In the closing days of World War II, Allied bombings of the munitions factories around Essen, Germany, became more and more frequent and fierce. When the air raid sirens sounded, armed guards would rush to bomb shelters, leaving the slave laborers (often Jewish and female) to huddle in the rubble and take their own chances.
On March 11, 1945, at the height of an endless bombardment, Elizabeth Roth and five companions decided to make their escape. They crept to the barbed wire surrounding the factory where they worked, crawled through a gap, and made their way across an empty field to a hill overlooking the town where they hoped to find a hiding place.
There, on the verge of freedom, one of the girls lost her nerve. Quietly, she turned back, recrossed the field, crawled back through the wire, and returned to the wreckage of the factory. The next day, along with five hundred other female workers, she was loaded onto a train and sent to Buchenwald and the gas chambers.
In recounting this story, William Manchester remarks, “It is a common phenomenon among escapees; the known, however ghastly, seems preferable to the unknown.”
Who would do such a thing?” you might ask. “What sane person would make such a tragic decision?” The answer is, “We would.”
Like Elizabeth and her friends, we know what it’s like to be imprisoned in a broken world. We’ve been there, living amid the wreckage, cowering under the consequences of our own failure and surrounded by our shattered lives, ruined relationships, and failed hopes.
Then, one day, Jesus comes and offers a means of escape. He takes us by the hand and leads us away from our old lives and habits. Over the wreckage and through the barriers and across the barren fields that
...