The Healing of a Child's Daimoku

Robin's mom came up to Massachusetts from New York to visit. She mostly wanted to see Ana, her 2 and 1/2 year old granddaughter.

Robin's mom is a Holocaust survivor. In the kitchen, with Ana on her father's lap, Robin's mom spoke of her experiences in Nazi Germany.

She said that one day they replaced her teacher with a Nazi. The Nazi made her and the other Jewish children sit in the back of the class. The work they did was ignored. She begged her mom to keep her home from school.

Her father's business was taken and given to a Nazi. He had to take a train to get to a menial job. The train passed his old business every day.

On Nov. 9, 1938, Nazis burned the synagogues and went from home to home beating Jews throughout the night. At 4:00 a.m., the bell rang — it was the Nazis. They beat her father and left him for dead in a pool of blood in the middle of the street. He managed to get back to the apartment. Blood was everywhere. No ambulance would come for a Jew. They had to take him to a Nazi doctor, who stitched his head with no anesthesia and sent him home.

The next morning the Nazis came again. They took her father to the Dachau concentration camp.

Robin fought back her tears. Ana, who was still sitting on her father's lap, put her little hands together and loudly chanted "Nam-myoho-renge-kyo" without stopping. Robin and her mom broke into tears.

Robin's mother is not a member but she understood. She said, "Now, look at that — I am telling about this horrible horror that happened to our family, and it's as if she is trying to say: 'This is the way to heal. This is the way to peace.'"

Robin said, "Ana's great-grandfather was pulled from his home and beaten because he was a Jew. Now, almost 60 years later, his great-granddaughter is chanting the Daimoku of the Lotus Sutra naturally, the sound bursting from her life like the rising sun. Thank you, Nichiren Daishonin, and presidents Ikeda, Toda, and Makiguchi, for making it possible for Ana to chant the Mystic Law, ensuring the happiness of her ancestors and the happiness of all mankind to come."

[A longer version of this experience is in the Nov. 21, 1997, World Tribune.]