"Uncle Klaus is planning to come tomorrow. Hopefully, it will happen. Then the family will be back together again comfortably. Except sadly it's not quite complete. But that too will come about. And then the long-awaited celebration will also come. One must just wait patiently. Sometime that day will come for certain. The lovely fruit season is over now. The last apple dropped from our tree yesterday."
"Bonhoeffer, with his immense capacity for empathy, worried about how his nephew, who was also his godson, was faring under these circumstances. Bonhoeffer later wrote to his own parents, "What sort of image of the world must be forming in the mind of a fourteen-year-old when for months he has to write to his father and godfather in prison? There won't be too many illusions about the world in a mind like his.""
Christoph von Dohnányi belonged to a family that resisted Nazism; his uncle Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his father Hans were imprisoned and later executed. At thirteen he sent a carefully phrased letter reflecting monitored correspondence and the need for coded language. The letter's everyday images of visits and fallen fruit concealed the perilous reality of surveillance and imminent loss. Bonhoeffer worried about the psychological effects on a child forced to write to imprisoned relatives. Despite trauma and restraint, Christoph displayed resilience and later pursued a distinguished career as a conductor devoted to central classical repertoire.
Read at The New Yorker
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