Helene's Story, Part II
Last month Elizabeth told of an Austrian woman's anguished spiritual journey from passionate belief in Adolf Hitler to radical trust in Jesus Christ. Here the saga continues with a true story of mystery and romance.
Smiling at her own foolishness, Helene Obermayer drew out a sheet of paper and wrote: "My Ideal Husband. He should have beautiful hands. He should love classical music. He should sometimes let me drive the car."
Helene looked at the last line and almost scratched it out. Most Austrian women, even in 1975, did not drive. But Helene loved driving! As sales representative for a dental supply company, she felt her hours behind the wheel with her cocker spaniel at her side were the best in any week.
Next she scrunched up the paper and tossed it on the floor. How ridiculous for a 45-year-old spinster to sit daydreaming about marriage like a romantic teenager!
Her own teenage years bad been spent in the shadow of the Second World War, first as a member of a Hitler Youth squadron that mobilized young girls to defend their homeland, then in the bitter postwar years of American occupation.
To Helene, the hunger, the cold, the bomb damage had been nothing compared with the discovery that the leader she had worshiped, Adolf Hitler, was in fact a bloodthirsty tyrant. Her disillusionment was so enormous that for 30 years she let herself trust no one.
Then 12 months earlier, in 1974, Helene had learned that God loved her. Daring to trust His love, she had begun over the past year to wonder if someday she could know a man's love too.
"Ridiculous!" Helene repeated. She scooped the wad of paper from the floor and threw it in a wastebasket. Where would she meet an unattached man at all, let alone one with a certain sort of hands and musical tastes! There were pitifully few Austrian men her age or older; virtually that whole generation had died in Hitler's armies, and those who survived had long since married.
But as the months passed, the desire for a husband only grew stronger. A year after writing out that childish list, she was praying one day, when into her mind, as clear as a photograph in her hand, came the vision of a man. "This is the husband," she thought she heard God say, "whom I am giving you."
Helene's mouth went dry; her heart pounded. In speechless astonishment she considered the picture in her mind. The man had intense dark eyes, beetling black eyebrows, a full head of white hair. The picture, in black and white, was of his head and shoulders only. But what she could see of his clothes told her something more: a jacket in a hideous pattern of crisscross stripes, and the ugliest tie Helene had ever seen.
He was an American. She was as sure of it as she was that God Himself was showing him to her. But Americans had been the enemy! The invaders. Was it possible that God was giving her to love a man from the country she'd hated with all her heart?
Or was this always God's answer? Where we've hated most, to plant the deepest love?
Helene began to pray daily for this person she had "seen," and to look for him everywhere - sales conventions, church retreats, concert halls. But 1977 came and went, then 1978. Though the portrait in her mind remained sharp, no such individual appeared.
Three full years passed, and Helene decided she must have mistaken her own longing for the voice of God.
Meanwhile, reading the Bible each day, she was eager to visit the Holy Land. In 1979 she joined a church group on a tour of Israel.
And it was there, in the conference hall of a hotel on the Golan Heights, that she saw him. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt in place of the awful jacket and tie she had seen in her vision. But the intent eyes, the heavy brows, the white hair-she would have recognized him anywhere.
And what should she do now? Could she simply walk up to a total stranger and say, "You will be my husband"?
Heart in her mouth, Helene worked her way toward the man across the crowded lobby. "Excuse me," she said, feeling a flush burn her cheeks, "but it seems to me I've seen you somewhere."
So they exchanged introductions. Gideon Miller, as Helene had guessed, was an American. She invented excuses to keep chatting, long enough to learn that he was presently managing a small bookstore in Jerusalem. How did he like living in Israel? Very much. "For us Jews, you know, it's a lifelong dream."
Us Jews. . . For a searing moment Helene saw herself in the black-and-brown uniform of the Hitler Youth, swallowing the poison of anti-Semitism. Was God going to leave no rag of prejudice unwashed in His love? Had He really chosen as her husband not only an American, but a Jew?
When her tour group got to Jerusalem she located the store where Gideon worked. A tape player was playing as she stepped in, a Chopin sonata. "My weakness," Gideon confessed. "I'll go without lunch to buy music."
Startled, Helene recalled her "ideal husband." A music lover. . .with beautiful hands. . .who would let her drive the car. She looked at Gideon's hands. Slender and strong, with long, tapering fingers. . .
As they talked, Helene learned that Gideon, like herself, had carried a burden of rage. For him the fury was against Germans - and Austrians in particular - who had murdered all but a handful of his family. Coming from opposite sides of a tragic history, the souls of this middle-aged man and woman groped toward each other there in that dusty bookstore in Jerusalem.
