No sign of life from Vasyl Volodko for days. Day 25 in the Ukraine War. On the altar of the Protestant Church of Reconciliation at the Dachau concentration camp memorial site, next to a vase with a red rose, is a portrait photo of the 97-year-old former Dachau prisoner. He lives with his bedridden wife and daughter Vera 20 kilometers southwest of the heavily contested Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. In mid-March, the Maximilian Kolbe factory in Freiburg was still in contact with the family. Volodko’s daughter added: “We have two particularly difficult and dangerous days ahead of us.” Church councilor Björn Mensing tried very hard to get in touch with Volodko, one of the five former Ukrainian concentration camp prisoners who are the focus of the interreligious service on Sunday. But no one has heard from Volodko since March 14.
At the beginning, Apostolos Malamoussis, Archpriest of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, speaks a prayer for peace in the church, which is packed with 90 visitors. Pastor Mensing lights a “candle of peace” for Ukraine. The candle with a rainbow motif, the Archangel Michael and the Ukrainian flag was made by Sister Benedikta from the nearby Carmel Monastery. As a child, Mensing says, she survived the air raids in Vienna in basements during the Second World War.
There is no lack of moving moments during the almost two-hour service – the visitors are completely moved by the singer Natalia Ruda, who fled to Munich from the Ukraine a few days ago. She performs three songs from her homeland, the last tells of the pain of a mother who lost her son in World War II.
The singer Natalia Ruda fled to Munich from the Ukraine just a few days ago.
(Photo: Niels P. Jørgensen)
There is no better way to tell about freedom, dignity and peace than these five
After the biographies of the five former Dachau prisoners, told by former volunteers of Action Reconciliation, Pastor Mensing renounced the planned sermon – “there was already so much sermon in it,” he says. Because there is no better way to talk about freedom, dignity and peace than these five. Volodymyr Dshelali (1925-2020), Jurij Piskunov (1925-2007), Vasyl Novak (1924-2020), Vasyl Volodka and Vasyl Bondar, born in 1926, had to experience as young people and children how their world was under violence and hatred of the Germans is broken. Like tens of thousands of other people in their country, they have experienced abduction, forced labour, torture, beatings, hunger, disease and humiliation.
90 visitors take part in the multi-religious service in the Evangelical Reconciliation Church at the Dachau concentration camp memorial site on Sunday.
(Photo: Niels P. Jørgensen)
They survived, but also suffered from the traumatic experiences in life afterwards, which for most of them began with the persecution by the Soviets as alleged collaborators with Hitler’s Germany. Anika Mensing’s voice trembles when she quotes Volodko, who reported how he had to be disinfected from Barrack 23 in the Dachau concentration camp and was driven back naked in the cold when he was killed on the death march of April 26, 1945 by an SS man with the gun butt was knocked unconscious and left dead in the street. Later, a visitor will say that he is going home from this service with the assignment to confront hatred always and everywhere.
“People are dying and there is no excuse for that”
“The pain will remain,” predicts Mayya Bakulina, a former AsF Russian volunteer at the Church of Reconciliation. By that she means Putin’s war, the attack on Ukraine, no matter how it ends. The 31-year-old left Moscow in 2014, she says. “People are dying and there is no excuse for that.” She carries Russia in her blood, in her heart. But she is filled with shame, pain and disgust at the war against Ukraine and her own citizens in Russia.
Jan Kwiatkowski, former Polish AsF volunteer and employee of the Max Mannheimer Study Center in Dachau, talks about the wave of willingness to help in his country. Two million have now fled to Poland. “People are opening their houses,” says Jan Kwiatkowski. The wave of aid is coming from civil society.
The role of the government can be neglected, it has created two borders. The refugees would be taken in on the Polish-Ukrainian route, while a humanitarian catastrophe was taking place on the Polish-Belarusian route. Instead of a warm welcome, there are deportations. He hopes for greater political sensitivity in Poland.
Jewish communities help refugees
Apostolos Malamoussis, Archpriest of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Munich, speaks a prayer for peace for Ukraine in the Evangelical Church of Reconciliation
(Photo: Niels P. Jørgensen)
Zoryan Augustin Atamanyuk, priest of the Ukrainian Catholic Church and chaplain in the parish association of St. Jakob, speaks a prayer for peace, as does Imam Şeref Ovalı from the Intercultural Dialogue Center in Munich. “Brothers and sisters in Ukraine, may God give you courage, strength and mercy.” Carmelite Prioress Sister Irmengard Schuster reads from the Gospel according to Matthew and sums up the central message: “Blessed are those who make peace, for they will be the children of God.”
Afterwards, Rabbi Steven Langnas at the Jewish memorial reminds that the Jews have played a special role in Ukraine since ancient times. Langnas is pastor of the Saul-Eisenberg-Retirement Home of the Jewish Community Munich and Upper Bavaria in Munich. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Ukrainian soil is soaked in Jewish blood, says the rabbi in memory of the Holocaust. But even if some historical events still have an impact today, Jewish life in the country is flourishing again. The Jewish communities in Germany opened their hearts and would help refugees – Jews and Christians alike.