accustomed to treating at William Beaumont; these were peacetime
soldiers, soldiers of the cold war, of war behind the scenes. ey
weren’t living through daily violence, but nevertheless were on high
alert, keeping the peace but at the ready for war. Most cold war
soldiers were stationed at the sites of prepositioned missiles. ese
missiles were mounted on mobile launchers, already hidden at
strategic sites. It was a matter of routine for these military personnel to
live with the perpetual threat of war, the middle-of-the-night sirens
that could signal another alert drill or an actual attack. (Like the
showers at Auschwitz. Water or gas? We never knew.) e chaplains I
was to address had the responsibility of supporting the spiritual and
psychological needs of soldiers doing their best to deter an all-out war,
doing their best to be prepared for whatever happened.
“What do they need to hear?” I asked. “What would it be helpful
for me to talk about?”
“Hope,” Dave said. “Forgiveness. If chaplains can’t talk about this
stuff, if we don’t understand it, we can’t do our job.”
“Why me?”
“It’s one thing to hear about hope and forgiveness from the pulpit,
or from a religious scholar,” Dave explained. “But you’re one of the
few people who can talk about holding on to hope even when you’d
been stripped of everything, when you were starving and le for dead.
I don’t know anyone else with that kind of credibility.”
* * *A month later, when Béla and I are on a train from Berlin to
Berchtesgaden, I feel like the least credible person, the last person on
Earth qualiĕed to talk about hope and forgiveness. When I close my
eyes, I hear the sound of my nightmares, the constant turning of wheel
against track. I see my parents, my father who refuses to shave, my
mother’s inward gaze. Béla holds my hand. He touches a ĕnger to the