No Thank You: A Story of Bread, Sacrifice, and the Image of God

Subtitle: Gen. 1:27 — So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

Rabbi Ed Feinstein tells a story shared with him by a member of his synagogue, a survivor of one of Hitler's concentration camps.

As a teenager, the man had been taken to the camp and placed on the labor side, the side of forced work and starvation. He lived in a barracks among older men, a long, unheated shed built for livestock, now crammed with wooden bunks stacked three tiers high, six men to a bunk. The straw in the mattresses had long since rotted. In winter, the cold came through the walls without resistance.

Every morning before dawn, a whistle tore the darkness apart. The men had a few minutes to arrange their bedding, use the single waste bucket shared by the entire block, and fall into formation outside for roll call, the Appell. They stood in all weather, rain, snow, sleet, until every number was counted and the count was satisfied. A man who swayed or stumbled drew the wrong kind of attention.

Then came work. Heavy labor, most of it purposeless by design. Digging. Hauling. Moving stone from one place to another and back again. The goal was not production. The goal was exhaustion.

The daily ration was built to kill slowly. Breakfast was half a liter of bitter ersatz coffee, a grain-based brew that offered neither nourishment nor warmth. At midday, a liter of watery soup, potatoes, rutabaga, a faint smell of meat that may or may not have been present. In the evening, roughly 250 grams of black bread, clay-like and dense, along with a thin scraping of margarine. Men on forced labor detachments ran a caloric deficit of 1,100 to 1,200 calories every day. At that rate, the body consumes itself. A normally nourished man could survive on his own reserves for perhaps three months. After that, the body had nothing left to spend.

Bread was the camp's only real currency. You could trade a portion of your ration for a spoon, since the camp issued none. You could barter for an extra sock, a piece of cloth, a few minutes of warmth. Stealing another man's bread was understood as attempted murder, and the other prisoners treated it that way. That small crust, that 250 grams, was the line between living another day and becoming what the prisoners called a Muselmann, a man who had gone past hunger into a kind of hollow apathy, moving through the days already half-gone, waiting without knowing he was waiting.

The young man in Rabbi Feinstein's story had been at the camp long enough to know all of this when he fell ill. A high fever. He could barely stand.

In the camp, illness was a sentence. The Nazis had a word for those too weak to work: they were sent to the infirmary, and the infirmary was where people went to die, or to be selected and killed outright. A prisoner who could not maintain his place in formation, who could not keep pace on the march to the worksite, risked being pulled from the line and never seen again. Discovery meant death.

The men in the barracks knew this. They knew it exactly. And they chose to act anyway.

They covered for him at work. They filled his place in the column, stepped into his absence so the count stayed clean, answered when his number was called, held the formation together around a gap that could not be seen. During roll call, they stood close on either side of him, men pressing their shoulders against his arms to keep him upright when his legs would not do it alone.

Most sacrificially, they gave him portions of their own bread. Not the margarine, not a scraping from the soup bowl. The bread itself. Each man reached into his own survival and handed part of it to the boy. In a place where 250 grams stood between life and death, they gave freely, day after day, until the fever broke and the young man found his legs again.

One night, after the lights went out and the barracks lay in darkness, the boy said aloud, "Thank you all for saving my life."

From somewhere in the dark, a voice quietly responded: "No, no, my boy. Thank you for reminding us what it means to be human, what it means to be men. What they're taking away, you just gave back to us."

True Humanity Reflects God's Image

"So God created man in his own image..." (Genesis 1:27) — Even in the darkest places, the dignity of being made in God's image cannot be erased.

Love Is the Mark of the Redeemed

"Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends." (John 15:13)

To Bear One Another's Burdens Is to Fulfill Christ's Law

"Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ." (Galatians 6:2)

Kindness Reveals the Grace of God

"Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you." (Ephesians 4:32)

In giving to that young boy, those men reclaimed their humanity. They defied the dehumanization around them by loving sacrificially just as Christ loves us. We too are called to live this way. Wherever you are, be the one who reminds others what it means to be human, what it means to be made in the image of God.