Above Pain or Fear

HEROIC HEART--THE DIARY & LETTERS OF KIM MALTHE-BRUUN (177 pp.)--Random House ($3).

This eloquent book bears a Danish boy's precocious witness to the hard scriptural paradox that he who loses his life shall find it. Seventeen and in love, Kim knocks around the Baltic as an apprentice on a three-masted schooner, fighting for peace within, while World War II rages around him. Soon this unschooled lad, who can write so tenderly to his sweetheart ("May you sleep as sweetly as a water lily on a pond"), is looking into the hearts of others--the cough-racked Finnish soldier riding a blacked-out bus near the front, the old Danish widow clinging to life by keeping a dried-up Christmas tree by her bedside. Kim joins the Danish underground in the war's last year, is caught and condemned to death.

By then, "all the layers of egotism, conceit, love and all the ups and downs of daily life" have been stripped away. "Strange, but I didn't feel any resentment or hatred at all," he reports after being tortured. "The cleansing of the spirit makes you see the world from a new level way above what is known as pain or fear." Most affecting of all the letters his mother has collected in this book is the one Kim wrote his sweetheart just before the Nazis executed him in April 1945. Kim, then 21, said: "Promise me--this you owe to everything I have lived for--that never will the thought of me come between you and Life." The hardbought truths of Kim's goodbye are valid for all the world's bereaved next of kin.

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