The Most Important One
The Fellowship | October 27, 2020
Yehudit has seen a lot in her 84 years of life. As a girl, she took what seemed to be an endless refugee journey with her family. Chased from their home in Czechoslovakia during the Holocaust, the Jewish family moved from one place to another until the Nazis caught them in 1944.
Yehudit found herself completely alone in Auschwitz at the age of eight. “Although I was a little girl at the time, I had no childhood,” she recalls. “I was lonely, frightened, desperate.”
At that young age, little Yehudit found herself pushing wheelbarrows that carried the bodies of other Jews murdered in Auschwitz. And then, as the Red Army approached, the Germans began to kill as many prisoners as they could. This is when Yehudit’s life was saved for the first time.
A fellow prisoner, assigned to supervise Yehudit and other Jewish children, hid the kids from the Germans. Once liberated, the young girl received treatment and care at a local monastery.
While Yehudit’s parents perished in the Holocaust, other relatives frantically searched for the girl once the war ended. After her story was published, Yehudit’s family found her and sent her to the Holy Land to live with an aunt.
A new life began in Israel, where Yehudit and her husband watched three children, a dozen grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren grow and thrive. The couple even returned to Europe to at last find the grave of Yehudit’s mother.
Now Yehudit finds herself alone again. Her husband passed away, and her children and grandchildren live in other cities. Now, as the coronavirus pandemic again spikes in Israel, the elderly widow cannot leave her home, for food, for medicine, for daily life.
But thanks to The Fellowship, Yehudit is not alone. She receives care from Christian friends around the world, including help that again saved her life. An emergency button, provided by The Fellowship and worn around her wrist, helped Yehudit call for help when she suffered a heart attack.
“I was alone at home. Without it I wouldn’t have survived,” she says of this very important gift from Fellowship friends, calling it “the most important one.”