Putting Others Before Yourself
Monday, August 09, 2010
The Amazing Bomb Story
My grandmother lived in Warsaw, while her family lived in Chelm. It was September 1939, and it had just been announced that Germany had invaded Poland. There was a mad scramble to get out of Warsaw as it fell victim to relentless German bombing. No inklings of 'Holocaust' or genocide were developed, it was merely a time when every Polish citizen tried to run, hide and contact family. My grandmother was one such Pole.
She decided to try to get to Chelm to see her family and take them with her safely to Russia. She was a devout Communist. She had been involved in smuggling communist propaganda into Poland, against strict Government rules and hatred of the Communist regime. She told me that she had once had the audacity to post a communist poster directly behind a polish soldier/guard standing in the street. If she was caught, immediate prison. However, she safely got away and people walked past the soldier and saw the poster, laughing on their way at his failure to see the catch onto the trick.
Anyway, on one of her dashes around the city as she prepared to go to Chelm, the sirens began to wail and foretold of the coming bombing raid. As always, there was someone willing to provide shelter in the basement for the public who got strande when the sirens sounded. It was a fairly civic minded Poland at that stage. She was huddling in the basement of someone's house, and could hear the bombs falling all around her. For someone of my generation it is difficult to imagine the fear of the bomb-lottery.
It is said that if you hear the sound of a bomb, you can breathe a sigh of relief. It has exploded already and you have heard it. It was this feeling of complete balance in the hands of luck, and complete terror and impending doom, that blanketed all in this house (and certainly many other houses). Many houses in the immediate area were being demolished, along with their huddled occupants.
As she huddled, a sudden terrible crash and shake enveloped the house. They had obviously been hit. There was a perceivable moment between the initial impact and the time the bomb ripped through the floors of the house. But then, no explosion. This was the real moment of terror. They had definitely been hit, but the bomb had yet to go off. Surely a matter of moments, incalculably long moments, until the inevitable massive trauma of the shrapnel and heat ripping through the house and themselves.
But more moments passed. Nothing happened. There was the faint sound of whimpering, crying and huddling. The sound that only people can make when they are too frightened to make noise. Slowly, the huddling strangers got up and gingerly moved about. It took about 2 minutes to locate the unexploded shell. Everyone had a sense of where it had fallen. It was big and shiny, and had broken into several pieces on impact. Perhaps this is what it was supposed to do.
The more brazen of the bunch touched the metal pieces, and found that there was no material, powder or explosive inside. Indeed, it was an empty shell. However, there was something. A piece of card or paper had survived the impact, and lay in between two of the broken pieces. The brazen man picked it up and found that it contained some scrawled German. One of the bunch read it, and translated it into Polish - "This is the best that we can do."
No-one knows who wrote it, but we all know why. Some decent person or persons in the German war machine was doing their bit to stop the waste of human life about to occur with the dropping of the bomb.
In Jewish experience, time and time again, it has been said, "If not for this, then I wouldn't be here!" Now I have my own "if not for" and there is a person or persons to thank, but I'll never know who.~... Story can be found online
I personally found this story to be amazing. As Christians, we know that the REAL person to thank is the Lord Jesus Christ Who ultimately gives life.
The person who did this was not thinking of himself, but of whom he could help. This has hit home with me lately because I don't know about you, but I am a very selfish individual. We are told in God's word, "...let each esteem other better than themselves" (Phil 2:3b).
I want to make a difference in other people's lives. As a Child of God, are you doing for others? There is much that can be done for our Lord if we will put Him first, then others, then ourselves. Think about it!