| The Healing
Power of a Child's Daimoku
Robin's mom came up to Massachusetts
from New York to visit. She mostly wanted to see Ana, her 2 and 1/2 year
old granddaughter.
Robin's mom is a Holocaust
survivor. In the kitchen, with Ana on her father's lap, Robin's mom spoke
of her experiences in Nazi Germany.
She said that one day they
replaced her teacher with a Nazi. The Nazi made her and the other Jewish
children sit in the back of the class. The work they did was ignored. She
begged her mom to keep her home from school. |
 |
Her father's business was taken
and given to a Nazi. He had to take a train to get to a menial job. The
train passed his old business every day.
On Nov. 9, 1938, Nazis burned
the synagogues and went from home to home beating Jews throughout the night.
At 4:00 a.m., the bell rang — it was the Nazis. They beat her father and
left him for dead in a pool of blood in the middle of the street. He managed
to get back to the apartment. Blood was everywhere. No ambulance would
come for a Jew. They had to take him to a Nazi doctor, who stitched his
head with no anesthesia and sent him home.
The next morning the Nazis
came again. They took her father to the Dachau concentration camp.
Robin fought back her tears.
Ana, who was still sitting on her father's lap, put her little hands together
and loudly chanted "Nam-myoho-renge-kyo" without stopping. Robin and her
mom broke into tears.
Robin's mother is not a member
but she understood. She said, "Now, look at that — I am telling about this
horrible horror that happened to our family, and it's as if she is trying
to say: 'This is the way to heal. This is the way to peace.'"
Robin said, "Ana's great-grandfather
was pulled from his home and beaten because he was a Jew. Now, almost 60
years later, his great-granddaughter is chanting the Daimoku of the Lotus
Sutra naturally, the sound bursting from her life like the rising sun.
Thank you, Nichiren Daishonin, and presidents Ikeda, Toda, and Makiguchi,
for making it possible for Ana to chant the Mystic Law, ensuring the happiness
of her ancestors and the happiness of all mankind to come."
[A longer version of this
experience is in the Nov. 21, 1997, World Tribune.]
