Luis Huete

Dear friend,

I would like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a happy new year 2012.

I invite you to revive one of the most incredible experiences ever in Christmas. An awesome testimony about how even under the most difficult conditions, the spirit of Christmas is able to bring love, peace and hope to the human heart.

Very many people have heard the tale of the ‘Stalingrad Madonna’ without perhaps knowing how she came to exist nor who drew her. It happened on the 24th of December of 1942, in the ruins of Stalingrad on which the enemy’s shells and bombs were constantly bursting. The dug-out belonging to the Senior Medical Officer, Dr. Kurt Reuber, was divided into two by a hanging blanket. On one side of it Dr. Reuber tended the wounded and the dying; on the other, where were his tiny living and sleeping quarters, he drew a picture for those poor men’s celebration of Christmas, the last Christmas that most of them would ever see. He knew that words no longer meant much to them, but that their eyes could still see. And in silence this picture of the Mother, with her child swathed in a white mantle which yet seems to reveal an inner light, entered into his comrade’s souls. What Kurt Reuber and his comrades underwent is described in his last letter to his wife:

“Christmas week has come and gone. It has been a week of watching and waiting, of deliberate resignation and confidence. The days were filled with the noise of battle and there were many wounded to be attended to. I wondered for a long while what I should paint, and in the end I decided on a Madonna, or mother and child. I have turned my hole in the frozen mud into a studio. The space is too small for me to be able to see the picture properly, so I climb on to a stool and look down at it from above, to get the perspective right. Everything is repeatedly knocked over, and my pencils vanish into the mud. There is nothing to lean my big picture of the Madonna against, except a sloping, home-made table past which I can just manage to squeeze. There are no proper materials and I have used a Russian map for paper. But I wish I could tell you how absorbed I have been painting my Madonna, and how much it means to me.” 

”The picture looks like this: the mother’s head and the child’s lean toward each other, and a large cloak enfolds them both. It is intended to symbolize ‘security’ and ‘mother love.’ I remembered the words of St. John: light, life, and love. What more can I add? I wanted to suggest these three things in the homely and common vision of a mother with her child and the security that they represent. When we opened the ‘Christmas Door’, as we used to do on other Christmases (only now it was the wooden door of our dug-out), my comrades stood spellbound and reverent, silent before the picture that hung on the clay wall. A lamp was burning on a board stuck into the clay beneath the picture. Our celebrations in the shelter were dominated by this picture, and it was with full hearts that my comrades read the words: light, life and love.”

“I spent Christmas evening with the other doctors and the sick. The Commanding Officer had presented the letter with his last bottle of Champagne. We raised our mugs and drank to those we love, but before we had had a chance to taste the wine we had to throw ourselves flat on the ground as a stick of bombs fell outside. I seized my doctor’s bag and ran to the scene of the explosions, where there were dead and wounded. My shelter with its lovely Christmas decorations became a dressing station. One of the dying men had been hit in the head and there was nothing more I could do for him. He had been with us at our celebration, and had only that moment left to go on duty, but before he went he had said: ‘I’ll finish the carol with first. O du Frohliche!” A few moments later he was dead. There was plenty of hard and sad work to do in our Christmas shelter. It is late now, but it is Christmas night still. And so much sadness everywhere.”

The wording on the drawing is “1942 Christmas in the Cauldron, Fortress Stalingrad” on the left, and “Light, Life, Love” (from the Gospel of John) on the right. Dr Reuber died whilst in Russian captivity in 1944. His letter and the drawing were sent to his family, and they donated the artwork to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche (Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church) in Berlin (the war-damaged structure still stands as a memorial to those who died in the conflict). It is there to the present day, and copies were sent to the Anglican Coventry Cathedral in England and a Russian Orthodox parish in Volgograd (the current name for Stalingrad) in Russia as signs of post-war reconciliation between former enemies.

Merry Christmas! And let we fill our mind and heart with the light and warmth of the Gospel.

Warmest regards,

Luis Huete