Change of Heart: Justice, Mercy, and Making Peace with My Sister’s Killer is a most unusual book.  As the subtitle notes, Jeanne Bishop has worked to first forgive and second to reconcile to the man who brutally murdered her sister, sister’s husband and their unborn child.

Change of Heart walks us through from the first few days after Ms. Bishop’s father found the bodies, through a nightmarish fiasco where the FBI tried to connect the murders with Ms. Bishop’s work in the Irish peace movement, to the trial and sentencing of the true murderer, David Biro.  That first part of the story is easy.  Bad guy commits murder, is found guilty and sentenced.

The second part of the book is harder.  Ms. Bishop became active in the anti death penalty movement, successfully lobbying for Illinois to end its capital punishment.  She describes how she initially held off from thinking of Biro as a person, putting him in a mental box even while she worked hard to forgive him.

After many years she realized that she needed to go beyond forgiving him in her private thoughts and heart, and instead pray for Biro that he could also receive God’s mercy and loving kindness.  Finally she visits him in prison to tell him that she forgave him and this act began an odd relationship.  Eventually Biro confessed to her in writing, an act that he recognized would forever make it impossible for him to pretend to innocence.

Biro was legally a minor, although the book implies he was just shy of 18 when he murdered, and Ms. Bishop extended her work to banish capital punishment to also banish the mandatory life-without-parole sentences for minors.  She did this knowing that such a sentencing revision could free the man who murdered her family.  She believes that we should never assume that a given person cannot be redeemed, cannot be rehabilitated and brought back into society.

Forgiving is hard enough.  Spending time face to face with someone you have every reason to hate must be incredibly difficult, and even harder would be to work for their eventual rehabilitation and possible release.

Once I spent several days with a person who found every possible way to annoy me.  It was so easy, so enticing, to play back the conversation and insults and dwell on his behavior.  It was only afterwards that I realized that such a personal encounter is actually an opportunity to receive God’s grace.  Difficult people and troubling experiences give us the chance to first recognize our own failings and sins and second to reach into the well of grace and help that person whether by action or prayer.  This isn’t namby pamby “saintliness” but true experience of grace.  Ms. Bishop went so far beyond that I have no words to describe her actions.

I recommend this but be aware it is well-written but due to subject matter is not enjoyable reading.  I received an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

This is a book review blog focusing on science fiction and fantasy, but I’ve been fascinated with why and how people followed such an evil man.  Hitler’s Last Secretary: A Firsthand Account of Life with Hitler helps answer the question.

Hitler’s Last Secretary: A Firsthand Account of Life with Hitler by Traudl Junge is unusual in that she wrote it in 1947-8, while her memories were fresh – and positive.  Junge doesn’t try to explain or justify, she remembers and describes what she saw and felt.

She spent hours in attendance with Hitler and his inner circle from 1942 until the very end, typing letters and speeches and providing pleasant companionship.  The book includes Junge’s comments from around 2000 regarding her thoughts when she re-read the manuscript years afterwards, after she had time to recognize the evil of the men she only thought she knew.

In her forward Junge says of the late 1940s, “At this period we were all looking to the future and trying – with remarkable success, incidentally – to repress and play down our past experiences.”  She comments that she didn’t know what was happening because she did not ask and she did not ask because she did not want to know.  She questioned only too late.

We see a portrait of Hitler as a kindly leader, warm, charismatic, fatherly to those he liked.  (It reminded me of watching the first Godfather movie.)  He even arranged/encouraged Junge’s marriage, a step she was reluctant to take.  (The cover photo shows her with her new husband and the two witnesses.)

Hitler clearly felt he was destined to rule, equated “Germany” with himself, thought he was always right and dramatically superior to everyone else.  He was the worst possible combination of an ideologue with a charismatic leader who thought of himself as invincible.  (I fear ideologues like Pol Pot, Mao, Hitler because they can justify everything they do on the basis of their distorted view of what should work vs. what does work.  They will sacrifice anyone and anything to make their vision real.)

Despite Junge’s overwhelmingly positive feelings there are chilling points.

• The Jewish school friend whose family was once well-off but were later barred from working and eventually emigrated to America.
• The dietitian friend and former co-worker who wrote Junge in the later part of the war that once the SS found her foundling great grandmother was Jewish that she and her family could not find work and were destitute.  Junge took the letter to Hitler who pushed through “Aryanization” for the dietitian and her family.
• The wife of a colleague who asked Hitler whether he knew of the horrible conditions the Dutch Jews were in when transported to the camps.  Hitler left the room and the colleague and wife were not invited back.

All throughout Junge claims she kept her eyes out of politics, stayed away from the party, avoided thinking of anything other than the day-to-day work, her friends.  She worried about her family in Munich once the air raids started but even then believed Hitler when he said the setbacks were temporary.

She mentioned two times she saw cracks in the kindly facade.  First when Hitler stated he wouldn’t marry because he didn’t think it was fair to bring children into the world who were destined to fall short of his greatness.  Second when he decorated boys defending Berlin while planning suicide for himself.

Aside from the glimpses she could have seen into the ongoing persecutions, Junge provides other vignettes that are disturbing.

Hitler insisted on having his secretaries and other female staff spend time with him every evening.  But he did not like to hear them call it a “duty”.  He saw the fact he survived the assassination attempt in his military bunker as proving he was fated to lead the world.  She doesn’t mention the vicious hunt for the assassination plotters and all their friends and potential conspirators; it is difficult to believe she heard nothing about it.

But the most disturbing part of the book was Junge’s blind acceptance of whatever happened, whatever Hitler said.  She didn’t question, didn’t look for answers, didn’t even allow herself to think beyond the pleasantries of the day. Years after the fact we sometimes wonder how so many could so blindly accept what happened.  If this puzzles you, then read Hitler’s Last Secretary: A Firsthand Account of Life with Hitler.