18 Book Burning

We interviewed Joachim Albrecht, Kurt Nikol, and Marianne Nikol in Bautzen, a city overshadowed by its infamous prison. Yet, as we sat in the Nikol’s apartment, their quiet dedication made it difficult to imagine the misery and horror represented by the prison walls only a few blocks away. The easy flow of conversation in this interview is the result of their long life of friendship and service together in the Church. At the time of the interview, Sister Nikol was serving as the stake Relief Society president.

Joachim: I was born in Königsberg, in East Prussia. My parents were not born in the Church. My mother was converted by the missionaries, who then came to see my grandparents. My grandmother then raised her three children in the Church, although she was not baptized until some time later. They went to the Church meetings every Sunday, but my grandfather fought against it. He didn’t want to be a part of it and would not allow my grandmother to be baptized. In 1935 my mother married a man who was not a member of the Church. My father had been a soldier. After his twelve years in the military, he went to work for the Customs Bureau, and the family moved to the Lithuanian border because my father was assigned customs duties there at the border. In these years, from 1938 until 1944, we were quite removed from the Church.

In 1944 we had to leave our homeland because the front was getting closer and closer. I was nine years old at the time. We went back to Königsberg but lived there for only a few weeks and then moved to the area near Elbingerode. There we thought we would have a little peace. My father’s brother was a forester in the area and owned a large farm at the edge of the forest. We felt more secure there than in a large city because of the bombings, but we had to move on again because the front was coming across southern Prussia.

It was January 1945 and bitter cold. We had to make the trip to Danzig with a horse and wagon. From Danzig we were to take a ship across the Baltic to Schweinemunde. The ship was part of a convoy of several ships that were bringing refugees out of East Prussia. One of the ships was the Wilhelm Gustwerf. It was a wonderful luxury liner that had been commandeered during the Hitler period as a transport ship. We did not get on this ship because on the way to Danzig my feet had become frozen. My toes and heels turned completely black from the frost. I couldn’t walk, and my mother took care of me in an old factory, where she rubbed my feet with gasoline to bring life back into them. The pain was terrible. Then a short distance before Danzig, we stopped at a military hospital, where they treated me. They wanted to amputate my feet but finally decided it would not be necessary. Life came back into my feet, so they wrapped them in heavy bandages and gave me two crutches to walk on. That was the reason we arrived too late at the harbor in Danzig. The liner Wilhelm Gustwerf was already overloaded with refugees, so we were put on an old, rusted-out freighter that had been used to haul ore. The refugees were placed below decks, and we were given some wood shavings to make a bed on.

We began our journey across the frozen Baltic. One night not far from Danzig, which was a freight harbor at that time, the sirens sounded the alarm that we were under attack. We were not hit, but the next morning we learned that within the convoy the Wilhelm Gustwerf had been torpedoed by a Russian submarine. The ship had sunk through the ice with all six thousand refugees on board. We picked up a few the next day who had somehow got into life boats, but very, very few. That was my first real experience with suffering and mourning.

My mother had been a little angry with me when we were hurrying to reach the Danzig harbor. We had spent the night in a schoolhouse, and when the sailors told us that the ship was already loaded, it was a great disappointment. But then when we learned that we had escaped certain death because of my problem, we were very happy, and we reached our destination, Rostock, on this old freighter.

However, we could not find an apartment in Rostock because everything was packed with refugees, so we made our new home in a little village near Rostock called Neubuckow. There was a branch of the Church in Rostock, which was an answer to our prayers. My mother had been trying very hard to find the Church, so right away we started attending the meetings. In the first two years, we met in various places, first in a school and then in a tavern. We had meetings there on Sunday, and on Monday they served beer and schnaps in the same rooms.

In 1947, I was baptized. The decision to be baptized was made when we traveled to Dresden for the big centennial celebration of the arrival of the pioneers in Salt Lake Valley. This took place in the old branch house on the Dr.-Kurt-Fischer Allee.

In the large park, we had an open-air celebration, and there I got to meet all the members and was introduced to two missionaries who were to be transferred to Rostock after the celebration. One of the brothers who was to come to Rostock as a missionary was Rudolf Wechsteter. He asked me, “Have you been baptized yet?” And I said, “No, I have not been baptized.” “That’s wonderful! We will have our first baptism when we get to Rostock.” And that’s what happened.

I was baptized on August 10, 1947, along with my brother and my grandmother, who had brought our entire family into the Church. My grandmother’s decision to be baptized became fixed after she had been cut off from my grandfather three times. He had stayed behind in Königsberg because of the war business that was going on there, and then he had been interred on a ship from Königsberg to Denmark. Next he was put in an internment camp. His family was scattered everywhere. My grandmother was with us because she had to take care of the children while my mother was at the doctor’s, and then we had to leave East Prussia in such a hurry. Grandpa said, “Well, it won’t be so bad. There will be a lot of people on the boat, and things are getting so hectic here.” So he stayed behind and had to be transported out later with this ship and ended up in an internment camp in Denmark. While he was in Denmark, we heard from our uncle in America. We had first heard from him in 1939. He told my grandpa that rather than go back to Germany after he was released he should come directly over to America from Denmark, so my grandfather had gone to America. And he wanted to know what was going on and asked my grandmother if she had really been baptized. My grandmother told him that after all the experiences they had been through she assumed he would no longer have anything against her baptism. So my grandmother was baptized with us two boys on August 10, 1947.

I was actually supposed to take my grandmother to America a little later since she couldn’t travel there alone. I went on a mission in 1953, and after my mission, I was going to go with my grandmother to America. But then grandpa died over there in 1954, after a separation of almost ten years from my grandmother, and that sort of settled the matter for me and I stayed here.

