Food #36:
Living with the Holocaust - I am a Living Witness
Reincarnated Witness
"I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure
suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor,
never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
For the dead and the living, we must bear witness." (Elie Wiesel)
"Even such is time that takes all in trust. Our youth, our joys, and
all we have and pays us but with age and dust. Who in the dark and silent
grave, when we have wandered all our ways, shuts up the story of our days.
And from which earth, and grave, and dust, the Lord shall raise me up,
I trust." (Walter Raleigh)
Did the Nazi and Russian Holocausts in the 1940s really happen? Or
were all the pictures and video evidence just faked?
*
Living Witness:
To me, it is unbelievable that anyone could doubt
that the Nazi Holocaust ever happened. Of course, in a past life, I
lived through most of it... so I am a Holocaust witness... once removed.
I can tell you from my own direct knowledge of my own past lives that the
Nazi Holocaust did, in fact, happen.
*
An Outrage:
To me, those who claimed it never happened are
offensive in the extreme. The reason is, if my camp [Ravensbruck] was
at all representative, that the numbers of those who died in the camps -
both Jews and Christians - was under reported and much of the cruelty
went unreported.
*
Mountain of Evidence:
As those who survived the Holocaust are
slowly dying off, there are less people who are alive today who
can offer direct evidence that it happened. All that remains are
still pictures of those tortured, book and videos full of the
testimonies of survivors, bones in mass graves, former camp
buildings slowly rotting, and possessions of the slaughtered.
*
Erasing the Past:
Despite this mountain of evidence, there are
those who claim the Nazi Holocaust never even happened. These "Neo-Nazis"
must claim that this is true... otherwise how could they live with such
a past? Fortunately, this tortured past cannot be denied (at least in
the US) thanks to efforts of Mel Mermelstein.
*
Mel Mermelstein:
He was a Jewish survivor of the Nazi Holocaust
who was angered by the Institute for Historical Review (IHR). The IHR
was a Neo-Nazi organization dedicated to claiming that the Nazi Holocaust
never happened. In the movie, "Never Forget" (1991), Mel Mermelstein
succeeded in getting the US Supreme Court to acknowledge that the Nazi
Holocaust is an historical fact.
*
Official Statement:
"The Court does take judicial notice of the
fact that Jews were gassed to death at Auschwitz concentration camp in
Poland during 1944. It is not reasonably subject to dispute. It is
capable of immediate and accurate determination by resort to sources of
reasonably indisputable accuracy."
"We who lived in concentration camps can remember
those who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their
last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer
sufficient proof that everything can be taken away but one thing: the
last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in an given set of
circumstances." (Victor Frankl)
*
True Tale:
A page on the Holocaust would not be complete
without a true story of love and sacrifice inside the mouth of Nazi
hell. In my camp, I was deeply touched by a man who was always
smiling... even though at the end, there was so little fat on his
face, that it had to be painful for him to smile... but he did it
anyway.
*
Saintly Man:
He was a Catholic priest who had been imprisoned
for giving Jews false baptismal certificates to hide their true religious
identity. When he was unclogging toilets and scrubbing the officer's
latrine with a toothbrush, I would ask,
"Hey, saintly man, why are you smiling?"
He would say,
"I am about my Father's business as are you."
I would grunt but keep on asking him the same question.
Whether it was on burial detail, in the property room, in the punishment
circle... and his answer was always the same and his smile never failed.
*
Hanged Man:
One day the commandant had enough of the saintly man
and decided to "wipe the smile off his face forever". He had the man hung
on the barbed wire. There was so little flesh on him by then that he had
to be hung by his bones. Although the pain had to be unbearable, still he
smiled. Risking the commandant's wrath, I went up to him. I had a sharp
knife and I knew just where to cut him in the neck to bring an swift end to
his horrible misery.
*
His Choice:
I was surprised when the saintly man refused my kind
offer. He smiled and said, "If I agreed to let you do this, it would
be a mortal sin on both our Souls. Me for suicide, you for murder. Better
for you to leave me in this place..." To be honest, I was furious...
here I was risking my life to help him end his pain and the "saintly man"
had the nerve to turn me down!
*
Target Practice:
Then I heard the commandant call my name.
Instinctively, I turned around and was greeted by a barrage of bullets
whizzing by me. I turned back to see a smile on the saintly man's face
as blood ran down his chest from where he had been shot. It was obvious
by the gasping quality of his next words that his lungs had been punctured...
and it was clear he would not survive.
*
Love and Sacrifice:
The saintly man looked down at me and said,
"I told you this was better. My loving God did not leave me in this
place. He did not forget me."
Then he smiled, shut his eyes, and died.
*
His Legacy:
The old priest was like a walking piece of the sun
beaming his rays of goodness and happiness on anyone lucky enough to be
near him. He had kind words for everyone, even for the "poor cynic" (his
name for me). He returned love when he received hate. He gave out
kindness when he was given cruelty. Once he was gone, the camp was the
poorer and sadder place for it.
