Letters From Grandpa #506

• LETTERS FROM GRANDPA
• 506

Dearest grandchild,

Today’s letter will be about an excellent book given to me by Uncle Steve. It is titled I WILL GIVE THEM AN EVERLASTING NAME by Samuel Cox . Sam is a retired US Army Reserve officer, an educator for four decades, and a lifelong student of the Holocaust. He holds advanced degrees from four different colleges and from 1994 – 1999 taught a Holocaust class at St. Johns County Day School in Orange Park, Florida. This school is only 15 miles away from Jacksonville, Florida, where Sam met ten special friends who experienced the holocaust in person. The testimonies of these six women and four men are reproduced in this excellent book. Sadly, only one of these heroic holocaust survivors was still alive when Sam completed his book in 2023.

The late Jim Rutherford Sr. once preached a sermon titled If I Were the Devil. In this sermon he speculated how to destroy people like you and me if he could choose only one arrow out of his quiver. Out of an infinite number of arrows he chose the arrow of “discouragement”. Touche! This doesn’t even sound bad to most people. We recoil from rape, murder, and robbery but welcome discouragement as though it were a friend. Yet, discouragement is often the key that opens our lives to a Pandora’s Box of problems. It was discouragement, as you know, that caused Judas to kill himself.

Those who survived the holocaust refused to be discouraged. Regardless of the difficulty and discouragement they faced every day they refused to quit! Take, for example, the testimony of Ella Lucak Rogozinski. She came from an upper middle class family in Czechoslovakia. In January 1944 she and her family were ordered to pack one suitcase each and go to the train station. After spending a month in a Jewish Ghetto they were again ordered to bring their single suitcase to the train station. This time, together with thousands of other Jews, they were loaded into cattle cars and taken to the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland. Ella and her family were herded into a cattle car with 250 others. They had virtually no food, no water and only a couple of buckets to use as toilets.

When they arrived at Auschwitz they were surrounded by German guards and vicious dogs. These thousands of Jewish prisoners were immediately separated into two groups. One group deemed unable to work, was sent immediately to the gas chambers. Ella was in the other group. They were herded into a cold stark holding room where they were stripped naked and their heads were shaved. For those who dared to ask about their loved ones the guards merely pointed to the smoke coming from the crematorium. Soon Ella would receive a tattoo and a prison uniform. She was then assigned to a work group of 350 women. For the next 540 days she worked 12 hours a day sorting the clothing and personal items of those who had been gassed and cremated. In spite of their starvation diet these emaciated women were visited regularly by medics to draw blood in order. Their precious blood was given to wounded German soldiers.

On one winter day Ella’s sister, Olga, developed frost bite and her toes turned black. Her ability to walk was key to keeping out of the crematorium so she borrowed a pair of rusty scissors and amputated two toes without the benefit of anesthesia or antibiotics. It was not at all uncommon for Ella and her companions to go five days without eating. She drank from a bucket of contaminated water with 10 other women. When the crematoriums were not operating hundreds of bodies were stacked like cord wood. Ella’s heart would break when she heard the screams of Jewish children being tortured to death by the macabre medical experiments of the infamous Dr. Mengele.

When the British liberated her prison April 15, 1945, they found 60,000 emaciated prisoners near death from starvation and disease. They also found 13,000 corpses in various stages of decomposition. Ella was only 18 years old at that time. She was near death, and weighed only 52 lbs. Of the 800 women in her barracks only 50 survived. Ella, with two of her sisters and her Aunt Lea, were among the survivors. Her brother, her parents, and all other family members were dead.

In 1959 Ella was privileged to emigrate to America. She arrived with only $8.50 in per pocket. She could speak seven different languages, but none of them was English. America, however, was far better than Auschwitz so she rolled up her sleeves and got a job in a bakery making 35 cents an hour. Today, her family personifies the American Dream. They own and operate the thriving Rogozinski Clinic in Jacksonville specializing in spinal injuries and surgery. Two of her sons are prominent orthopedic surgeons, and the third son earned a business degree and manages their medical practice.

Dr. John Lennox has defended the Christian faith in debates with some of the most famous atheists in the world. Dr. Lennox confesses that the problem of suffering is one of the most difficult problems to explain. While he doesn’t have the ultimate answer, he dares to ask what God was doing on a cross? A God who suffers with his creation is unique in the religions of the world. Jesus not only suffered with us, but we also have the privilege of suffering with him.

Please consider these inspired words of the Apostle Paul: “But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith. I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.” (Philippians 3:7-11)

I love you,

Grandpa Boyce