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With love in our hearts, there is nothing we cannot overcome. —Chen Yeng
I remember this. How it felt to have my soul torn from my chest.
If you want things done, hurry to it.
“First the Communists killed all the smart people who made things work in the cities. And now they want to make doing good at anything at all a punishable crime! What has happened to the world? How did we end up in an asylum?”
“If you work hard, Papa, if you hurry to it, you are doing the right thing because God rewards your hard labor.”
“Yes, sweetheart, but that was when life made sense. Now there’s nothing but madness.”
Is that what it takes to feel like this? To come so close to death, you want to burst for joy because you feel so glad to be alive?
Can happiness be that easy? Finding little joys in the worst moments?
Laughter was like a hot shower for the soul after a long, cold day.
“Keep laughing,” she said, wagging a finger at her. “Laughter keeps you young at heart. Laugh at least once a day. Twice is better.”
constantly put the past behind us and not dwell too much on the future. If you must look back, try to find the beauty and the benefit in every cruelty done to you. If you must think about the future, try to have no expectations about it. Trust in God to guide you through.
He said praying was where you talk to God. And meditation was where you listen.”
What possesses men to do such evil? Are they even human? Can’t they see that when you kill someone or destroy a holy place, the faith always goes on? Don’t they see that in broken hearts and ruins, something always glows?
“She told me once that she believed that life does not happen to you; it happens for you, and that your whole life is a blessed journey of discovery. But you can only see life clearly and relish it when the journey is almost at an end.”
“The bee is a miracle,” he heard a man say in German, but in an odd, thick accent. “No bee, no flowers, no fruit, no beauty, no life.”
“How can thinking change the future?” “Not change, influence,”
“What you seek is what you will find, but only if you hunt it with all your heart and mind.”
“The problem is, most people get frustrated when they do not find what they are looking for or don’t do what they are trying to do easily and in a short period of time. They give up after a couple of failures or a couple of years of struggle.
The dream that once lit up their heart now begins to darken it, and their thinking changes. They lose faith far too early. They believe far too early that their dream can never exist.
Once disbelief takes hold in their heart and thoughts, the Almighty hears it and gives up trying to help them. That’s
“Whatever emotions you carry in your heart, Martel, especially love. God listens loud and clear if you feel love. The Almighty also knows if you are feeling good.
The Universal Intelligence responds when you are happy or courageous or even if you are just calm. It understands when you are grateful for the miracle of your existence and rushes to help you when you have a dream that helps other people. The Divine hears all the languages of the heart and beauty.”
and you will walk through battles untouched and have anything your heart desires.”
make sure there were no more death camps or starvation. Ever.”
even if the starved went west and prospered and the Jews who survived became the toughest people on the planet, they would all still be human, and they would all still have broken hearts over what was done to them and to their families.
all it took to have a good life was a cheerful, grateful mood, a clearly envisioned, heartfelt dream, and the willingness to chase it with an unwavering belief in its eventual realization.
“You know, I used to think life was something that happened to me,”
“But now, I know life happened for me.”
“Don’t chew on the bad things that happen to you, dear. Try to see the beauty in every cruelty. It sets you free. Forgive hurt if you want to heal a broken heart. Try to be grateful for every setback or tragedy, because by living through them, you become stronger. I see the hand of God in that.
Historians believe that between twenty and twenty-five thousand ethnic Germans perished on the Long Trek from Ukraine to Hungary, and on the trains that took the refugees north from Budapest to Lodz, Poland, which became known as the Ellis Island of the Third Reich.
According to Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Memorial, some eighteen thousand Jews were massacred by the SS’s Einsatzkommando 12 of Einsatzgruppen D in fields and ravines outside the town of Dubossary in early to mid-September 1941.
Historians believe that western Allied soldiers may have raped as many as eighty thousand German and ethnic German women during the last part of the war and its immediate aftermath. They believe Soviet soldiers may have raped more than one million German women in that same time period.