I was on a mission from 1953 to 1956, and my last area was in Bautzen. I met my wife and decided I wanted to set up camp here because I didn’t really have a home in Rostock anymore. I didn’t want to go back to Neubuckow, where my home had been, because I would be so far away from the Church. There was a little group of members in the Bautzen Branch. As a missionary, I had been called to be the branch president, and when I was released from my mission, the missionaries still had to take over the branch leadership. So in May 1957, I was set apart as branch president again. I was released in 1980.

G. Davis: Was there a branch in Bautzen before the war?

Joachim: Yes, but I must say that the branch was shuffled around a bit, here and there, because of the things that were going on. For a time we had no meeting place, no rooms. Meetings were held in members’ homes.

G. Davis: That was in the thirties?

Marianne: Early in the thirties there were missionaries from America here, and they stayed until just before the outbreak of the war. Then suddenly, overnight, the missionaries were gone. Through Sweden or Norway, gone, overnight. And here we stood, without leadership. At that time, we had a large building on Münz Street. It was a lovely chapel, but we had to give it up. I don’t remember why anymore. During the war, we had a room in a tavern. Then that wasn’t allowed anymore, so we had to meet in a private apartment, one room, on the fourth floor. We were there for a long time. I can remember that well. Saturday evening I had to go heat up the room so that it would be warm. The meetings were at 7:30 at night. But we didn’t have any missionaries then. My father, who was branch president, did it all. Then the war and all that brought us a lot of trouble. We didn’t have any meetings at all.

G. Davis: Was Nikol your maiden name, too?

Marianne: Yes, I was born a Nikol.

Kurt: We are, if you like, sort of related because our fathers were half-brothers. Our grandmother on our fathers’ side had these two boys out of wedlock, and yes, in that way, we are actually half-cousins. As children we had a little contact from this relationship.

I didn’t grow up in Bautzen but in a little village about ten miles from here. My parents were farmers. I finished out the war, and I had received my discharge papers from the German army just as the war ended, after May 8, 1945. At the time, I had been with the communications service on the Yugoslavian border in an old building. So we tried to get home on foot through Austria. Well, we got as far as Klagenfurt and had to decide which way to go. Toward Vienna and through Czechoslovakia? The Russians were there, and we didn’t want anything to do with that business, so we decided on the longer route, through Salzburg and Bavaria, but the English were there. The options became fewer and fewer. We couldn’t get through the Bündering Pass anymore, so we had to go this way and that way through meadows and finally found ourselves spending several weeks in a so-called internment camp run by the English. After about eight weeks, we were turned over to the Americans there in Bavaria. We were taken to Donau-Eschingen for final release. That was the plan. Then one day I was not released.

They learned I had been with the communications division, and communications people were not to be released. Everything had to be put back together—all of the telephone lines and telephone connections, etc. I told them I was no high-wire man. I didn’t have the slightest idea about telephone lines and things like that. I was a telegraph operator. Didn’t help. I didn’t go home. Instead I was given to the French and taken from Donau-Eschingen to a POW camp high in the Western Forest. For six weeks, I was put to work for a farmer in a slaughter house–butcher shop. I was then sent back to the camp, and from there I was transferred to a POW camp in the south of France. With one other prisoner, I was sent out to work during the day for a farmer who owned a vineyard. Two others were already assigned to work in the vineyard, so that made four of us. The conditions in the camp were not good. We were put into two small rooms with slab cots, so we made plans for our escape, but a few false starts fell through when the farmer got wind that we were trying to get away.

We weren’t taken back to the POW camp every night because it was over sixty kilometers away, so we had to spend some nights at the vineyard. Finally, in October 1946, I and the others who were with me at the vineyard did manage to make our escape. We made it from the Spanish border all the way to Austria. One of my companions had relatives on a large farm there, and from there we made contact with our families and requested the necessary civilian papers to get home. We actually smuggled our way across all the borders until we were home.

My first stop was here in Bautzen. I had come all the way by trains, but the connections were not so good, so I stopped over here in Bautzen for a while. Marianne and I were always good friends as children.

Marianne: But that’s not the whole story. I have to add a little. When they escaped from the vineyard, the next day he had blood poisoning in his big toe because he didn’t have any good shoes, only those heavy boots. It turned red, then black.

Kurt: Yes. That happened when we were running away from the vineyard to get to the closest train station. That was about sixty kilometers away, and we couldn’t let ourselves be seen during the day, so we had to walk at night. Actually we wanted to ride the freight trains. We had gotten hold of a schedule, so we knew where they were going and could make our way home. We had to keep hidden during the day. We needed water during the day so that I could cool my foot off so that I could walk a few kilometers the next night.

G. Davis: So you two became reacquainted here in Bautzen?

Kurt: Yes. We got a little better acquainted here, and then in April 1948 we got married. On November 16, 1948, I was baptized in Bautzen in the Spree River. There were at least eight people baptized that day, some of them from here and some from Grünewalde.

G. Davis: How large was the branch at that time, in 1948?

Marianne: In those days, we had a good-sized group.

Kurt: We became acquainted with the branch here, and held the meetings at the home of Sister Hänsel. She was the widow of a dentist and had a fairly large apartment.

Marianne: We had at least twenty-five.

Kurt: In those days, we had meetings in Bautzen and in Grünewalde, because they couldn’t always get over here, and also in Doberschau.

G. Davis: There were no foreign missionaries here during this time?

Marianne: Before the war, they were all pulled out and since then, none. It’s been fifty years now, that is until last year, when the missionaries came back.

