I
BELIEVE
By
Rachmiel Frydland
September 1, 1939 was a beautiful day in
Warsaw, Poland. I was walking along Nowolipki Street,
heading toward the Jewish business district, when the big
rooftop sirens began to wail. "Another air raid
test," I thought. A halfblock farther on, I heard the drone
of airplane engines and then the heart-stopping roar of
exploding bombs. Warsaw was under attack by German
bombers. World War II had begun.
I quickly took shelter in a nearby
house, but not for long. Where could Polish citizens,
especially those who were Jewish, find protection from the
advancing Nazi juggernaut? Little did I realize then
that behind the swiftly advancing phalanxes of the German
military machines were the Nazi weapons of slave labor,
starvation, torture and murder for the so-called "inferior
races."
European Jews have seldom enjoyed complete
freedom, but there was no hint of the approaching holocaust
while I was growing up in a tiny forest village near Chelm,
Poland. It was during the years following World War
1, when my father eked out a living for our family of
seven by buying fruits, vegetables and animals from peasant
farmers and selling them to the townspeople.
BECOMING A RABBINICAL STUDENT
I progressed rapidly in my religious studies with
the village teachers, so my proud father sent me, his only
son, to a Jewish Yeshiva in Chelm. I was nine years
old when I entered. For four years I studied for the best
part of the day and was well prepared when time came for my
bar mitzvah. My father soon decided that I was ready
for rabbinical school, and off I went to Warsaw, the
capital.
As I studied, perturbing questions began to
creep into my thinking. Like small barriers at first,
they began to loom larger. Were the Gentiles as
terrible as my teachers said? Why did Christians
follow the teachings of our Jewish prophets? Must the
school discipline be so strict and unfeeling?
A growing rebellion stirred within me.
Gradually, without realizing it, I moved away from a
rabbinical career. First I left the highly regarded
rabbinical seminary which I was attending for one which was
less rigid. Then I shifted again to another one with
still more freedom. Encountering some financial
difficulties, I began to sell clothing items in the street
to earn money. This completely disqualified me for
rabbinical training.
At seventeen, I was on my own in Warsaw.
Looking for a place to stay, I was taken in by a Jewish
tailor and his family. I soon learned that they were
visiting a meeting hall where Gentile Christians were
seeking to convert Jews. My new friends encouraged me
to go with them. They said that I could help them
answer the missionaries' claim that Jesus was really the
Messiah of the Jewish people. I agreed to go.
ARGUING WITH A PREACHER
After the meeting, I talked with the preacher. He
read several passages from the Old Testament that he said
were prophecies about the long awaited Messiah of
Israel. I could give contradictory interpretations
for all but one of the passages. Daniel 9:24-26 told
of the Messiah's strange departure from Jerusalem.
Since I had not studied the Book of Daniel, I consulted
Jewish commentaries. I found very little information
on the passage in question and none of it seemed reasonable
to me.
The passage which perplexed me reads as
follows:
Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon
thy holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an
end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and
to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the
vision and the prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy. Know
therefore and understand, that from the going forth of the
commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the
Messiah the Prince shall a seven weeks, and threescore and
two weeks: the street shall be built again, and the wall,
even in troublous times. And after threescore and two weeks
shall Messiah be cut off, but not for
Himself.
This declaration raised many questions, but
the one which puzzled me most was: "Why was Messiah to be
cut off?" Further study and reflection caused my
ready-made answers to melt away. I realized that my
objections were based mostly upon what others had taught me
and not upon my own unprejudiced study of the Bible.
The prophetic promises which appeared to be fulfilled in
Jesus were too numerous to be explained away. As I
admitted these things to myself, I determined to read the
New Testament to find out about this Jesus.
A GREAT DISCOVERY
I obtained a copy of the New Testament in
Hebrew. As I read, I compared carefully the many
references I found in it to the Tenach (Old
Testament). Slowly and clearly it began to dawn upon
me that the New Testament was a continuation of the Old
Testament.
I reasoned that if the Jewish Scriptures are true, the
Christian Scriptures are also true
. From this it followed that Jesus must be my
Messiah.
At first I lacked courage to admit that I had
been wrong and to confess what I now believed. One evening
in 1937 I sat in a meeting composed wholly of Jewish people
who professed Jesus as the Messiah. The speaker was a
Gentile woman who spoke compellingly and with great
understanding about the Temple of Jerusalem. She
traced its great significance for the faith of Israel,
showing that its appointments and structure were Divine
object lessons, pointing to man's sinful condition
and God's provision for forgiveness, culminating in the
sacrifice of the Messiah for the forgiveness of sins.
So, that was why Messiah had to be cut off, as Daniel had
foretold! "How is it," I asked myself, "that a
Gentile woman knows more about the Bible and its
significance than I, a student of a Yeshiva?" At that
very meeting I dropped to my knees in prayer and asked
Messiah Jesus to become my Saviour. There was a wonderful
sense of the forgiveness of sins and a grant of courage to
confess Messiah openly.
I had been a believer for two years when the
war broke out. Warsaw shook under more and more
bombs. Food became scarce and the electricity and
water supply failed. Along with several other young
Jewish believers in the Messiah, I went to help defend the
city. Because I did not want to use a gun, I was
given physical work. Within a month the city was
crushed and the triumphant Germans marched in.
A TASTE OF NAZI BRUTALITY
I decided to leave the city and seek farm work with
friends to the north. With a certificate in hand,
given to me by my pastor, I set out across the
burning city. Reaching the outskirts, I was stopped
by a soldier. "Are you a Jew?" he demanded. Without a
word, I handed him my certificate. He looked at it
and then spat out:
"Yes, but you are still a Jew! "
He seized a shovel and slammed it into my back, knocking me
into a ditch. There I was ordered to join fellow Jews
who were digging graves for dead horses. It was my
first taste of Nazi brutality, but actually mild in
comparison with what awaited so many others.
