World War II is presented as both a vast historical rupture and a pressure felt in particular lives: it exposes the human cost of fear and persecution, tests religious commitments to peace, displaces people from their homes, and leaves losses that persist in the record of culture. Across the book, its significance emerges through the experiences of Quakers, Simone Weil, Dorothy Day’s newspaper, and the destruction of an important manuscript of Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias.

A looming war and the dangers of witness

The approach of war is already present in the account of Thomas Kelly’s 1938 visit to Germany. Kelly had travelled there on a mission arranged by Rufus Jones and others, as American Quakers worried about the welfare of German Quakers living under Adolf Hitler. Many German Quakers remembered Kelly from an earlier visit, and he was expected to assess their situation and convey the concern of Quakers in the United States. His role was not simply that of an observer: the journey brought him into contact with people whose circumstances made even ordinary communication dangerous.

During the visit, Kelly crossed the border into France to write home beyond the reach of German censorship. He warned his wife that he could not use names or place names in his letters, and described the risks attached to a chance anecdote: imprisonment, beatings, family separations, and death. The need to conceal identifying details gives his account a material measure of political terror. It also shows how witnessing and correspondence were constrained: even a private letter could expose others to harm.

The experience changed the questions Kelly brought back to his own life. After seeing suffering under Nazism, he questioned the comfortable circumstances he enjoyed at Haverford College, in parklike surroundings, while the world was in flames. He understood the inhumanity he had witnessed as bound up with an absence of love. Yet his return to the United States in September 1938 did not resolve that strain: he was the last person off the ship and seemed dazed, and he later experienced spiritual dryness as the intense experiences of God he had known proved brief. The narrative thus connects political violence not to a simple spiritual triumph but to a difficult return, in which awareness of suffering leaves lasting demands.

Exile, occupation, and resistance

For Simone Weil, war altered both location and possibility. After the German occupation of Paris, her family moved to Marseille. In 1940, the Vichy anti-Jewish laws led to her dismissal from the state teaching service. The move and dismissal form part of the setting in which her mystical life intensified, while her friendship with Father J. M. Perrin and her relationship with Gustave Thibon developed. War is therefore more than background to an inward religious story: persecution and displacement shape the circumstances in which Weil pursued spiritual and intellectual life.

On May 17, 1942, the Weil family sailed for the United States and took an apartment on Riverside Drive in New York. Weil found American life too secure while people in France suffered under Nazism and war. At the same time, she attended daily Mass at Corpus Christi Church on 121st Street. She learned that her wish to be parachuted back into France was unrealistic, making that route home impossible; nevertheless, she remained determined to join the French Resistance. On November 9, 1942, she left her family and sailed for England to work for the Free French government in exile. The sequence is marked by a sharp reversal: exile removes the return she wanted, but it does not end her effort to serve the cause of France.

In England, Weil wrote The Need for Roots, a work concerned with the development of postwar France. Its three parts move from the needs of the soul, including order, liberty, responsibility, equality, security, and truth, to the uprooting produced by war, and then to the growing of roots. The book was published in 1949, six years after her death. Its arrangement gives the consequences of war a social as well as personal dimension: loss includes unemployment and the erosion of national culture, while recovery requires attention to the conditions people need in order to become rooted again.

Pacifism and postwar relief

The book also traces how the Quaker commitment to peace met the danger of war. Steere made risky visits to Germany in 1937, while Hitler was in power and the threat of war was real, and again in 1940, after war had begun in Europe. His work was part of a wider peace commitment: he was active in the Fellowship of Reconciliation and chaired its American section from 1954 to 1966. These details place his peacemaking across the boundary between impending conflict and a war already underway, rather than treating pacifism as an abstract conviction detached from danger.

In July 1945, at the end of World War II in Europe, Steere led the organizing of a Quaker relief effort in Finland, a country that had suffered greatly during the war. At an early planning meeting, he prayed; after Fred Tritten prayed, Steere described a sudden experience of spiritual release, tears, certainty, and closeness to those present. His account makes the relief effort at once practical and communal: the work addressed a country’s wartime suffering, while the meeting became, for him, an experience of shared spiritual life. In 1987, the Finnish government awarded him the Declaration of Knight First Class of the White Rose in Finland for this work, a recognition long after the immediate postwar effort.

Public consequences and cultural loss

War affected the circulation and subject matter of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin’s newspaper, The Catholic Worker. When its first edition appeared on May 1, 1933, 2,500 copies were printed for sale at Union Square for a penny each. Circulation later reached 190,000 in 1938, then fell during World War II because of Day’s pacifism; by 1984, it had stabilized at about 104,000. The paper reported on poverty, racism, labor, housing, hunger, and injustice, and, as war approached, on war and peace. The change in circulation registers a public consequence of Day’s refusal to abandon her convictions, while the paper’s coverage placed the conflict alongside the social conditions its founders sought to address.

The war’s effects also reach the book’s account of historical memory. A valuable Rupertsberg manuscript of Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias was destroyed in the bombing of Dresden during World War II. A photocopy made in 1927 survived; between 1927 and 1933, a facsimile on parchment was produced at Ebingen, another monastery Hildegard had founded. That facsimile is the only source of knowledge of the colors used in the manuscript’s miniatures. The loss is therefore specific: the bombing destroyed an artifact, but an earlier copy preserved evidence that would otherwise have disappeared. In the book’s treatment, the war’s reach extends beyond immediate human suffering to the fragile material record through which earlier religious art can still be understood.