The Diary

In a long, blessed, exciting life, I decided, in the 1970's to buy a residence in NYC which would be a launching pad for my world travels and allow me to meet interesting people in NYC, especially around the United Nations (UN). My first purchase was a co-op apartment at 12 Beekman Place, just north of the UN, right across the street from the home of Irving Berlin and diagonally across from the South Korean Embassy. It was the same building in which the presidents of ABC and CBS lived. This was a wonderful residential area and a great opportunity for me to meet many exciting people. However, the apartment was small, and I decided if I were going to spend a week each month in Manhattan, and have that type investment in NYC, I should have a larger place.

Buying real estate, whether there or here, has never been easy for a blind man. But, as general Stonewall Jackson said, “The battle is ours, but the outcome is God's.” I knew a female broker with Charles Grenthal Co. and she told me that she wanted to sell a large apartment on 56th Street, which had become available due to financial problems of the owner. It works out that the owner, big time operator in Atlantic City, was financing this apartment for his daughter. He was desperate to sell the property due to his daughter being incapacitated. I went to the lawyer's office and actually paid for the property with my credit card, over $100k. The lawyer had never processed a sale like this previously but I told him to call my bank and make sure everything was alright. Then he said, “Give me your card.”

One of my friends, from NC, who had studied interior design, went up and helped me refurbish the new apartment. A Herculean job, considering the state of mind of the previous occupant. Evidentially, she had been hauled off to a hospital (where she later died) incapacitated by drugs. All furniture had been left, books, etc. but all the decent clothing and articles of any value had generally been removed from the apartment. It became a matter of first class cleaning, loading boxes with trash, then completely redecorating the apartment. (Which I later sold for many times what I paid for it) Here in this very room, where I'm sitting at the present, is a French Provençal armoire, which was in the bedroom, and in which I found the woman's diary/journal, a loose leaf notebook.

I had someone read the journal to me because, along with the journal, were capsules obtained from a veterinarian of barbiturates (used to put pets in their final sleep). This woman, with chemicals, had killed herself and she had kept a journal of her neurosis involved and what she was experiencing in her slow death. Along with the journal and the capsules, were photographs, even of her Jewish wedding. According to her own words, this former Columbia University student, active in the anti-nuclear war movement, an employee of the Lenblad tourist company, (located within walking distance of the apartment) had a devastating breakup with her husband because of her abortion and her acquired insanity (psychological neurosis) with her revelations concerning her feelings toward a “fringe affiliation” with God, her commitment to her Jewish heritage, and her confusion resulting from her conversations with a Catholic friend who was very pro-life.

In her anti-war staunchness, her historical study of the Jewish Holocaust and the many children who were killed there, her allegiance to the “Social Justice” group, with whom she had most of her life contacts, she tried to find justice in the killing of herself as she had allowed her unborn child to be killed. In the fact that 80% of the Jewish people are Agnostic, particularly in Israel, where she had visited, that most of her business and other contacts were Atheist, she was “tormented” by the same conscience with which God has blessed us all, in the knowledge that she had done something very sinful and this was her only method of escape. Like most educated Atheists, Agnostics, she could not get her brain around the idea that the God of the Universe could love her and in her Jewish heritage, she could not justify her life with the curses of Deuteronomy 28. The final writings were a conjecture of temperament, social justification, Jewish mysticism, and a clamoring for the forgiveness only found in the Christian faith, in the atonement of Christ, as had been presented to her by her Catholic friend.

This is another example of why abortion is so evil and such a tragedy, not only for the killing of the innocent unborn child, but for the mother of the child, whether choosing life or death, has not been given alternatives. (Adoption, single motherhood, etc.) Obviously, from reading the journal, no one assisting her in her abortion had offered her any alternatives other than the 'surgical removal' of a problem. Knowing that her husband so objected to the killing of his child, he had deserted her totally. The only person who could have assisted was her father, whose only interest was in finding his answers in gambling and alcoholism.

Simon Wiesenthal, (December 31, 1908 - September 20, 2005) was an Austrian-Jewish architectural engineer and Holocaust survivor who became famous after World War II for his work as a Nazi hunter. While working as a slave in a Nazi concentration camp, a German nurse asked him to go to a patient, who turned out to be a member of Hitler's SS troops. The German soldier, asked him if he were Jewish and then told him that he was going die and wanted a Jew to forgive him. He described to him how he and other Hitler troops had put Jewish families in a house, filled with explosives, then set the house on fire; he told him how he saw the women and children die and he wanted forgiveness from a Jew for his killing of Jews. The entire message of Wiesenthal's book Sunflower, is IF he should have forgiven him, as a Jew, for the killing of Jews.

The message comes loud and clear in the journal of this Jewish woman's mental torture, after aborting her child, her reaching out for forgiveness from someone, where because of her race, education, and others around her, she did not experience the marvelous redemption in 'sins forgiven', which comes only through grace by faith in Jesus Christ. It is the sorrow of all mankind that the lost do not find salvation in the Creator's only way of redemption. (John 14:6)