Life Is So Good
| November 4, 2020
If the old sewing machine could talk, almost ninety years old, the stories it would tell. The antique Singer sits in Dominca’s small cottage in rural Ukraine, just as it sat there during World War II.
“One of the Nazis walked in,” the 102-year-old Jewish widow remembers, “and sat right there in this chair.”
The Nazi had just murdered Dominca’s family – her mother, her father, and her two brothers – in front of her. And now he sat down and ordered her, the family’s only surviving member, “Fix my uniform with your sewing machine.”
Dominca doesn’t know why she survived. Perhaps because of her sewing machine. But surely because of God’s love.
And she doesn’t know what she would do – all alone, more than a hundred years old – without His love or without the ongoing help of Christians around the world.
When Yael visited Dominca last year around the holidays, the widow’s eyes lit up at the sight of the Fellowship box of fresh food – oranges, cucumbers, eggs, tuna fish, and green and red peppers. “It’s the most beautiful pepper I have ever seen,” Dominca declared.
While the ongoing pandemic has made life even more difficult for elderly Jews around the world – Jews like Dominca – she knows that the love of Christians she’s never met will help her eat, help her survive as the holiday season approaches.
As this sweet soul sits in the very room where she once witnessed such pain, a room that for years has now been all alone, save for that old sewing machine, she still tells us, “Life is so good.”