Today is Friday, December 12th, 2008; Karen's Korner #1465
This is taken from "Chicken Soup for the Christian Family Soul", about the Christmas season. The short story talks about pneumonia and World War II; pneumonia was a killer-disease prior to the development of life-saving antibiotics in the mid- 1940s:
What Goes Around Comes Around
Eve Gordon had difficult duty on Christmas Eve, 1940. She was a special-duty nurse at a London hospital, and she had been assigned to care for a desperately ill German student from a nearby college. The young man had contracted pneumonia and was in critical condition. Staff physicians held out little hope for his survival. The student, aware of his perilous circumstances, pleaded with the nuse to keep him awake, saying, "If I go to sleep, I'll never wake up."
Throughout the long hours of the night, Gordon kept her patient from drifting off into sleep. With painstaking detail she told him the biblical Christmas story---the journey to Bethlehem, the birth in a stable, the adoration of the shepherds, the visit of the Magi, the flight into Egypt. When she exhausted the story, she sang to him every Christmas carol she could recall from memory. And whenever her patient seemed on the verge of falling asleep, she gently shook him back to consciousness.
The dawn of that Christmas monring found the student still alive and able to celebrate the day. The crisis passed, and the young man gradually improved and was released from the hospital.
Several years passed, Britian and much of the rest of the world were engulfed in World War II. Gordon, now a medical doctor, had been conscripted into the service of her country. Because she was fluent in Norwegian and a skilled skier, she was placed undercover in Nazi-occupied Norway.
One morning German occupation troops arrested her along with scores of Norwegian civilians. Someone had tipped off the Germans that one of that group was a British secret agent. Knowing that her true identity and mission would be discovered, Gordon prayed that death would come quickly and that she would not be subjected to torture.
Gordon was brutally shoved into a small room, where she faced her interrogator, a Nazi soldier. The man reached for his side arm. My prayer was answered, she thought. Then their eyes met, and there was surprise at the mutual recognition. The German student and the Engligh nurse were face to face again. Replacing his gun in its holster, the soldier pointed to the back door and said: "Go, I give you back your Christmas."
~~ Victor Parachin
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