Parable from Prison

In 1943, Harvard-educated Langdon Gilkey, the son of a Baptist minister and an English teacher at Peking's Yenching University, was arrested by the Japanese and sent to a prison camp near Weihsien, in Shantung province. There he lived for 2 1/2 years in the company of 1,500 other interned civilians, most of them British and American missionaries or traders. Out of his wartime experience, Gilkey, now a professor of theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School, has distilled a fascinating memoir called Shantung Compound (Harper & Row; $4.95) that is both a vivid diary of prison life and a theologian's mature reflection on the condition of man in times of stress.

As concentration camps go, Weihsien was relatively civilized. The prisoners were not beaten or tortured by their Japanese guards. But there was never enough food--Gilkey lost 45 Ibs. during the ordeal--and prison life was dominated by tensions wrought by both boredom and fear. Living space was at a premium in the compound, a former Presbyterian mission. In the dormitories, chalk lines were drawn on the floor, carefully delimiting the area each man had for his bed and few possessions. Privacy was almost nonexistent.

Moral Breakdowns. As a prologue to Shantung Compound, Gilkey approvingly quotes Brecht's sardonic couplet: "For even saintly folk will act like sinners,/Unless they have their customary dinners." To his surprise, Gilkey discovered that the most devout missionaries were not immune from selfishness. Even ministers began to squabble with their fellow prisoners bout food shares and steal from communal supplies. Forgetting the lesson of the Good Samaritan, missionaries with families bluntly refused to share any portion of their living area with others who needed space. One preacher went so far as to contend that he needed extra room "in which I can have quiet to think out sermons." All in all, Gilkey concludes, life at Weihsien was a series of "moral breakdowns so serious that they threatened the very existence of our community."

The new demands of prison life, says Gilkey, frequently exposed the strict Protestant ethic as legaiism wrapped in hypocrisy. Many of his fellow prisoners were critical of the compound's fundamentalist ministers. On principle, they refused to lend their canteen cards to heavy smokers--but they would not hesitate to barter the cigarettes they got from the Red Cross for extra tins of food. Far more popular were the Roman Catholic missionaries, who generally displayed a spirit of freedom from material wants that enabled them to play a creative, neighbor-helping role in the community.

One prison favorite was a Trappist monk who was caught smuggling 150 eggs into the compound under the prison wall. Sentenced to 45 days in solitary, he took the punishment lightly, since as a monk he was used to long and lonely meditations. Still another prison saint was Dick Rogers, a former British soldier. An alcoholic, he proved to be virtually the only man who could be trusted to guard the communal food store without stealing anything for himself. Nonetheless, writes Gilkey, "Many a pious diner, whose ration of food depended on Dick's strength of character, still thought of him as immoral because he drank."

Love of Neighbor. Many Jews lost their faith in God's providence at Auschwitz. Gilkey, however, emerged from the Shantung prison with a deeper conviction that God alone is the answer to the problems of man and society, the source and inspiration of human creativity. Whenever a man's ultimate concern is a finite object such as food or comfort, Gilkey argues, he will sacrifice everything, including his neighbors, to satisfy this need. At Weihsien, only those with genuine faith in a transcendent Creator were free enough to respond to the new challenges of prison life, to see in deprivation a challenge rather than a threat. It is loyalty to a finite concern, he concludes, that is the source of social antagonism and communal strife. Only when man is faithful to a being beyond the world is he free to love and live for his fellow man.

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