Solitary Confinement, by Christopher Burney
Do Not Miss This…
Deep gratitude to the indispensable Ted Gioia for this one, which I simply have to share:
The Prisoner Who Pursued a Contemplative Life in a Nazi Solitary Confinement Cell
By Ted Gioia
Two years ago, I shared an account of Christopher Burney, a British spy captured by the Nazis in World War II. He spent 526 days in solitary confinement under brutal conditions.
He survived by developing deep skills of mindfulness and silent mediation. Then he wrote a book about it.
The book was unfairly forgotten. But my article helped bring it back to life.
A new edition of Solitary Confinement has just been released by Recovered Books, and it features my essay as introduction.
My original write-up on Burney is below:
Many books have been written about the joys of the contemplative life. But I only know of one written by a prisoner in solitary confinement.
Christopher Burney (1917-1980) had it worse than almost any inmate today. Captured by the Nazis in occupied France, and held in Fresnes Prison, he survived on a single daily bowl of watery soup with a little bread—and even that was taken away sometimes in punishment… READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE
Sounds great.
In a related vein, I recommend the wartime diaries of Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jewish woman who's community is in the process of being shipped off to the camps. A second part consists of letters from a transit camp en route to the chambers.
First published in English in 1986 the New York Times reviewer said it was “A story of spiritual growth such as I have seldom seen anywhere, written with the interior richness and woven design of a Jamesian novel . . .”
That interior richness is a mark of its honesty, not artifice. In unrelenting service to others Etty is determined to live by the highest ideals and never stoops to blame her oppressors and the increasing restrictions on life.
She noticeably doesn’t blame God either as in this pasage.
“I think, alas, there doesn't seem to be much You Yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives. Neither do I hold You responsible. You cannot help us but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last.”
Or again . . .
"In spite of everything, you always end up with the same conviction. Life is good after all. It's not God's fault that things go awry sometimes, the cause lies in ourselves. And that's what stays with me even now, even when I’m about to be packed off to Poland with my whole family."
I love Etty's writing and her life, lived in deep deprivation in which she never lost her heart. Etty died in 1943, the last words written and thrown from the cattle car on the way to Auschwitz