Chapter 32
Brothers and Sisters
On a cool Sunday evening in August 1946, Ezra Taft Benson and two traveling companions drove a military jeep along the eerily quiet streets of Zełwągi, Poland. Rough roads and heavy rains had vexed the travelers all day, but the foul weather had finally cleared up as the men neared their destination.
Zełwągi had once been part of Germany and had been known as Selbongen. National boundaries had shifted after the war, however, and much of central and eastern Europe had come under the influence of the Soviet Union. In 1929, the thriving Selbongen Branch had built the first Latter-day Saint meetinghouse in Germany. But after six years of war, the Saints in the village were barely surviving.1
Elder Benson had come from the United States earlier that year to oversee the Church’s distribution of relief throughout the European Mission. He had been a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles for less than three years, but he had extensive experience in Church and government leadership. At forty-seven, he was young and healthy enough to handle a grueling travel schedule through several European nations.2
But no experience had prepared him for the horrors now surrounding him. Since coming to Europe, he had witnessed the ruins of war from London to Frankfurt and from Vienna to Stockholm.3 At the same time, he could see the European Saints banding together to help each other and rebuild the Church in their countries. On a visit to the mission home in Berlin, he was impressed by the mountains of genealogical records Paul Langheinrich and others had recovered, even as they worked to provide food, clothing, fuel, and shelter for more than a thousand Saints in their care.4
He also saw how the aid from the Church was making a difference throughout western Europe. Under Belle Spafford, the newly called Relief Society general president, women in wards and stakes in the United States, Canada, and Mexico had coordinated massive efforts to gather clothing, bedding, and soap for the European Saints.5 A Relief Society in Hamilton, Ontario, donated a bundle of children’s sweaters, suits, and underwear knitted with cast-off material from a clothing factory. A Relief Society in Los Angeles, meanwhile, contributed to the effort by making more than twelve hundred articles of clothing and volunteering nearly four thousand hours for the Red Cross.6
But in much of Germany and in eastern European nations like Poland, where Soviet-influenced governments resisted Western aid, Saints continued to go without necessities.7 The fact that Elder Benson was in Poland at all felt like a miracle. With no telephone lines operating, he and his associates had struggled to contact officials who could help them secure paperwork to enter the country. Only after much prayer and repeated contact with the Polish government was the apostle able to obtain the necessary visas.8
As the jeep neared the old meetinghouse in Zełwągi, most of the people in the streets scattered and hid. Elder Benson and his companions stopped the vehicle in front of the building and climbed out. They introduced themselves to a woman nearby and asked if they had found the Latter-day Saint chapel. The woman’s eyes filled with tears of relief. “The brethren are here!” she cried in German.
Immediately people came out from behind closed doors, crying and laughing with joy. The Zełwągi Saints had been out of contact with general Church leaders for three years, and that morning many of them had been fasting and praying for a visit from a missionary or Church leader.9 Within a few hours, about a hundred Saints gathered to hear the apostle speak.
Many of the men in the branch had been killed or deported as prisoners of war, and the Saints who remained were downhearted. Since the war’s end, some Soviet and Polish soldiers had terrorized the town, plundering homes and assaulting residents. Food was rationed, and people often paid outrageous prices for whatever extra nourishment they could get on the black market.10
That evening, while Elder Benson spoke to the Saints, two armed Polish soldiers entered the chapel. The congregation stiffened with fear, but the apostle motioned for the soldiers to take a seat near the front of the room. In his talk, he emphasized the importance of liberty and freedom. The soldiers listened attentively, remained in their seats for the closing hymn, and departed without incident. Afterward, Elder Benson met with the branch president and left food and money for the Saints, assuring them more aid was on the way.11
A short time later, Elder Benson wrote the First Presidency. He was encouraged to see the Church’s aid reaching Church members in Europe but worried about the difficulties the Saints still faced.
