Lest We Forget

Miracle That Saved Girl 

The Auschwitz Gas Chamber

By Paul Ewart
NZ Herald

Yvonne Engelmann was just 15 when she was rounded up with her family and sent to Auschwitz concentration camp, one of the network of German Nazi extermination camps operated by the Third Reich in Poland in World War II from 1940-1945.

But it was an unlikely miracle that saw her survive to tell the disturbing tale.  After arriving at the camp, Yvonne was immediately sent to the gas chamber. Thanks to some strange twist of fate, it malfunctioned and she was left naked in the chamber overnight before being freed.

By some miracle, the Nazi's kept her alive, and she was sent to sort through the clothes of newly arrived Jews to find any gold or valuables they'd hidden.  Her "job" saw her stationed in between the crematorium (which burnt 24-hours daily) and the gas chambers. She ended up being the sole survivor from her entire family, and made a new life for herself in Australia.

Yvonne's Story

"I was 14 and a half when war broke out," Yvonne tells news.com.au.  "I wasn't allowed to go to school, I couldn't walk on the street, I had to wear the yellow Star of David and couldn't mix with any non-Jewish people. Friends I'd grown up with now totally ignored me, solely because I was born a Jew.

"My father was taken to the police station many times and we never knew if he would come back. One day he returned and his front teeth had been knocked out. We lived in fear constantly - we had no idea what would happen to us in the next hour, let alone in the next day."

Born in Czechoslovakia to shopkeeper parents, Yvonne was an only child.  "I had the most wonderful childhood that anyone could wish for, but unfortunately it was short-lived."  At the approach of her 15th birthday, she and her family were taken from the ghetto - along with hundreds of others - to the railway station where they were piled into dozens of cattle wagons.

Lest We Forget

Elie Wiesel, 1928 – 2016

Patterico

Death camp survivor, Nobel Laureate, prolific writer, and tireless fighter for human rights Elie Wiesel has died. From his obituary at the Jerusalem Journal:

Wiesel was a hollow-eyed 16-year-old when he emerged from the newly liberated Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945. He had been orphaned by the Nazis and their identification number, A-7713, was tattooed on his arm as a physical manifestation of his broken faith and the nightmares that would haunt him throughout his life.

Wiesel and his family had first been taken by the Nazis from the village of Sighetu Marmatiei in the Transylvania region of Romania to Auschwitz, where his mother and one of his sisters died.Wiesel and his father, Shlomo, ended up in Buchenwald, where Shlomo died. In “Night” Wieselwrote of his shame at lying silently in his bunk while his father was beaten nearby.

After the war Wiesel made his way to France, studied at the Sorbonne and by 19 had become a journalist. He pondered suicide and never wrote of or discussed his Holocaust experience until 10 years after the war as a part of a vow to himself. He was 27 years old in 1955 when “Night” was published in Yiddish, and Wiesel would later rewrite it for a world audience.

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed …,” Wiesel wrote. “Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live.”

It is utterly sobering to be reminded of what so many like Wiesel endured. And not just endured, but miraculously lived to tell, spending the remainder of his days confronting evil for the sake of righteousness.

He was often described as somber. An old friend, Chicago professor Irving Abrahamson, once said of him: “I’ve never seen Elie give a belly laugh. He’ll chuckle, he’ll smile, there’ll be a twinkle in his eye. But never a laugh from within.”

As his burden of pain and sorrow is lifted in passing, may he be surprised by laughter finally unloosed from the deepest reaches of his soul.

–Dana

The Call of Philosemitism

Following Apostolic Teaching

We have just finished reading an interesting volume on the Jewish Question--about the place and position of Jewish people upon the earth.  In the West, anti-semitism is making a "comeback" it would seem.  This is taking place, in part because of the influence of Islam in general and the attitudes and activities of  some Islamic refugees in Europe, on the one hand, and because of the recent tendency of the Left sympathetically to embrace Islam, and Islam's prejudices.  Anti-semitism is one such.

