Francois Guillaume was punished with solitary confinement for an extended period. For part of that time he was placed in one of the “standing cells” we saw on our visit. These cells were stone chambers similar to chimneys, measuring 75 x 80 cm, too small to even allow the prisoner to sit down. The archivist explained that prisoners were normally placed in those as punishment for a 72-hour period maximum, as longer than that was really not survivable for a human being. I don’t even want to think about how they discovered the upper limit of that punishment. Francois Guillaume said that what kept hope alive for him during this time was that every morning, he would hear a bird chirping outside his prison cell. That reminded him that there still was a Higher Power out there that even the Nazi regime could not touch, that despite what the Nazis would have him believe, they were not ultimately in control.

The offense he had committed to be punished so brutally? He had been sent a photo of his children. It came about in this way: As the war progressed and things became more desperate for Germany, the leadership recognized that the prisoners in the concentration camps could be a valuable resource, using the prisoners for forced labour. Now they had an incentive to feed prisoners more than a starvation diet. In a cruel twist, they allowed prisoners to receive food packages from home to supplement their diet. Although the Netherlands was now enduring a deliberate starvation policy in an attempt to bring the populace to their knees, Maria, with the help of people in the surrounding area and the congregation in Sneek, managed to send food to Francois several times. One food package had included a photo hidden between two slices of koek (spice cake). It had been discovered upon inspection. And photos of your children were dangerous contraband, for they could inspire hope. Like prayers for the Queen, photos gave hope of eventual freedom, of restoration. Only one hope was allowed: that of work. That was the actual message inscribed in the iron gate to Dachau: “ARBEIT MACHT FREI” – “Work will set you free.” A false hope, to be sure.

Communion, confession and a plea

Another story Francois Guillaume told later, almost too incredible to be believed, was that he participated in a communion service organized by Polish Catholic prisoners at Dachau just days after it was liberated. The archivist we met with confirmed it; they have the pictures to prove it. Organized to celebrate the Polish national holiday, it was perhaps the most truly ecumenical church service in history: after the horrors they had survived together, all were welcome – differences in creed or confession mattered not; all that mattered was that God had triumphed, both then and thousands of years before. 

But the most incredible part of his story came sometime after his rescue from Dachau and before his move to Canada. One day Francois was asked to go to the hospital to visit a person who was about to die. Upon arrival, he was stunned by the man’s confession that he was the one who had betrayed Francois to the Nazis years ago. And now the dying man wanted forgiveness. Forgiveness for betraying him, for causing him and his family all those years of torment. 

That is, in my humble opinion, too much to ask of anyone. That is beyond all human compassion. What was Reverend Guillaume to do? There was no doubt in his mind about what he should do, but then there is what one is capable of. So he did what he was able: he took the man’s hand and reassured him that God would forgive him. 

But in so doing, something miraculous happened. He found that he was now able to forgive as well, and added the words, “and I forgive you too.” The same hands that had grasped his suitcase as he entered Dachau offered, to his betrayer, the grace and forgiveness of God.