The Battlefield

Anger is a seed for war. Forgiveness is a seed for peace.

From 2013 to 2017, I visited Auschwitz three times. One of my cousins asked before the third trip, “Can’t you think of a better vacation than walking through death camps?” It was a fair question.

During this time, I was traveling with a Holocaust survivor named Eva Mozes Kor. Eva was sent to Auschwitz II, also known as Birkenau, when she was just 10 years old. She and her family were forcibly removed from their home in Portz, Romania and taken to a cold, drafty warehouse in the Cehei ghetto in Sălaj County, Romania, in the spring of 1944. Her family consisted of her father, mother, one older sister, and Eva and her twin sister, Miriam. Upon their arrival at Birkenau, the twins were ripped from the edges of their mother’s skirt and sent to the barracks where Dr. Josef Mengele was conducting horrific medical experiments on twins. She was officially labeled a “Mengele Twin.”

Eva and Miriam were the only members of their family not sent to the gas chamber that day.

I’m sharing this as context for why I began writing about Erik Herrmann, former professor at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis and pastor on the Lutheran Church— Missouri Synod pastoral roster, when I did, about a month ago.

Fifty-five years after Eva and Miriam were rescued from Birkenau by Soviet soldiers who broke through the barbed wire and gave them “hugs, cookies, and chocolates,” Eva did something extraordinary: she chose to forgive the Nazis responsible for exterminating her entire family and for nearly killing her time and again when she was just a child. Eva called herself a Forgiveness Advocate, and she spent the rest of her life spreading this message:

“Anger is a seed for war, forgiveness is a seed for peace.”

I traveled with Eva with a clear goal in mind: to write a play about how she survived Dr. Mengele, her decision to forgive him, and the tremendous backlash she received for doing so. Together, we traveled through Poland, Romania, and Hungary so I could capture the fullness of her story. That time with Eva was one of the greatest treasures of my life. Sadly, Eva passed away on July 4, 2019, but her unmatched resilience, her relentless search for justice, and her wildly misunderstood journey through forgiveness live on as a fire in my heart.

So, forgiveness.

In February and March of this year (2025), I was compiling notes, voicemails, emails, and photos from my time with Eva for a book I’m writing about forgiveness. One of the key tenets of forgiveness that Eva often spoke about was that it cannot be achieved while you’re still on the battlefield of any given trial. One of the examples she used to demonstrate this idea was:

“In the camp, we had to spend every ounce of energy we had on surviving. There was no time for anything other than stealing potatoes for food, disconnecting ourselves from the dead bodies we had to step over daily, and trying to stay alive while looking into Dr. Mengele’s black eyes from our place on the operating tables.”

Eva also spoke about a more common human experience, and when she shared this, silence always filled the air no matter the size of the audience, from 100 to 3,000 people. She said:

“If you’re being abused by an adult or a partner, the time to forgive is not now. Now is the time to escape to a place of safety. Survive. Then, you can consider forgiveness later.”

The battlefield is not a place to forgive.

Writing again in Eva’s voice, revisiting her fire, courage, and the profound thoughts she shared with me about forgiveness, I began to reflect on the people in my life I was still holding in unforgiveness.

Enter Erik.

What occurred to me in March is that I still hadn’t forgiven Erik because I was still on the battlefield. Even though it had been two years since I last saw him, and even though I had spent those two years wrestling with pain, confusion, questions, and truths about myself, I was still carrying a weight. A heavy weight. So, I stopped writing and started praying.

What I realized was that some of that weight wasn’t even mine. I had dealt with my own, but I was still carrying Erik’s secrets. So, I began researching. Then, I began writing.

First, I discovered that Erik was teaching again at another seminary. Then I found out he was still preaching. Places I had never heard of before—Institute for Lutheran Theology (ILT) and The Center for Missional and Pastoral Leadership (CMPL)—kept appearing in my searches of Erik’s name. That’s when I sent an email to Dennis Beifeldt, the president of ILT, asking if he knew Erik had resigned from Concordia Seminary due to sexual misconduct. Things quickly escalated when someone inside Concordia Seminary told me that when Erik resigned in June 2023, the seminary had sent out an email stating that Erik’s resignation was not due to moral failure. Whoops.

I put aside my writing about Eva for a while to clear the battlefield for myself, my family, and our future. The truth is, it worked. After two years of brutal, hellacious fighting for healing, I finally feel… free. I am finally free of Erik.

I still haven’t forgiven him. But I know that by the grace and mercy of God, I’ll get there. I imagine one day soon I’ll take him off my hook and put him back onto God’s hook. I can feel it coming, and I’ll know when the time is right.

Photo credit: Portrait Of A Heart, by Christian Schloe