Chapter 28
Our United Efforts
In the spring of 1942, industries across the United States were throwing their support behind the war effort. In Cincinnati, factories supplied machine parts and engines. Other companies in the city produced blackout curtains, parachutes, and radio transmitters. At grocery stores, like the one the Bang family operated, items were carefully rationed as more and more goods went toward feeding and outfitting soldiers.1
Once everyday materials became scarce, Paul and Connie Bang wondered if the Cincinnati Branch would be able to build their new meetinghouse. After selling their old chapel, the Saints had moved their meetings to a rented room in a nearby YMCA facility. Paul and Connie were members of the branch’s building committee, and they had been raising money for the new meetinghouse since before the war. But now, with so many shortages, the committee had little hope of proceeding with their plans until the fighting was over.2
Around this time, Paul and his brother-in-law Milton Taylor were thinking about taking their families to the temple. Everywhere they turned, the war was pulling families apart. Husbands and wives, sons and daughters were leaving home to serve their country. As young men in their twenties, Paul and Milton had registered for military duty and could be drafted into war at any time. Amid such great uncertainty, eternal marriage and temple covenants provided assurance to them and their young families.3
One day, Paul and Milton learned that their friend Vaughn Ball, a member of the Cincinnati Branch from Salt Lake City, wanted to take a trip to Utah. If the Bangs and Taylors drove to Utah with him, they could fulfill their dream of being endowed and sealed in the temple. And by traveling together, they could save on costs.4
The only problem was finding a way to get there. Nearly two years had passed since Paul and Connie Bang’s wedding, and they now had a ten-month-old daughter, Sandra. Milton and his wife, Esther, also had a young daughter, two-year-old Janet.5
Milton knew a man who had a reliable car with enough seating, and he agreed to rent it to them. While previous generations of Saints had gone west by wagon, handcart, or train, the Bangs, Taylors, and Vaughn Ball would be driving a 1939 DeSoto Touring Sedan.6
The group left for Utah the last week of April. Since gas was not nearly as scarce as rubber amid the wartime ration, the group could make their cross-country trip in good conscience, provided they drove slowly to avoid wearing out the tires too quickly.7
As the DeSoto headed across the United States, the travelers benefited from the many paved roads and service stations that had appeared over the last thirty years. At night they stayed at roadside motels, where they always managed to persuade the owners to let them stay for a few dollars less than the advertised price.
Aside from Vaughn, no one in the car had been so far west before, so the changing landscape was new to them. They enjoyed the scenery until the Rocky Mountains appeared and the roads became steeper and more treacherous. Vaughn loved riding up and over the beautiful mountain passes, but everyone else seemed terrified that the craggy slopes would give way and bury them alive. They were relieved when they arrived safely in the Salt Lake Valley.8
In the city, Paul, Connie, and Sandra stayed with the mother of Marion Hanks, a missionary who was serving in Cincinnati, while the Taylors stayed with Vaughn Ball’s mother. Both families visited Temple Square several times, taking pictures of the buildings and monuments on the site. They also visited Charles and Christine Anderson, who had led the Cincinnati Branch for more than two decades. The Andersons had immense love for the two couples and had long hoped to see them sealed.9
On May 1, Paul and Connie entered the Salt Lake Temple with Milton and Esther. After receiving their endowment, the couples were taken to one of the temple’s five sealing rooms. Apostle Charles A. Callis, who had once served as the mission president over Cincinnati, took each couple in turn and sealed them together while President Anderson served as a witness. Janet and Sandra were then brought into the room, dressed in white, and sealed to their parents.10
A few days after their sealings, Paul, Connie, Milton, and Esther returned for another endowment session. As Paul and Connie walked through the temple’s many rooms and hallways, they marveled at its size and beauty. They were thrilled to be there, secure in the knowledge that they and their daughter were sealed together for time and all eternity.11
That spring, near The Hague, Netherlands, thirty-seven-year-old Hanna Vlam said goodbye to her husband, Pieter, as he headed to the train station. For the past two years, Nazi Germany had occupied the Netherlands. As a former officer in the Dutch navy, Pieter was required to register with Nazi officials regularly, and he was now headed to a city near the German border to do so.