G. Davis: But you always had your own local missionaries?

Kurt: There were the local missionaries. The first ones we got to know were Brother Schieck from Annaberg and Brother Plietschau. I don’t know exactly where he came from.

Joachim: Those were the missionaries in the first years after the war. Then for a long time, there was nothing here in Bautzen. In 1954, Bautzen was opened up again for missionary work with Brother Meier. At that time, the missionaries lived in our branch house. We had rented a branch house here in Bautzen, on Korn Street. Everything had to be remodeled, and the missionaries lived in the same building. We turned one of the classrooms into a room for them, and we had missionaries here until 1957.

Marianne: The very first ones were called right after the war to get the branches back together and see that everything got going again. There were many people who were out of contact with the Church. We didn’t even know where they were anymore. They called these men right away so that they could gather the sheep into branches so that we could get together again.

G. Davis: Do you think there were many members who were lost?

Marianne: Yes, yes. Many were in POW camps, the cities had all been bombed, and there was great confusion because of the war. There were many who went over to their relatives or emigrated some way or another. No one knew for sure where anyone was.

Joachim: Here in Bautzen, many members joined after the war; many were baptized. It became sort of a test of faith when we started receiving welfare goods from America; this attracted many people. We had a saying among us in German that these were the “canned-goods members” [Büchsengeschwister, Büchsenmitglieder], who kept a sharp eye out for canned peaches. And when the welfare goods stopped coming, we noticed that the members became less and less active. We didn’t, of course. We visited and took care of the members we had here in Bautzen, but we couldn’t get them back into activity again.

Marianne: But we always had a good relationship with those members. Two sisters live just a little ways away, and they are always happy when someone comes to see them. They were always glad to have a visit, but they never came back. They always admit that everything they know they learned from us. One of them goes to another Christian church occasionally.

Joachim: Before the branch on Korn Street became self-sufficient, we were dependent on the Bischofswerda Branch. The brothers came over here from Bischofswerda on Sunday to conduct the meetings. That must have been before the new missionaries came, before 1952.

Marianne: We met at Sister Hänsel’s place until about 1950. Then Brother Habicht came and took care of us, I remember, with his young wife. They came around 1952.

Joachim: In any case, a bunch of members were up in Grünewalde, about fifteen kilometers away. The missionaries were active up there and baptized a few members, but it was very hard for them to come into the city to the meetings. There were a few older sisters among them, including Sister Fietze, a local sister who made her home available. We held meetings in her apartment on Thursdays and Sundays. I went over there as a missionary Thursdays by bike and on Sundays by train or with the bike. These visits were very important, and the missionaries after me kept them up.

When the sister missionaries came, they didn’t go over anymore. A few of the members had moved away or died, and the group became smaller and smaller until we stopped holding meetings. Sister Frieze’s brother, Brother Gleizmann, let himself be made a secretary in the Evangelical Church and turned out to be very antagonistic toward the Mormons. He was a member himself. He had gotten a little upset over a few things, but that was mainly a matter between him and his sister. Then he left for the West, and we wanted to clean things up so we invited him to a Church court. It didn’t help. The man wouldn’t talk with us. But he came back because things didn’t go so well for him over there. He was very homesick and was all alone. But he never showed up at church again and was never taken back. We learned that he was back only when his sister died, and even though she didn’t even mention him in her will, he got most of her estate and actually made a lot of trouble for the Church there in Grünewalde because of his attitude.

We were just getting a little activity going in the genealogy program. Brother Tschislig, who lived in our branch, had some ancestors from Grünewalde, and he wanted to look them up in the archives of the Evangelical Church. One day when he went over to the church office, he ran into Brother Gleizmann. They didn’t know one another, but when he said that he was a Mormon and wanted to look up some ancestors, Gleizmann had him thrown out of the church offices and arranged it so that no other members could do research there. That was not easy for him to do, but I would say that he hurt himself more than he hurt us. The members who were still there in Grünewald drew a clear line. They knew whom they had to deal with and decided to whom they would go. But they eventually all died out, and there are no more members there.

Once we had great success there with conversions because a large group of Swedish refugees moved in. The local people were not so interested in accepting the gospel; it was more the refugees in those days. One of the enthusiastic members in Grünewald was Brother Koschrücke, a refugee. He was one of the younger brothers in Grünewald when we were holding meetings there, and he took over the missionary work.

Later, after 1957, the branch was no longer under the direction of strangers. By strangers I mean the full-time missionaries, who were the branch presidents and who were changed about every six months. In 1957, I was set apart as branch president, and since then the activity in the branch has been good. I was branch president until the organization of the stake, when we were put together with Bischofswerda. That was because we had to give up our meetinghouse on Korn Street when the city started rebuilding the area. They offered us another place on a side street. The place was large enough for us, but it was old, with damp walls. There were a lot of construction problems there. We made it as attractive as we could, but it wasn’t a permanent solution. It was supposed to be only a temporary move, but then they never gave us another place to meet. So on Pentecost 1952, our branch was dissolved, and we became part of Bischofswerda.

We had always had a good relationship with Bischofswerda. There was one common elders quorum between the two branches, and when they rebuilt their meetinghouse, we were very active in helping them during the construction. Brother and Sister Nikol both shoveled lime or dirt out of the lime pit onto the conveyor belt when they were digging out for the drainage tanks. That was hard but beautiful work, and by doing that we were laying the foundation for our own branch house, right? That was two years ago.

Marianne: The work started at eight. We traveled over to Bischofswerda by motorcycle.

Joachim: We belong to the Bischofswerda Branch but live in Bautzen. We have about twenty-two members here in Bautzen.

Marianne: That’s quite a few. More than when we had our own branch.

G. Davis: And how many members are there in Bischofswerda?

Kurt: There have always been about forty.