*
His Teaching:
When the "saintly man" had called me "poor" back
then I thought he meant "misunderstood". "Poor" as in "if only I understood
God better, I would not need to be so cynical". Now I realize that he
meant "poor" in the sense of loss of my faith. For in that life, all I
felt was bitterness, anger, and hate... the emotions which keep those
who hold onto them poor in spirit. The poverty only got worse in that
life as I watched the slaughter I helpless to prevent... I could only
save handfuls of people as rivers of them flowed past me into the gas chambers.
*
My Lesson:
"I am about my Father's business as are you."
I wondered if he knew that I was helping others to
escape. I wondered then if it even mattered. The Talmud says that
"when you save a life, you save a universe"
and so it did matter after all. When I was caught,
I was relieved to be killed... determined to give God a piece of my mind
about the whole situation when I left this pitiless world.
*
The Greatest Lesson:
In this life, I understood what the "saintly
man" meant when he said,
"My loving God did not leave me in this place.
He did not forget me."
His God had sent the priest there to bring a
ray of light and hope to one of the darkest times and places in the
universe. God was showing that he had not forgotten all those whose
karma had landed them in our concentration camp.
"The Holocaust shows us how a combination of events
and attitudes can erode a society's democratic values." (Tim Holden)
Why did the Nazi and Russian Holocausts have to happen?
What was the karma behind them?
*
Violent Past:
Most of human history in most places in the world
has been extremely violent. Without honest law enforcement, one individual
could "get away" with harming others for an entire lifetime… and never
get caught.
*
Human Injustice:
Even if a wrongdoer was caught, if they were
rich or powerful enough, they could buy their way out of trouble. Their
bad karma would pile up on them… and it would become progressively worse
over time.
*
Severe Imbalance:
By the time of the Holocaust (1940s), the
karma of those on Earth was severely imbalanced. This generation was born -
knowing at the Soul level - that they had agreed to an extreme experience
of karma.
*
Harsh Correction:
The means for this balancing was a global
conflict that was destined to involve most of Europe and Asia. Those
who decided to deeply commit to this experience reincarnated into Jewish
families… so that they had almost no chance of escaping the suffering
and oppression that would inevitably overtake them in the Holocaust… and
balance their past life karma.
*
Past Life Karma:
Many who chose to reincarnate into Holocaust
impacted Jewish families were directly balancing their Anti-Semitic
beliefs and actions in past lives. They were the prime example of the
reincarnation truism:
"What you bring hate into, you reincarnate into."
These souls needed to understand the beauty
and the value of the
Jewish faith.
There was no better way to do this… than to suffer and sacrifice by
being persecuted for their belief in their religion.
*
Past Life Lineage:
Yonassan Gershom and other prominent Jewish
commentators on reincarnation believe that those who reincarnated as
Jews in the Holocaust were a "special" karmic soul group bound together
by the covenant made at Mt. Sinai. In the words of the Torah - "l'dorotam
l'vrit olam" - this covenant was "for all generations to be an eternal
covenant" (Exodus 19- 31). While this was true for some, it was not true
for all who suffered and died.
*
Soul Growth:
Souls really do not have any permanent ties to any
one religion and end up trying them all. This is because coming back to
the same religion path for multiple incarnations arrests an individual's
spiritual growth and development (an example of this is the Dalai Lama,
head of
Tibetan Buddhism
for 14 incarnations).
"... this was the meaning of surviving your children... so that you
may become purified through these years of suffering... so that you may
become worthy of joining your children in Heaven..." (Viktor K. Frankl,
"Man's Search for Meaning")
Was your last past life in the Holocaust?
What can you do to heal it?
*
The Crucible:
The more difficult the past life, the more it
impacts the present. Few experiences on Earth are harder than having
lived during the Nazi (11 million dead) or the Russian (25 million dead)
Holocausts. Those who have reincarnated from the Holocaust to live
again are almost as scarred as actual survivors...
*
Physical Traces:
Birth defects,
birth-marks,
and skin discolorations bear silent
witness to where
wounds
were inflicted on the body in the past.
Allergies, asthma, and other respiratory diseases are how the
body remembers being gassed to death.
Obesity
is the result of the
mind over feeding a body which was starved to death.
*
Mental Traces:
Lifestyle problems get created by the mind's
desire to keep the body safe.
Hoarding
and over-saving becomes
a defense against losing everything. Overeating becomes a defense
against starving. Mistrust and suspicion creates
fears which becomes
a defense against others meaning to do you harm.
*
Emotional Traces:
Depression, anxiety,
rage, and other emotional imbalances are experienced
as the individual unconsciously wrestles with the deep trauma left by the
brutality
of a life in the midst
of despair, cruelty, and terror of the Holocaust. Joy in the here and
now seems an impossible, unachievable goal.
Reincarnated Witness
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