“I’ll see you again tomorrow,” he told Hanna before leaving.12
The German invasion had taken Hanna and Pieter by surprise. Hitler had promised not to invade the Netherlands, a neutral nation, and Pieter had believed it. Then, one night in May 1940, the sound of warplanes dropping bombs had shaken them out of bed. Pieter had quickly dressed in his uniform and left to help defend his country. But after five days of fighting, the Dutch military had surrendered to Germany’s overwhelming force.13
Living under Nazi rule was difficult. Pieter lost his military commission, but he had secured a civilian job to support his family. The German occupiers allowed the Dutch Saints to continue meeting as long as Nazi officials could listen in on what they said. And the Saints had to meet during the daytime to comply with blackout restrictions. As the second counselor in the Netherlands Mission presidency, Pieter spent nearly every weekend traveling with President Jacob Schipaanboord and first counselor Arie Jongkees, both fellow Dutchmen, to visit branches throughout the country.14
Tragedy had come to the Vlams in March 1941, when a train had struck and killed their four-year-old daughter, Vera. Hanna and Pieter’s only consolation was knowing that she was theirs for eternity. When Vera was just a baby, the Vlams and their three children had been sealed together in the Salt Lake Temple on their way home from a military assignment in Indonesia. That knowledge helped them cling to their covenants and find solace in the dark days that followed.15
On the morning Pieter left to register with Nazi officials, Hanna could not have expected their separation to last any longer than his weekend trips with the mission presidency. But later that day, their oldest daughter, eleven-year-old Grace, burst through the door.
“Is it true?” she cried. Rumors were flying that the Nazis had arrested the former military personnel who had shown up for registration, she told her mother. They had been herded into cattle cars and were on their way to a prison camp.
Hanna was too shocked to speak. The next day, she received a notice in the mail confirming that Pieter had been taken to Germany. He was now a prisoner of war.16
As the weeks slowly passed, Hanna prayed for peace and strength. She asked the Lord to watch over her husband and keep him safe. After nearly six weeks of waiting for news, she finally received a small card from Pieter, his handwriting cramped to fill every bit of space.
“I am well in body and spirit,” Pieter wrote. The Nazis were holding him at a prison called Langwasser in the German city of Nuremberg, and although the guards treated him and his fellow prisoners poorly, he was getting by. “My thoughts are constantly with all of you,” he wrote. “In my mind, I embrace you tightly, my dear Hanny.”
He asked Hanna to send him some food and his scriptures. Hanna could not be sure if the books would pass the Nazi censors, but she determined she would at least try.
“Be courageous,” Pieter urged her. “God will bring us together again.”17
On July 5, 1942, David Ikegami attended a conference of the Japanese Mission in Hawaii’s Oahu Stake Tabernacle. For David, this Sunday meeting was different from most. Not only would he be ordained to the office of a teacher in the Aaronic Priesthood, but he had been asked to speak during the first session of the conference. With more than two hundred people attending, it would be much larger than the Sunday School gatherings he was accustomed to.18
David based his talk on Doctrine and Covenants 38:30: “If ye are prepared ye shall not fear.” Nearly seven months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, fear and uncertainty still hovered over Hawaii. The United States military had taken over hotels and fenced in beaches with barbed wire. Soldiers enforced the strict curfew, and people who violated it risked being shot. David’s school had started classes again, but he had to carry a gas mask with him, and the students often performed drills to prepare for air raids and gas attacks.19
As Japanese Americans, David and his family also had to endure the growing suspicions of their non-Japanese neighbors. Some people, including many government and military officials, assumed without any evidence that Japanese Americans would try to undermine the American war effort out of ancestral loyalty to Japan. Beginning earlier that year, the U.S. government had even begun relocating more than one hundred thousand Japanese American men, women, and children from their homes in California and other West Coast states to internment camps in interior states like Utah.20
The government did not carry out such widespread internments in Hawaii, where almost 40 percent of the population was of Japanese descent. But officials detained around fifteen hundred members of the Japanese community who were in powerful positions or deemed suspicious. And most of these detainees became prisoners in camps on the islands.21
To show his loyalty to the United States and assist in the war effort, David had joined a volunteer group called the Kiawe Corps to build trails and clear thickets of spiky kiawe trees for military camps. His father, meanwhile, had begun working with his assistants in the Japanese Sunday School to organize a fundraiser for U.S. servicemen, whose ranks included members of their own Sunday School.22
When David stood at the pulpit during the mission conference, he shared words from Elder John A. Widtsoe’s most recent general conference address. “Fear is a chief weapon of Satan in making mankind unhappy,” the apostle had taught the Saints, reminding them that those who lived righteously and unitedly had no need to fear. “There is safety,” he had declared, “wherever the people of the Lord live so worthily as to claim the sacred title of citizens of the Zion of our Lord.”23
In the weeks following the mission conference, David’s father continued raising money for American soldiers. Called “We’re United for Victory,” the fundraiser provided means for a committee of fifty Japanese men on the island to print thousands of invitations and donation envelopes to distribute among their friends and neighbors. Within a few months, they had collected $11,000. Military leaders on the islands expressed appreciation for the money, which would be used to purchase books, phonograph language courses, and two movie projectors and screens to help raise the morale of the soldiers.24
The Saints of the Japanese Mission were glad to help. Their patriotism and loyalty were displayed clearly on the invitations distributed throughout the community. “We desire to do everything we can to help secure the freedom and liberty we love,” they read. “The servicemen will be made happy through our united efforts.”25
A few months later, in a prison in Hamburg, Germany, Karl-Heinz Schnibbe waited to stand trial for treason. Shortly after his arrest, he had seen his friend Helmuth Hübener in a long, white holding room with dozens of other prisoners. The prisoners had all been ordered to keep their noses to the wall, but as Karl-Heinz walked past, his friend tilted his head, grinned, and gave a little wink. Helmuth, it seemed, had not incriminated him. The young man’s bruised, swollen face suggested that he had been beaten severely for holding out.26
Not long after that, Karl-Heinz also saw his friend Rudi Wobbe in the holding room. All three boys from the branch had been arrested.
