For Bethlehem Township pastor, cross found in World War II prison camp is a sign of everlasting faith

Pastor's father had questioned his faith until he found a cross while a prisoner in World War II.

  • The Rev. Peter Unger, pastor of St. John's United Church of Christ in Bethlehem Township, holds a cross his father found while a prisoner of war during World War II.
The Rev. Peter Unger, pastor of St. John's United Church of Christ… (KEVIN MINGORA, THE MORNING…)
December 24, 2012|By Adam Clark, Of The Morning Call

On special days like Christmas Eve, the Rev. Peter Unger reaches into a bookcase and carefully removes a cross that hangs next to photos of his late father.

Riddled with pockmarks, the piece of black iron is slightly bigger than the palm of a hand and about as heavy as a stack of quarters.

Draped around his neck as he leads services, Unger wears it as a symbol of everlasting faith — for himself, his congregation and his late father.

Nearly 70 years ago, Unger's father, Dolf, found it in a World War II prison camp, just as he was beginning to question his faith.

It forever changed his father's outlook on life.

"It's a story about a man who found for the first time in his life, through a faith experience, a feeling of being free," said Unger, the pastor of St. John's United Church of Christ in Bethlehem Township. "The story really, at the heart of it, is a little miracle."

The son of an art dealer, Dolf Unger was raised in a well-to-do family in Holland and belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church. He got a college education, worked as a bookseller and married. Shortly before he left to fight in World War II, he and his wife welcomed a baby girl.

Dolf Unger went into the war with faith. It was internal assurance, invisible and untouchable, yet strong enough to guide believers even when logic suggests otherwise. But as the war dragged on, he was running out of reasons to believe.

On March 8, 1942, Dutch forces on the island of Java, part of Indonesia, surrendered to the Japanese. Dolf Unger, along with American and British soldiers, was taken as a prisoner of war.

Over the next three years, he watched as fellow prisoners slowly faded and died. They lived in bamboo huts, walked muddy paths and were surrounded by rats. Men were starving and being beaten.

On a gray morning in the fall of 1944, Dolf Unger was assigned to shovel scrap iron from a rotating drum. He was 30 and had spent three birthdays away from his family. The winter was looming. The anger inside him swelling.

After cleaning out the drum, he kicked the scrap heap, sending fragments of iron in different directions. One piece flew back at him and landed on the tip of his boot.

It was in the shape of a cross.

"I never speculated how it got in the heap, how just this piece hit the door when I kicked the heap apart, how it landed on my boot," Dolf Unger wrote many years later. "There are a million accidental events that happen on any given day. Somehow this seemed like a message and answer to my self-questioning a short time back: 'What in God's name am I doing in this Godforsaken place?' "

The elder Unger had previously questioned the symbolism of the cross. He wondered how a man on a cross centuries ago had relevance in the modern era.

Now, that symbol took on new meaning.

"Slowly, I began to perceive that that event might have a purpose now," Dolf Unger wrote. "Jesus of Nazareth was put on a cross by people who absolutely rejected unconditional caring for others. But people came, lived and died. And the strange power of that cross went on, in human beings, generation after generation, unexplainably."

Dolf Unger survived the prison camp and emigrated to America in his mid-30s. He worked whatever jobs he could find and traveled the country trying to earn money to attend seminary, Peter Unger said. Eventually, Dolf Unger became a Presbyterian minister.

Peter Unger, who grew up in New England, also chose to make a career of his faith. When he was ordained as a pastor in 1984, his father came to the ceremony and placed the iron cross around his neck.

"My dad gave it to me when I became a pastor and said, 'This has gotten me through a lot of tough times,'" the younger Unger, now 57, recalled. "It means a lot to me."

Dolf Unger died in 1989 at age 76, But the iron cross continues to help those whose faith may need assurances. Peter Unger, who arrived at St. John's in 1987, shares it with members of his congregation, including those who are sick or have recently lost a loved one.

Lifelong church member Carol Mark asked to touch the cross at an Easter service, not because she was questioning her faith, but because she wanted to experience its power.

"It just felt like God was touching me or I was touching God's hand," the Bethlehem Township woman said. "It just sent chills through my body knowing that God had done this and I could touch it and be a part of it."

In Mark's mind, there's no question what happened on that gray morning decades earlier.

"A perfect cross like that just doesn't show up without someone making it," she said. "It's just divine intervention. There's no other reason."

It's because of reactions like Mark's that Unger has compiled his father's writings on his time as POW into a book that the church is selling as a fundraiser.

Congregation member Alice Dickey of Palmer Township is reading it, drawing comparisons to events in her own life.

"You don't know how much your faith means to you until you come up against something that you don't have control of," Dickey said. "That's when it becomes more important to you than anything else."



•St. John's United Church of Christ in Bethlehem Township is selling a book about Dolf Unger's experience in a prisoner of war camp in World War II as a church fundraiser. Contact the church at 610-866-1155 for more information.

Morning Call Articles