Suddenly Gideon turned and began rummaging in a drawer. "I don't know why I'm doing this," Helene heard him mutter. He straightened up. "I've never in my life given anyone a picture of myself," he said, clearly baffled at his own behavior, "but - " He thrust a photograph at her, "This was taken three years ago."
Helene held it in her hands, as she'd held "it so long in her heart. The photograph of a white-haired man with compelling eyes. . .the striped jacket. . .the terrible tie. . .
With this evidence of God's purpose in her hands, Helene waited expectantly for Him to reveal the design to Gideon as well. All that week in Jerusalem she dreamed up devices to throw the two of them together, asking him to show her numerous landmarks.
But Gideon, though cordial enough, seemed to regard Helene as nothing more than an especially determined sightseer. Eight years older than she, he had had an unhappy marriage in his younger years. After the death of his wife, he'd remained a bachelor. Marriage was obviously the last thing on his mind.
And there was an added impediment, Helene realized, as her tour group boarded the plane for home. Gideon was struggling with prejudice as Helene had. But his root of bitterness went deeper - based not on lies but on the terrible reality of the Holocaust.
From Austria Helene began writing to Gideon, describing the centuries-old isolation of Jews that had made possible the Nazi hate campaign, urging him to visit Austria as a teacher and bridge-builder. Such teaching, she told him honestly enough, was desperately needed. What she couldn't mention was her personal motive.
For months Gideon resisted the suggestion. But he was above all a praying man; at last he wrote that God was directing him to come.
Helene met him at the Salzburg airport. At the curbside she handed him the car keys. He stared at them in dismay. "I'm sorry, Helene. Would you mind? You see, I've never learned to drive."
Joyfully Helene chauffeured him about the country, translating for him as he spoke. As invitations multiplied, he returned to Austria again, then a third time. And still, for all Helene could see, she remained simply his driver and interpreter. Occasionally she would catch him staring at her with a tortured look. But about his feelings he never spoke.
The night before Helene's fiftieth birthday was the lowest point of all. Gideon had spoken that evening in Wuppertal, Germany. "There's nothing scheduled tomorrow," he said as she dropped him at the private home where he was to spend the night. "So we won't need to get together."
". . .won't need. . .I won't need you. . ." All the way to the women's hostel where Helene was staying, the crushing word pursued her. It was need alone that made him seek her out.
She cried herself to sleep and awoke to a dismal birthday in a strange city. In Salzburg friends had planned a great celebration. Instead she was alone, far from home, chasing a dream of marriage to a man who tolerated her presence only as a matter of practicality.
She wandered disconsolately into a small bookshop, looking for something to read. There was a rack near the entrance, and in it. . .a solitary birthday card.
Why, those were Alpine flowers decorating it! The very ones Helene had picked as a child on the mountains above Salzburg. Suddenly Helene knew that this was her card, her special birthday greeting from God. She opened it to the message: "Blessings on your birthday. What God has promised, that will He also do (Romans 4:21)."
That birthday card kept Helene from despairing as still another year passed, then 18 months. Gideon was spending more time in Austria, depending on her German translations at his meetings-but nothing more. The card reassured her when she discovered a lump in her breast. God had promised her a husband, this husband, so how could she die before He brought it about?
In the spring of 1982 she was told she must have an operation. The day before the surgery Gideon came up to the hospital room with a letter postponing their speaking dates until Helene was well enough to travel again. At a table in the room she shared with three other patients, Helene was translating his English draft into German when Gideon suddenly laid his hand over the page.
"Helene. . .will you come outside with me?" Startled, Helene looked out the window. It was pouring rain.
Something in Gideon's eyes, though, stifled her objections-the look of anguish she had caught there before. She dressed swiftly and followed him down the stairs and into the garden behind the hospital. The rain had driven everyone else inside, creating the only private spot in that busy institution. Walking close together beneath his black umbrella, they'd gone halfway down the path when Gideon stopped.
"Helene, will you marry me?"
He had fallen in love with her, he rushed on, that very first week in Jerusalem-and struggled against it every day of the past three years. "I gave myself all the logical reasons why we could never be close. But, Helene. . .it's almost as though our being together had all been settled ahead of time."
"A long, long time ahead," said Helene.
Editor's note: Surgery revealed a benign tumor. Gideon and Helene were married in the fall of that year. Today they lead groups of Austrians on missions of repentance to the sites of local concentration camps. They've come a long way, the former Nazi and the Jew.
Helene's Story, Part 1
Helene's Story by Elizabeth Sherrill is copyright 1990 by Guideposts, Carmel, New York 10512. All rights reserved.
If you would like to reproduce this story, contact Guideposts, ATTN: Rights & Permissions Department, 16 E. 34th St., 12th floor, New York, NY 10016, Permissions Editor@guideposts.org.
