"What I Learned in
the Gulag"
Following an operation, I am
lying in the surgical ward of a camp hospital. I cannot move. I
am hot and feverish, but nonetheless my thoughts do not dissolve
into delerium, and I am grateful to Dr. Boris
Nikolayevich Kornfeld, who is sitting beside my cot and
talking to me all evening. The light has been turned out, so it
will not hurt my eyes. There is no one else in the ward.
Fervently he tells me the long
story of his conversion from Judaism to Christianity. I am
astonished at the conviction of the new convert, at the ardor of
his words.
We know each other very slightly,
and he was not the one responsible for my treatment, but there
was simply no one here with whom he could share his feelings. He
was a gentle and well-mannered person. I could see nothing bad
in him, nor did I know anything bad about him. However, I was on
guard because Kornfeld had now been living for two months inside
the hospital barracks, without going outside. He had shut
himself up in here, at his place of work, and avoided moving
around camp at all....
[The
reason for his chosen isolation was the very real threat of
murder. Dr. Kornfeld had refused to compromise his convictions
and shield criminal behavior, for he loved God more than his
life. Therefore he was a target for the criminals among the
political prisoners.]
It is already late. The whole
hospital is asleep. Kornfeld is finishing his story:
"And on the whole, do you know, I
have become convinced that there is no punishment that comes to
us in this life on earth which is undeserved. Superficially it
can have nothing to do with what we are guilty of in actual
fact, but if you go over your life with a fine-tooth comb and
ponder it deeply, you will always be able to hunt down that
transgression of yours for which you have now received this
blow."
[That's may
seem right, but it's not a Biblical statement. Though many
"blows" in life are caused by our own actions, other "blows" are
simply part of life on this earth -- allowed by God as part of a
Christian's training in trusting Him and following His way. See
John 16:33, 15:18-21 and Phil. 4:13]
I cannot see his face. Through
the window come only the scattered reflections of the lights of
the perimeter outside. The door from the corridor gleams in a
yellow electrical glow....
Those were the last words of
Boris Kornfeld. Noiselessly he went into one of the nearby wards
and there lay down to sleep. Everyone slept. There was no one
with whom he could speak. I went off to sleep myself.
I was wakened in the morning by
running about and tramping in the corridor; the orderlies were
carrying Kornfeld's body to the operating room. He had been
dealt eight blows on the skull with a plasterer's mallet while
he slept. He died on the operating table, without regaining
consciousness.
And so it happened that
Kornfeld's prophetic words were his last words on earth, and
those words lay upon me as an inheritance. You cannot brush off
that kind of inheritance by shrugging your shoulders....
I would have been inclined to
endow his words with the significance of a universal law of
life. However, one can get all tangled up that way. One would
have to admit that, on that basis, those who had received even
crueler punishments than imprisonment, those who were shot or
burned at the stake, were some sort of super-evildoers. And yet
it is the the innocent who are punished most zealously.
And what would one then have to say about our torturers? Why
does fate not punish them? Why do they prosper? [See Psalm
73:12-28]
The only solution to this would
be that the meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have
grown used to thinking, in prospering, but in the development of
the soul. From that point of view our torturers have been
punished most horribly of all: they are turning into swine; they
are departing downward from humanity. From that point of view
punishment is inflicted on those whose development... holds out
hope.
But there was something in
Kornfeld's last words that touched a sensitive chord, and that I
completely accept for myself. And many will accept the same for
themselves....
I lay there a long time in that
recovery room from which Kornfeld had gone forth to his death,
and all alone during sleepless nights I pondered with
astonishment my own life and the turns it had taken. Looking
back, I saw that for my whole conscious life I had not
understood either myself or my strivings. What had seemed for so
long to be beneficial now turned out in actuality to be fatal,
and I had been striving to go in the opposite direction to
that which was truly necessary for me. But just as the waves
of the sea knock the inexperienced swimmer off his feet and keep
tossing him back onto the shore, so also was I painfully tossed
back on dry land by the blows of misfortune. And it was only
because of this that I was able to travel the path which I had
always really wanted to travel.
It was granted to me to carry
away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke
beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being
becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful
successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was
therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer and an
oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was
doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments.
It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I
sensed within myself the first stirrings of good...."
"...in all these things we are
more than conquerors
through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that
neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor
powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height
nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to
separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus
our Lord."
Romans 8:37-39