Joachim: About one third to two thirds. And it’s still about that.

G. Davis: What sort of problems did you have in directing the branch? I understand that you had many problems getting manuals.

Joachim: Yes, that was a big problem, teaching materials. After a while, we got better organized and helped ourselves. There were relatives or friends over there in West Germany who sent us their leftover manuals from the previous year, and we duplicated them on the typewriter. That was very, very, hard work. But then this work was taken over to a certain extent by the mission office.

That was the teaching material, but there were other things such as the Stern [Church magazine in German]. Until about 1949, we were permitted to bring these things into the country, but after that it was strictly forbidden. When I was on a mission and was working in Rathenow, near Berlin, we had a lot of contact with the mission office in West Berlin, Dahlem. We local missionaries had to take the manuals in our pockets and get them from Berlin into East Germany. This was always done with a certain amount of fear and trembling and with a pounding heart. But then one day our mission president, Henry Burkhardt, said, “No more of that. That’s forbidden, against the law; we simply can’t do it. Period.”

Before that we smuggled in a lot of teaching materials. We had a saying in the mission, “We go out without purse or script but come home with a box of books.” I remember that I was sending new books here to Bautzen and had a box so big I couldn’t get it to the train station because it was so heavy. I had to unpack it and put the books into three boxes when I sent all my things home from my mission.

Suddenly one day I received a message from our mission president that all of the manuals, books, tracts, etc., we had smuggled into the country somehow, illegally, could be very harmful to the Church. The authorities had already searched a few of our apartments, and we were instructed that we had to destroy all of these materials. I sat down in front of our open stove with a big pile of books and kept telling myself, “You have to keep that one” and “You have to keep that one” and “You can’t burn that one,” but for two days, we kept the fire going without coal, just paper. It was pretty warm. But in the end, I did keep one book. It was four years of priesthood manuals I had saved and had bound into one volume. “I don’t care if they throw me in prison,” I thought to myself. “This is one book I am not going to burn!”

I can say that at that time I was obedient. I did it because I was told to. But somehow I couldn’t see how anyone could get into trouble because of these manuals. Then one day I received an unexpected visit from a certain office.

G. Davis: Secret police?

Joachim: Of course! They asked me a few questions about the branch and wanted to know this and that. Then they wanted to have a look at my bookcase and wanted to know what kind of books I had. I was able to open my bookcase without a pounding heart and show them what books we had.

G. Davis: What about those four years of priesthood manuals?

Joachim: I didn’t show them. But I had the Stern, which we were permitted to receive up until 1949, and they wanted to see the later volumes. I told them I didn’t receive them. Then they asked me if anyone from “over there” [West Germany] was sending them to me, relatives, etc. “No,” I said, “you can see that this is all I have.” I was so happy that I was finally shown a reason, some sense, for burning my books. I must say that I really mourned over my books. But in the end, this actually gave us more encouragement to study our lessons more thoroughly from the standard works. The whole thing made us a little sulky, but it taught us a good lesson.

G. Davis: Do you think now that it was inspiration, that you should burn your books?

Joachim: Of course, I’m convinced that it was inspiration. I had to learn from direct experience how to understand the whole matter. They sent these people to us to search our apartment, and the order to burn the books came from our mission president, Brother Burkhardt.

Marianne: At the time, everyone here was saying, “Well, religion, that’s going to be abolished. In this country, there will be no more churches. Religion will be abolished.” That was really the big concern we had here, that there would be no more religion. Especially those in the government were saying it. We had a relative, a brother-in-law, who was a big party member. He was always spouting this rubbish. “Sooner or later, mark my words . . .” And when we were interrogated, it was always a frightening experience. What do they really want? Where did they get that information?

I remember once I was at home alone with my little boy when this lady came and introduced herself, saying she was from the bank. I was working in the Relief Society at the time, and she wanted to do an audit of the finances for the bank, she said. I asked her if she wanted to know about my private finances or just what it was she wanted. No. She said she knew everything about what I did in the Church, and she began to tell me all about it. I’m not certain whether she said she had already spoken with Brother Albrecht or not. But she knew a lot of details. I just told her, “I’m sorry, but I don’t know anything about the Church finances.” We had been instructed, essentially, not to give out any information. “That’s the business of the branch president.” But she kept on. “You must know that. You’re an active member of your church.” She also asked me if I was happy in the Church. I said I was, but she wouldn’t leave. She kept asking and asking and asking. I don’t remember if I called my husband, but she wouldn’t let me alone. She wanted to know all about the Church finances. Then she started in on tithing. I ought to know how much tithing I paid, I ought to know that, and how many members there were. I kept saying, “I’m sorry, I can’t help you, that’s what the branch president is for. I don’t pay any attention to those things. I can’t help you.”

Kurt: But in general, they didn’t try to make a lot of trouble for us here in Bautzen. They knew that we belonged to the branch here and that we had to report on our meetings every week. We reported everything about all of our meetings to the police and that seemed to satisfy them, except for these special things, which they really put under the magnifying glass.

I had a similar visit once. I hadn’t been a member for very long, and he began asking me about Church “taxes.” I told him we didn’t have any church taxes, but then it became obvious that he knew all about our law of tithing. I told him it was one of the laws of the Church, but that it was all based on voluntary contributions. If I pay my tithing, that’s my own business, and if I don’t pay, I won’t be kicked out of the Church. Well, that’s what it was all about, I think, whether or not our tithing was a form of church “taxation.” The other churches have a fixed taxation, which is taken, in part, from their paycheck. So that was the conversation I had with this man. He introduced himself by name, but I didn’t recognize what office he came from.

