I am reading Eric Metaxas’ fantastic new biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who led the resistance in the church and participated in the plot to kill Hitler. Hitler had him executed in April 1945 just a few weeks before the end of the war.?
Metaxas also wrote the best selling biography Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery.?
I found this passage particularly meaningful because it reminds me of my 92 year-old mother.
On the day of the boycott [of Jewish stores, April 1, 1933] in Berlin, Dietrich?s grandmother was shopping.?The patrician ninety-year-old was not about to be told where to shop. When SA men [Brownshirt stormtroopers] tried to restrain her from entering one store, she informed them that she would shop where she liked and did so. Later that day she did the same at the famous Kaufhaus des Westens, the world?s largest department store, ignoring the silly kickline of SA men stationed in front. The story of Julie Bonhoeffer marching past Nazi gorillas was a favorite in the Bonhoeffer family, who saw in her an embodiment of the values they sought to live by.
