Reunited At Last—An Incredible Christmas Story

When the new pastor and his wife took up their first congregational ministry in Brooklyn, New York, in early October and saw the state of the church, they realized the need for extensive renovation work. They set a goal to have everything ready in time to celebrate their first service on Christmas Eve. They worked hard, repairing benches and walls, painting etc. And on December 18, earlier than expected, they were finished.

On December 19, a terrible storm hit the area that lasted two days. On the 21st, the pastor went to church. He was discouraged when he saw how the roof had leaked and caused a large layer of plaster about 2 x 2.5 m to fall from the front wall of the sanctuary just behind the pulpit. The pastor cleaned up the mess on the floor. He felt so bad in front of the church that he thought it best to postpone the Christmas service and went home to discuss it with his wife.

On the way home, he discovered a charity flea market on the street, so he stopped. One of the objects was a beautiful hand-embroidered tablecloth, ivory paint, an exquisite work with fine colors and embroidery. It was the right size to cover the hole in the front wall. He bought it and went back to church.

By then it had already started snowing. An elderly woman came running down the street to catch the bus she missed. The pastor invited her to wait in the warm church until the next bus would arrive in 45 minutes. She sat on a bench and did not pay attention to the shepherd while he fetched a ladder and scaffolds to hang the tablecloth as a background decoration. The pastor could hardly believe how beautiful it turned out. Then he noticed that the woman was walking down the middle of the hallway.

The pastor,” she asked, ”where did you get that canvas from?”, and the pastor explained. The woman asked him to check the lower right corner to see if the initials EBG were embroidered there. He found them. These were the woman’s initials, and she had made this canvas 35 years earlier, in Austria. The woman could hardly believe it when the pastor told her how he had just gotten hold of the tablecloth.

Sent to a concentration camp

The woman said that before the war, she and her husband were wealthy people in Austria, but when the Nazis arrived, she was forced to leave home and flee. Her husband was supposed to accompany her the next week, but she was captured and sent to a concentration camp, and then saw neither her husband nor her house.

The pastor wanted to give her the tablecloth, but she wanted the church to keep it. The least he could do was to drive her home on the other side of Staten Island. She was only in Brooklyn during the day for a cleaning job.

The congregation had a wonderful service on Christmas Eve with an almost full church, the music and atmosphere were inviting. At the end of the program, the pastor and his wife greeted everyone at the door, with many saying they would return. An elderly man, whom the pastor recognized from the neighborhood, remained seated on one of the pews and stared ahead as the pastor wondered why he wasn’t leaving the church.

The man asked where he had gotten hold of the embroidered cloth on the front wall, as it was similar to the one his wife had embroidered many years ago when they lived in Austria before the war. How could there be two tablecloths so similar? He told the pastor how the Nazis came, how he forced his wife to flee for her safety and that he would follow her, but that he was arrested and placed in a concentration camp.

The pastor asked him if he could take him for a drive. They drove over the bridge to Staten Island and the same house where the pastor had left the woman three days earlier. He helped the man climb the three steps up to the apartment, knocked on the door, and witnessed the best reunion imaginable at a Christmas feast.

The event took place in 1975, recounted by Bengt-Samuel Forsberg a former missionary, who worked many years in South America.

Traslation by Google translate