Survivor

No, I’m not going to expound on the reality TV show.

I just finished reading a book on Kindle I received through The Fussy Librarian entitled I Just Wanted to Live. It is about a youngster who survived the Holocaust.

Arie was a Polish Jew whose family was upper middle class. His father owned a large textile business in Krakow. Because of the usefulness of textiles, when the Germans overran Poland, Arie’s father was kept on as manager of the business as the German “owners” knew nothing about day to day operations. Due to this arrangement, Arie’s first impression of Germans was a positive one and it remained that way until all Jews were ordered to move to the Jewish Ghetto.

The family still managed to do well in comparison to many other Poles, Jews and Christians alike, as Afie’s father was allowed to continue working. When the orders came to evacuate the Ghetto, the Germans were separating children to go to Auschwitz for killing. Arie managed to hide out and lived with a Polish family on the outskirts of Krakow for some months.

He finally got caught through a series of events, is actually put before a firing squad, and regains consciousness as the gravediggers are starting to roll the corpses into their mass grave. Miraculously, Arie gets up and walks away as if there is a shield of protection around him (which I believe there was).

He re-connects with his father in the labor camp which adjoined the field where the firing squad action took place. In a short time, Arie was again able to see his older sister and mother who are in the same labor camp but separated from the men.

The actual story of Arie’s father’s death was not given as it appears to tip the scales with all the trauma the youngster had endured. Arie went into a deep depression after he lost his father, and nearly died. However, since this all happened just a few weeks before the  war in Europe ended, American soldiers came to the rescue.

Arie’s entire immediate family died at the hands of the Gestapo under the command of a cold-blooded psychopath (whose name I can’t remember) and who was executed during the War Trials in the late 40’s.

Despite the heartbreak, this story is full of hope, as young Arie refused to give up and was determined to survive. It’s definitely a book worth reading.

A Matter of Time

I love the idea of being able to straddle two centuries. Having lived the majority of my life in the previous century, in addition, I knew several relatives well who were born in the late 1800’s—my maternal grandmother and grandfather and their siblings, as well as my fraternal grandmother who was born in 1875. Oh yes—there was my mother’s fraternal grandfather, whom I also knew as a child. He was born during the Civil War and died when I was nine or ten.

What brought this all to mind was realizing that my mother-in-law, Ann Suter Diehl, was born 100 years ago this coming May.

As many of you know, the concept of time travel fascinates me. I don’t foresee me engaging in that, literally,  but having known people who lived 100 or more years ago and knowing some details of how they lived ,gives me an inkling of what time travel would be like.

To add to my interest, my next writing project is based on my great-great grandmother’s life. She died in 1921 so my mother didn’t even get a chance to know her, but her husband wrote a short autobiographical sketch about him and his family, so I am becoming acquainted with these folks. Traveling back through time, I will get to know them and imagine their emotions as they embraced joyful times and faced death and poverty.

It would be fascinating to talk to these relatives from long ago and see what advice they would have for us in this century. The physical changes on our planet would astound them—jet planes, cell phones, computers. But judging from the lessons we can glean from studying the Bible whose characters lived and died long before my family members of two centuries ago, the temperament of human beings has not changed.

So I’m guessing my ancestors’ words of wisdom would echo that of Jesus (as they were mostly People of the Book)—Love God with all your strength and lovingly accept yourself so you can lovingly accept those around you.