Close to you I waken in the dead of night.
And start with fear -- are you lost to me once more?
Is it alwasy vainly that I seek you, my past?
I stretch my hands out,
and I pray --
and a new thing now I hear:
"The past will come to you once more,
and be your life's enduring part,
through thanks and repentance.
Feel in the past God's deliverance and goodness,
Pray him to keep you today and tomorrow."
The poem printed above was composed by Bonhoeffer during the last year of his life, probably during his last weeks at Tegel prison in the suburbs of Berlin. After his time at Tegel, Bonhoeffer was moved to the Gestapo headquarters in downtown Berlin, followed a few weeks later by a move to the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp. By April 1945, Bonhoeffer had moved once more, to the Flossenburg concentration camp. It was at Flossenburg that he was executed on April 9th.
One thing I have always found striking about Bonhoeffer was the calm way in which he writes. The aforementioned poem starts out with an uneasy feeling, where the writer awakens in fear, but ends with a feeling of God's deliverance and goodness. It seems Bonhoeffer really believed his redemption was drawing near!
On the day of his execution, the SS doctor that witnessed Bonhoeffer's execution wrote that Bonhoeffer was “devout . . . brave and composed. His death ensued after a few seconds .
. . I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the
will of God.” Bonhoeffer's final message to his friend George Bell had a similarly submissive tone: “This is the end, for me the beginning of life.”
Quotations from USHMM
"If we want to participate in this Advent and Christmas event, we cannot simply sit there like spectators in a theater and enjoy all of friendly pictures. Rather, we must join in the action that is taking place and be drawn into this reversal of all things ourselves."
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