During the first few months of his imprisonment, Karl-Heinz endured interrogation, threats, and beatings at the hands of the Gestapo. The interrogators could not imagine that Helmuth Hübener, a seventeen-year-old boy, could be behind such a conspiracy, and they demanded to know the names of the adults involved. Of course, there were no adult names to offer.27
On the morning of August 11, 1942, Karl-Heinz changed from his prison uniform into a suit and tie sent from home. The suit hung on his thin frame like it might on a hanger in the closet. Then he was brought to the People’s Court, infamous in Nazi Germany for trying political prisoners and handing down terrible punishments. That day, Karl-Heinz, Helmuth, and Rudi would stand trial for conspiracy, treason, and aiding and abetting the enemy.28
In the courtroom, the defendants sat on a raised platform facing the judges, who were draped in red robes adorned with a golden eagle. For hours, Karl-Heinz listened as witnesses and Gestapo agents detailed evidence of the boys’ conspiracy. Helmuth’s flyers, full of language denouncing Hitler and exposing Nazi falsehoods, were read aloud. The judges were enraged.29
At first, the court focused on Karl-Heinz, Rudi, and another young man who had been one of Helmuth’s coworkers. Then they turned their attention to Helmuth himself, who did not appear intimidated by the judges.
“Why did you do what you did?” one judge asked.
“Because I wanted people to know the truth,” Helmuth replied. He told the judges that he did not think Germany could win the war. The courtroom exploded in anger and disbelief.30
When it was time to announce the verdict, Karl-Heinz was shaking as the judges returned to the bench. The chief judge called them “traitors” and “scum.” He said, “Vermin like you must be exterminated.”
Then he turned to Helmuth and sentenced him to death for high treason and aiding and abetting the enemy. The room fell silent. “Oh no!” a visitor to the courtroom whispered. “The death penalty for the lad?”31
The court sentenced Karl-Heinz to five years in prison and Rudi to ten. The boys were stunned. The judges asked if they had anything to say.
“You kill me for no reason at all,” Helmuth said. “I haven’t committed any crime. All I’ve done is tell the truth. Now it’s my turn, but your turn will come.”
That afternoon, Karl-Heinz saw Helmuth one last time. At first, they shook hands, but then Karl-Heinz wrapped his friend in an embrace. Helmuth’s large eyes filled with tears.
“Goodbye,” he said.32
The day after the Nazis executed Helmuth Hübener, Marie Sommerfeld learned about it in the newspaper. She was a member of Helmuth’s branch. He and her son Arthur had been friends, and Helmuth had thought of her as a second mother. She could not believe he was gone.33
She still remembered him as a child, bright and full of potential. “You will yet hear something really great about me,” he told her once. Marie did not think Helmuth was boasting when he said it. He had simply wanted to use his intelligence to do something meaningful in the world.34
Eight months earlier, Marie had heard about Helmuth’s arrest even before the branch president’s announcement over the pulpit. It had been a Friday, the day that she normally helped Wilhelmina Sudrow, Helmuth’s grandmother, clean the church. When she entered the chapel, Marie had seen Wilhelmina kneeling before the pulpit, her arms outstretched, pleading with God.
“What is the matter?” Marie had asked.
