Chapter 25
No Time to Lose
On the evening of March 11, 1938, Hermine Cziep gathered her three children around a radio in their small, one-room apartment just outside Vienna, Austria. Kurt Schuschnigg, the Austrian chancellor, was broadcasting an address to the nation. German troops had massed along the border between their countries. Unless the Austrian government agreed to accept the Anschluss—the union of Germany and Austria under Nazi rule—the German army would take their land by force. The chancellor had little choice but to resign and ask the country to submit to a German invasion.
“And so I take leave of the Austrian people,” he declared. “God protect Austria!”
Hermine began to cry. “Now we aren’t Austria anymore,” she told her children. “It is Satan’s work. Force begets force, and what the Nazis have is not good.”1
Over the next two days, few people openly resisted Adolf Hitler’s army as the Germans entered the country and took over the police force. Hitler had been born in Austria, and many Austrians supported his desire to unite all German-speaking people in a powerful new empire called the “Third Reich,” even if it meant giving up national independence.2
Hermine’s husband, Alois, shared her wariness of the Nazis. He had been president of the Vienna Branch for over four years, and Hermine served alongside him as Relief Society president. The branch was small, with only about eighty members, and some of them were staunch supporters of Hitler and the Anschluss. Other branch members, especially those with Jewish heritage, viewed Hitler’s rise to power with fear and apprehension. But the Saints in Vienna were still a family, and the Czieps did not want the Nazis to divide them.3
When Hermine and Alois joined the Church as young adults, it had created a rift between them and their parents. Alois’s father, a devout Catholic, had effectively disowned his son, telling him in a letter that he must renounce his association with the Latter-day Saints. “If you decide not to heed my words,” his father wrote, “I shall not speak to you again in this life, and what you write to me will end up burned in the fire.” His father had since died, and although Alois now had a good relationship with his siblings, he knew the pain of a fractured family.4
Other Vienna Saints had experienced similar rejection, and many younger couples in the branch looked to the Czieps as parents. Since Hermine did not usually have money for streetcars, she would walk across the city several times a week to visit women in the branch. When someone from the branch had a baby, Hermine would bring the family food, help with cleaning, and take care of the older children. Alois, meanwhile, traveled by bicycle, often heading out to attend to branch business after finishing work at seven o’clock each night.5
Three days after Chancellor Schuschnigg’s speech, red and white Nazi banners with black swastikas lined Vienna’s streets. Since Alois worked for a large German company, he and his coworkers were ordered to leave the shop to form a “guard of honor” as Hitler and his troops paraded through the city. As Alois stood in the crowd, he could barely see Hitler’s gray convertible as it rolled down the street, surrounded by police cars and armed soldiers in crisp uniforms. All around Alois the people cheered, raising their right arms in the Nazi salute.
The next day, Alois joined thousands of his fellow citizens as they crowded into the Heldenplatz, or “Hero’s Square,” just outside Vienna’s Hofburg Palace. Hitler strode onto the palace balcony and declared, “I can announce before history the entry of my homeland into the German Reich.”6
As the crowd surged, shouts of “Heil Hitler!” filled the square. Alois realized he was witnessing a pivotal moment in history. How these events would affect the Saints in Vienna remained unclear.7
On the other side of the world, twenty-three-year-old Chiye Terazawa was discouraged. For nearly a month, she had been serving as a Japanese-speaking missionary in Honolulu, Hawaii. Although her parents were from Japan, she had been born and raised in the United States and did not speak Japanese. In fact, as she studied the language with other missionaries, she often berated herself for not picking it up more quickly. Almost every day was a struggle, and she pleaded with God to loosen her tongue.8
Nearly three years had passed since President Heber J. Grant felt prompted to open a mission among Hawaii’s large Japanese population. While he and his counselors had been eager to resume missionary work among Japanese speakers, one former mission president to Japan advised against it. He believed too many cultural barriers stood in the way of success.
Still, President Grant had pressed ahead with the plan, convinced that a Japanese-language mission in Hawaii could establish strong branches of Japanese speakers who could then share the gospel with friends and family in Japan.9 In November 1936, he called Hilton Robertson, who had also been a mission president in Japan, to open the mission. President Robertson and his wife, Hazel, moved to Honolulu, and three elders from the United States soon joined them.10 Chiye then arrived in early February 1938.
