‘Inner Light’ Sparked the Efforts of ‘Quiet Helpers’

Hans J. Wendler is the German consul general in Los Angeles, but in 1947 he was just a hungry 7-year-old shellshocked by the devastation of World War II. The war had destroyed his home, caused him to flee to the country and deprived him of his father, who spent most of the war in a Russian detention camp.

Then came the Quakers, with a gift Wendler still vividly recalls: a teddy bear. It was his first toy. Wendler slept with teddy every night and used it to comfort him in years of deprivation and uncertainty.

“This Quaker gift was like a ray of sun that had come into our lives,” Wendler recalled. “It was a sign of hope for a better life.”

The Quakers--Christians who stress individual communion with God over ritual and hierarchy--helped millions of Germans such as Wendler. They also aided Jews, Poles, Japanese and others in war-torn regions. Through their U.S. and British service units, Quakers organized massive feeding programs, clothing distribution, refugee aid and rescue operations to spirit thousands of Jewish children to havens in Britain and elsewhere.

Quakers, members of the Religious Society of Friends, worked so unobtrusively that they were dubbed “Quiet Helpers.” The Friends Service Council--now the British Friends Service Committee--and the American Friends Service Committee won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947 for their efforts in Germany.

But although the humanitarian outreach of that era garnered global recognition, Quakers had also aided victims of World War I.

An exhibit of photos and artifacts that highlights the efforts in Germany after both wars will open Sunday. Assembled by the German Historical Museum to celebrate the 50th anniversary in 1996 of postwar Quaker service in Germany, the “Quiet Helpers” exhibit will make its initial West Coast appearance at First Friends Church in Whittier.

The extensive photo array includes such images as hungry children gobbling up soup served by Quakers and liberated Jews still clad in the striped uniforms of death camps getting new sets of clothes. There is a boy’s ragged outfit, its tatters covered by a crazy quilt of patches. There are scrawled drawings, handmade toys and vases fashioned out of mortar shells--all thank-you presents to the Quakers from the Europeans they served.

The aid not only fed the hungry and clothed the needy. German historian Achim von Borries said the Quaker relief effort after World War I also provided a powerful psychological boost to a country “isolated from the outside world, morally stigmatized and politically humiliated.”

“American and British Quakers came not as victors among the vanquished, but as Christians to those in need,” Von Borries wrote in a book that accompanies the exhibit.

“Quiet Helpers,” Quakers say, offers not only a snapshot of the past but contemporary lessons on the futility of violence. Many draw parallels between their service during and after World War II and what they believe is necessary today to deal with the extremism that led to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Military retaliation is not the answer, say the many Quakers who profess pacifism.

“A response to the terrorists in a vengeful way will just increase the violence,” said Edwin Stephenson, a Quaker who assisted relief efforts in Poland after World War II. “I don’t have any answers. But I have to live according to my belief, and my belief is that love is a great force in humanity, and we’ve never been able to give that a chance.”

Stephenson, 83, talks the talk, but has walked the walk too. The Santa Rosa resident was a conscientious objector during World War II; he says he rejected militarism because he took literally Jesus’ call to turn the other cheek.

He was drafted while a graduate student in math and physics at the University of Michigan in 1941, and spent those years in such alternative service as firefighting in Oregon and building latrines to control the spread of hookworms in Florida.

But that “didn’t satisfy my desire to make a contribution to my nation in time of crisis,” he said. So he signed up for Quaker relief efforts in Europe and landed in Paris in March 1946.

For $2.50 a month, he helped repair U.S. military trucks for civilian use, and later, in Marseille, hauled food to children’s homes. Four months later, he moved to Poland and became co-leader of a transport team hauling building materials to reconstruct homes. In a pocket of 25 villages, Stephenson said, only one house remained standing.

“People were shocked by the destruction of the World Trade Center, but imagine all of Manhattan that way and you can get an idea of what Warsaw looked like,” he said.

Barbara Graves served in Europe, too, as head of Quaker missions in Germany for five years beginning in 1948. At the time, the American relief effort was shifting from direct aid to teaching Germans self-sufficiency. She oversaw several programs that trained Germans in how to sew, knit, make shoes and master other skills. The experience there, and earlier wartime service with the American Red Cross in England, filled her with pressing questions about the rationality of war, she said.

“The so-called face of the enemy was not in the kids and the hungry people in rags; the enemy is violence,” Graves said. For her, a saying of early Quaker William Penn that inspired her European work is equally apropos today: “Let us then try what love can do: For if men did once see we love them, we should soon find they would not harm us.”

Quaker humanitarianism is based on the belief that all people carry the inner light of the divine, that there is “that of God in everyone.”

It follows that no one is an enemy, said Claire Gorfinkel of the service committee office in Pasadena. “If every person carries a divine spark within, it’s our job to illuminate that spark and see the best,” said the self-described “Quakerish Jew.”

The Friends movement arose in England around 1650 as religious and social protest. Members stressed a direct experience of God rather than through mediators, and the equality of all stemming from their “inner light.”

The name “Friends” comes from Jesus’ words: “Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you. . . . These things I command you, that ye love one another.”

Quakers were mercilessly persecuted, and even executed, but gained a foothold in the Pennsylvania colony founded by Penn. The group later launched many of the first efforts in what were then shockingly radical causes, including Native American rights and the abolition of slavery.

Today, the faith community is small--only about 300,000 worldwide--but its activities are legendary in scope and impact. With offices in 45 U.S. cities and a dozen abroad, service committee programs focus on relief, peacemaking, youth leadership and education.

Said Gorfinkel: “We are hoping to inspire future generations of people who will, at minimum, question the use of military force and the efficacy of war as a way to solve problems.”

The free exhibit is at First Friends Church, 13205 Philadelphia St., Whittier, until Oct. 28, noon to 4 p.m. Wednesday to Sunday; school tours and special hours by appointment. (626) 791-1978.