How refreshing it has been, then, to read Gertrude Himmelfarb's The People of the Book: Philosemitism in England, From Cromwell to Churchill (London: Encounter Books, 2011). The historical, gradual re-acceptance of Jewish people into the United Kingdom is fascinating in part because of the cast of actors involved over a three hundred year period, from Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans onward.  This cast begins with Cromwell, of course, who was staunchly philosemitic (that is, a lover of the Jewish people).  The Jews had been expelled from England: Cromwell began the reversal of that position.  But it also includes luminaries such as philosopher, John Locke, scientist, Isaac Newton, and notables such as Edmund Burke, William Macaulay, author and politician, Benjamin Disraeli, Gladstone and Winston Churchill, as well as literary figures such as Walter Scott, George Eliot and Charles Dickens.

This political and literary tradition, coupled with the attempt by Hitler to exorcise the Jewish people from the human race and the reaction that was part of World War II has left the English speaking world largely philosemitic--at least up to our generation, when things have begun to change.

Himmelfarb documents the connection between a love of the Old Testament amongst Christians--one of the great consequences of the Reformation--and a sense of kinship and respect for the Jewish people that was one of its fruits, particularly in England.  Puritan scholarship with respect to the Old Testament, to the Hebrew language, and to traditional rabbinic teaching was legendary.  Out of it came an abiding theme of philosemitism that flowed through to the wider culture of learning, the arts, and politics.  It did not win Jewish people full civil and political rights immediately--but the leaven was at work, and in the end the "revolution" was bloodless and a consequence of the "natural acceptance" of higher and deeper truths.  It represents a particular high water mark of Christian civilisation.

With the attenuation and decline of the Christian faith in the English speaking world--already well under way by the end of the nineteenth century, and gathering pace throughout the twentieth, it was inevitable that the Jewish Question would arise again.  And so it has come to pass.

Continuing to Pray for Israel's Salvation

Darkness At Noon

The Scriptures speak of a judicial darkness lying over the hearts and minds of Jewish people.  This hardening of heart, and blindness of eye is for the sake of us Gentiles, who have been called.  (Romans 11)

Early Church Father, Athanasius confronts that blindness when he writes a "Refutation of the Jews".

(39) But surely they cannot fight against plain facts. So it may be that, without denying what is written [in the Old Testament], they will maintain that they are still waiting for these things to happen, and that the Word of God is yet to come, for that is a theme on which they are always harping most brazenly, in spite of all the evidence against them.

But they shall be refuted on this supreme point more clearly than on any, and that not by ourselves but by the most wise Daniel, for he signifies the actual date of the Savior's coming as well as His Divine sojourn in our midst. "Seventy weeks," he says, "are cut short upon thy people and upon the holy city, to make a complete end of sin and for sins to be sealed up and iniquities blotted out, and to make reconciliation for iniquity and to seal vision and prophet, and to anoint a Holy One of holies. And thou shalt know and understand from the going forth of the Word to answer,[17] and to build Jerusalem, until Christ the Prince."[18]

Working Amidst the "Decline and Fall"

Diaspora and Mission

Much debate over procedural issues concerning the global Christian mission to convert the world remains superficial and trite.  By "procedural issues" we mean, how do we (the Church visible) actually get the task of discipling all of the nations done?

Whenever this question comes up, sooner rather than later the discussion shifts to the book of Acts.  This is not unreasonable.  Yet, the outcome is not that helpful, more often than not.  One reason for this is that reading the book of Acts as if it were an operational missions manual--a "how to" book for dummies--necessarily strips that wonderful book of Scripture out of its redemptive and historical context.  Whenever you do that with the Bible little good will come. 

Let's throw down a particular precept as an example.

The Most Real of All Histories

Beloved for the Sake of the Fathers

In Romans 11, Paul gives the divine plan for human history.  It turns around redemption and deliverance of the human race.  A key dynamic driving the progress of redemption is the Jewish-Gentile relationship.  We learn that a hardness came over the heart of Israel, so that the Gospel could legitimately come to the Gentiles.  The latter, coming to reverence the God of Israel and worship His Messiah, make the Jewish people jealous, causing them, in their turn, to desire to return to the God of their fathers.  Then, in its turn,  return of Jewish people to the Messiah becomes the apex stone of blessedness for the entire world.

In certain periods of history, it has pleased the Lord to return to His ancient people, making the call of the Gospel life from the dead for them.  In such times, the veil appears removed.  It would seem that one such period of blessedness is occurring in the United States now.