Everyone has heard of Anne Frank, the Jewish girl who died in a Nazi concentration camp. Fewer have heard of Gena Goldfinger, the girl who nursed 15-year old Anne as she lay dying.
Before Gena's journey to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, she spent time at Auschwitz, where an apparent malfunction in a gas chamber spared her life. But a brother was shot by the Nazi SS. One of Gena's sisters was gunned down trying to smuggle food into the camp. Another sister died a horrible death after being injected with gasoline by Dr. Mengele.
But little Gena—not even ten years old—was a survivor, and she intended to stay that way. At the time, an epidemic of typhus fever had swept throughout the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where she and her mother had marched. Hundreds died every day.
Gena, of course, saw the effects of the epidemic up close. Determined to ensure her and her mother's survival, the plucky girl talked her way into a job at the camp hospital.
As for Anne Frank, Gena remembers, "She was delirious, terrible, burning up." Gena brought water to Anne in an attempt to relieve her discomfort.
"I washed her face, gave her water to drink," recalled Gena, whose bunk was around the corner from Anne's. "I can still see that face, her hair, and how she looked."
Unlike Anne, who died three months shy of her 16th birthday, Gena survived and lived a long life after the war, leading school children in tours of the death camps in later years.
She had lost three brothers and two sisters in the Holocaust—along with a friend named Anne Frank.
On June 7 of this month, at the age of 95, Gena passed away. I look at her life and wonder—when I finally come to the end, will there be anyone who remembers me giving them a cup of water? We may not be in a concentration camp, but the parched and dying are all around us, some of them even appearing healthy on the outside.
In her famous diary, Anne Frank wrote, "How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."
Jesus said, "And if you give even a cup of cold water to one of the least of my followers, you will surely be rewarded." –Matthew 10:42.
Know anyone who could use a cup of cold water?