That night I escaped in the darkness and
resumed my journey. My friends received me gladly and
fed me, but in a short time the new restrictive laws
against Jews forced me to leave. Returning to Warsaw,
I discovered that one of my sisters had died of typhus and
that a wall had been built around the Jewish section.
I decided to walk the 150 miles southeast to my native
village. Jews were not allowed to travel any longer
on public vehicles.
HOME AGAIN
My parents could hardly believe I was still alive when I
arrived in mid-December. One of my sisters also
returned home, and we settled down, hoping to wait out the
war. We knew, however, that our blue-and-white
armbands, marking us as Jews, were a constant hazard to our
lives. I was forced to work with slave laborers,
building a road, but managed to escape when starvation
swept the camp. Home again, my mother told me that I
must stop telling my Jewish friends about the
Messiah. But the spreading pall of suffering and
death caused people to reach out for some hope or answer
for the dreaded future.
One day my sister came to me. "I read your
Bible," she said, "and I heard your discussions. I
believe, and if God gives us peaceful days, I want to be
baptized. " My mother came to me and said, "I have watched
you and you are a different person. I was reading
your New Testament and I don't see anything wrong in this
Jesus. Why are our rabbis so much against Him?"
My father never admitted anything to me. However, he
stopped hiding my Bible and rebuking me for speaking about
Jesus. He began secretly to read the Bible.
The blossoming faith of my family was a great
blessing to me as death drew nearer in 1942. We saw
trucks and trains loaded with Jewish people rolling toward
the extermination camp at Sobibor. One by one and
village by village they disappeared. My father, my
mother, my sisters, my newly wedded wife, and all other
relatives except a brother-inlaw perished. At the end
of August the order came for me to go. I was given
permission by the mayor of our village to say goodbye to my
parents, who at that time had not yet been called. I
fled to the woods, and though time and again I was
captured, by miracle after miracle God enabled me to
survive.
ALONE IN THE WOODS
Once, alone in the woods in the biting cold of winter,
exhausted and discouraged, my whole being seemed to cry
out: "Why are we so persecuted?" I was convinced that
the companions who had been with me just days before had
been caught, and lived no more. I, too, was ready to
die. But there still remained the Lord, the same
yesterday and today. He began to speak to
me.
"You have enough of my grace. Had not Job
enough? Had not Paul enough?"
The still small voice of God spoke softly to me.
Overcome with tears, I yielded and decided to live as long
as the Lord would allow me to live, and to work for
Him. Confident that God was with me, I rose up
and left those woods.
As I moved from place to place, Gentile
Christians often risked their lives by hiding and feeding
me. One of my bitterest experiences, however, was the
discovery that many German Christians, though they knew of
the Nazi atrocities against the Jews, would not help.
"It is our government, and we must obey," they said.
IN THE WARSAW GHETTO
In late 1944, by hiding in cemeteries, deserted
churches, and the homes of fearful friends, I was one of
the few surviving Jews in Warsaw outside the ghetto.
In that enclosure were 5,000 Jews, the last of Warsaw's
original 500,000. By God's enabling, I secretly
slipped into the ghetto and was able to speak comfort to a
few of the Jewish believers still alive. Other Jewish
brethren heard the message and believed in Messiah
Jesus. My friends in the ghetto insisted that I
leave. They said that if God had preserved me thus
far, I would be a witness to the woes they now
experienced. At the end of the war, I could tell the
story of their suffering. I was probably one of the
last to leave the ghetto. It was only shortly
afterward that the Germans obliterated the entire camp.
Time seemed to drag slowly. There were
nights when a Christian family would risk their lives by
sheltering a Jew. Once, in the shop of a Christian
undertaker, I slept in a coffin. There were other
times when a barn provided my shelter. In all that
time there was the assurance that God wanted me to
live. As long as He wanted it, I was ready. And
finally the day came when I was no longer hunted and
condemned for being a Jew. In January of 1945,
Russian troops entered Warsaw and the automatic death
sentence for Jews was lifted.
After the war I left Poland and went to
England to study. With my training behind me, I came
to the United States to share in a witness for Messiah
among my own people. Then, for four years, I lived in
Israel, serving as a pastor to Israeli believers in Messiah
and sharing my witness with my brethren there. In
Israel I met my wife, who is also a Jewish believer in the
Messiah. She had suffered through the Nazi occupation
of France and had survived to immigrate to Israel.
WHAT MY HEART FEELS
Words fail to describe what my heart feels. Awed by
the power and greatness of the God of Daniel, King Darius
wrote a decree to his dominions which perhaps describes
best the awe and reverence that I feel for what God has
done for me:
...
for He is The living God, enduring forever; His kingdom
shall never be destroyed, and His dominion shall be to the
end. He delivers and rescues, He works signs and wonders in
heaven and on earth, He who has saved Daniel from the power
of the lions.
(Daniel 6:26-27).
From my harrowing experience, I see that men
who reject Messiah are capable of bringing hell on
earth. But surely God has not abandoned
mankind. He has a plan for every person who will trust
Him. The Bible, which has guided and sustained me
thus far, promises that peace and justice will fill the
earth only when the Prince of Peace returns. He is
the only hope of mankind, and I know that He will come,
because He has proved His great love and His miraculous
power to me. Will you not also trust Him, my friend?
And I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplications: and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son. - Zechariah 12:10