Despite her struggles with the language, Chiye was an enthusiastic missionary. She was the first full-time Japanese American missionary to serve in the Church, and the gospel was a treasured part of her life. Neither of her parents were members of the Church, but they had lived for many years among the Saints in southeast Idaho. Before her mother passed away in the influenza pandemic of 1918, she had asked Chiye’s father to send Chiye and her five siblings to Church meetings.
“You can’t raise them by yourself,” Chiye’s mother had told him. “The Church will be their mother so you can be their father.”11
And the Church had done its part well, both in Idaho and then in California after the family moved there. Before Chiye left for her mission, the Saints in her stake had thrown her a farewell party with speeches by local leaders, a tap dancer, a string quartet, and an orchestra for dance music.12
As the only single sister missionary in the mission, Chiye usually worked with Sister Robertson. Since neither of them spoke much Japanese, they often taught other English speakers. President Robertson also called Chiye to organize a Young Women’s Mutual Improvement Association in the mission and serve as its president. The assignment was daunting, but she received some advice on how to organize an MIA when Helen Williams, the first counselor in the YWMIA general presidency, visited the islands.
Chiye chose her counselors and decided on leaders for the Bee-Hive Girls and Gleaner Girls. She also worked closely with Marion Lee, the elder assigned to lead the young men, to plan the mission’s first MIA meeting.13 Although the organization was for the youth of the Church, MIA meetings were open to people of all ages. It would be an evening of traditional Japanese songs, dancing, and storytelling from local Saints and friends of the branch. Marion would speak on the purpose and aim of the MIA, and Chiye would talk about the history of the YWMIA program.
They scheduled the meeting for March 22. Chiye was nervous that no one would come. Marion worried that the program they had planned would be too short. His companion said there was nothing to worry about. “The Lord will provide,” he promised.
When the time came to start the meeting, some people had not yet arrived, but Chiye and Marion decided to begin without them. The missionaries opened with a song and offered a prayer. Kay Ikegami, the Sunday School superintendent, then showed up with his family. A short time after that, another family arrived. By the end of the meeting, more than forty people had assembled, including every one of Chiye’s fellow leaders in the MIA. One man even sang three songs, filling out the program and alleviating any fear about a short meeting.
Chiye and Marion were relieved. The mission’s MIA was off to a promising start. “God has opened up the way,” Chiye reported in her journal. “I only hope that we can make it a success.”14
That summer, J. Reuben Clark of the First Presidency prepared to speak at an annual gathering of Latter-day Saint seminary, institute, and college religion teachers.
President Clark, a former lawyer and diplomat, was a strong proponent of education. Like many religious people of his generation, he worried about secular trends replacing religious beliefs in the classroom. He was especially bothered by biblical scholars who emphasized Jesus’s moral teachings over His miracles, Atonement, and Resurrection. Throughout his adult life, he had seen friends, coworkers, and even fellow Latter-day Saints become so absorbed in secular ideas that they abandoned their faith.15
President Clark did not want the same thing to happen to the rising generation of Saints. The Church’s three colleges, thirteen institutes, and ninety-eight seminaries were founded to “make Latter-day Saints.” Yet he worried that some teachers at these schools missed opportunities to nurture faith in the restored gospel of Jesus Christ when they refrained from bearing testimony, supposing it would bias their students’ pursuit of truth. He believed that the youth of the Church needed a religious education, grounded in the foundational events and doctrine of the Restoration.16
On the morning of August 8, 1938, President Clark met with the teachers at Aspen Grove, a beautiful canyon retreat tucked away in the mountains near Provo, Utah. As he stood to speak, a rainstorm blew through the area, battering the lodge where he and the teachers were assembled. Undeterred, he told his audience that he intended to speak frankly on behalf of the other members of the First Presidency.
“We must say plainly what we mean,” he said, “because the future of our youth, both here on earth and in the hereafter, as also the welfare of the whole Church, are at stake.”
He identified the fundamental doctrine of the restored gospel. “There are for the Church, and for each and all of its members, two prime things which may not be overlooked, forgotten, shaded, or discarded,” he said. “First—that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Only Begotten of the Father in the flesh.”
“The second,” he continued, “is that the Father and the Son actually and in truth and very deed appeared to the Prophet Joseph in a vision in the woods.”