Marianne: Could I say something else? One evening we heard the doorbell ring; that was after June 17, 1953 [the day of a major uprising of the citizens of East Germany against the oppressive communist government; the uprising was harshly put down by the Soviet army], and after we had been told the Church was categorically forbidden to provide refuge. During the uprisings, several political prisoners had escaped from prison. I remember we had been told that what we did privately was our own business, but that we shouldn’t do anything like that in the name of the Church. As I was saying, just after supper one night, the doorbell rang. That’s when we were still living with the Ottos in Lichtenau, and the man at the door asked if he could come in—he was a fugitive. Then he told us he knew the missionaries, and he named a name. Brother Schiebold was a missionary in our branch at the time, and I don’t remember the other one anymore. He was supposed to meet a Mr. So-and-so, but he didn’t meet him.

Kurt: He had been to see Grandpa, and Grandpa had sent him to us.

Marianne: Oh yes, that’s the way it was; that’s what came out. He claimed that he was a fugitive and a member, that he came from Hamburg and that, of course, he was in hiding and had no money to get home. Could we help him? He gave us his name and address and everything. “I can trust you with this. I am a member.” And he even told us how long he had been a member. He knew the addresses of members from Cottbus, people that we knew so that we were supposed to believe that he was a member. We gave him some money. We really couldn’t afford it, but my husband had received some money from his mother as his inheritance. At that time, this was our sacred treasure, and we gave him the money for his transportation. I remember very clearly we told him, “What we are doing we are doing as private citizens because we feel sorry for you, but this has nothing to do with the Church.” We had been warned to say that, and that was probably our salvation. I gave him some soup to eat. He slurped it down so that one was to assume he hadn’t eaten for days. Then I said to him, “Now tell us if this is too dangerous; maybe I should get the ticket from the train station for you, and you can rest a little.” “No, no,” he said. “I’ll worry about that.” He didn’t want anyone to go with him. No one! We never heard from him again. That’s the kind of man he was.

Kurt: He passed himself off to us as a fugitive.

Marianne: He escaped from Görlitz. That’s where they were doing time. We were glad we never heard from him. That meant the whole matter was done with.

Joachim: There was a lot of that going on. Someone who had a little record with the police would turn to people who had a little sympathy left in their hearts, usually religious people. They would go to them and try to raise some feelings of pity. We had people who would come right in the branch house and in the meetings and start asking questions. We didn’t know what to think of them. Were they enthusiastic investigators? That’s the way they represented themselves. But in the end, they would turn out to be clever people who were supposed to spy us out. We experienced a lot of that.

And not only men; there were also women who showed up during the week at MIA. They joined right in, everything was wonderful, and then someone from the Church recalled seeing her somewhere. They were working for the police or for someone and just tried to slip into our circle. It was usually pretty hard to just slip in; we were, after all, a pretty small group. It wasn’t so easy. We all knew one another. We could tell they had spent a lot of time studying us from the outside.

The reports we had to turn in on our meetings varied a great deal. In the first few years after the events of June 17, 1953, they handled things very, very strictly. We had to file a report on our meetings every week. Who were the speakers? Who was presiding? Everything had to be in the report. Later, we only had to turn in a monthly report. In the last few years, they just told us, “We don’t care what you do in your meetings; you can do whatever you want. You just have to tell us when you hold your meetings, what are the starting times.” And this happened only once or twice a year, whenever we had some contact with them. They handled things very differently then.

Then the district officials set up an office that was responsible for church affairs, and I was often invited to attend forums conducted by them. They invited the various church leaders, asked them what kinds of problems they were having, whether they could do anything to help, etc. Usually that was in connection with an upcoming election, when they wanted to attract a little sympathy from the people.

We even invited one of the city councilors who was up for election to come and meet with us. He informed us about his goals and plans. That was a good thing. At least I considered it a good thing because then the members could talk very openly with the man. He was a functionary of the CDU [Christian Democratic Union, one of the political parties in the GDR]. His job was to represent the interests of the Christians to the authorities. That was nice. The members asked some good questions. They kept him so busy he couldn’t even squeeze in his propaganda. He had time only to answer our questions. And we were able to come out in the open and tell him, “We’re ready to help out. We’re ready to support our country, but on the basis of free agency.” And we were able to scatter in a lot of criticism at the same time. I thought it was a good thing that we became a little better known. I have always had the feeling that these people come around only to give us their opinions. As it turned out, he got a little instruction from us. That was pretty satisfying to me. At least I know that after this kind of open meeting with the officials we had a better relationship. We had fewer difficulties.

G. Davis: Would you say that the insurrection of 1953 was a turning point in your relationships with the government. Did they become stricter? Did they curtail your missionary work?

Joachim: More and more it began to reach a head. That went on until 1959. To begin with, after June 17, 1953, the day of the insurrection, the government began to give us a little air, a little breathing space. They said, “OK, maybe we were pulling the reins in a little too tight; you were shoved around a little, etc. Now you can have a little more room to spread out.” For a while things were fine. But we noticed that systematically, little by little things started coming back. They reintroduced regulations concerning our branch house, reports on our meetings. All written material that came from outside the country was inspected. Each local area handled it a little differently. Then they seemed to be very concerned about the fact that we served missions and thereby robbed the state of workers. That was the reason they gave. They could not afford to let people be unproductive. The missionaries were workers without work, they produced nothing for the state, and the government couldn’t allow that. So, missionary activity had to go. We could do missionary work in our free time but no more door-to-door. After that we called retired members to serve full-time missions.

