Though the Holocaust was full of unimagineable horrors, a touching story from a concentration camp survivor shows that the kindness of the human spirit was never lost among the prisoners.
In a clip from the documentary film, "HUMAN," 82-year-old Holocaust survivor Francine Christophe tells how she reaped a priceless reward for a small act of kindness as a child, decades later. The clip was posted on the film's Facebook page and has received over 450,000 shares and over 7,000 comments from people who have been moved by the story.
Christophe and her mother were brought to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp when she was a young girl, and her mother took with her two small pieces of chocolate, telling Christophe she would save them for a day when they really felt hopeless. She thought the chocolate would help to give them the strength to carry on.
But the day came unexpectedly, when another prisoner named Helene went into labor. Christophe's mother asked her, if she would mind sharing her piece of chocolate with Helene. "Giving birth here will be hard," Christophe says her mother told her. "She may die. If I give her the chocolate, it may help her."
She agreed and Helene, with the help of a little piece of chocolate, was able to give birth. Six months later, they would be freed from the camp.
But the true reward for Christophe came just a few years ago, when at the urging of her daughter, she gave a lecture on how survivors would have coped differently if they had had the help of counsellors in their recovery.
A woman came to the podium saying she was a psychiatrist living in Marseille, France. She said she had something to give to Christophe on stage.
The woman came up and placed a piece of chocolate in Christophe's hand and said, "I am the baby."
Beautiful.
You can learn more about the film, "HUMAN" here.
Also on HuffPost:
