(19) Recovering as a Cultural for Survival

The 12th Step and the 8th Principle in Recovery aren't really about substance abuse. They are about survival.

They are about finding ways to GIVE to others with actions and words that display practical encouragement and REALISTIC HOPE.

Bill Wilson, founder of AA described it well when He stated,

"He could only remain sober when he sought to help others who were struggling. People struggling like HE WAS. This is how he was able to stop the destruction in his life and in the lives of those around him.

He did it by working his own recovery among other strugglers. By both Leading and Following.

The story below is an excellent practical Illustration of this type of giving back.

It comes from World War II Germany during the time of the Holocaust.

The unknow writer from Crown Heights, New York, describes an elderly Jewish man named, Yankel, who owned a bakery near his home. Yankel was young when he survived the camps.

The story illustrates the critical, "HOW," he was able to survive.

“You know why it is that I’m alive today? I was a kid, just a teenager at the time. We were on the train, in a boxcar, being taken to Auschwitz. Night came and it was freezing, deathly cold, in that boxcar.

The Germans would leave the cars on the side of the tracks overnight, sometimes for days on end without any food, and of course, no blankets to keep us warm,” he said. “Sitting next to me was an older Jew – this beloved elderly Jew - from my hometown I recognized, but I had never seen him like this. He was shivering from head to toe, and looked terrible.

So I wrapped my arms around him and began rubbing him, to warm him up. I rubbed his arms, his legs, his face, his neck. I begged him to hang on. All night long; I kept the man warm this way.

I was tired, I was freezing cold myself, my fingers were numb, but I didn’t stop rubbing the heat on to this man’s body. Hours and hours went by this way. Finally, night passed, morning came, and the sun began to shine. There was some warmth in the cabin, and then I looked around the car to see some of the other Jews in the car. To my horror, all I could see were frozen bodies, and all I could hear was a deathly silence.

Nobody else in that cabin made it through the night – they died from the frost. Only two people survived: the old man and me…

The old man survived because somebody kept him warm; I survived because I was warming somebody else…”

The 12th Step and 8th Principle,
They are about SURVIVING.... TOGETHER..... NOW.......

With a REAL HOPE of thriving in the future.

It is about HEALING in the places where we are dying. 

This principle is also played out repeatedly in a similar story in the movie, "The Book Thief." Well worth the watch on Hulu or other places.