G. Davis: Were you able to have stake missionaries after the stake was organized?

Joachim: Yes. We already had district missionaries, but the kind of work they were permitted to do restricted them a bit. We were not allowed to do any missionary work in public. We could not set up any street displays. All of that was declared illegal. We saw that other churches had a window display, but when we came into the center of a city, they said, “No!” Those who already had something, that fell under the laws of customary behavior. But when we turned in a new application, we got a very strict “No!”

Also printing of any kind was strictly controlled, even for invitations or for little tracts. Of course, the missionaries were also clever. They said to one another, “If you don’t get permission in this area, go try somewhere else.” The various officials in the various areas were very different. In Bautzen they were very strict. They were a little afraid to make any concessions to us because of the higher officials. It was the same over in Görlitz, wasn’t it?

Marianne: It was bad there. We were not even allowed to write “Until we meet again” on an obituary. They gave you a selection of prewritten verses, and you could choose one. That was all pretty stupid, but there was nothing we could do.

G. Davis: How did you maintain relations with the Church?

Joachim: We took advantage of every opportunity to get together with any of the authorities who came in. When I was a missionary, I had the opportunity to meet Henry D. Moyle in West Berlin. I even had a personal conversation with President Kimball at the chapel in Charlottenburg. There were a few from the Quorum of the Seventy, but the most beautiful time for us was when they had the Leipzig Fair. When the fair came around, many foreign visitors came as guests. Many of the Church authorities took this opportunity to come to the fair, and then we were all invited to a special conference at the chapel in Leipzig. We would have a meeting for all the leaders of the branches the day before, and on the next day, a meeting for all the members. The branch house in Leipzig in those days was an old factory building on Gerber Street. We stood on the steps and anywhere just to be there. It was really an inspiration to see someone from the leadership of the Church again.

I will say that the brethren from over there in the West did everything possible to make contact with us, and I must also say it was a great inspiration to us. The members from Bautzen and Görlitz got together and rented a bus and rode together to Leipzig. That was really an event. It was only a meeting, but it was a place to meet one of our leaders, and that was always a high point for us; it was like a conference.

Kurt: But, as we have said, that was possible only until ’61. In 1961 came the Wall, and then it was all over.

Joachim: When the Wall was built, we were completely isolated.

Kurt: After that we didn’t even have these good contacts in Leipzig. But when the Tabernacle Choir sang in West Berlin and the president of the Church was in Berlin, we were there.

Marianne: But the leadership did everything—a special train, right? So the members somehow made the arrangements. But maybe that was arranged from the other side, from the leadership in America. Because, a special train!?—You have to get permission for that—so that all the members could go over. But that was also before 1961.

Joachim: With the building of the Wall, it was as good as over with us. All contacts were shut off. And then, then we began to develop an entirely different attitude. All I know is that the Brethren told us that we had to live according to the laws of our government. We could not break the law in order to solve our ecclesiastical problems; that wouldn’t do. On top of all that, we had this problem: we wanted to go to the temple.

There were many members who were already retired and were permitted to travel to West Germany for a visit, but the temple was in Switzerland, and their travel visa did not permit that. Of course, it would have been possible. You just had to climb into the car of one of the relatives over there, and they could have taken you to Switzerland with them. But then you wouldn’t have a temple recommend. Our mission president could not write out a recommend because he couldn’t give the impression he was breaking a law of the state by approving travel to a foreign country when the person had no papers authorizing such a trip.

So that was our problem. When the Brethren began to say that we would live to see the day when our wishes would be fulfilled, when we would travel to the temple, we always thought of the Swiss Temple as our temple. Someday they will open the borders, everything will be possible, and we will be permitted to travel.

When this kind of talk was going on, something began happening with us. Maybe not even consciously at first, but we began to be aware that the government was beginning to show a different attitude toward us. They were saying, “The Mormons want to travel to their temple. But they accept the fact that this is forbidden, and they don’t go.” There were even cases where members went to the police and said, “I want permission to travel to West Germany. I am retired. But I also want to travel to Switzerland.” And then they got permission. Even though they had no relatives there, they got permission! Those were exceptions. But by this, we recognized that they were showing us more trust. Like they were saying, “If you are open about it and have not broken the laws, maybe we can make a little exception in your case.”

Later we noticed that more and more things began to develop in a different direction. We noticed that the government was becoming very anxious to get capital, to get hard currency into our country, the German mark, the American dollar. In 1976 my mother flew to America on a visit, and she was given instructions on the general rules of behavior. She would not do anything to harm our country when she went abroad, they told her, because she would certainly tell her people there what living conditions were like here, etc., and it was important that they receive a good impression. And my mother said, “Oh yes, we can certainly do that. Things are going well for us here, and I will tell them that. And if they give me some money over there, may I then bring the money home with me?” “Bring as much back as you can! There is no limit.”

They kept a sharp lookout for this kind of currency, and when we began to build the temple, it became very clear why they were actually treating us so nicely. We had always demonstrated that we lived a decent life and that we supported the state, but behind it all, behind all this special treatment, lay the fact that they wanted our hard currency from the West. And because of this, they may have permitted us many things that they may not have permitted other people. I am thinking in particular of travel permits. I heard from many brothers who had been permitted to cross the border just by asking for a travel permit. And they got it, even though they could not demonstrate they had relatives over there. They just said in all honesty, “I want to visit a friend. We have worked together for a long time, and now he is over there in West Germany. He is working in my Church. We are both active members.” And they gave them permission. But that really began to develop for us in a positive way only in the seventies.

G. Davis: And what did you think when you heard they were going to build a temple here?

Joachim: I was so surprised that the temple problem was going to be solved in this way, that we were going to have a temple in our own country. From my point of view, I was overjoyed that such a thing could happen. And in this connection, I think I began to see a little further into the future. I began to see that because of this a new era was beginning, where we could also rearrange our missionary efforts. Of course, the consequences have been that we now have full-time missionaries and that we have been able to send missionaries abroad. But the fact that the state has declared itself so favorable to us, that was a real surprise, and I must say that credit is due to the good leadership we had here in the Church.

