On a Crooked Cross

Question 7 (Louis de Rochemont Associates). The hammer and sickle is a crooked sort of cross, but on it many millions of Christian martyrs hang. This picture-sponsored by the same Lutheran groups and produced by the same film company that made Martin Luther, one of the memorable religious films of the '50s--compresses in one patiently detailed and quietly harrowing episode the essential facts about the most massive, subtle and effective persecution in Christian history.

The story, written from case histories by Allan Sloane and ably directed by TV's Stuart Rosenberg, takes place in a small town in East Germany. As the film begins, the local pastor, hauled into court for a travesty of a trial, is sentenced to five years at hard labor. The new pastor (sensitively played by Michael Gwynn) arrives. At once an official campaign of petty harassment gets under way. When the congregation gathers to greet its new leader, the police perfunctorily break up the party; church buildings, the inspector coldly explains, are licensed for religious education, not for social gatherings. When the pastor refuses to sign an official peace petition, hoodlums decorate his sidewalk with a political expletive: WARMONGER! When he visits a farmer who persists in attending church, he finds an official sound truck sitting outside the man's house and blaring patriotic speeches--it has been. day and night, for several weeks.

On Sunday he finds his congregation small. Many people would like to attend church, baptize their children, bury their parents in sacred ground, but they fear losing their jobs if they do, or at least the hope of advancement. The Christian community nevertheless survives--in the present generation.

Will it survive in the next? The full weight of the state is brought to bear on every twig, to bend it into a Communist attitude. The Marxist interpretation colors every subject that is taught in school, and after school the children are marshaled in youth battalions and kept too busy to think anything but what they are told to think. To gain its end. the state plays ruthlessly upon the natural ambitions of the young: boys and girls are warned that if they do not conform they will be denied admission to college.

It is, therefore, not the pastor but his teen-age son (Christian de Bresson) who principally suffers and must fundamentally resolve the crisis of the Christian conscience in a Communist society. The boy is a gifted pianist who longs to enter a conservatory, but to gain admission he must belie his religious beliefs when he replies to the crucial seventh question in a government questionnaire. The state. personified in a likable and persuasive young teacher, urges him to leave his father's "outworn ideas," join the new society: "We need music as well as bread and coal and houses." Against this advice, the boy weighs his father's warning: "If you trade your soul for a career, I don't care how well you play, how famous you become-you'll be nothing."

In anguish and high drama, the boy makes his decision; and the film ends at the eye of life's storm as the pastor reads into the teeth of the police the terrible and holy paradoxes of St. Paul (77 Corinthians) : "We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed. Perplexed, but not driven to despair. Persecuted, but not forsaken. Struck down, but not destroyed ... As sorrowful, yet always rejoicing. As poor, yet making many rich. As having nothing, and yet possessing everything . . . For we look not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen pass away, but the things that are unseen are eternal."

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