You are loved- Esther Raab’s story

Our oldest gave a talk in church today about facing adversity, and she shared one of my favorite stories about the love that is here for each one of us, as well as the miraculous miracle of our own stories.

I am grateful to share that story here for all who are ready to hear. I first listened to it years ago from Alan Arkin’s memoir “Out of my Mind”. My dad always exposed us to wonderful art, music and theatre, and he is the reason I gravitated to the book in the first place, as Alan was one of his favorite actors.

The true story is about the prisoner escape from Sobibor Nazi prison camp in 1943 and this is how Alan shares it (get out the tissues):

“In 1987 I was offered one of the leads in a three-hour special for CBS. The film was called Escape From Sobibor. It was the true story of a mass escape from Sobibor, a Nazi prison camp.

To add to the authenticity the production company brought over from the States a half dozen people who had been prisoners in Sobibor, all of whom had participated in the escape and lived to tell the tale.

I’d seen concentration camp victims before, and they all seemed to have a kind of grey cast to them, as if a piece of them had disappeared in the camps and had never come back. A kind of carefulness in their demeanor and the expectation that things were never again going to be really terrific. Not too surprising an attitude. But there was one woman in the group who was different. Her name was Esther Raab. She was now in her sixties, with a halo of blond hair, a comfortable, plump figure and a big smile; she radiated a peaceful joy with an easy laugh, and there was no sense whatsoever of the nightmare years she had experienced some forty years earlier.

We started hanging out together a bit, and I found that her demeanor started to intrigue me. Her cheerfulness and ease. At first it was just out of curiosity, wondering how in the world she could be living in a state of comfortable ease after what she’d seen and been through. I knew her story from the script, it was being played out right in front of us, and I knew she’d lost most of her family to torture and murder in Sobibor and other camps, and at first I couldn’t believe her demeanor. I thought it might be an act. But as I got to know her better, it became clear that she was the real thing. This was who and what she was.

Not given to an overly buoyant view of the planet and many of its inhabitants, I was deeply interested in how she maintained this emotional stance in light of what she’d seen and where she’d been. One afternoon, after I’d known her for a few weeks, I found the courage to get a bit more personal with her and I asked her if she’d always been so happy, so comfortable and positive. She said yes. “Always?” I asked gingerly. “Always,” she said. “Even in the camp?” “Yes,” she said. “Even in light of what was taking place around you? The torture, the murders? The murders of your own family?” “Yes,” she said. How could this be? I asked. She paused for a moment and said, “I have a deep belief in the Almighty. I think he knows what he’s doing.” It was hard for me to believe this degree of steadfastness and belief, and I went on. “Did your belief ever flag?” I asked. “No,” she said. I had a hard time believing what I was hearing. “In light of what you were witness to on a daily basis for years, your belief never flagged?” “No.” “Not for a moment? Not for a single moment?” “No.” “You never doubted for a moment.” “Not for a moment,” she said. Then she added softly, “I couldn’t,”

It spoke to an almost effortless, solid, indomitable trust and belief in the rightness of things unseen that was unshakeable. I don’t remember ever having encountered that degree of belief before. I felt as if I’d been jolted with a cattle prod.

This is esther’s story of her miraculous faith in God:

The night before the escape Esther had a vivid dream about her mother. In the dream her mother showed her three houses. When Esther woke up she thought about it fleetingly and then put it out of her mind. There were pressing, hair-trigger arrangements to be made in her part of the mutiny, and there was no time for musing. The escape took place and the preparations went like clockwork, key guards were killed, the fences torn down, and with machine guns being fired at them from the gun turrets, hundreds of prisoners fled into the woods without a specific plan except to run for their lives. Esther fled with the others, and as she left the encampment she was grazed in the temple. It was a shallow flesh wound but it bled profusely. As she ran into the woods the dream of the night before flashed into her head and she knew immediately that her mother was giving her a road map of what to do and where to go. The three houses were landmarks. A couple of her friends from the camp felt her sense of purpose and followed her into the woods. Esther sensed that she couldn’t tell her companions about the dream; between the strangeness of the dream itself and her flesh wound they’d think she’d gone crazy, so she kept silent except to say she had a vague idea of where to go. They ran for miles, hoping that they were getting as far away from the camp as possible, and before too long Esther saw the first house from the dream. It was a peasant’s hut with a thatched roof, and though her companions were terrified, Esther sensed that it was a safe haven and after a tentative look around knocked on the door. An old peasant gingerly opened the door. He somehow had gotten wind of what had just taken place and hurriedly let them in. He and his wife told them that they could spend the next day there. They were given food and a place to sleep, and Esther was given some primitive first aid. The next evening, the peasants began to feel the enormity of what they’d done and told their three guests that they had to leave. The three thanked their hosts, were given a food package by their benefactors, and ran back out into the woods under cover of darkness. With some sleep under their belts and a little nourishment they had the strength to get farther away from the camp. They ran on, stumbling through most of the night, and as daylight started to come up they came to the second house Esther had seen in the dream. Once again they knocked on the door and were given the same reaction they’d been given the night before. Another safe haven for the day and some food to get them through the next night. Once again, as soon as it got dark they left their temporary safe haven and following the stars headed as far away from the camp as possible. The next dawn after running through the night, Esther saw the third house from the dream. This one was a substantial farmhouse with a barn. The house seemed deserted, but they watched carefully for several hours to see if any life stirred within. After detecting nothing but silence and a sense of emptiness, they decided the safest thing would be to make use of the barn rather than breaking into the house. They carefully stole into the barn and then up to loft, which was covered with hay. It felt like a good place to hole up till they had a specific, sensible plan. Exhausted from their two days of running, they all flopped down in the wonderful-smelling softness, and out of the hay, looking like a ghost, emerged the figure of a man. He had been sleeping under the hay, and in an instant Esther recognized that the figure was her brother, who had been arrested the same day she was arrested, years earlier. He had been sent to another camp. Esther had assumed for years that he had probably been killed. That was all that Esther told me, and I didn’t need to press her any further.” -Alan Arkin

The prison escape of Sobibor in 1943, of the hundreds of Jewish prisoners who escaped, it is believed on 50 of the escapees lived through the war.

I highly recommend you listen to the book on audio, as Alan does a stellar job at reading it and you can’t not be elevated in your very being from his honesty and love.