What these people must have suffered when the floods hit them! Helplessly watching everything being washed away, all their belongings. The fear of death from the constantly rising, raging floodwaters. The panicked search for relatives. Screams in the darkness. And their silence.

135 people lost their lives in the Ahr Valley on 14 and 15 July 2021. Some of them might have been saved if the emergency services had acted quickly and, above all, effectively. But apparently they didn’t, even though there were early warnings. (…)

They wear the same robes as their brothers in faith, have studied the same holy scriptures and vowed eternal fidelity to the same god.

But their hands concede no blessing, and their words offer no comfort. They are the evil that roams the house of the Lord, tormenting human beings and mocking the Lord by violating His holy commandments. Believers have left the church by the thousands, holding the hands of their children who joined as merry young Christians and came back as broken souls. Ravished, abused, mortified.

They step out into life with a burden on their shoulders that will never vanish. A burden which feels like a stain and silences them because no-one is willing to listen. Not within the family, not in church, where up to the highest ranks unscrupulous accessories hush up and deny every wrongdoing to protect a guilty priest. (…)

A tiny virus, a twenty thousand times thinner than a human hair, has done what the great and powerful of this world like to dream of: it dominates all thoughts. Without exception.

Nobody, no matter from which social class, no matter whether young or old, can avoid the topic of „Corona“ these days. It haunts us all the time, right into our dreams. A deadly equalizer that brings people in line and unites them in a way never seen before. In their fear, their losses, their loneliness and need.