This was especially true in the case of Jakob Kropf, a man of peasant upbringing and but scant education, who suddenly found himself arm in arm with one of Europe’s leading Jewish rabbis, combining his skills and practical common sense with the rabbi’s spiritual wisdom. The two men had grown to love one another in a tight friendship of mutual cause and purpose, to the point where either would without hesitation give his life for the other.

Always before each of their mind’s eye was the sobering example of the man who had quite literally given his life that the rest of them might escape. The memory of the baron’s willing surrender had elevated in measureless ways the stature of manhood residing within the soul of both Jakob Kropf and Heziah Wissen.

The profundity of the man’s Christian faith spoke louder and more forcefully to each with every passing day. The rabbi had never been able to forget the words from the baron’s mouth about Christianity completing and bringing to fulfillment what the law of Judaism had only begun.

The words had struck him at the time. When combined with the growing significance of the baron’s action within his memory, a deep truth began to break through upon the learned rabbi: The baron’s very life validated his conviction as to the truth of his Christian testimony.

It was exactly as the baron had said—his faith was no mere religion to him, but a daily, practical way of living. When he had turned into the face of certain death, offering himself in place of wife and daughter, and in place of the rest of them, the reality and truth of his belief was suddenly authenticated more powerfully than anything he had seen come out of the Jewish law in all his years.

Sacrifice of a technical sort was intrinsic to the Jewish system. But not the willing sacrifice of one laying himself down for another. What the baron had done was unheard of. The rabbi had never seen anything like it in his life!

Especially in that he had been the one, the only innocent among them! Only he possessed pure Aryan blood—undefiled. A Gentile, a German of the highest order, a son and descendant of nobility.

That was the astounding factor that blew all reason and intellectual analysis out of consideration like a hot, searing, desert wind.

Everyone else a Jew, including the man’s own wife and daughter! All the rest of them guilty in Nazi eyes!

Yet he—the innocent!—had stepped forward, had walked into the Nazis’ hands and had let them take him, so that the rest of them—all Jews, all guilty of the Nazi crime of pedigree—might go free.

The thing was too incredible even to contemplate!

Heziah Wissen hadn’t slept a wink that night in Fürstensdorf!