In what are known as martyrologies, Christianity preserves the memory of those who have lost their lives for the Christian faith over the course of millennia. A special example is a monograph published in the last ten years on the approximately 500 Catholic clergymen who were deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp – including both those who perished and those who survived. These men and women did not form a homogeneous group of prisoners. Among them were village priests and chaplains, church dignitaries, seminarians and university professors, military chaplains and simple monks. Some of them had forged passports in France, sheltered Jewish people in Poland, hidden Allied airmen in Belgium, or listened to banned radio stations in the Netherlands. For others, daily life prior to their deportation had consisted of pastoral care, prayer and work.
For some clergymen who were employed in the camp as interpreters or clerks, resistance took the form of concrete actions to support their comrades. Others provided pastoral care to their fellow prisoners within the limited confines of camp life, thereby helping them to endure the unbearable situation – eyewitness accounts referred to this as résistance spirituelle, spiritual resistance.
This project to research the camp biographies of Catholic clergy extracts individual stories from the bureaucratic documentation in the perpetrators’ files and from the hidden archives of eyewitness accounts. It fulfils the duty to remember and gives a face to both the victims and the survivors.
