OTTO AND ELISE

Otto and Elise received the news. The mail had been hand delivered by a woman who left quickly. Elise opened the envelope with trembling hands. She read it and sat in silence with her head in her hands. Her husband asked, “Is it about the boy?” She looked at Otto and furiously tore up the letter. Their son had been killed in the war, killed fighting for Nazi Germany. Otto and Elise were both grief-stricken and furious.

Otto understood that their son had died fighting for an evil regime on a scale rarely seen in world history. Otto was a simple man living in Berlin. He worked in a factory making coffins for the military. Otto was far from being powerful or a man of influential, but Otto decided to do whatever he could to defeat Hitler.

An idea came. He bought a supply of postcards. He bought thin gloves for his hands. He disguised his writing. With the painstaking strokes of printing the texts, he wrote words on the postcards, words which criticized Hitler, the man, who, in Otto’s words, had murdered his son. He would take meticulous care to write words incriminating the government.  He took those cards, one at a time, and put them in various areas where passersby would see them. His wife was scared and advised against it. Their elderly Jewish neighbor had jumped to her death when the authorities came for her.

Otto spent the evenings donning his gloves, taking up his pen, and writing the truth. Then he would put a card on the stairwell of a heavily entered administrative building. He would put another card at an entrance to an elevator. One by one. One day at a time.

A person would see the card, stop, pick it up, read it, then turn it over to the authorities. As the few cards turned into many, the German machine roared into action to find, stop, and kill the author. The man in charge of finding Otto read the cards and put a pin on a map of Berlin which would signify the location where the card was found. Soon pins with red flags covered the Berlin map. A white-hot obsession gripped the Nazis. For two years in Berlin, finding Otto was the #1 priority of the regime. They knew that one day, Otto would make a mistake. During this time, his wife joined him in their dangerous card-placing.

One day Otto made a mistake. As he arrived at work, he took off his coat and found that the right side pocket had a hole in it. Several of the cards were missing and then Otto saw them, lying on the factory floor, being picked up by a worker. The worker took them to the manager who called the authorities. They took Otto into custody. During his interrogation, the Nazis made him kneel. They circled around him. They celebrated his capture by drinking champaign, then breaking their glasses over his head.

They found Elise. Their trial was a speedy one with the pronouncement of “Guilty!” Otto and Elise were led out to the courtyard where a guillotine awaited.

The man who had pursued and captured them came to realize the evil of the government, stood in his office, raised a pistol to his head, and killed himself, but not before taking those 200 collected cards and throwing them out the window. They fell on the street below and passersby picked them up. In death, the truth was distributed.

The world system hates the truth. It will ruthlessly and with all the resources available, hunt down those that dare to offend the regime. Otto and Elise were only two modest people who used the only resource they had to get the truth to not only 200 people, but also to the authorities who read cards and the 200 others who picked them up when they fell from that window. 

Acts 8:4 tells us about the common folks in the early church: “Therefore, those who had been scattered went about preaching the word.”