For more true stories of hope and inspiration, visit www.guideposts.org.
Smiling at her own foolishness, Helene Obermayer drew out a sheet of paper and wrote: "My Ideal Husband. He should have beautiful hands. He should love classical music. He should sometimes let me drive the car."
Helene looked at the last line and almost scratched it out. Most Austrian women, even in 1975, did not drive. But Helene loved driving! As sales representative for a dental supply company, she felt her hours behind the wheel with her cocker spaniel at her side were the best in any week.
Next she scrunched up the paper and tossed it on the floor. How ridiculous for a 45-year-old spinster to sit daydreaming about marriage like a romantic teenager!
Her own teenage years bad been spent in the shadow of the Second World War, first as a member of a Hitler Youth squadron that mobilized young girls to defend their homeland, then in the bitter postwar years of American occupation.
To Helene, the hunger, the cold, the bomb damage had been nothing compared with the discovery that the leader she had worshiped, Adolf Hitler, was in fact a bloodthirsty tyrant. Her disillusionment was so enormous that for 30 years she let herself trust no one.
Then 12 months earlier, in 1974, Helene had learned that God loved her. Daring to trust His love, she had begun over the past year to wonder if someday she could know a man's love too.
"Ridiculous!" Helene repeated. She scooped the wad of paper from the floor and threw it in a wastebasket. Where would she meet an unattached man at all, let alone one with a certain sort of hands and musical tastes! There were pitifully few Austrian men her age or older; virtually that whole generation had died in Hitler's armies, and those who survived had long since married.
But as the months passed, the desire for a husband only grew stronger. A year after writing out that childish list, she was praying one day, when into her mind, as clear as a photograph in her hand, came the vision of a man. "This is the husband," she thought she heard God say, "whom I am giving you."
Helene's mouth went dry; her heart pounded. In speechless astonishment she considered the picture in her mind. The man had intense dark eyes, beetling black eyebrows, a full head of white hair. The picture, in black and white, was of his head and shoulders only. But what she could see of his clothes told her something more: a jacket in a hideous pattern of crisscross stripes, and the ugliest tie Helene had ever seen.
He was an American. She was as sure of it as she was that God Himself was showing him to her. But Americans had been the enemy! The invaders. Was it possible that God was giving her to love a man from the country she'd hated with all her heart?
Or was this always God's answer? Where we've hated most, to plant the deepest love?
Helene began to pray daily for this person she had "seen," and to look for him everywhere - sales conventions, church retreats, concert halls. But 1977 came and went, then 1978. Though the portrait in her mind remained sharp, no such individual appeared.
Three full years passed, and Helene decided she must have mistaken her own longing for the voice of God.
Meanwhile, reading the Bible each day, she was eager to visit the Holy Land. In 1979 she joined a church group on a tour of Israel.
And it was there, in the conference hall of a hotel on the Golan Heights, that she saw him. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt in place of the awful jacket and tie she had seen in her vision. But the intent eyes, the heavy brows, the white hair-she would have recognized him anywhere.
And what should she do now? Could she simply walk up to a total stranger and say, "You will be my husband"?
Heart in her mouth, Helene worked her way toward the man across the crowded lobby. "Excuse me," she said, feeling a flush burn her cheeks, "but it seems to me I've seen you somewhere."
So they exchanged introductions. Gideon Miller, as Helene had guessed, was an American. She invented excuses to keep chatting, long enough to learn that he was presently managing a small bookstore in Jerusalem. How did he like living in Israel? Very much. "For us Jews, you know, it's a lifelong dream."
Us Jews. . . For a searing moment Helene saw herself in the black-and-brown uniform of the Hitler Youth, swallowing the poison of anti-Semitism. Was God going to leave no rag of prejudice unwashed in His love? Had He really chosen as her husband not only an American, but a Jew?
When her tour group got to Jerusalem she located the store where Gideon worked. A tape player was playing as she stepped in, a Chopin sonata. "My weakness," Gideon confessed. "I'll go without lunch to buy music."
Startled, Helene recalled her "ideal husband." A music lover. . .with beautiful hands. . .who would let her drive the car. She looked at Gideon's hands. Slender and strong, with long, tapering fingers. . .
As they talked, Helene learned that Gideon, like herself, had carried a burden of rage. For him the fury was against Germans - and Austrians in particular - who had murdered all but a handful of his family. Coming from opposite sides of a tragic history, the souls of this middle-aged man and woman groped toward each other there in that dusty bookstore in Jerusalem.
Suddenly Gideon turned and began rummaging in a drawer. "I don't know why I'm doing this," Helene heard him mutter. He straightened up. "I've never in my life given anyone a picture of myself," he said, clearly baffled at his own behavior, "but - " He thrust a photograph at her, "This was taken three years ago."