“Something terrible has happened,” Wilhelmina replied. She then described how Gestapo officers had shown up at her door with Helmuth, searched the apartment, and carried away some of his papers, his radio, and the branch typewriter.35
Horrified by what Wilhelmina was telling her, Marie had immediately thought of her son Arthur, who had recently been drafted into the Nazi labor service in Berlin. Could he have been involved in Helmuth’s plan before he left?
As soon as she could, Marie had traveled to Berlin to ask Arthur if he had participated in any way. She was relieved to learn that, although he had occasionally listened to Helmuth’s radio, he had no idea that Helmuth and the other boys were distributing anti-Nazi materials.36
Some branch members had prayed for Helmuth throughout his imprisonment. Others were angry at the young men for putting them and other German Saints in harm’s way and jeopardizing the Church’s ability to hold meetings in Hamburg. Even Church members who were not sympathetic to the Nazis worried that Helmuth had put them all at risk of prison or worse, especially since the Gestapo were convinced that Helmuth had received help from adults.37
Branch president Arthur Zander believed he had to act quickly to protect the members of his branch and prove that Latter-day Saints were not conspiring against the government. Not long after the boys’ arrest, he and the interim mission president, Anthon Huck, had excommunicated Helmuth. The district president and some branch members had been angered by the action. Helmuth’s grandparents were devastated.38
A few days after Helmuth’s execution, Marie received a letter he had written to her a few hours before his death. “My Father in Heaven knows that I have done nothing wrong,” he told her. “I know that God lives, and He will be the proper judge of this matter.”
“Until our happy reunion in that better world,” he wrote, “I remain your friend and brother in the gospel.”39
For months, Pieter Vlam wondered why the Lord had allowed the Nazis to lock him up in a prison camp, far from his family.
The dilapidated barracks in the camp were infested with lice, fleas, and bedbugs, and Pieter and the other prisoners sometimes ventured outside to rest on a small patch of grass. One day, as they lay looking up at the sky, a man asked Pieter if they could talk about spiritual matters. He knew Pieter was a Latter-day Saint, and he had questions about the world beyond this one. Pieter began teaching him the gospel.40
Soon, other prisoners sought Pieter’s spiritual guidance. The guards would not allow the men to talk in large groups, so Pieter would take two men at a time, one on each side, and go on walks around the camp. Not all the men believed what Pieter taught, but they appreciated his faith and gained a better understanding of the Church.41
After spending a few months in the German camp, Pieter and his fellow Dutch officers were transferred to Stalag 371, a prison camp in Nazi-occupied Ukraine. Their new quarters were in a frigid stone building, but conditions there were somewhat better than what the men had endured in Germany. Feeling stronger in body and spirit, Pieter continued to take walks with anyone interested in what he was teaching. He walked so much that he wrote home to his wife, Hanna, asking if she would send him some new wooden shoes to replace his battered footwear.42
Before long, a group of around ten men encouraged Pieter to organize a Sunday school, and he agreed. Since the Nazis forbade such meetings, they gathered secretly in an empty building in a far corner of the camp. They covered the window with an old blanket and found a soapbox to use as a pulpit. Miraculously, the scriptures and songbook Hanna had sent to Pieter after his arrest had passed the censors without being confiscated. Pieter taught from the Bible and Book of Mormon, but the group did not dare to sing. Instead, Pieter read hymns aloud. At the conclusion of their meetings, the men would slip out the door one by one to avoid detection.43
A Protestant minister at Stalag 371 eventually noticed men walking and talking with Pieter. He took each of them aside, showed them a booklet full of distortions about the Church, and told them Pieter was deceived. Rather than persuading them to abandon Pieter and his teachings, however, the minister’s efforts only made the men more curious about the restored gospel.
After reading the booklet, a man named Mr. Callenbach decided to join the group. “I do not want to be converted,” he told Pieter. “I only came to hear the story from you.”44
One Sunday, Pieter decided to teach the principle of fasting. He told the men they should give the little cup of beans they received that day to someone else.
“If you cannot sleep in the night,” Pieter said, “you should pray to God and ask Him if the things you heard from me are true.”45
The following Sunday the men stood to share their testimonies. Mr. Callenbach was the last to speak. With tears in his eyes, he recounted his experience with fasting.
“That night I had been very hungry,” he said. “Then I remembered what Mr. Vlam had said about prayer.” He told how he prayed earnestly to know if the things Pieter taught were correct. “An indescribable feeling of peace came over me,” he said, “and I knew that I had heard the truth.”46