How Things Can Be

Dear Friends,

There are inspiring Olympic stories aplenty, each summer and winter game. There is one story that stays with me year to year because of the violent time in which it unfolded, a time like our own.

German Carl “Luz” Long and US athlete Jesse Owens competed at the 1936 Munich Olympic Games. Both medaled in the long jump event. Their interracial friendship shocked both Germans and Americans. Their bond was strengthened when Long was shunned by Hitler at the games and Owen’s president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, never spoke about the African American’s win.

The two men kept in touch during the war years ahead. Long went on to serve in the German Army (as any able-bodied German man was forced to do) but his letters to Owens expressed a longing for peace.

Before he died in a battle with Allied forces, he wrote a final letter to Jesse Owens:

I am here, Jesse, where it seems there is only the dry sand and the wet blood. I do not fear so much for myself, my friend Jesse, I fear for my woman who is home, and my young son Karl, who has never really known his father. My heart tells me, if I be honest with you, that this is the last letter I shall ever write.

If it is so, I ask you something. It is something so very important to me. It is you go to Germany when this war is done, someday find my Karl, and tell him about his father. Tell him, Jesse, what times were like when we were not separated by war. I am saying – tell him how things can be between men on this earth.

Owens fulfilled his friend’s dying wish by going back to Berlin 30 years later and meeting with Luz’s son. The two formed a friendship of their own and Owens would serve as the best man in his wedding. The families of both men keep in contact to this day.

Can any words about peace ring true this summer? Can friendships be grown in Sudan or Gaza or Ukraine? In Chicago or Milwaukee? In Paris and Lagos? In Port au Prince or Moscow? If peace is possible it will come because of relationships like that of Luz Long and Jesse Owens, who showed “how things can be between men on this earth.”

~ Sister Susan Schantz