"I have a rosary for you!"

One day in 1942, prisoners were walking in a line inside the Nazi prison yard in Berlin, Germany. A voice whispered to a German priest, "Father, do you have a rosary?" The Jesuit provincial, Father Augustin Rösch, a prisoner too, did not have one. The voice insisted, "Father, please try to get me a rosary, I really need one!"

That night Father Rösch could not sleep. His hands were chained and a lamp was kept on above his head so that the guard could watch his every move.

Suddenly he heard the door creak open and he was seized with fear. Was someone coming to check on him or to interrogate him? It was only a guard, one of the few kind-hearted ones. The guard told him that he was Catholic. Mustering up his courage, the priest asked him for a rosary.

In the middle of the night, he heard a key in the lock again. The same guard approached the priest and whispered: "Father, are you asleep? I have a rosary for you!" The priest was greatly surprised. "Yes, Father, it was a gift from my mother. You can use it until I buy you a new one. Good night!"

The happy priest was left alone with his rosary! But he did not keep it for himself and circulated it through the dark prison in which tortured men awaited death. Everyone could keep the rosary for half an hour. Even those who used to mock this devotion now looked at it as a chain to cling to God.

An inmate later confessed: "In the old days I didn’t want to hear anything about the Rosary. But in captivity I learned how much strength and joy there are in the mysteries of the Rosary to obtain help and protection from Our Lady."

According to the German Jesuit magazine Maria, 1959