Chapter 11, part 4: Profound Impressions

Gutted out freight car - with flowers.

July 29 - July 31, 1942.

Summary:

The five soldier students — Alexander Schmorell, Hans Scholl, Willi Graf, Hubert Furtwängler, and Raimund Samüller — continue their eastward travel towards the Russian front. Willi Graf says they are living in the day. He reads Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey in German translation.

RAF bombs Willi Graf’s hometown of Saarbrücken, this time not even pretending to aim for military or industrial sites. They strike the downtown area, near Willi’s home and his father’s Gasthaus.

Eugen Grimminger turns fifty, and the Scholls make preparations for Robert Scholl’s upcoming trial. Sophie has a hard time enjoying her friend Lisa Remppis’ stories about her boyfriend Gust Schlehe. All Sophie can think about: Her father’s trial, and her own mandatory assignment at a munitions factory.

The five soldier students focus their conversation and private thoughts on three topics. First, the Russian partisans whom they cannot see, but whose handiwork is plainly visible.

Second, the beauty of the Russian landscape. Hans Scholl notes that even next to gutted freight cars and distraught faces, flowers bloom.

Finally, they talk about man’s destruction of that beauty, wishing that just as rainstorms had cleared the air for them, so a tempest would come and wash away the cruelty, destruction, and despair imposed by “godless men.”

Hans Scholl longs to “go forth, leaving everything behind.”

Why this matters:

• All of us occasionally find ourselves in places or situations where we must simply live day to day, not planning for the future or thinking too hard about things we’re going through. In those days, the most important thing: Having a safety net, a support group of friends with whom you can talk things out.
  Willi Graf had barely survived the Russian front from 1941-1942. During that tour of duty, he had had no one to talk to, no one who shared his values. His despair can sometimes be alarming to read.
  Contrast that to the clinical rotation in 1942, spent with Alex, Hans, Hubert, and Raimund. They provided him with sanity in a war zone that was still as awful as it had been the previous year. Willi Graf still saw the same atrocities, the same unjust German actions.
  But this time, he was not alone.
  If you are facing crises, reach out to a safety net, friends you can trust. Friends with whom you can express your feelings and worries.

• Gnaw on this a few minutes. Sometimes waging war can have unintended consequences. A country sends its young people to another country to kill and maim.
  But as was the case with the five soldier students, sometimes those young people get to the country of the hated enemy and find fellow human beings, beauty, and contradictions to warmongering propaganda. The enemy is humanized.
  Now, sometimes the young fighters are so entrenched in nationalistic propaganda that they are blind to that humanity, to any beauty in the countryside. But “war” can be life-changing in a positive sense for soldiers who have not been radicalized.

Have you been in a position where you felt things were hopeless, until your friends stepped in? Have you been able to be a safety net for one of your friends?

Have you ever gone into an adversarial situation, thinking you know everything about your opponent (“enemy”), only to find out they share your hopes and dreams?

Talk about it!

White Rose History, Volume II, pages 143-144.

Notes and references available only to paid subscribers.