Wild Bill's story

There’s a revealing account in a book called “Return from tomorrow,” by George C. Ritchie.  The hero was nicknamed Wild Bill because of the shape of his drooping mustache.  Wild Bill accomplished unselfed love through a conscious decision to forgive his enemies.  Here are some excerpts from that story as recorded by Mr. Ritchie.

 ‘He was one of the inmates of the concentration camp, but obviously he hadn’t 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.

‘We came to him with all sorts of problems . . . . But though Wild Bill worked fifteen and sixteen hours a day, he showed no signs of weariness.  While the rest of us were drooping with fatigue, he seemed to gain strength. . . . . his compassion for his fellow-prisoners glowed on his face, and it was to this glow that I came when my own spirits were low. . . 

‘So I was astonished to learn. . . that he had been in Wuppertal since 1939!  For six years he had lived on the same starvation diet, slept in the same airless and disease-ridden barracks as everyone else, but without the least physical or mental deterioration.

‘Perhaps even more amazing, every group in the camp looked on him as a friend.  He was the one to whom quarrels between inmates were brought for arbitration. . . 

‘It’s not easy for some of them to forgive,’ I commented to him one day. . .  ‘So many of them have lost members of their families.’

‘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.

. . . “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.” ’

It's very humbling to ask, "Would I be able to make that decision to remove hate from my life -- by loving every person -- even those who had murdered my children in front of  my eyes?"  This is what Christians of all stripes profess.  Yet Wild Bill was a Jew - and understood exactly the demand Life was making on him.  To not hate.   To live, to truly live and to live truly, he would love.