“Perhaps the many benefits of the great Church welfare program to these and our other Saints in Europe shall never be known,” he wrote, “but many lives have undoubtedly been spared, and the faith and courage of many of our devoted members greatly strengthened.”12
Around this time in Austria, eighteen-year-old Emmy Cziep awoke at five thirty in the morning, ate a single piece of bread for breakfast, and started her one-hour walk to Vienna General Hospital. It had been seven years since her harrowing rail journey out of Czechoslovakia, and now she was studying to become an X-ray technician. Because Vienna, like Berlin, was an occupied city, Emmy often passed Soviet soldiers on the road to the hospital. But medical workers were respected, and she believed her Red Cross armband offered her some protection from harassment.13
Vienna had been the site of violence and terror during the war, yet Emmy’s parents, Alois and Hermine, had continued to lead branch and Relief Society meetings. Alois now served as district president over the Church’s five branches in Austria, and he and Hermine worked hard to help their fellow Saints. Most people in Vienna, including Emmy, had emerged from the war traumatized and on the verge of starvation. Emmy’s brother, Josef, had served for a time in the German army, surviving capture and torture by Soviet soldiers after the war.14
Emmy’s training at the hospital was one of the few things in her life that could give her hope. Another was a recent visit to Vienna by Elder Benson, who had brought much-needed cheer to the Saints in Austria. Emmy’s family had felt honored to have him stay at their home. In the evening, the apostle had asked Emmy to play hymns for him on the piano, and she had felt uplifted by his presence.15
Some months after Elder Benson visited, the Church’s aid shipments arrived in Austria, and by 1947, Alois was overseeing the distribution of hundreds of cases of clothing, cracked wheat, beans, peas, sugar, oil, vitamins, and other essentials. Emmy herself received many wonderful items, including beautiful dresses with notes from the giver pinned to them.16
Latter-day Saints elsewhere in Europe were aiding each other as well. The Nordic nation of Finland, which Elder Benson had recently dedicated for missionary work, was home to three branches of Saints. When Church members in neighboring Sweden found out that these branches were in need, they sent boxes of food, clothing, and bedding.17
In Vienna, a few days before Emmy’s final exams at the hospital, her father asked for her help. Many children in Austria were undernourished and needed medical attention they could not get in Vienna. Since Switzerland had remained neutral in the war, Church members there had more resources, and they offered to take young Latter-day Saint children from Austria into their homes for three months to nurse them back to health.
Alois had a group of twenty-one children who needed care, and he wanted Emmy to help him take them to Switzerland. Emmy agreed to go, knowing she would be returning to Vienna within a few days to take her final exams.
During the journey to Switzerland, the train was so crowded that some of the children had to sit on the floor or in the luggage space above the seats. When it began to rain, the cardboard covering the windows did little to keep water from seeping inside. Many of the children were uncomfortable and missed their parents, so Emmy did her best to soothe them.
After a long night with little sleep, Emmy, her father, and the children arrived in Basel, Switzerland. They were greeted by the mission president and his wife, Scott and Nida Taggart, along with members of the local Relief Society, who presented the boys and girls with oranges and bananas.
The next day the Swiss families brought the children into their homes, and Emmy bade them farewell.18 Before she could return to Vienna, however, President Taggart invited her to remain in Basel to serve as a missionary. “The Lord needs you,” he said.
Emmy was stunned. She had never thought of serving a mission before. And what about her exams at the X-ray institute? If she stayed, she would not be able to finish her training, nor would she get a chance to say goodbye to her loved ones back home. In Switzerland, she would be surrounded by strangers who had not endured bombings, starvation, heartache, and death. Would they be able to understand her?
Despite these concerns, Emmy felt the answer to President Taggart’s question settle on her heart. “If the Lord wants me to stay,” she said, “I will.”
That night, about a month shy of her nineteenth birthday, Emmy Cziep was set apart to serve in the Swiss-Austrian Mission.19
In the spring of 1947, a year and a half after reuniting with her father, Helga Birth was no longer a missionary in Berlin. Nor was she known as Helga Birth. Now she was Helga Meyer, married to a German Latter-day Saint named Kurt Meyer. They lived in Cammin, a rural town about eighty miles north of Berlin, and had a baby boy, Siegfried, named after Helga’s brother who had died in the war.
Helga first met Kurt when he visited the East German Mission home in early 1946. A soldier in the German military, he had returned home at the end of the war only to learn that when the Soviet army had swept through his hometown, his parents had drowned themselves to avoid being taken prisoner or killed.20
At the time Kurt came to the mission home, he was not an active Latter-day Saint, but he was interested in returning to church. Not long after meeting Helga, he proposed to her.
