THE COMFORTING HAND
It seems difficult these days to accept anything as real, except that which can be experienced by our five senses and confirmed by science. After all isn’t it essentially taught throughout the educational process that everything can be explained by physical and natural means? So, as a result, there is no room left for events or happenings outside of the scientific realm.
Throughout history, however, there have been those happenings which seem to defy the above principles. In doing so, those instances tend to give credence to that famous line of Shakespeare - “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”*
Anna** was a young Jewish woman imprisoned in Bergen-Belsen, a Nazi concentration camp, during WW2. She had been there four years and most likely had been exposed to all the hardship, brutality, pain, and suffering imaginable during that time. In addition to all this, a typhus epidemic was raging and had, by itself, claimed thousands of lives prior to Anna becoming infected. Her friends in the camp essentially gave her up for dead and told her that to fight the infection would be useless. Anna, however, was determined. She felt that if she could only keep moving, she would be able to keep going but if she lay down, she would die. So fevered and delirious, she wondered about the camp, tripping over dead and dying persons, often stumbling and falling but determined to keep going.
She noticed in the distance a small hill and, drawn to it, she felt that if she could reach the mound, she would survive, but, if not, the typhus would triumph. Weak and often unable to walk, she ended up crawling on her hands and knees to finally, with the last of her strength, reach that small hilltop. There she collapsed and crying, called out to her father whom she knew was also somewhere in that same camp.
Suddenly, she felt a warmth and the sensation of a gentle hand on her head, the same feeling and touch that her father used to give when he stroked her head and blessed her when she was a child. Anna recognized her father, and told him she had no more strength to live any longer. Her father said to her “Don’t worry, my child. You will manage to survive for a few days, for liberation is very close.”
That was on Wednesday night, April 11, 1945. On April 15, British tanks entered Bergen-Belsen.
Anna survived in a hospital in the British zone, and when well enough returned to Bergen-Belsen. It was then she learned that the mound or hill that she had been so desperate to reach during her interment and illness was in fact a huge mass grave of Jewish prisoners and that her father was one of those who had been buried there sometime prior to Anna’s illness. The night Anna felt the hand on her head, she was weeping on her father’s grave.
So what did Anna really experience that night in Bergen-Belsen? Was it a delusion or did her father really reach up from the grave to comfort his daughter? Perhaps it was an angel or even God Himself who reached down to give her solace. Scientifically we will never know but then can all things really be explained by science?
The Bible states that: “The secret things belong unto the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever…” (Deuteronomy 29:29). In 1 Corinthians, it’s put this way - “…Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known” (1 Corinthians 13:12).
There must be hundreds of thousands of experiences similar in a way to that of Anna. Are they all imaginary or is there really more to this world then science can explain? To those of us who have faith and believe, such experiences just give further evidence that there is something beyond this existence. To those who don’t believe: well, it should give them pause and something serious to think about.
- From the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare
** Adapted from Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust by Yaffa Eliach as written in Jesus and the Holocaust by Joel Marcus pg 91-93
No comments:
Post a Comment