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Chapter 49 Epilogue After this morning, it was especially comforting that I was allowed to experience a reunion with my fatherly priest friend Prof. Dr. Donders on the afternoon of that very same day. So many noble friends were no longer among the living when I returned home.... I could only linger at their graves, which have since been smashed in air raids. But the oldest and most trusted of all of them, who had been consumed with worry and had borne my fate with me deeply from a distance, at least I was allowed to meet him again on this earth, for which I praise God's goodness still today. This reunion was one of the most profound joys for me. On Sunday, April 4, this noble priest held a high mass of thanks for my newly recovered freedom in the Miinster Cathedral, now so terribly destroyed.1 On August 9, 1944, God called home his never-tiring servant, who was completely consumed by worries and suffering, into eternal peace. When we have been separated for a long time from everything that belongs to us, from relatives and friends, from all our possessions, from our dear habits, inclinations, and duties, and from the activities we are accustomed to performing daily; namely, when brutal violence has taken us away from them, how the desire grows with every hour to take back that which we have done bitterly without for so long, to seize possession of it again—how we enjoy to the fullest these first heartbeats of freedom! You are free, free, you have back what belongs to you! My heart felt this exultantly. When this overwhelming moment of freedom and newly acquired possession comes, however, when we sense warmly the first sunbeam of newly granted happiness and our hands and heart stretch out toward them impatiently, how suddenly all excitement, all overpowering feelings, can disappear again. How does that happen? Was the joy excessive? Were we 1. Miinster had been heavily targeted by the RAF and then by the U.S. military for air raids from 1939 on. By the end of the war, the inner city of Miinster, including the area where the cathedral is located, was 90 percent destroyed. 242 The Blessed Abyss ungrateful? Was the expectation exaggerated?Amongus in the concentration camp, it was the case that the fantastic dreams, which we gave ourselves up to in the longing for freedom, really were exaggerated. Probably everyone who has been locked up for many years, especially those prisoners who have been martyred, naturally exaggerates the true concept of real freedom. God knows, freedom is certainly the most precious gift of natural life—and yet one should not create a fantasy image of a reality in which one no longer lives oneself, when one is instead bound at the hands and the feet, bound at the spirit and the soul. In our brooding misery, the most modest maid or the simplest factory worker seemed like a queen to us: in comparison to our situation, they passed as almost the ideal of freedom. They did not wear inmates' clothing, they did not have shorn heads, they were not constantly accompanied by the SS, overseers, and dogs, were not surrounded by this horror, this torment every hour, but could move around freely, breathe freely. In the first period of my newly recovered freedom, my own personality tormented me. But who can fathom a heart which, after a long period of suffering, after a death-like existence, must accustom itself once more to love, to joy, to a world filled with beauty! I could no longer express my joy outwardly, I had simply unlearned it. Just as great pain is usually mute and is suffered through silently, greatjoy and great happiness are borne similarly after profound suffering. Does not the Creator ofallhappiness and alljoyalso speak to our souls in silence? And we do understand him in such moments. And so joy and gratefulness do best to rise up to their Creator during these hours in silent thanks. And how much constancy and how much mercy did I have to thank God for! No, he does not desert his own. I was allowed to experience myself that "Need is never greater than the helper," as the second strophe of the song I hummed so often during these years so aptly says: "Trust, my soul, trust securely in the Lord, Commend all to him, he will so gladly aid. Do not fawn, soon...

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