West Port Experiment

Aubrey and I just read A Theatre in Dachau by Hermanus Knoop. This was the second book by a Dutch Reformed minister who was thrown into this notoriously vicious concentration camp in World War II and lived to tell. And what a testimony it was. Knoop used as theme his narrative the “theatre” or “spectacle,” first used under inspiration by the Apostle Paul, “For I think that God hath set forth us the apostles last, as it were appointed to death: for we are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men” (1 Cor. 4:9). While the scenes he recounted were of unspeakable horror and inhumanity, the spectacle of Christians like him were paradoxically the very inverse of what their tormentors saw. While they saw contemptible and despicable weakness in their victims, those with faith—including their Christian readers—witnesses nothing short of the “beauty of holiness.” And Knoop, of course, witnessed the glory firsthand:

In the concentration camp of Dachau the God of all grace did wonders of grace by His Word and Spirit every day. Oh, it was indeed a dreadful time for me that I spent there, and yet it is not at all a hollow phrase when I say that I would for no amount of money have missed this time of my life, since it was so unspeakably rich in grace. I saw God there. The Lord was in this place. It was a house of God and a gate of heaven.

This book was more of the same, which we read together some years back: Faith and Victory in Dachau by Jack Overduin—also by the same publisher, Inheritance Publications. Just like Knoop’s account, it all came down whether this Reformed minister should “obey God rather than men.” Either the Reformed Churches, ministers, schools, and parents capitulate to their Nazi occupiers and peddle their propaganda for them, or they resist and pay. Rev. Overduin paid. And so his stirring account in the bowels of Dachau. Both of these books are so worth reading, though this one you may need to find it on the used market.

Rewinding a generation to World War I, my daughter Annie and I read All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque in anticipation of watching the cinematic remake back in 2022. This classic novel portrays enthusiastic fresh-faced German boys volunteering themselves for their existential awakening (or rather, mortification) in the trenches of France. The book was truly great, and the film definitely did it justice. The scene where the protagonist finds himself in a crater between the trenches, ineffectively trying to finish off a dying French soldier, is so powerful. As the unconscious dying man gurgled, the German found in the nameless man’s pocket a picture of him and his family back in France. The humanity of it all came down on him hard. War is a taste of hell, and it is simply madness to court it.

The other moment that struck me was the scene portraying the Treaty of Versailles signed in a passenger train car. While watching it in the theater, I leaned over and whispered to Annie. When the French later surrendered in World War II in 1940, the Führer ordered that very same train car be found and re-used ceremonially for their capitulation to the Germans. In many ways, World War I ended and World War II seminally began in 1917 when the Allies imposed extreme war reparations that became wholly unbearable for Germany. While Hitler proved a madman, he certainly had a flair for poetic justice. If you sow the wind, you will reap the whirlwind. Interestingly, the Nazis banned the book precisely because it frowned on German nationalism and war-mongering.