Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part 1: The Bombing of Dresden

1 The Dead Need No Water

2 I Saw the Opera House Burning

3 Let’s Follow Dad—He Holds the Priesthood

4 It Was the Hunger

Part 2: Rebuilding Zion

5 If the Lord Needs Me, I’ll Go

6 The First Conference

7 Odyssey to Find a Chapel

8 If God Is for Us, Who Can Be against Us?

9 The Story of My Patriarchal Blessing

10 They Shared the Last Crumb

11 My Mission, 1953–1974

12 A Second Mission

13 Twenty-five Years a Branch President in Neubrandenburg

14 A Dollhouse for a Chapel

15 All They Have Left Is an Organ and a Window Drape

Part 3: Living with the Communists

16 All the Promises Have Been Fulfilled

17 I Saw the Russian Tanks Coming

18 Book Burning

19 The Border Guards Often Confiscated Them

20 Political Isolation

21 Church or School?

22 Time to Put Out the Lights?

23 The Way Things Were

24 Those Are Just Little Things

25 Those Were Hard Times

26 The Gospel and the Government

27 We Couldn’t Have Church Literature

28 In the Valley of the Naive

Part 4: A Brighter Day

29 A Temple in Our Country

30 Conversion Stories

31 We Hope They Call Us on a Mission