Book Review

I just finished reading an amazing true book called Return from Tomorrow by George Ritchie. At the age of 20 he died in a military hospital in Texas. Nine minutes later he returned to life. In this book he tells of his experience. It changed his life. But I really like that it took awhile for him to learn how to apply what he learned; he changed by degrees. He had to be taught what to do with what he had learned.

I want to just share a part of his experience that happened a year or so after his near death experience. He was with a group that freed a concentration camp in Germany called Wuppertal. Mr Ritchie was in charge of getting medical help to the newly liberated prisoners.

He met a man that was in Wuppertal that they called Wild Bill Cody because of his mustache. "He was one of the inmates of the concentration camp, but obviously he hadn’t been there long; his posture was erect, his eyes bright, his energy indefatigable. Since he was fluent in English, French, German and Russian, as well as Polish, he became a kind of unofficial camp translator.

"We came to him with all sorts of problems; the paper work alone was stagering....But though Wild Bill worked fifteen and sixteen hours a day, he showed no signs of weariness. While the rest of us were drooping with fatigue, he seemed to gain strength. ‘We have time for this old fellow,’ he’d say. ‘He’s been waiting to see us all day.’ His compassion for his fellow-prisoners glowed on his face, and it was to this glow that I came to when my own spirits were low.

"So I was astonished when Wild Bill’s own papers came, that he had been in Wuppertal since 1939! For six years he had lived on the same starvation diet, slept in the same airless and disease-riden barracks as everyone else, but without the least physical or mental deterioration....

"’It’s not easy for some of them to forgive,’ I commented to him one day. ‘So many of them have lost members of their families.’

"‘We lived in the Jewish section of Warsaw,’ he began slowly, the first words I had heard him speak about himself, ‘my wife, our two daughters, and our three little boys. When the Germans reached our street they lined everyone against a wall and opened up the machine guns. I begged to be allowed to die with my family, but because I spoke German they put me in a work group. I had to decide right then, whether to let myself hate the soldiers who had done this. It was an easy decision, really. I was a lawyer,..I had seen too often what hate could do to people’s minds and bodies.....I decided then that I would spend the rest of my life--whether it was a few days or many years--loving every person I came in contact with.’

"Loving every person...this was the power that had kept a man well in the face of every privation. It was the power I had first met in a hospital room in Texas, and was learning little by little to recognize wherever He chose to shine through--whether the human vehicle was aware of Him or not."

This book gets 5 stars from me. It is an easy read (it only took me a few hours.) and is very insightful. His view of the spirit world is a bit different from books I have read by LDS people on the same subject I think because, as he described himself, he was very selfish and spoiled. So he saw what happens to people who are slaves to bad habits on earth. Still he describes how very loved he felt and how much he wished he could stay there.