Helga did not know how to respond. Ever since the death of her first husband, Gerhard, people had been encouraging her to marry again. She was not eager to rush into another marriage, though. She was not in love with Kurt, and she did not want to move to his hometown of Cammin, where the nearest branch of the Church was a train ride away. Part of her wanted to emigrate to Utah.
But she was not ready to leave Germany yet—at least not until she and her father found her mother. Marrying Kurt would allow Helga to remain in Germany and have some stability in life. Kurt already had a house in Cammin, not far from a lake full of fish. If she married him, neither she nor her father would go without shelter or food.21
With few choices available, Helga decided to accept Kurt’s proposal and the security it offered. They married in April 1946, and almost a year later their son was born.
Then, late in the spring of 1947, Helga and her father received news that her mother was alive. After being driven out of Tilsit, Bertha Meiszus had evaded capture by the advancing Soviet forces and walked for days, half-frozen, until she reached a boat that took her to a refugee camp in Denmark. She had been there for two years before she finally made contact with the family. Soon she too was living with them in Cammin.22
One day, around this time, some Soviet troops came to Helga’s door. With the lake nearby, soldiers stopped at the house once or twice a week to demand fish from her. The troops had a reputation for brutality, and Helga had heard stories of them committing rape and other acts of violence in Cammin. The sound of the soldiers’ car approaching her house always frightened her.23
Helga let the troops in, as usual. They had vodka, and the commander was clearly drunk. He took a seat at her table and said, “Frau—come, sit.” The soldiers ordered Kurt to join them, but then they largely ignored him.
Helga sat down beside the commander, and he asked her to have a drink.
“I do not drink,” Helga said.
“Give it to her, give it to her,” prodded the soldiers’ chauffeur, a cruel-looking German.
Helga was afraid. Drunken men could be unpredictable. But she said, “No, I’m not drinking.”
“If you do not drink,” the commander said forcefully, “I will shoot you!”
“Well, then,” Helga said, throwing her arms out, “you will have to shoot.”
A few moments passed. “Do you belong to some religion?” the commander asked.
“I’m a Mormon,” Helga said.
The commander and his soldiers stopped threatening her after that. The next time he came to her house, the commander patted her on the shoulder and called her a “good Frau,” but he did not ask her to sit with him. He seemed to admire her strength and respect her for standing up for her beliefs.
Before long, she and the soldiers were friends.24
A few months later, in July 1947, Saints from across Austria met in Haag am Hausruck, a town some 140 miles west of Vienna. Since July marked the one hundredth anniversary of the pioneers’ arrival in the Salt Lake Valley, district president Alois Cziep wanted the Austrian Saints to gather for a celebration, as many Church members were doing around the world. Haag am Hausruck was near where the first branch of the Church in Austria had been organized in 1902, and it provided an ideal venue.
More than 180 Saints came to the event—too many for the local branch’s meetinghouse to accommodate—so Church leaders rented a large room in a nearby hotel and constructed a temporary stage. The three-day celebration featured speeches, musical performances, and a play depicting scenes of early Church history and the entrance of the pioneers into the Salt Lake Valley.
On Sunday the Saints met in a gravel pit, where they set up a platform for the speakers and hauled out an organ to accompany their singing. Perched on a rocky ledge behind the platform was a seven-and-a-half-foot-tall replica of the Salt Lake Temple. Kurt Hirschmann, a member of the Frankenburg Branch, had spent several months crafting the intricate replica from cardboard packing boxes that had once contained welfare supplies from Salt Lake City.
Neither Alois nor most of the Saints at the celebration had been to the temple. With Europe in disarray and the nearest temple thousands of miles away, all they could do was imagine what the experience of being endowed and sealed to their families would be like. But that did not stop Alois from recognizing the importance of temple covenants or feeling the Spirit as the Saints spoke, sang, and bore testimony.25
As night fell, the group lit a bonfire that bathed the cardboard temple spires in a warm, flickering light. Alois closed the meeting by speaking of the faith of the early missionaries in Austria, likening them to the pioneers of 1847. “How thankful we should be for the gospel, the priesthood, and all the splendid opportunities given us in this Church to work out our salvation and even exaltation,” he said.
By the end of the meeting, the light from the bonfire had dimmed, so a Latter-day Saint soldier from the United States jumped into his jeep, turned on the headlights, and again illuminated the temple against the night sky.
