The Books I Would Take

Twice this week, an interesting question came up.

A few nights ago my wife had a nightmare. In it there was an unspecified terrorist attack on Atlanta, and we were forced to evacuate. We only had a few minutes to decide what to take with us. She shared the dream with me the following morning, and we talked about what would be important enough to grab: Rhiannon’s meds? My laptop? Family photos? My eyes gazed over the literally thousands of books that fill our house. I wondered, which books would I take?

Then yesterday, I read a Cistercian pamphlet called “The Tragic Story of the Lives of Our Jewish Brothers and Sisters.” It’s part of a series called Cistercian Witnesses of Our Time, about Cistercian monks and nuns of the last century or so who have been martyred or otherwise lived lives of heroic faith and virtue. This particular pamphlet tells the tale of a Jewish family that converted to Catholicism in the Netherlands during the early years of the twentieth century, with six (!) of the children eventually becoming Trappists. When the Nazis conquered Holland and experienced resistance from the bishops, they targeted Jews who had become Catholic, and five of these brothers and sisters were forcibly removed from the monasteries (in the middle of the night, of course) and eventually dispatched to Auschwitz, where they all perished.

Part of the drama of this story lies in the fact that these Jewish converts knew they were targets even before they were taken into custody. One of the sisters had previously written “I’ve put everything in order. I’m ready to leave. I only want to take these books with me (breviary, missal, New Testament, The Imitation of Christ). That’s enough for me.”

So for the second time in less than a week I was faced with this question: what books would I take with me if a crisis forced me to leave my home, possibly forever?