Reflections on postwar freedom

Frank Stirk
BC Correspondent
bc@christianweek.org

On Thanksgiving, I was high—high up in the air, that is, on a flight home from Germany. It was the final leg in a 10-day journey to visit aunts and cousins I hadn’t seen in seven years.

Apart from reconnecting with my extended family, the thing I most wanted to do was see for myself the newly rebuilt Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady) in the heart of Dresden. I was not disappointed. The church towers magnificently above the rest of the other faithfully restored buildings in the Altstadt (old city)—all of which had been destroyed in a series of British bombing raids in February 1945.

Thousands died in the firestorm that followed—my maternal grandparents, fleeing the advancing Russians, were in the area at the time and narrowly missed the inferno themselves—and a city centre renowned for two centuries as “Florence on the Elbe” for its lofty artistic and architectural achievements was a vast ruin.

Funded entirely by private German and British donations, the new Frauenkirche stands as an important symbol of reconciliation and forgiveness between once warring nations.

Even 60 years after the fact, it is virtually impossible to go anywhere in Germany and not be reminded of the Second World War. Another city I visited was Wurzburg. It too was badly damaged from the air around the same time as Dresden. And like Dresden, its architectural centerpiece—the massive bishop’s palace—was destroyed and is now wonderfully restored.

At a museum in Cologne, I looked down at a large mosaic that once graced the floor of a Roman villa. Had it not been for the Allied bombing of Cologne, it might still remain undiscovered.

In the Eiffel region bordering Belgium and Luxemburg, I noticed two strange-looking clumps of trees, and was told that underneath them were the remnants of German bunkers destroyed by the French following the war. And in Echternach, a town just over the border in Luxemburg, the scars on the walls of a monastery left by bullets and shells fired during the Battle of the Bulge are still plainly visible.

Looking across the lush forests and rolling hills of the Eiffel, it was hard to imagine that I was standing on some of the most fought-over and blood-soaked land in the world. Which brings me back to my homeward flight. Of all my relatives, I am the only one who was born in Canada—making me the only one who has never known the horrors of war and its aftermath. My grandfather was so grief-stricken over having lost everything in the war that he died just months after it ended. As a result of the post-war division of Germany into East and West, for 40 years I had family on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

So I thought it was fitting that I should be flying home on Thanksgiving—to a spacious, prosperous, peaceful corner of the planet, an ocean and a continent away from a country whose history is so closely wedded to war, both hot and Cold.

Why should I have been so blessed? I have no real answer, although Proverbs 8:35 offers an important clue: “For whoever finds me finds life and receives favour from the Lord.” And since He knew before time that I would find Him, maybe that is why the Lord chose to bless me even as to where I would be born.

Whatever the answer, it is for me humbling beyond words—and a great reason to give Him thanks.