Detlef Manke
When at the age of fifteen, I held the photography book "The Yellow Star" in my hands for the first time, I was shattered and deeply affected. The suffering and injustice mirrored in the faces that looked back at me was haunting. At the time of my birth in Berlin, my father was 28. I have many happy childhood memories. One is the extra effort my father made so that I would not be exposed to war toys or toy weapons. The approach "never again" was an important part of my childhood, as was silence with regard to the war years and National Socialism. According to my parents, both subjects were taboo. .
But if the pictures of the Holocaust were unnerving for me as a teenager, I was all the more stunned by a letter I received years later, in 1986, when I was a young father. The letter concerned my father, who had died ten years earlier, and came from the German Armed Forces. Its intent was to notify me as next of kin that my father had been both an SS Storm Trooper and Junior Squad Leader. That was a preliminary rank of the Nazi Party - essentially the party's shield squadron.
My father? An SS man? What was I to make of all the silence during my growing-up years now? I was overcome by how hushing things up had not solved anything, but simply built up walls between us. And I was unsettled by the magnitude of guilt with which my father had gone to his grave, unredeemed.
It was at this time that I became conscious, through counseling, that even though , out of a desire to follow Jesus's commandments in the Sermon on the Mount, I had refused to serve in the military, in my heart of hearts I was still no better than my father. The darkness and wickedness in me was just as much in need of redemption as that of any other person. The word, "forgive us our trespasses," is a cry that that would from now on always connect me with my father.
Ten years later, I had the opportunity to attend a meeting in Dachau. I happened to travel there by bus with an Israeli. Because we knew each other were about the same age, and had similar interests and concerns about the world etc., we sat together. Nonetheless we had never been so churned up simultaneously, as we were after our visit to Dachau. It was only then that we really began to talk to each other. When he told me that he had lost his entire family during the Holocaust, I broke down completely and wept. My own father had been stationed at that exact time in the very same area.
What took place in those short hours on the bus between me and this man cannot be described in words. It is the secret power of the plea "Forgive us our trespasses" and the promise of blessing and healing that springs from the resolve expressed in the phrase that follows it: "As we forgive those who trespass against us."