An interview excerpt from the YouTube conversation "Life Worth Living with Miroslav Volf" (recorded June 13, 2023) in which Volf and another speaker exchange wartime family stories to illustrate themes of faith, moral transformation, and resilience. Volf tells of his father’s encounter with a man (a "holy fool") in a death march/labor camp whose steadfast faith and risky act of speaking about God’s love transformed Volf's father from rage to a renewed inner life. The other speaker relates a great-aunt who survived the Holocaust and framed survival as leaving people either "stronger or broken," underscoring mutual dependence, service, and the moral role others play in enabling resilience.
Chapters
You wrote a book, and it's the title that I find absolutely arresting, which is Life Worth Living. And the first question I have for you is, what is your favorite story that captures the essence of what you're trying to impart?
It's the story of my family. My father was on a death march after Second World War. My father met there another fellow inmate, you might call them. And this person was so possessed by a kind of certain equanimity and certain kind of joy that irritated my father to no end, that made him curse God and everything and the world even more. Because there's this person who could have a stance like this in the situation of dire need when their lives were depending on hanging on a thread.
So what you mean by is they're doing this death march and he's saying, what a lovely day for a walk, almost.
That's how my father experienced. In fact, this person was starting to tell him about how God is love, right? And it just totally did not resonate. They were then in a labor camp, and the river, river Sava in Croatia was separating two sides of the same camp. And they were separated. And this person swam across the river risking his life in order to talk to my dad about God being love. And what I think was behind that was that this whole hell in which we are right now is not the last nor most significant thing we have to say about the world. There is a foundational goodness, even if we cannot see it right now, sort of as an act of faith. And after that act, my father, who was completely enraged by circumstances, suddenly he was at one point arrested in this and transformed almost in a moment, I started to sing a song about God's love and transformed his total life. He was a different, different human being. And I thought, what an incredible thing this holy fool, call him, whatever, this completely impractical man who seemed to live outside of the reality, actually was living connected with the reality that was more fundamental than anything that was surrounding them. And he communicated that and basically rescued my father. Suddenly, his whole world transformed. Nothing changed. But his world inside, from inside toward outside, has been transformed. To me, that's incredibly inspiring.
My great aunt survived the Holocaust.
And she had her first child. She gave birth to her first child on the train to the concentration camp. She was actually born on the train.
And her and her husband survived the camps.
And.
She told me when I was quite young that, you know, you came out of the Holocaust one of two ways. You were either stronger or you were broken. That's it. You either came out stronger or you came out broken. Those are your only options. And she said, I came out stronger. My husband came out broken.
And that's why we need each other.
You know, and this is sort of reminds me of your father and the holy fool, that there's a. There's a relationship, the idiot, the enlightened, whatever you want to call them. I doubt he could have been that person without someone to sacrifice for like your father. If he was alone, I'm not sure he would have been able to do it. That there had to be an element of service.
You know, that if he was all by himself, he. Madness probably would have ensued. But he had purpose because of your father, which allowed him to stay in that heightened state. And your father would not have become who he was without somebody there.
