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At last - a motivational story without the 'Pollyann' attitude...
Warning...not for the fatalistic.
The story of Stanislaw Lec
They needed no reason. They came simply because he was of Jewish descent. The Nazis stormed into his home, arrested him and his entire family. Soon they were herded like cattle, packed into a train and then sent to the infamous death camp, Auschwitz. His most disturbing nightmares could not have prepared him for seeing his family shot before his very eyes. How could he live through the horror of seeing his child’s clothing on another because his son was now dead as the result of a ‘shower’?
Somehow, he continued. One day he looked at the nightmare around him and confronted an inescapable truth; if he stayed there even one more day, he would surely die. He made a decision that he must escape – and immediately. He knew not how, he simply knew that he must. For weeks, he’d asked the other prisoners, “How can we escape this horrible place?” The answers were always the same: “Don’t be a fool,” they said, “there is no escape! Asking such questions will only torture your soul. Just work hard and pray you survive.” But he couldn’t accept this – he wouldn’t accept it. He became obsessed with escape, and even when his answers didn’t make any sense, he kept asking over and over again, “How can I do it? There MUST be a way. How can I get out of here, healthy, alive, today?"
It is said that if you ask, you shall receive. And for some reason, on this day he got his answer. Perhaps it was the intensity with which he asked his question, or maybe it was his sense of certainty that ‘now is the time’. Whatever the reason, the giant power of the human mind and spirit had awakened in this man. The answer came to him through an unlikely source; the sickening smell of decaying human flesh. There, only a few feet from his work, he saw a huge pile of bodies that had been shovelled into the back of a truck – men, women, and children who had been gassed. The gold fillings had been pulled from their teeth; everything they owned, even their clothing, had been taken. Instead of asking, “How could the Nazi’s be so despicable, so destructive? How could God make something so evil? Why has God done this to me?” Stanislaw Lec asked a different question. He asked, “How can I use this to escape?” And instantly, he got his answer.
As the end of the day neared and the work party headed back to the barracks, Lec ducked behind the truck. In a heartbeat, he ripped off his clothes and dived naked into the pile of bodies while no one was looking. He pretended to be dead, remaining utterly still even though later he was nearly crushed as more and more bodies were heaped on top of him.
The fetid smell of rotting flesh, the rigid remains of the dead surrounded him everywhere. He waited and waited, hoping that no one would notice the one living body in that pile of death, hoping that sooner or later the truck would drive off.
Finally, he heard the sound of the engine starting. He felt the truck shudder. And in that moment, he felt a stirring of hope as he lay among the dead. Eventually, he felt the truck lurch to a stop, and then it dumped its ghastly cargo – dozens of the dead, and one man pretending to be one of them – in a giant open grave outside the camp. Lec remained there for hours until nightfall. When he finally felt certain no one was there, he extracted himself from the mountain of cadavers, and ran forty-five miles, naked, in the cold of November through a forest, to freedom.
What was the difference between Stanislaw Lec, and so many others who perished in the concentration camps? While, of course, there were many factors, one critical difference was that he asked a different question. He asked persistently, with expectation of receiving an answer, and his brain came up with a solution that saved his life. The questions he asked himself that day in Auschwitz caused him to make a split-second decisions that led to actions that significantly impacted his destiny. But before he could get his answer, decide whether to act on it and then actually DO IT, he had to ask himself the right questions.
JayBee.
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