Marianne: I would like to second that. We were always taught that if we received permission to cross the border, whether retired or not, we should not take advantage of the situation and say to ourselves, “I’ll take this permission to travel, but I’ll stay over there and never come back. I’ll emigrate out the back door.” And I think the government authorities must have noticed that we, as a Church, accepted the principle of being subject to authority, supporting the government, etc. There may have been a few individuals who reacted differently, but that’s what we were taught.

Kurt: Although they knew there were very few Communists in the Church.

Marianne: You might as well say none. But I believe that doing good does help the State, and if the government notices that these are people who have been taught by their church to do an honest day’s work, to do their best, to be diligent, then that has to help the State. And they must have noticed over time that there was no subversive activity against the government going on. They see that this is the case, that we are serious about it, and that there really is a religion which teaches its people to do good.

G. Davis: Why did you decide to stay here?

Marianne: I can tell you. When the demonstrations came in ’53, many left, good members, leaders in the Church. I remember those times very well. I was very confused and said to myself, “Maybe we should just take a trip over to Berlin and ask . . .” We asked ourselves, “Should we stay here or get out?” and we decided our place was here. I was very nervous. First this family left, then that one. We didn’t want to lose our chance.

Kurt: There were a few members here who, I think, started a regular stream of emigration. I remember, it was in 1960, ’59 or ’60, before the Wall went up. There was such an uproar among the members. We were coming home from a conference in Dresden, and during the conference, the members had been talking among themselves a little and saying they had the strong feeling we ought to get out, and they influenced others. Here we were sitting on the train with our brothers and sisters, and they were saying to me: “You’ve got it made. You’ve got relatives over there in America!”

Marianne: That really made us nervous. Should we get out or not?

Joachim: We simply had to make a decision; in any case, we were very agitated. And I said, “Why leave? Somebody has to stay here. We can’t all just take off. We can’t do that.” And I really had to exert myself to calm my little flock at the time, because such a strong mood had swept over us to just get out. There was one brother who started a regular hysteria with his attitudes. Of course, he couldn’t say anything openly in the public meetings, but he would tell someone, and then they would say the president was of this or that opinion. It was terrible. Then one day the whole family was suddenly gone, and they had a lot of children, too.

Marianne: His last daughter, she was on a mission and had to quit her mission early to join her parents in the West. But we didn’t want to leave; this was our home. Earlier, after the insurrection, I could have gone over, but Mother said, “Well, we may have a little less to eat here, but we’re all together, and if we stick together, we’ll get along.” That was right. It really wasn’t such a great thing, going West. One day you’re here, and suddenly you’re in a big whirlpool of confusion. Then when Father said, “Our place is here,” that was the end of the matter. “They can all go if they want to. We’re staying here.” And we did.

G. Davis: Have you looked on staying in East Germany as a sacrifice?

Kurt: I have to say that I have not considered it a sacrifice. We found our Church callings here. In such a small branch, everyone has to have several callings. When someone can’t be there for one reason or another, things don’t run so smoothly. It all depended on each and every individual, and we had plenty to do here. There was scarcely a Sunday when every brother in the branch did not have to speak or teach a lesson either in the Sunday School or in priesthood meeting or with the younger brothers in the Aaronic Priesthood. We didn’t get many visitors here. We were so used to this activity that we didn’t look at it as a sacrifice.

Marianne: Somehow I was quite happy in our branch.

G. Davis: Did you have the feeling that in spite of the difficulties the Lord was blessing you here in this branch?

Marianne: Yes, we were such a small branch; I was always happy here. We were like a family.

Joachim: We had a lot of work. If there was only one person responsible for the MIA, that person had to organize something for every meeting. Even if we didn’t do something terribly exciting every time, neither did we just study the gospel. We concerned ourselves with educational things of a general nature and interest. I was looking back over some of the themes we had in the MIA in the past, and I must say they were wonderful.

Kurt: It is somewhat difficult for us because we live in Bautzen, and the branch is in Bischofswerda, and it takes a while to get there. In principle, if there are meetings during the week, it is possible to get to them only if you have your own car, because public transportation doesn’t come and go according to our needs. It regulates itself according to work and shopping schedules.

When we had our branch here in Bautzen—our little group—and when we knew one another intimately, we could tell just by looking at one another what each one needed. We had no problems then. As has been said, that’s the way things were. We didn’t have a lot of choices. We couldn’t have a different calling every few years. Brother Albrecht was the branch president for thirty years, and I was for the last two, before we became part of the Bischofswerda Branch. I was the branch clerk for twenty-five years and, of course, at the same time a counselor in the branch presidency.

We didn’t have a big selection of brethren here, so each one had his calling and filled his calling. There wasn’t a lot of opportunity for us to see how things were done outside. It was only at conferences and the like, when we met with other members, that we could hear and experience things and see how others were doing it.

Joachim: But I have to say that this new organization of our branch, being transferred to Bischofswerda, has also been a good thing. It was an intelligent decision that corresponded with the times exactly. It was also a blessing for us. That’s the way I look at it. We had improved our family finances to such a degree that we could afford the trip over to Bischofswerda. Our family got a car. We were then able to take the brothers and sisters with us, the ones who live in this area and had to go by train. We solved the problem with the members here in the city. We couldn’t have done that a few years ago. We were prepared for it. We had the cars; we could drive over.

