Steve
Member
I just finished reading 'Return from Tomorrow' by George Ritchie MD, a NDE book about Ritchie's own NDE and how it affected him (I enjoyed it ).In it he tells the story of 'Wild Bill' a Polish Jew he met when he was assigned to help in the concentration camps after the war. When he first met him, he assumed that 'Bill' had only been there a short time, because he looked healthy, but it turns out he'd been there since 1939 !
Do you think that ,somehow, his loving way of living makes this possible ?
Do you think that ,somehow, his loving way of living makes this possible ?
And that is how I came to know Wild Bill Cody. That was not his real name. His real name was seven unpronounceable syllables in Polish, but he had a long drooping handlebar mustache like pictures of the old western hero, so the American soldiers called him Wild Bill. He was one of the inmates of the concentration camp, but obviously he had not been there long: his posture was erect, his eyes bright, his energy indefatigable. Since he was fluent in English, French, German and Russian, as well as Polish, he became a kind of unofficial camp translator.
Wild Bill leaned back in the upright chair and sipped at his drink. “We lived in the Jewish section of Warsaw,” he began slowly, the first words I had heard him speak about himself, “my wife, our two daughters, and our three little boys. When the Germans reached our street they lined everyone against a wall and opened up with machine guns. I begged to be allowed to die with my family, but because I spoke German they put me in a work group.” He paused, perhaps seeing again his wife and five children. “I had to decide right then,” he continued, “whether to let myself hate the soldiers who had done this. It was an easy decision, really. I was a lawyer. In my practice I had seen too often what hate could do to people’s minds and bodies. Hate had just killed the six people who mattered most to me in the world. I decided then that I would spend the rest of my life— whether it was a few days or many years— loving every person I came in contact with.”