Cristina Arana de Sanguinetti. On January 20, 2012, I was reading an online Argentinean newspaper, La Nación, when I found an article by a well-known journalist; it was a report about the Argentinean Jews who escaped the Nazi Holocaust. I am interested in learning all I can about our older brothers, the Jews, because our Father and the Founder of Schoenstatt also suffered during the Nazi regime.
Fr. Joseph Kentenich was imprisoned because, as the Schoenstatt founder, he educated people who would not easily become mass men, the goal of National Socialism. On January 20,1942, Fr. Kentenich freely decided to go to the concentration camp because he sensed, in his prayer, that this is what God wanted from him. In Dachau, he lived in inhumane conditions, which he described as a “city of death, slaves and madmen.” Fr. Kentenich also said that “in the concentration camp he experienced on a small-scale what humanity could experience in the future” and he crowned the Blessed Mother as the Queen of the concentration camp.
The Wannsee Conference
It was with great surprise that I read what the article had to say about the Wansee Conference (in Berlin), which celebrated its 70th anniversary on January 20, 2012. “Its 70th anniversary?” I quickly asked myself. But, today is the 20th of January! As I was reading the online version of the newspaper, I became aware of the “coincidence” of the dates between Fr. Kentenich’s 1-20-1942 and the terrible Wannsee Conference.
On January 20, 1942 Satan had acted strongly in Berlin, but the Blessed Mother, in Koblenz, also did not miss a beat.
The Wansee Conference, headed by Nazi leaders, was supposed to have taken place in 1941, but was postponed. The meeting only took place on January 20, 1942 and the decision was to act quickly: “from that moment, the demands of the Holocaust were given priority, even to the detriment of the war efforts, and this attitude was reflected in Hitler’s decision: regardless of the outcome of the war, the European Jews could not live.” (History of the Jews, Paul Johnson)
Fr. Kentenich was imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp, where hundreds of thousands of prisoners died. He accepted the shackles so that the entire Schoenstatt Family, each one of his children, would win the freedom granted to God’s children.
Sarah-Leah Pimentel: English translation