“Without these two great beliefs,” he declared, “the Church would cease to be the Church.”17
He then spoke of the importance of teaching these principles to students. “The youth of the Church are hungry for things of the Spirit,” he said. “They want to gain testimonies of their truth.”18
He believed a personal testimony of the gospel ought to be the first requirement for teaching the gospel. “No amount of learning, no amount of study, and no number of scholastic degrees can take the place of this testimony,” he said. Furthermore, he declared, “You do not have to sneak up behind this spiritually experienced youth and whisper religion in his ears. You can come right out, face-to-face, and talk with him. You do not need to disguise religious truths with a cloak of worldly things.”
As rain beat against the windows of the lodge, President Clark urged the teachers to help the First Presidency improve religious education in the Church.
“You teachers have a great mission,” he testified. “Your chief interest, your essential and all but sole duty, is to teach the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ as that has been revealed in these latter days.”19
After the speech, some teachers objected to the course the First Presidency had charted for Church education, believing it restricted their freedom to teach as they thought best. Others welcomed its emphasis on teaching foundational truths and bearing personal testimony. “I am anxious to carry forward the work,” commissioner of Church education Franklin West told President Clark. “I promise you that you will see marked and rapid improvement.”20
A few months later, the seminary program introduced a new class for its students: “The Doctrines of the Church.”21
In February 1939, Chiye Terazawa learned that her mission president was planning to transfer two sister missionaries to another area of Hawaii. The news rattled her. With her YWMIA going so well in Honolulu, she did not want to leave. Who would be transferred, she wondered, and where would they go?22
The mission now had four sister missionaries, all of them living and working together in Honolulu. President Robertson, however, had recently organized branches of Japanese Saints on Maui, Kauai, and the Big Island of Hawaii. The sisters he selected for the transfer would be responsible for working with the elders to build up one of these branches from its earliest stages.23
On March 3, 1939, President Robertson called Chiye and her companion, Inez Beckstead, into his office. He told them he was sending them to Hilo, a city on the Big Island. Chiye felt many emotions at once, and she could not help crying. She was happy and relieved that she no longer had to fret about staying or going. But she would miss working closely with the Robertsons and the Japanese Saints on Oahu.
A few days later, Chiye and Inez said goodbye to a crowd of missionaries and Japanese Saints at the harbor in Honolulu. Several women draped the companions with beads and lei. Kay Ikegami gave them some money for the trip. Longtime Japanese Saint Tomizo Katsunuma presented them with postage stamps.24
One person not at the docks was Tsune Nachie, the beloved temple worker from Japan, who had died a few months earlier. The elderly woman was widely known as the “mother of the mission,” and she had become a dear friend and mentor to Chiye over the past year. In the hours after Sister Nachie’s death, in fact, the Robertsons had asked Chiye to help them prepare her body for burial. Sister Nachie would have loved to know that two sister missionaries were going to Hilo. Some years earlier, she herself had served a local mission there.25
Chiye and Inez arrived at Hilo on the morning of March 8, somewhat seasick but ready to work. Hilo was much smaller than Honolulu. Chiye and Inez could see no hotels or restaurants in the town, aside from a café along the waterfront. The Hilo Branch was about five months old, and normally around thirty-five people—most of them investigators—attended Sunday meetings. The elders had already organized a Sunday School and an MIA program for the young men, but there was no YWMIA or Primary. Chiye agreed to lead the young women while Inez served as the Primary president.26
The two missionaries moved into the basement of a boardinghouse for women and found plenty of opportunities to improve their Japanese. One of the first things they did was ask administrators and teachers at a local Japanese elementary school if they could speak to the students about Primary. At the time, missionaries used Primary as a way to acquaint children and their families with the Church. Since the activities were fun and promoted simple Christian values, they attracted children of many faiths. Chiye and Inez made a good impression on the school, and before long, dozens of children were attending Primary on Wednesday afternoons.27
That spring, the sister missionaries decided to have the children perform The Happy Hearts, a musical play the Primary general board had commissioned for Primary festivals throughout the Church. In the play, a king and queen of an imaginary land teach children why unpleasant things like rain, eating vegetables, and early bedtimes are in fact good for them.28
When Chiye and Inez were not knocking on doors, studying, or meeting with investigators, they could often be found practicing songs, sewing costumes, assembling props, or pleading with parents to send their children to play practice. The Hilo Saints and the elders helped as well, rounding up the absent children, making sets, and assisting with rehearsals.29
Nine days before the performance, the rehearsal was a disaster. “What a mess,” Chiye wrote in her journal. “But I do believe it will be all right. At least here’s hoping.”30
Later rehearsals went better, and as the day of the performance neared, everything started to come together. The missionaries advertised the festival in the newspaper and finished sewing and mending costumes. Tamotsu Aoki, a local businessman who was investigating the Church with his family, agreed to serve as master of ceremonies.31
On the morning of the performance, Chiye woke up early and helped gather flowers, ferns, and other plants to decorate the meetinghouse stage. Then, as the Saints and elders set up chairs and arranged the scenery, she rushed to get the children in costume and makeup in time.
