"A Substância dos Mártires" <
“Can’t you guess where that gold came from?” Dumphrey said. “Hohler was one of the butchers of Dachau. Stripping the rings from his victims’ fingers as they were led wailing into the gas chambers. Wrenching the gold teeth and fillings from their lifeless mouths as they were fed into the furnaces. Accumulating his pile of gold, melting it down into bars—“
Eu acho que essa deve ser a história que você queria. No entanto, a parte sobre "retribuição" não corresponde exatamente. Alguns cristãos inocentemente transformaram o ouro em um novo crucifixo para sua igreja, desconhecendo a verdadeira origem das barras de ouro, acreditando que o ouro fosse do antigo crucifixo que havia sido roubado pelos nazistas, e que eles erroneamente acreditavam ter sido feito de ouro. E longe de ser "amaldiçoado":
Above the altar that strangely serene, that powerful golden figure enveloped them in a warmth they’d never known before.
And as if to prove that God was indeed among them, there occurred then the first of the miracles attribute to the golden Christ. A child, a victim of a shelling attack, had been brought to the service. The child had been buried alive in the ruins of his blasted home, pinned beneath the bodies of his parents. When they’d dug him out, he had shrieked once, then it was as though a light had been extinguished within him: his eyes went blank. He became mute, an unresisting, and unsmiling creature, with no spark of humanity.
But in the church he’d look upon the golden Christ. A faint light leaped into his eyes. He stared. His eyes became brighter. Brighter. And suddenly he screamed, a terrible, piercing scream. He began to cry. The tears were real, genuine tears of emotion. He was alive again, a thinking, feeling human soul; in great anguish—but sane.
“He is a strong young man now, with children of his own,” Dumphrey finished, as we walked down the worn stone steps and back to the car. “His was the first, but there have been similar . . . cures.”