The incredible story of Father Gereon who, enlisted by the Nazis, refuses to swear allegiance to Hitler and becomes a Franciscan. To then finally arrive in Japan
“When I was an eight-year-old boy and an altar boy, one day a missionary came. He told how devoted Japanese children were. After the sermon, I followed him into the sacristy and said to him: “Father, I’m coming with you”. He looked at me: “What? But you’re still a kid.” I began to cry. The father told me: “Listen to me, to come to Japan every day you have to say at least one Hail Mary. Do you want to make this promise?”. “Yes I will!”. I started right away. I kept my promise until one day – exactly thirty years later – I actually arrived in Japan». Already this dialogue says a lot about the extraordinary nature of Father Gereon Goldmann, a German Franciscan friar, who died in 2003 after long years of apostolate in the East. But what makes his story truly unique is the thirty years that elapsed between the dream of the mission and the actual landing in the land of the rising sun: a chain of events that not even the most imaginative of novelists would dare to imagine. And that today we can retrace by reading the new, accurate version of Father Gereon’s autobiography, “Under the shadow of his wings. My life from seminarian in Hitler’s Germany to missionary in the Far East”, in the bookshop for the types of Ares.
Born in 1916 into a Catholic family, the young Gereon entered the seminary with the Franciscans, with the hope of being sent to Japan one day (the same desire that animated Jorge Mario Bergoglio as a young Jesuit). At the outbreak of the Second World War, Goldmann was assigned to an SS unit and in 1940 took part in the invasion of France, but – taking advantage of a six-month leave – he went to study theology in Freiburg. In 1943, having finished the officer cadet course, when it was time to swear an oath of allegiance to Nazism, he refused, unlike his comrades. For this he is expelled from the SS, transferred to the Wermacht and assigned to the health service. Destined for the Russian front, luckily for him he is repatriated for health reasons: his division will in fact be annihilated in Stalingrad. After the Allied landings in Sicily, he takes part in military operations in Southern Italy. Goldmann was ordained a deacon during a leave in Germany, after which he managed to meet Pope Pius XII in Rome, who authorized his priestly ordination.
Back at the front, he was taken prisoner in Monte Cassino, then transferred to a French prison camp in Algeria. There, while in detention, Goldmann finally receives priestly ordination. He then gets to be transferred to Morocco, where the German prisoners were interned, and serves there as army chaplain. In 1946, on the basis of false accusations, he was tried as a Nazi criminal and sentenced to death. But once again the script provides for a twist: the fatal sentence is suspended. Back in Germany, Father Gereon resided there until 1954. It is only at that point that he can finally fulfill his missionary dream: sent to Tokyo, he will live there until his death.
The decision to put his incredible journey in writing (which will give rise to an authentic world bestseller) was born almost by chance. It is Father Gereon himself who recounts it in the book: “When I arrived in Japan and, just a year later, I became parish priest, I was completely devoid of the means to be able to carry out a pastoral activity among a population of five hundred thousand people, many of whom were in a state of severe poverty. I had to work: as a rag-picker, I emptied the rubbish bins for many years, then selling what they contained that was useful». One day, here was the turning point: «The good business began when I obtained permission to harvest even in the bases of the American occupation forces. Thousands of families lived in those centers and the heavy work yielded thousands of dollars. Numerous American clubs invited me to tell my experiences of war and captivity. So I went to speak in many places, as far as Korea. The result of all those conferences was a book printed in the USA in several editions: “The Shadow of His Wings”. A Japanese magazine began serializing the translation of the book. Then followed, in several editions, the publication of the book in Japanese, shortly after in Korean, in several languages of South-East Asia, in Indian dialects and in African languages». That’s not all: the German edition will be released in 1990 (two years after the Italian one); in 2015 it will be the turn of the French and Spanish ones.
There is no shortage of interesting pages dedicated to the confreres in the book. When he visits the island of Hokkaido (in northern Japan), Father Gereon is shocked, so much so that in a letter dated November 25, 1962 he notes: «Coming for the first time to some of these outposts, I realized that I , in Tokyo, I have a relatively easy life. During this tour I reached Bibai, a mining settlement that extends deep into the mountains and into the virgin forest. There a Franciscan confrere of mine runs a small missionary house. A room that doesn’t deserve to be called that, the bed on the floor, not a person to prepare him food, with a food that reminded me of my imprisonment. Poorer and more disinterested than that it is truly impossible to imagine». The ending was beautiful: «And yet, strange to say, his bedroom is always overflowing with young people. It’s a mystery to me how he manages this.’