By seven o’clock in the evening, about five hundred people had gathered for the performance. To Chiye’s relief, the children played their parts well. She and Inez were thrilled that so many people had come to the meetinghouse to support the Primary.32 At the end of the musical, they all listened as the young cast sang in unison:
Where is the Land of Happy Hearts?
Here and ev’ry where!
There are wide and shining roads for you,
Or a little lane or a trail will do,
To lead you surely there.33
In the summer of 1939, eleven-year-old Emmy Cziep and her siblings, fifteen-year-old Mimi and twelve-year-old Josef, were enjoying a vacation in Czechoslovakia, a country just north of their home in Vienna, Austria.
The children and their parents, Alois and Hermine, had visited family there several summers since the death of Alois’s father. They stayed with two of Alois’s brothers, Heinrich and Leopold, and their families in Moravia, a region in the central part of the country.34
Like Austria, Czechoslovakia was Nazi-occupied territory. Shortly after the Anschluss, Hitler’s army had seized the Sudetenland, a Czechoslovak border region with a large number of ethnic Germans. Although many Czechoslovaks wanted to defend their country, the leaders of Italy, France, and Great Britain hoped to avoid another large-scale war in Europe and had agreed to the annexation. In exchange, Hitler pledged to refrain from any further invasions. Within a few months, however, he had broken his agreement and seized the rest of the country.35
To Emmy, the conflict seemed far away. She loved being with her extended family. She enjoyed playing cops and robbers with her cousins and splashing around with them in a nearby stream. When her parents had to return to Austria partway through the summer, she and her siblings stayed in Czechoslovakia a few weeks more.
On August 31, 1939, the Cziep children were just sitting down to lunch when their uncle Heinrich burst into the room, his face flushed. “You have to go now!” he exclaimed. “There is no time to lose!”
Emmy was confused and frightened. Her uncle told them that Hitler seemed to be planning something. Orders had been issued to close borders, and the one o’clock train passing through their town could be their last chance to return to Vienna. Catching the train might be impossible, he said, but the children had to try if they hoped to get home to their parents.
Earlier that morning, Emmy and her siblings had put all their clothing in a tub of soapy water for washing. Their aunt and uncle helped them wring out their clothes before tossing them, still wet, into a suitcase. Then they dashed to the train station on foot.
The station was a mass of frantic people, all of them jostling to get out of the country. Emmy and her siblings crammed themselves into the train and immediately found themselves surrounded by scores of hot, sweating passengers. Emmy could barely breathe. When the train stopped at villages along the route, people threw themselves at the train’s windows, screaming and trying to climb in, but there was no room.36
It was dark when the train finally pulled into Vienna. Full of tears, the Cziep family rejoiced that they were back together.
Instead of returning to the tiny apartment where Emmy had spent her whole life, they went to a new apartment on Taborstrasse, a beautiful street in the center of town. For years, Alois and Hermine had wanted to find a better home for their growing family, but their low income, a housing shortage, and political controls over assigning apartments had made that impossible. Then the economy improved after the Anschluss, and business increased fivefold at the company where Alois worked.
With the help of a Church member who worked for a Nazi official, Alois and Hermine had applied for a new apartment and received one with three bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a living room. It was also much closer to the branch meetinghouse—a forty-five-minute walk, rather than the two hours they were accustomed to.37
Sadly, the good fortune came at the expense of Jews who had once been the main occupants of Taborstrasse. Not long after the Anschluss, the Nazis and their followers had vandalized Jewish businesses, burned synagogues, and arrested and deported thousands of Jewish citizens. Many Jews with means to flee the country abandoned their homes, leaving apartments open for families like the Czieps to occupy.38 Other Jews remained in the city, including some Saints with Jewish heritage in the Vienna Branch. And they were growing ever more fearful for their lives.39
On September 1, Emmy and her family spent their first night together in their new apartment. While they slept, one and a half million German troops invaded Poland.40