The Austrian Saints lifted their voices together, the words of the pioneer hymn “Come, Come, Ye Saints” ringing up toward heaven:
Gird up your loins; fresh courage take.
Our God will never us forsake;
And soon we’ll have this tale to tell—
All is well! All is well!
Surrounded by his brothers and sisters in the gospel, Alois was sure the hymn had never been sung with more conviction.26
While Saints around the world celebrated the pioneer centennial, former prisoner of war Pieter Vlam was serving as a full-time missionary in the Netherlands Mission. As part of his new calling, Pieter had moved about thirty miles away from his home to lead the Church’s branch in Amsterdam. His wife, Hanna, and their three children remained at home.
The Amsterdam Branch had suffered terribly under the Nazi occupation. The city had been on the brink of starvation before its liberation. Had it not been for Ruurd Hut, Pieter’s predecessor, many branch members would have succumbed to hunger. Ruurd had vowed to do everything in his power to keep the Saints under his care from starving. He had collected money from branch members and purchased food, which the Relief Society cooked and distributed among the hungry Saints.27
Still, the Netherlands was in a deplorable state after five years of occupation. More than two hundred thousand Dutch people had died during the war, and hundreds of thousands of homes had been damaged or destroyed. Many Saints in Amsterdam and other cities in the Netherlands were bitter toward the Germans—and toward fellow Saints who had cooperated with the occupiers.28
To help unify the Saints, the mission president, Cornelius Zappey, encouraged branches to supplement their food supplies by starting potato-growing projects using seed potatoes from the Dutch government.29 Pieter and his branch soon rented a piece of land in Amsterdam, and men, women, and children worked together to plant potatoes and other vegetables. Other branches in the Netherlands also started potato patches wherever they could find a spot, growing potatoes in backyards, flower gardens, vacant lots, and road medians.30
Near harvesttime, Cornelius held a mission conference in the city of Rotterdam. Having met with Walter Stover, the president of the East German Mission, Cornelius knew that many Saints in Germany suffered from severe shortages of food. He wanted to do something to help, so he asked local leaders if they would be willing to give a portion of their potato harvest to the Saints in Germany.
“Some of the most bitter enemies you people have encountered as a result of this war are the German people,” he acknowledged. “But those people are now much worse off than you.”
At first, some Dutch Saints resisted the plan. Why should they share their potatoes with the Germans? They did not think Cornelius understood how terrible the Germans had been to them in the war. Although he had been born in the Netherlands, the mission president had spent most of his life in the United States. He did not know what it was like to lose his house to German bombs or watch his loved ones starve to death because German occupiers had taken their food.31
Cornelius still believed the Lord wanted the Dutch Saints to help the Germans, so he asked Pieter to visit branches throughout the Netherlands and encourage them to support the plan. Pieter was an experienced Church leader whose unjust imprisonment in a German camp was well known. If the Dutch Saints loved and trusted anyone in the mission, it was Pieter Vlam.
Pieter agreed to help the mission president, and as he met with the branches, he alluded to his hardships in prison. “I’ve been through this,” he said. “You know that I have.” He urged them to forgive the German people. “I know how hard it is to love them,” he said. “If those are our brothers and sisters, then we should treat them as our brothers and sisters.”
His words and the words of other branch presidents moved the Saints, and the anger of many melted away as they harvested potatoes for the German Saints. Disagreements within the branches did not disappear, but at least the Saints knew they could work together going forward.32
Cornelius, meanwhile, worked to secure permits to transport the potatoes to Germany. At first, the Dutch government did not want to export any food from the country. But Cornelius kept petitioning them until they relented. When some officials tried to stop the shipment plans, Cornelius told them, “These potatoes belong to the Lord, and if it be His will, the Lord will see that they come to Germany.”
Finally, in November 1947, Dutch Saints and missionaries met in The Hague to load ten trucks with more than seventy tons of potatoes. A short time later, the potatoes arrived in Germany for distribution among the Saints. East German Mission president Walter Stover also purchased truckloads of potatoes to add to the supplies.33
Word of the potato project soon reached the First Presidency. Amazed, second counselor David O. McKay said, “This is one of the greatest acts of true Christian conduct ever brought to my attention.”34