Roberta Green Ahmanson, cofounder and former Visionary in Residence at the CCCA, shares personal reflections on artist Peter Brandes, whose monumental artistic achievements adorn Biola's Calvary Chapel. The essay can be read at Religion Unplugged.
Peter was born in Assens on March 5, 1944. His Jewish father Thomas had left Germany in the 1930s and had become a serious Christian. He met Gerda; they married and had a daughter in 1940. In 1944, when Peter was in utero, the news came that the occupying Germans were about to round up all Jews and deport them to camps in Germany or Poland. The fact that Thomas Brandes had converted to Christianity made no difference. He was one of the Jews the Danes famously saved by transporting them in small fishing boats to Sweden. Peter’s father’s boat was one the Germans actually chased, and he ended up in Latvia before eventually making it to Sweden. Peter was more than two years old before he met his father...
