This morning, Thursday May 11th, I read the following story in a book and it touched me. The book is Edgar Cayce on Angels by Robert J. Grant.
I found the book in a box in the closet as I was working toward my move in a few weeks. It was as if the Angels had placed this unread book there for me to find to assist me on my journey.
A powerful soul named Adolf Hitler seemed to have the entirety of the blessings of Satan himself at his disposal to attempt to carry out his malignant vision called “the final solution” of exterminating the Jews during World War II. The power to command hundreds of thousands of Nazis to commit murder was indeed a malevolent power from the realms of hell itself. Yet, there are stories from this tragedy which indicate that there is a divine light even in the darkest night. As a medical doctor working at the end of World War II to liberate the concentration camps. George Ritchie, author of Return To Tomorrow, found love amid the hatred. He found something which even the most malevolent of fallen angels could not touch.
Dr. Ritchie assisted the inmates of a concentration camp near Wuppertal, Poland, in receiving medical attention when Germany surrendered to the Allies in 1945. One such inmate helped Ritchie treat the starving prisoners from the camp. “Wild Bill,” as Ritchie called him, appeared to have recently arrived at the camp prior to Germany’s surrender. He seemed healthy, bright, optimistic, and in good spirits. Wild Bill always had time to help at least one more inmate at the long day’s end. His energy seemed boundless. He became a valuable resource for Ritchie and the rest of the medical team in helping the former prisoners find their families, in offering translations and doing paperwork. Dr. Ritchie was astounded when he learned that Wild Bill had been a concentration camp inmate since 1939! Ritchie wrote the following in his book, Return From Tomorrow:
“For six years he (Wild Bill) 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… Only after I’d been at Wuppertal a number of weeks did I realize what a rarity this was in a compound where different nationalities of prisoners hated each other almost as much as they did the Germans.”
Ritchie believed that the secret to Wild Bill’s survival was love. In the face of great persecution and hatred from the Germans, Wild Bill learned love and forgiveness. According to Ritchie, Wild Bill had lived in the Jewish section of Warsaw with his wife, two daughters, and three little boys.
“When the Germans reached our street, he said, 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 camp… I had to decide right then… 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. Loving every person… this was the power that had kept a man well in the face of every privation.
Wild Bill made a choice to not hate those who had persecuted him. He realized that the very evil which killed his family thrived on hate. For Wild Bill to react in kind with the Germans would have created a pact of evil and continued the chain of hate. In his ability to love, Bill ascended from the darkness to the light and was freed. In doing so, he not only survived the Holocaust, but he miraculously retained his health. How? His choosing to love opened a channel or way through wh;icy the Divine could help him. In hatred, there is no channel of light, no divine intervention, no help available. There is only access to more evil influences which perpetuate and flourish in such emotions. Love breaks the chain of whatever power the angels of darkness have. Edgar Cayce once said in a reading that it was easy to love one’s friends; the real challenge is loving the enemy; the people who hurt, betray, or deceive us. The readings went so far as to say that until we can see the Christ in the most vile person, we have not yet begun to grow spiritually. This indeed is a challenge for all of us.
