Me: it is a nice day for a boat ride.

Prodigal: Yes, and you can share stories as we ride out.

Me: I think I have a good one to share.

This is from the book Small Miracles for Women by Yitta Halberstam & Judith Leventhal

First came the volley of shots, then the high pitched screams, and finally, the irrevocable silence of death. Later, in the women’s barracks, hushed whispers would tell of an aborted escape by some of the men. And much later, a young woman by the name of Esther would learn that Yidel–her beloved brother and only surviving family member–had been among the casualties.

Now her world was totally broken, destroyed. She was the last, the remnant. Two years earlier, when Hitler’s nightmare had first been unleashed in Poland, her beloved parents had been shot down by the Nazis in cold blood, and Yidel–older by four years–had become both father and mother to her. Yidel had been her sanctuary and port, her stalwart companion during her sojourn through the camps. Now he was gone. She was 20 years old and completely alone.

“He died a hero,” she tried to console herself. “And better a bullet in the back than death in the gas chambers.” That ignoble death would soon be her fate, she was sure, when she discovered that the next step on her journey was the infamous death camp Sobibor.

Until now, Esther had been relatively fortunate. Over the course of the past two years, she had been moved from camp to camp, but all of them had been “work” camps, where slave labor was harnessed for the Third Reich, where it was still possible to survive.

But Sobibor, like Treblinka and Belzec, was a “death camp.” Its only industry was extermination. When Esther was told she would be transported to Sobibor, she knew the end was near. Sobibor existed for one purpose only–the manufacture of death.

Strangely, though, when she entered the main gate of Sobibor together with the crush of hundreds, it was a sense of elation, not despair, that suddenly engulfed her. You are going to escape from here! a voice deep inside her exulted. That certainty surged through her even as her eyes absorbed the impossibly high barbed wire fence, the formidable watchtowers that loomed overhead, the menacing guard dogs with bared teeth.

Her first minutes at the death camp served only to confirm her incongruous conviction that here at last, in the jaws of hell, she was going to be blessed. For whenever a new transport arrived, a selection was made. Almost all of the arrivals were sent immediately to the furnaces, but during each selection a handful were plucked out from the crowd and spared.

Sobibor was not only a death factory, but also the place where Nazi personnel lived, and skilled laborers were required to tend to their needs and maintain the camp. Sometimes the call came for carpenters, or goldsmiths, or dentists; sometimes musicians, or singers, or dancers were recruited to entertain the Nazis when they were bored at night. On this particular day, the Nazi recruiter just happened to be looking for women who knew how to knit, a skill at which Esther excelled.

Out of the transport of 800 young people who arrived at Sobibor that day, only seven were selected for a temporary reprieve. And Esther was one of them.

“Eventually, they’ll replace us with others.” one inmate murmured to another.

“No one leaves here alive.”

“We must escape!”

And so, almost as soon as she had arrived at the camp where her fate never looked bleaker and the odds never seemed greater, Esther joined with other feisty spirits to plot the famous Sobibor uprising–the biggest prisoner escape of World War II.

On the eve of the revolt, Esther bade farewell to those in the barracks who would not be joining their effort to escape. They were either too sick or dispirited to try. We’re never going to make it either, Esther thought sadly as she kissed her friends good-bye. But better a bullet in the back than death in the gas chambers.

That night her sleep was restless and her dreams had a hallucinatory quality to them. In one of those dreams, she saw her deceased mother enter the main gate of Sobibor.

“Mama,” she cried out in disbelief. “What are you doing here? Don’t you know that we’re going to escape tomorrow?”

“I know,” her mother said answered calmly. “That’s why I came.”

“Ester’le,” her mother said tenderly, “I am here to tell you that you will escape! And this is where you must go when you do.”

Her mother took her by the hand, led her out of the gate, and brought her to a barn. They went inside the barn, and there her mother pointed toward the loft and said in a clear, firm voice: “Here you’ll go and her you’ll survive.”

And then she disappeared.

Esther awoke with a start and, trembling, roused the woman who shared her bunk. Shaking she recounted the dream, but Esther’s friend was unimpressed and made short shrift of its import.

“Listen,” she scoffed, “you’re nervous, you’re scared, of course you would dream about the escape. But the dream doesn’t mean anything. Don’t take it seriously.”

Esther was unswayed by her friend’s dismissive words.

“Nonetheless,” she vowed, “if somehow I miraculously survive, I won’t rest until I find the place my mother showed me!”

In the dream, Esther had recognized the barn; she actually knew the place quite well. As a child, she had tumbled in its hay and played hide-and-seek underneath its rafters. It was part of the property owned by a Christian farmer, a friend of her deceased father’s a kind man who lived 18 kilometers away from her hometown of Chelm, a town that was currently occupied and flooded by legions of Nazi soldiers.

