Rose will not leave you in peace.” Night after night, Germans awoke to find subversive slogans like “Freedom!” and “Down with Hitler!” scrawled on walls.
Graf’s main job in the White Rose was to recruit new members. But his work ended in February 1943 when the Gestapo arrested him and the organization’s leaders. Two months later he was convicted of high treason and aiding the enemy, and sentenced to death. All appeals were denied, and Graf was beheaded on 12 October. Just before his execution, he wrote a final note to his family. “On this day I’m leaving this life and entering eternity. God’s blessings on us. In Him we are and we live.”
3 January
Takashi Nagai
3 January 1908—1 May 1951
The Saint of Urakami
When the atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki, Takashi Nagai, a radiologist, was on duty at the city’s medical college hospital. Although badly injured in the blast, he pitched in with the rest of the medical staff to treat the hundreds of wounded that began trickling into the hospital. It was only a day later that he was able to make his way to the suburb of Urakami where he lived with his wife, Midori, and their children.
The children had been sent to the mountains for safekeeping two days before the explosion. But Midori, and the house she and Nagai shared, were gone. He was able to recognize the carbonized remains of his wife only by the rosary clutched in the powdered bones of her right hand. Stricken with grief, Nagai prayed: “Jesus, you carried the heavy Cross until you were crucified upon it. Now You come to shed a light of peace on the mystery of suffering and death, Midori’s and mine.”
Nagai had come to Christianity as an adult. The son and grandson of physicians who practiced Shinto, Nagai went through a period of atheism during his medical training. He converted in his mid-twenties when his future wife, Midori, a devout Roman Catholic, slipped a catechism into a care package that she sent to him during his mandatory period of military service.
A month after the destruction of Nagasaki, Nagai was stricken by radiation sickness. Already diagnosed in the spring of that year with leukemia caused by his medical work with X-rays, Nagai remained near death for a month. But to the surprise of everyone he recovered. During his convalescence, he built a small hut from the rubble of his Urakami house where he lived for two years with his children, mother-in-law, and two other relatives. Eventually he built a smaller one for himself as a hermitage in which he spent hours in prayer and contemplation. He named the hut Nyoko do, “As Yourself House,” from Jesus’ command to “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
It was in Nyoko do that Nagai began writing poems and books that commemorated the victims of Nagasaki, connected their suffering to the suffering of Christ, and praised the spirit of loving forgiveness. With chilling poetic finality he describes the incineration of young Christian schoolgirls “like lilies white” who died “burning red” chanting psalms. One of his poems, inspired by the death of Christian schoolgirls as they participated in morning prayer, is a stark reminder of the more than eight thousand Japanese Christians who perished in the blast. It was written as he lay dying of leukemia.
4 January
Albert Camus
7 November 1913—4 January 1960
Resisting Murder
Philosopher, novelist, and activist Albert Camus was no stranger to violence. During the Nazi occupation of France, he was a member of the French Resistance and edited the illegal newspaper Combat under the nom de guerre “Beauchard.” But by war’s end, he was sick of the killing and destruction he’d witnessed. He knew there had to be a better way to resolve differences. He voiced his conviction in 1946 in a remarkable series of essays titled Neither Victims nor Executioners.
Camus argued that people today live in a constant state of fear and that this fear “implies and rejects the same fact: a world where murder is legitimate and where human life is considered trifling.” The fear is often translated into patriotic zeal that encourages killing for one’s country. But for his part, declared Camus, he can no longer “hold to any truth which might oblige me, directly or indirectly, to demand a man’s life.” He will not be a murderer, and will resist those who advocate murder. Camus admitted that he wasn’t naïve enough to wish for a world in which violence is eliminated, “but rather one in which murder is not legitimated” by the state.
A first step toward resisting murder is defending the right of “universal intercommunication,” or “le dialogue,” between humans. At the very least, this means refusing to see natives of other countries, cultures, beliefs, and tongues as strangers to be feared and resisted. It’s difficult to wage war when the “enemy” wears a human face.
Camus lived by these principles for the rest of his life. He was an outspoken champion of pacifism and opponent of capital punishment. He became an advocate for human rights, working with UNESCO until resigning to protest the United Nations’ recognition of Generalissimo Franco as Spain’s ruler. He tried to arbitrate a peaceful settlement in the Algerian War, a conflict that especially disturbed him since he was born in Algeria to a pied-noir or French settler family. He spoke out against Soviet aggression at a time when it was unfashionable for intellectuals to do so. And in his writings—novels, plays, political essays, and philosophical monographs—he tirelessly urged his readers to join him in resisting murder. “All I ask,” he wrote, “is that in the midst of a murderous world, we agree to reflect on murder and to make a choice. After that, we can distinguish those who accept the consequences of being murderers themselves or the accomplices of murderers, and those who refuse to do so with all their force and being.”
Albert Camus died in a car accident three years after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature.
5 January
Lanza del Vasto
29 September 1901—5 January 1981
Servant of Peace
When many people hear the word peace, they automatically think of the absence of armed conflict or the intervals between wars. But this negative definition of peace only scratches the surface. Genuine peace—the kind that makes for an end to warfare—is a lifestyle that seeks to nurture just relations between people on a daily basis so that well-being may flourish. It involves an inner conversion as well as a certain kind of comportment in the world. It’s not just an occasional cause. It’s a way of life.
Few people have appreciated this more than the Italian nobleman Lanza del Vasto. He spent some months in India before the Second World War learning the principles of nonviolence from Mohandas Gandhi. After the war, he returned to India for a while to work with Gandhi’s disciple Vinoba Bhave. Gandhi was so impressed by del Vasto’s dedication to nonviolence that he gave him the name Shantidas, “Servant of Peace.”
In 1948, del Vasto, his wife, and several friends began an experiment in communal nonviolent living, which they called the Community of the Ark. Located in France, Ark members embraced a simple lifestyle that aimed for self-sufficiency and incorporated nonviolence into every aspect of their life together. Believing that in order to help heal the world’s violence they needed to distance themselves from its baleful influence, del Vasto and his fellow Ark members saw their community as a refuge in which to build their commitment to peace and rejuvenate their spirits. As he once said, “We are accused of going against the times. We are doing that deliberately and with all our strength.” But the community was never intended to be a head-in-the-sand retreat. Del Vasto and his companions were frequently in the thick of public witnesses against war, torture, the nuclear arms race, and militarism, actions for which del Vasto was arrested many times.
Del Vasto’s pivotal meeting with Gandhi convinced him that “the most efficient action and the most significant testimony in favor of nonviolence and truth is living a life in which there is no violence or unfairness, neither hidden violence nor brutal violence; neither legal and permitted unfairness, nor illegal unfairness.” Trained by the Community of the Ark in this kind of life, he and his followers felt empowered to help others find