Stalingrad. It’s Christmas. A 36-year-old doctor and theologian, Kurt Reuber, assigned to the 16th Panzer Division, draws a mother holding her child in her lap on the back of a Soviet map. Beneath it, he writes, as in the Gospel of John: “Light, love, life.” He hangs it in his bunker, which becomes a place of pilgrimage for his comrades. It is called “Our Lady of the Fortress.” Reuber will be taken prisoner by the Soviets and dies in January 1944, after having drawn another Madonna while in captivity in Russia with the same phrase underneath. The original, Our Lady of the Fortress, is now in Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.
