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284 D Chapter Eighty-Six d The work is finished During the final phase of his life on Earth, a cherished companion other than Marcus, his lovely fiancée Claudia,and myself,was Lassie,a little long-haired dachshund who belonged to my English friend Bertha.Each morning the little animal was delivered to the house,and she promptly ran up the stairs to the bedroom, jumped onto the bed, and placed herself across the patient’s midsection. Martin stroked her silky-soft fur, enjoying the warmth of the small creature so aware of the comfort she was giving him. Waiting for his Lord to call him home,my husband rarely spoke anymore; when he did speak,it was of the sea,the Mediterranean he loved so well,his thoughts drifting back to the days of his service in the Imperial German Navy.When he felt strong enough to read,it was not the Bible,worn out by the eight years of use in the cells of one prison and two concentration camps,but the hymnal of the Evangelical Church,a uniquely beautiful collection of all the anthems he knew by heart, particularly his favorite,“Die Güldene Sonne”(“The Golden Sun”).Soon he would see it in all its glory.Up to the end,he chuckled about the fact that he had survived Hitler for almost forty years, maintaining that, by keeping him safely locked away until the end of the Third Reich, the führer had most certainly saved his life. As a free man, sooner or later, he would have joined the resistance and ended on the gallows.And he smiled, in anticipation. We waited with him, each in his own way. The family came, the children and the grandchildren from near and far, one after the other tiptoeing into the bedroom for one last word, one final embrace. On the Sunday before his death, a motion of his hand signaled that I should come close.With a faint gesture, too weak now to open his eyes,my husband put the golden wedding band that he had taken off his finger into my hand. Two days later, on Tuesday, March 6, at the peak of the carnival season, with a city having turned into a madhouse of drinking and dancing, Marcus, Claudia , and I realized that the end was imminent. Marcus, concerned over my state of exhaustion , had spent the previous night next to his dying father. With the first blackbirds singing their jubilant evening song in the birch tree outside the window during the last minutes before the dusk turned to darkness, at seventeen minutes after five o’clock, Martin Niemoeller took a final deep breath under a simple crucifix, the one that Jack Bowling, the American admiral and a close friend, had made for him as a token of his love. Marcus placed the stethoscope on his father’s chest. Turning around to us he said softly,“He has gone out to sea.”Surrounded by those he loved best, Martin, after The Promised Land 285 ninety-two years and fifty-two days,joined his ancestors,the peaceful expression on his still face conveying the reassuring message that he had reached the other shore. No stranger was to touch him, so the three of us prepared him for his last journey. Only when they came to put him in his coffin did Marcus and Claudia send me out of the room. In his black pastor’s robe, well-worn in the service of his Lord, a small bouquet of snowdrops from the garden in his folded hands, he lay in state in a downstairs room, so all his friends could bid their final respects. We kept him in the house for two days, days that were filled with utter peace. As Luke 2:29 reads,“Lord, now lettest Thou thy servant depart in peace, according to Thy word, for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation.” Filled with deep gratitude,we returned the unopened package containing morphine to the pharmacy. God had been merciful; Martin died without suffering the agonizing pains usually accompanying the deadly disease that had ravaged his body. In accordance with his wishes, he was laid to rest in the red Westfalian soil of the little rural cemetery in the village of Wersen near the city of Osnabrück, from which his four grandparents had come.One year later,the gravesite that I had designed would bear a cross of black African granite with...

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