“This is the place you’d escape to?” Esther’s friend asked incredulously. “You’d have to be crazy….walking into the enemy’s embrace. You might as well die here!”

“My mother didn’t come to me for nothing,” Esther said stubbornly. “If she told me to go to the barn, there must be a good reason….”

On the morning of October 14, 1943, 300 inmates of Sobibor, armed with weapons smuggled into camp by sympathetic partisans, revolted. Chaos erupted as phone wires were snipped, electric cables cut, guards overwhelmed, the Armory seized, Nazi soldiers shot, and hundreds of prisoners jumped the barbed wire fence. As Esther leaped for freedom and ran for cover to the adjoining woods, blood gushed from her scalp. She had always feared a bullet in her back; but when it came, it grazed her head instead.

Faint with hunger, weak from her injuries, Esther nonetheless prevailed. In the forest, she joined up with a group of partisans with whom she traveled. She hid by day and walked at night, and when the hunger and thirst drove her to the brink of madness, she knocked at the doors of the little farmhouses she passed, and mercifully, everyone was kind.

The partisans begged her to stay with them and become a permanent member of their group. She would be safer, much safer, they tried to convince her, if she hid in the woods and joined their cause. But Esther could not be deterred.

“I have to find the barn in the dream.” she said stubbornly.

And two weeks later she did.

Beyond the edge of the woods where she walked, she finally saw the outlines of the structure she had so tenaciously sought. She waited until dusk, and then warily slipped inside. The barn was empty. She ascended the ladder to the loft, made a bed out of the hay, and then fell asleep.

The next day, she went hunting for food. A compassionate farmer gave her a loaf of bread and a bottle of milk, but when she returned to the loft to slowly savor her meal, and odd thing occurred. She placed the bottle of milk on top of a bale of hay while she tore into the bread, but when she turned to retrieve it, the bottle was gone. Somehow the mounds of hay enveloping her had swallowed the bottle up whole or else it had dropped o the floor below. Esther was frantic with thirst. She dug through the hay and hunted on the floor. All sense of caution was flung aside as she clawed at the floorboards in vain, making agitated noises as she dove deeper into the hay. Her movements grew louder and more careless with each passing moment, jolting awake the slumbering figure huddled in a corner on the other side of the barn.

“Who’s there?! the figure sprang up in alarm.

Now I’m finished, Esther thought.

“Who’s there?” the menacing figure shouted once more.

Esther froze in shock.

“Yidel?” she cried in disbelief as she recognized her brother’s unmistakable voice. “Yidel…is that you?”

“Esther!” he screamed. “Esther’le!”

“But Yidel….” she labored slowly, incomprehensibly. “Your’re supposed to be dead!”

“No, Esther, you’re the one who’s dead!”

“They told me you were shot at the work camp…”she said.

“Esther,” he broke in gently, “I was the only one who escaped that night. Everyone else was killed. But Esther’le,”he said, eyes brimming with tears, “someone told me that you were dead! I am overcome with joy that you are alive! But how did you know to come here?” Yidel asked in wonderment.

“Mama told me to,” Esther explained. “She came to me in a dream. I’ll tell you all about it soon. But first I want to know how long have you been here?”

“Ten months. Papa’s friend has been hiding me here since I escaped.”

“Yidel!” Esther sobbed. “All I want you to do is sit with me all night and just hold my hand…And then we’ll watch the sun rise …together.”

The next morning, the two heard a loud sharp whistle coming from outside the barn. “That’s a signal for me to come out,” Yidel explained hurriedly to Esther. “It’s Papa’s friend, the farmer. He wants to talk to me.”

The eyes of the farmer were tense and worried.

“I don’t know if I can keep you here anymore, “he said not unkindly. “A strange woman has been seen wandering nearby, and no one knows is she belongs to a partisan group or who she is. I’m worried that the neighbors will get suspicious.”

“That woman is my sister!” Yidel cried. And he told the farmer the miraculous story of his sister, the dream, and her escape from Sobibor.

The farmer was visibly moved by Yidel’s account.

“Well, if God brought you together,” he said, “who am I to tear you apart? Your sister can stay with you in the barn.”

And in the barn, thanks to the loving guidance of a mother who watched over her children from a world beyond, Esther and Yidel hid safely for nine more months, until they were liberated by the Russians and the war finally grounded to its end.

James 5:11

Speak not evil one of another, brethren. He that speaketh evil of his brother, and judgeth his brother, speaketh evil of the law, and judgeth the law, thou art not a doer of the law, but a judge.

Jennifer Van Allen

www.theprodigalpig.com

www.faithincounseling.org