Weekday Devotion With Pastor Chris

Rachel Neufeld (b. Zhwartz) was born on February 3, 1925 in Sevlus, a town of fourteen thousand in southwest Czechoslovakia.  Her family owned a wine business and did very well.  They lived in a large house on the main street; and her father held a prestigious position within the Jewish community there.  The Nazis arrived March 19, 1944.

     Looking back on that moment, Rachel’s sister Anna said, “There was no time to hide.  They came in with their tanks.  There was no time.  They had guns and we were taken away.  They took all the Jews in town and put us into a ghetto in the poorest part of town.  We had nothing but the clothes on our backs… Then they took us to Auschwitz.”  Rachel and Anna were separated at that point from the other members of their family.  They never saw them again.

     After three months of forced labor, each day wondering if it would be their last, the two sisters were sent to an enormous underground plant in northern Germany to work on bombs.  At that point their greatest fear was the allied bombers roaring overhead.  The earth shook with the explosions.  The bombing continued right into the spring of 1945.  Nearly half the prisoners died, but somehow the two sisters held on.

     Two days before the end of the war, the surviving prisoners were pulled from the camp and then abandoned in some woods.  There they ate leaves and grass until the British finally arrived.  Rachel and Anna ended up in a transit camp in Budapest where they spent the next four years.  They met and married their husbands in the camp, and in 1949 moved to Israel.  Ten years later they finally made it to the United States.

     Rachel and her husband had two children, and once they arrived here she worked numerous jobs – sweatshops, day care centers, kitchens and offices – with the sole goal of sending her children to college.  She succeeded.  Both her children graduated from Brooklyn College, and one of them went on to Hofstra where she earned two master’s degrees.  One became a banker, and the other an elementary school principal.

     The last time Rachel and her sister were together, they went out for a walk.  Anna says, “It was cloudy.  I like this kind of day.  But she said, ‘Oh, what a lot of lovely flowers.’ I am very cynical about flowers.  None of them are related to me.  She was angry with me. “You don’t have a sense of beauty,’ she said.  She enjoyed every leaf, every blade of grass.’”  After surviving the Holocaust, living as a displaced person and moving half way around the world, Rachel Neufeld was killed some twenty five years ago when she fell beneath the wheel of a city bus in Brooklyn.  She was seventy years old.

 

     Who has ever heard of Rachel Neufeld?  But what a life she lived.  And what amazes me is that in spite of all the suffering and loss she had endured, she could still be moved by the beauty of some flowers, still enjoy this extraordinary creation that God has given us.  We all know people who are prisoners of their past; their lives marred by bitterness and anger.  Rachel reminds us that it doesn’t have to be that way.  No matter who we are, no matter what our past, we can, in fact, choose life.

“Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days…” (Deuteronomy 30:19-20)