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Mother to the rescue
Here’s a story our German friend, Rita, shared with my family.
She told us how her older brother was a prisoner of war during the Second World War in the then Soviet Union. His family back in Germany had no information on his whereabouts for a long time, even after the war had ended.
During this period, Rita explained, her mother would visit a POW camp in Germany that held Russian prisoners. She would stand outside the fence of the camp and offer the prisoners whatever small amounts of food she could share. When her friends would ask why she would make the effort to do this, she couldn’t explain why she felt compelled to carry out this compassionate gesture. She would continue her visits despite not knowing the whereabouts of her own son in Russia. Rita told us how they had never expected to see her brother again. There was no information on whether he was even alive.
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About the author
Mark Pierce lives in Long Beach, California.
