Saints and Villains by Denise Giardina✔✔✔✔✔

I ordered this book after reading about it in a list of favorite historical fiction novels created by a book club in the U.S. and it stayed on the shelf for probably five years before picking it up to read two weeks ago. It wasn't that I didn't want to read it , but how I choose a book already on my shelf varies considerably. Since I've been reading non-fiction almost exclusively, I felt that historical fiction wasn't too far off the track, and this just caught my eye one day - and I knew it would be the next one I read.

The name Dietrich Bonhoeffer first became known to me when I was organist at a German Lutheran Church in London, Ontario during my years in university. The Pastor, Godfrey Oelsner, mentioned him often in his sermons, so I knew that he was a German theologian who had been imprisoned by the Nazis during WW II, and finally executed. I can't remember whether I read any of his Letters and Papers From Prison, but I was aware that he was a man of great faith and compassion, and was considered a martyr by the Lutheran Church.

This was an incredible book to read, and for me it was the first book I have ever read detailing the rise of Hitler, the overthrow of the German government, the resistance movement led many Germans, and the unfolding of the war from a German vantage point. It also depicts the confusion within the Church - those who sympathized with Hitler, and those who knew the only way to defeat him from within was to kill him. Bonhoeffer had to leave Germany at least twice because he so inflamed the hierarchy in the Church.

The most illuminating part was Bonhoeffer's time in prison leading up to his execution - the terrible conditions under which he was held in the beginning, then a relaxing of rules as time goes on, and it is at this point that he becomes truly a pastor as he ministers to other prisoners and becomes a friend to one of his guards.


A quote from Bonhoeffer: " God makes a convenient scapegoat. Or people always think God is absent when things are going bad for them. Things go better and God is back. Well, I want to live in a world as if there were no God. That is the only way God can truly be with any of us."