Helene held it in her hands, as she'd held "it so long in her heart. The photograph of a white-haired man with compelling eyes. . .the striped jacket. . .the terrible tie. . .
With this evidence of God's purpose in her hands, Helene waited expectantly for Him to reveal the design to Gideon as well. All that week in Jerusalem she dreamed up devices to throw the two of them together, asking him to show her numerous landmarks.
But Gideon, though cordial enough, seemed to regard Helene as nothing more than an especially determined sightseer. Eight years older than she, he had had an unhappy marriage in his younger years. After the death of his wife, he'd remained a bachelor. Marriage was obviously the last thing on his mind.
And there was an added impediment, Helene realized, as her tour group boarded the plane for home. Gideon was struggling with prejudice as Helene had. But his root of bitterness went deeper - based not on lies but on the terrible reality of the Holocaust.
From Austria Helene began writing to Gideon, describing the centuries-old isolation of Jews that had made possible the Nazi hate campaign, urging him to visit Austria as a teacher and bridge-builder. Such teaching, she told him honestly enough, was desperately needed. What she couldn't mention was her personal motive.
For months Gideon resisted the suggestion. But he was above all a praying man; at last he wrote that God was directing him to come.
Helene met him at the Salzburg airport. At the curbside she handed him the car keys. He stared at them in dismay. "I'm sorry, Helene. Would you mind? You see, I've never learned to drive."
Joyfully Helene chauffeured him about the country, translating for him as he spoke. As invitations multiplied, he returned to Austria again, then a third time. And still, for all Helene could see, she remained simply his driver and interpreter. Occasionally she would catch him staring at her with a tortured look. But about his feelings he never spoke.
The night before Helene's fiftieth birthday was the lowest point of all. Gideon had spoken that evening in Wuppertal, Germany. "There's nothing scheduled tomorrow," he said as she dropped him at the private home where he was to spend the night. "So we won't need to get together."
". . .won't need. . .I won't need you. . ." All the way to the women's hostel where Helene was staying, the crushing word pursued her. It was need alone that made him seek her out.
She cried herself to sleep and awoke to a dismal birthday in a strange city. In Salzburg friends had planned a great celebration. Instead she was alone, far from home, chasing a dream of marriage to a man who tolerated her presence only as a matter of practicality.
She wandered disconsolately into a small bookshop, looking for something to read. There was a rack near the entrance, and in it. . .a solitary birthday card.
Why, those were Alpine flowers decorating it! The very ones Helene had picked as a child on the mountains above Salzburg. Suddenly Helene knew that this was her card, her special birthday greeting from God. She opened it to the message: "Blessings on your birthday. What God has promised, that will He also do (Romans 4:21)."
That birthday card kept Helene from despairing as still another year passed, then 18 months. Gideon was spending more time in Austria, depending on her German translations at his meetings-but nothing more. The card reassured her when she discovered a lump in her breast. God had promised her a husband, this husband, so how could she die before He brought it about?
In the spring of 1982 she was told she must have an operation. The day before the surgery Gideon came up to the hospital room with a letter postponing their speaking dates until Helene was well enough to travel again. At a table in the room she shared with three other patients, Helene was translating his English draft into German when Gideon suddenly laid his hand over the page.
"Helene. . .will you come outside with me?" Startled, Helene looked out the window. It was pouring rain.
Something in Gideon's eyes, though, stifled her objections-the look of anguish she had caught there before. She dressed swiftly and followed him down the stairs and into the garden behind the hospital. The rain had driven everyone else inside, creating the only private spot in that busy institution. Walking close together beneath his black umbrella, they'd gone halfway down the path when Gideon stopped.
"Helene, will you marry me?"
He had fallen in love with her, he rushed on, that very first week in Jerusalem-and struggled against it every day of the past three years. "I gave myself all the logical reasons why we could never be close. But, Helene. . .it's almost as though our being together had all been settled ahead of time."
"A long, long time ahead," said Helene.
Editor's note: Surgery revealed a benign tumor. Gideon and Helene were married in the fall of that year. Today they lead groups of Austrians on missions of repentance to the sites of local concentration camps. They've come a long way, the former Nazi and the Jew.
Helene's Story, Part 1
Helene's Story by Elizabeth Sherrill is copyright 1990 by Guideposts, Carmel, New York 10512. All rights reserved.
If you would like to reproduce this story, contact Guideposts, ATTN: Rights & Permissions Department, 16 E. 34th St., 12th floor, New York, NY 10016, Permissions Editor@guideposts.org.
For more true stories of hope and inspiration, visit www.guideposts.org.