Acknowledgments

Many people have contributed to this project, the intention of which is to preserve some memory of the faithfulness of the members of the Church in the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) who held the Church together under difficult circumstances during the forty years of communism. It is to these people themselves that we acknowledge our primary indebtedness. They lived the lives, they befriended us, they invited us into their homes, they told their stories. Thank you all!

We are deeply grateful to Manfred Schütze, former president of the Leipzig Stake and former president of the Berlin Mission. With the exception of chapter 6, “The First Conference” by Walter Krause and Walter Kindt (given us by Edith Krause), and chapter 11, “My Mission” by Käthe Würscher (given to us by John W. Welch), all the journals and historical information in part II, “Rebuilding Zion,” were collected and edited by President Manfred Schütze and are translated and published here with his kind permission.

Our thanks to Sister Edith Krause who gave us a paper contained in chapter 1, part I, entitled “The Dead Need No Water.” With the exception of that paper and “A Temple in Our Country?” written by Elke Schulze, all of the other materials were taken from taped interviews which we made ourselves in the homes of the members in the spring of 1990 and again in the spring of 1994.

For the difficult work of transcribing these tapes onto computer discs we are grateful to Maja Lund, Renate Reading, and Scott Sheffield, former graduate assistants in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages at BYU. We must take the responsibility for the translations ourselves.

Acknowledgments for the photographs are included in the caption for each.

We are especially grateful to Doris Dant, executive editor of BYU Studies, and to her staff for seeing the book through the press.

Finally, we offer our special thanks to Sister Elke Schulze of Dresden for assisting us “on site” in collecting and distributing materials, arranging hotel reservations, setting up appointments for interviews, and in general for being gracious and willing to assist with any request—reasonable or unreasonable. Thank you Elke!