"I wouldn't have survived three weeks"

            Although I named this blog for the whispers that began coming to me in 2005, I’ve blogged only a few of them.  I’ve felt many to be too personal to blog, but more of them should be shared, so I’ll be digging some of these up and blogging them more now.  For the story of the whispers, see my post on the blog title's inspiration

           I'll start with this one of October, 2015, in relation to my horror of the Holocaust. Upon my husband’s recommendation, I had just read Viktor Frankl’s chilling book, Man’s Search for Meaning.  Frankl was a Holocaust survivor who shared his own story of the Holocaust and his own search for meaning in the most dire of life experiences as a way to frame his philosophy.  I finished the book unsatisfied.  Perhaps Frankl could heroically find “meaning” through his horrors, but I sure could not.  And the “meaning” he did find, to me, was wholly unworthy of the torture he had endured.

            Walking to work one October day, I was musing over Frankl’s concluding thoughts and the horrors faced by the Holocaust victims, and thought, with a very bitter tone, mostly directed to the perpetrators, “I would not have survived three weeks in one of those camps!” My heart, soul, and mind were racked with rage.  I wanted those perpetrators, wherever they were, to hear me accuse of them of the evil of their horrors, and I was about to start attacking them.  But a whisper of mystery interrupted.  In a sweet, gentle voice, the whisper said, “You are right, my child.  You would not have survived longer than three weeks.  You would have found an out by then.” 

Whoa.  What was that?  I surrendered my angry line of thinking and turned my attention to the whisper.  “What do you mean, I ‘would have found an out’? I would have escaped or I would have died?”

“Either one,” the whisper replied, “Probably death.  But you would have chosen to leave, even if by death, which would have been granted to you as an option every single day.”  The whisper paused, permitting me to take this in.  Then the whisper continued, “You would have tried to escape, but in a way that would certainly kill you if you did not succeed, like trying to climb over one of those electric fences.”

“So I’d have committed suicide?” I asked.

“Neither on Earth, nor in heaven, are the deaths of choice by Holocaust victims called ‘suicide,’” the whisper replied.  “They are hailed as ‘martyrs,’ not as ‘suicides,’ but, yes, many of them chose death, as you would have done.”

The whisper continued, “Death was inches away for the Holocaust prisoners, and every day, they were given the chance to choose it.  They could join a line up to the gas chamber.  They could anger a guard holding a gun.  They could let themselves starve.  Many of the millions who died in the Holocaust chose both their time of death and their form of death.”

I was astounded by this concept that had never occurred to me.  “And I would have been one of them?” I asked again.  The whisper concluded, "Yes, you would have chosen your death, and you would have chosen it quickly."

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