St. Nikolai at Dachau:
Faith Under Persecution

The Arrest — From Zica to Vojlovica

In July 1941, three months after the German invasion of Yugoslavia, occupation forces arrested Bishop Nikolai at the Monastery of Zica. The monastery — seat of the Serbian archbishopric since the thirteenth century — was looted and damaged. The Germans suspected Nikolai of links to Serbian resistance fighters.

They transferred him to the Monastery of Ljubostinja. There he witnessed German soldiers execute innocent Serbian civilians — reprisal killings for partisan activity.

"Is this the German culture," he said, "to shoot a hundred innocent Serbs for one dead German soldier! The Turks have always proved to be more just."

He was released under surveillance but forbidden from serving as bishop. In December 1942, the Germans arrested him a second time. They moved him to the Monastery of Vojlovica near Pancevo, outside Belgrade. By May 1943, Patriarch Gavrilo V had been brought to Vojlovica as well. The Patriarch had been arrested at Ostrog Monastery in April 1941 — the Gestapo called him "a war instigator and a criminal."

For eighteen months, the two highest-ranking Serbian churchmen lived as prisoners in the same monastery. Then Dachau.

Serbia's Church Under the Sword

Nikolai and Gavrilo were not isolated cases. The Serbian Orthodox Church suffered systematic destruction during the Second World War.

In the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), the fascist Ustasha regime pursued a policy of genocide against the Serbian population. Of 577 Serbian Orthodox clergy in NDH territory, 217 were killed and 334 expelled. Roughly 450 Serbian churches were destroyed.

Four Serbian bishops were martyred:

The Holy New Martyrs of Jasenovac — the Orthodox faithful who perished at the Ustasha's principal death camp — were collectively canonized on April 16, 2010.

His biography traces how Bishop Nikolai had earned international recognition during the First World War, speaking to packed churches in England and America. St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco called him "a great saint and Chrysostom of our day." The Germans arrested him because they understood what St. John understood — that this man could move nations with his words.

Dachau

Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp, opened in March 1933. By the time Nikolai arrived in September 1944, it had become the primary camp for imprisoned clergy. Over the course of the war, 2,720 clergymen were held there — 2,579 Roman Catholic priests, 109 Protestants, 22 Orthodox, and others.

Bishop Nikolai and Patriarch Gavrilo were classified as Ehrenhäftlinge — "honor prisoners" — and held in the Ehrenbunker, a section for prominent captives. They were separated from the general population of the camp.

The kontakion composed for St. Nikolai's liturgical service states simply: "For Christ you endured suffering at Dachau."

Nikolai used the time.

What He Wrote Behind Barbed Wire

Three works survive from St. Nikolai's years of captivity.

The first is Through a Prison Window (Kroz tamnicki prozor), a diary of seventy-six chapters addressed to the Serbian people. Published posthumously in 1985 by the Serbian Orthodox Eparchy for Western Europe. The work ranges across the spiritual condition of modern civilization, the wars of Europe, and the faith of the Serbian people.

Nikolai filled seventy-six chapters without a single reference to his own condition. No hunger. No cold. No fear. From inside a concentration camp, surrounded by death, he wrote about the world's spiritual crisis — what he called "Life without aim and death without hope."

The second work is Three Prayers in the Shadow of German Bayonets (Tri Molitve u Senci Nemachkih Bajoneta), described as a spiritual diary of his captive years.

The third is a Petitionary Canon and Prayers to the Most Holy Mother of God (Molbeni Kanon i Molitva Presvetoj Bogorodici). St. Nikolai attributed his survival of imprisonment to the intercession of the Theotokos.

A man in a death camp, writing prayers of thanksgiving and warnings to a dying civilization. The prison walls enclosed his body. They could not reach his mind.

"Never Been Closer to God"

After the war, St. Nikolai spoke about Dachau to those close to him. Bishop Jovan of Sabac and Valjevo preserved his testimony in a 1988 address calling for Nikolai's canonization:

An Athonite elder had once taught Nikolai to practice "the perfect visualization of God's presence." Years later, Nikolai reflected on the fruit of that practice: "This helped me enormously to prevent me from sinning in freedom and from despairing in prison."

The parallel to St. John Chrysostom is exact. Chrysostom — the original "Golden Mouth" — was exiled from Constantinople in 404 for denouncing the empress. He spent his final years in forced marches through Asia Minor, writing letters to his deaconess Olympias. He died on September 14, 407, on the road. His last words: "Glory to God for all things."

Nikolai, "Serbia's New Chrysostom," was exiled from his see for opposing an occupying regime. He spent years in forced confinement, writing to his people. He died in exile in America, found kneeling in prayer. Both men turned persecution into their most productive period. Both refused to speak of their own pain.

Chrysostom wrote to Olympias from exile:

Nikolai could have written the same words from Dachau. In a sense, he did. His entire body of prison writing says exactly this: the only real evil is spiritual death. Everything else — the camp, the wire, the bayonets — is secondary.

Pascha at Dachau

On April 29, 1945, the US Seventh Army liberated Dachau. One week later, on May 6, the surviving Orthodox prisoners celebrated Pascha.

Eighteen Orthodox priests and one deacon — mostly Serbian, with Greeks and Russians — gathered for the Paschal Liturgy. They had no vestments. No liturgical books. No icons. No candles. No prosphora. No wine.

Hospital towels taken from the SS guards were sewn into epitrachilia and oraria. Red medical crosses were stitched onto the fabric. The priests wore these over their blue-and-gray striped prisoner uniforms.

The entire service was chanted from memory. The Easter Canon. The Stichera. The Gospel of John: "In the beginning was the Word." The Paschal Homily of St. John Chrysostom.

A young Greek monk from Mount Athos delivered the Chrysostom homily. The witness Gleb Rahr, a Latvian prisoner who later taught at the University of Maryland, recalled that the monk spoke "with such infectious enthusiasm that we shall never forget him as long as we live."

Archimandrite Meletios, too sick to stand, was carried in on a stretcher.

Metropolitan Dionysios, who later served as Metropolitan of Trikkis and Stagon, wrote in 1949:

In 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of liberation, a Russian Orthodox Memorial Chapel — the Resurrection of Our Lord Chapel — was consecrated at Dachau. Its icon depicts angels opening the gates of the concentration camp and Christ Himself leading the prisoners to freedom.

Exile and Repose

St. Nikolai could not return to Yugoslavia. Tito's communist regime branded him a traitor and stripped him of his civil rights. He emigrated to the United States in 1946 as a refugee.

He spent his final decade teaching at Orthodox seminaries — St. Sava's in Libertyville, Illinois; St. Vladimir's in Crestwood, New York; and St. Tikhon's in South Canaan, Pennsylvania, where he served as dean. The man who had written the Prologue from Ohrid — a thousand pages of daily readings for the faithful — now lived the last chapter of his own life in quiet exile. He wrote. He taught. He prayed.

On the morning of March 18, 1956 — March 5 by the Julian calendar — the seminary staff found Bishop Nikolai kneeling at the foot of his bed before the morning Liturgy. He had departed this life in prayer. He was seventy-five years old.

His remains were buried at St. Sava Monastery in Libertyville. After the fall of communism, his relics were translated to his native village of Lelic, Serbia, on May 12, 1991. The Holy Assembly of Bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church glorified him as a saint on May 19, 2003.

The man who wrote "Bless my enemies, O Lord" twenty years before Dachau had lived what he wrote. Enemies drove him into God's embrace. Friends bound him to earth; enemies loosed him from it. The prayer was not sentiment. It was prophecy.