I have also said that if we would do our missionary work here then we could become an independent branch again. It’s a problem when we have to send our investigators over to Bischofswerda. After you are converted, you accept all the difficulties and problems, and you overcome them. But before someone is converted, to take them out of the comfort of their apartment and tell them they have to take the train over to Bischofswerda and will get back at eleven o’clock at night—that’s difficult.

Marianne: That is really a difficulty. We are members, and for us that is understandable and normal. When I want to attend Relief Society, for example, I have to leave here at four o’clock and get home about eleven o’clock at night. And if there is no one to pick me up at the train station, I have an hour’s walk to get home. And it’s dark, and I’m afraid. It’s pretty lonely, and things happen now and then. You can’t always be calling on our Father in Heaven, making demands of him. It’s not much fun. I leave here at four and get there at five-thirty. But Relief Society doesn’t begin until seven-thirty, so I have two hours with nothing to do. Sure, I can clean the branch house or take along some knitting, but somehow that is . . . Seven-thirty to eight-thirty, and then you get to the train about ten. We have a good time when we have to take the train. There are three of us, sometimes four. Now one of the younger sisters has a car and can take the four of us over. That’s a lot of fun. That’s nice. But if we have an investigator, we don’t have enough room.

For two years, I took the train so that Papa could load everyone up and take them over in the car.

G. Davis: Brother Albrecht, what were the big problems you had to solve when you were branch president?

Joachim: Keeping the branch house clean was the problem that got on my nerves more than anything. The building we were in with those big, thick walls! They were built from some kind of stone, granite. The building was at least five hundred years old. Earlier there had been a little brewery in the basement. The basement had vaulted arches, and all of the groundwater had gone up through the stone walls. On the main floor of the branch house, the water crept through the stones right up to the ceiling. We had really wet spots on the wall. When it was lovely outside, summer, one would naturally think that it would be nice if the dampness would go away, but it was in the walls. They were so wet you could pull the wallpaper off. And the dampness had so much saltpeter in it that it was continually flaking off. So we had to clean them or put wallpaper over them, or they would just go on dripping.

Then we covered the chapel with large panels. We screwed some furring onto the walls and attached these plates to the furring. That provided a space so that air could circulate. In this way, we hid the wet walls, so to speak. It looked lovely, but the walls began to smell. And if we didn’t air the place out during the week—but we couldn’t be airing it out all the time, could we—when we came, well, this musty, strange smell was not too pleasant. I guess I could say we pulled our hair out over this building.

Kurt: That is the only thing in the Church that I have not really understood. President Burkhardt knew what was coming up in the future. This putting the two branches together—that wasn’t planned overnight. And we worked, literally, up to the last day on those walls. We built in a timed thermostat and tried everything else; then suddenly the word came out from the authorities: that’s it, shut the doors, close it down. They knew what was coming in advance, didn’t they? We turned in our budget every year, didn’t we? All of our remodeling plans had to be approved by the mission headquarters, and they let us work right up to the last day.

But, I guess we had to leave it in good shape. There’s a grocery store in there now, and if it weren’t for us, they wouldn’t be able to sell their groceries.

Joachim: We did our duty there right up to the last minute. We invested thousands of marks in cash and our energy and our time and our ideas.

Marianne: I’ll tell you something lovely, something wonderful. I’ll never forget it. When Brother Albrecht was replaced by Brother Nikol, Brother Albrecht said, “I know that Brother Nikol is not able to do much physical work anymore”—he knew that the whole building project was coming up—“so I will support and help him as much as I can.” I find that quite beautiful. When one has done all he could for so many years, when he has got everything going, and then another comes along to finish it off—that he could have such thoughts. I find it beautiful when people cooperate like that.

G. Davis: How do you feel in relation to the future? Are you optimistic?

Joachim: Yes. I have my own particular visions when I see what is happening here in our country, in our city, in relation to the Church. Now I can speak more openly and more freely with people, and even though they have their own ideas and plans, I have the feeling that some I have spoken with we will one day accept as members. Many of them.

G. Davis: Do you believe that the Lord is behind all of these great changes that have come about this past year?

Kurt: We have talked about that. In every country where the Church gets a foothold, where the Church can carry out its missionary work, a new world will open up for the people. We have certainly experienced that here in East Germany—ever since the temple was built. Over ninety thousand people came through in two weeks. Since then we have been working in Freiberg as temple missionaries—we go over every two weeks. At first we worked primarily in the Information Bureau in Freiberg. After Brother and Sister Birsfelder went home and before Brother and Sister Müller arrived, the tours were directed by the temple missionaries. We learned then how hungry people were to really learn about us.

Marianne: The people infect one another with their curiosity; it doesn’t come from the members. The ones who were there come back with their relatives. They say, “I was here once,” and now they are there with relatives from West Germany.

Kurt: In the business where I worked, I was the only member of the Church. I had a colleague there; she is now an official guide for the East German Travel Agency and takes tours around every weekend. Whenever she is in the area, she arranges it so that she can come by the temple. In the last five years, she has brought many busloads by and has given the people much information. It’s simply amazing.

When I was in the war, there was suddenly this kind of an atmosphere. There was a different relationship. My comrades would come to me and say, “Tell me about your church.” Many were becoming more and more dissatisfied with the system. They were members of a church but had no real association with it and hardly ever went to church. But they were very interested in our way of life.

G. Davis: We have baptized many people who had their first contact with the Church at the temple. I don’t know if you are aware of this or not, but in the 1970s, when President Kimball was the prophet, we were asked to pray often that the borders to the Eastern countries would be opened so that missionary work could be carried out there. And now, beginning in July [1990], we will have new missions in Warsaw and in Prague.

Marianne: In Czechoslovakia? What is the world coming to?