From a dark past...

When Mitka awoke on his first morning in Rotenburg an der Fulda, ten days before Christmas, he might have seen houses festooned with garlands, windowpanes glinting in firelight. The pastoral village, however, would become nightmarish for Mitka over the course of his seven-year enslavement.

That winter morning in 1942, Mitka wore pants held up by string, a shirt, and rags tied around his feet. He believes he must have received other clothes as he grew, but looking back, he remembers none until 1945.

Mitka had been inexplicably saved from the concentration camps by a Nazi officer but was forced to a life of servitude. His identity stripped from him, he worked long, hard hours on the German farm. He was fed pig slop and was banished every night to a bare room with barred windows.

He would be kept there for years after the war was over—until 1949. He had little reason for hope, except for an unknown voice he heard one day that told him:

Am Ende findest du dein Ziel—“In the end you will find your purpose."

...Into A Bright Future

The Jewish orphan, so often in the line of Hitler’s homicidal intentions, had survived. The prisoner, little Mitka, had left the camps alive—broken, but alive. The Nazis had taken his family, his faith, his name, and his freedom.

But every one of these things he reclaimed. His name is Mitka, and he is proud to be Jewish—he has even seen some of his children embrace Judaism. What the locust had eaten had been restored.

Mitka is an unabashedly cheerful man, a man who loves, who seeks no revenge, who trusts, who delights in the moment, who embraces truth, and who trudges forward expecting to find answers to mysteries yet unsolved.

But he is also a man who lives with an ache in his heart, a man who manages his lifetime of trauma, in part, by telling and retelling all that happened to him.

The man with reasons to hate chose love. He refused bitterness and found happiness. He, the victim, rejected victimhood. The grace he received became the grace he gave.