Stefan Horwitz

Taken from From Ashes to Healing by Rabbi Yonassan Gershom

The Clock
by Bruce Whittier

My story begins in the spring of 1991. According to my dream journal for April 8 of that year, I began having very vivid dreams about the Second World War. The dreams continued to come for nearly two weeks. This is what I dreamt:

I found myself living in a foreign country with a wife, a daughter and son, and an older man. We also had a black and white dog. It was wartime and I was afraid, having been warned that the Germans were going to invade the Netherlands. As Dutch Jews living in Holland, our lives were in danger, because of something I had learned while working in my office. The details of this information are not clear, but I think it had something to do with politics. In the basement of our house was an old root cellar, where we decided to find shelter. The room was cold and dark, but it was a safe hideout. Against one wall, we had put a square table, with a clock sitting on it, so that we could keep track of the time. The chime of the clock was gentle and quiet. One day, I had crawled through the opening to our hideout in order to take the dog outside. It was very early. Dawn had just broken and there was mist or fog in the air. As I entered the backyard, everything was still, but the dog began to sense something. Before I knew it, somebody was speaking to me and accusing me of some crime. At first I resisted arrest, but they shot the dog and then threatened me.

When I awoke from this dream, I was very much shaken up. I wondered and worried about it all day, asking myself what it could possibly mean. The next night I had the same dream, and again the night after that. On the third night, I was told that our former clock was now here in Canada. I thought to myself, what an imagination! But the dream actually gave specific directions: travel on Route I [in Nova Scotia], and there will be a newly opened antique shop. The clock is there. I put this trip off for several weeks, but the dreams continued, giving me more details:

We are at a camp of some sort. We are told it is Auschwitz, and I can still smell chicken cooking. Ashes and dust cover everything. Parts of this are sketchy and not very clear, but I remember my wife and I being summoned. We are taken to an area where there is a large trench. We can’t see what is in there until we are made to stand at the edge. It is a mass grave. Here we are shot. I take a bullet through the heart area. I can still see the bodies in the trench.

As I wrote this, tears filled my eyes and my emotions ran rampant. Why, I asked myself, Why? First of all, I am not Jewish, and secondly, I am only twenty-nine years old, so why was I dreaming about things which happened fifty years ago? How could I be remembering a war that was over before I was even born?

In this life, my contact with Jews has been almost nonexistent. I have met only two that I am aware of, and talking on the phone to Rabbi Gershom about this story makes a third. In the little Canadian town of 1,600 people where I grew up, there are no Jews. Nor do I have any Jewish ancestors that I am aware of. Our family originally came from England in the 1700’s. We are just ordinary folks who work hard and love life. So why would 1, a Canadian goat farmer, be dreaming about Dutch Jews in the Holocaust?

Finally, I decided to take the venture and look for the antique store. But I didn't want to go alone, so I asked a close friend to travel with me. And sure enough, there was, as the dreams had indicated, an antique shop on Route 1. The shop was called “In Tyme," a strange archaic spelling, but how appropriate! We drove up to the parking lot and ventured into the store.
There were lots of nice antique pieces, but no clock.

There were lots of nice antique pieces, but no clock. Oh well, I thought to myself, it was just a silly dream. We were about to leave, when the antique dealer came out from the back room to greet us. He closed the door behind him and there, previously hidden from our sight, was the very same clock from my dream! I was not only stunned, I was in shock. That clock was mine, or, at least, it had been in another life.

Of course, I wasn't about to tell a complete stranger that I had dreamt about owning his clock in another incarnation – what would he think? Still, I wanted to know more about its history. So I asked the shopkeeper where he had picked up such lovely pieces. He began telling me how he had just returned from Europe, where he had purchased many different pieces. He had found a lot of them in Holland, where the authorities had opened up some old warehouses full of unclaimed possessions from Dutch Jews, dating back to World War II, beautiful things which had been confiscated by the Nazis. This clock had been among those Jewish pieces.

This was just too much of a coincidence! I wanted to touch the clock, to hold it in my hands and see if I could get any psychic feelings from it. But it was very expensive, and I could not afford it, so I didn't have any plausible excuse to handle it. I left the shop without actually touching the clock, but I was glad to know that it really did exist.

All of this remained in my mind on a daily basis, the first thing when I woke up and the last thing before retiring for the evening. As I sat quietly and looked back over my life, I could clearly see how there had been other incidents, puzzling at the time, which now seemed connected to that same life as a Dutch Jew..

The first of these happened when I was nine or ten years old. My parents were watching a war movie, and I began to panic. I do not know exactly which movie it was, but I clearly remember being sent to my room and not being allowed to watch television that night.

Later, as a young teenager, we moved several streets away to an old house that was built by a sea captain around 1870. 1 distinctly remember that I was about fourteen at the time. My mother, grandmother, a couple of friends, and I had gone shopping at a secondhand clothing store. While going through a bin full of odds and ends, I discovered two Jewish skullcaps and immediately bought them. One was brown velvet and the other was multicolored silk. Each day after school, I would wear one of these while I was studying. It made me feel like I belonged. And another strange thing: all my life, I have never liked pork, and only on rare occasions will I eat it. I find this meat offensive, and it has a terrible taste to me.

But why should I have these Jewish ideas at all? I was raised in the United Church of Canada and later joined the Pentecostal movement, where belief in reincarnation at any level is unheard of. So I certainly did not get this from my upbringing! In 1982, 1 had a genuine experience of being baptized in the Holy Spirit, including speaking in tongues. This was a wonderful experience, and since that time, I have spoken in another language, which one person told me was Yiddish, whatever that is.' Now I began to wonder. Could this, too, be past life related?

In August 1995, after talking with Rabbi Gershom, I decided to undergo hypnotic regression in order to get to the bottom of all this. The hypnotist was George McAdoo, who conducts reincarnation seminars here in Nova Scotia. Under hypnosis, I saw myself as a Dutch Jew named Stefan Horwitz 111, who was married to a woman named Helene. The couple had two children. The clock was there, too. It was a family heirloom, which had belonged to my grandmother in that life. Under hypnosis, I could see it on the little table in my parents' sitting room and hear its soft chime. When the Nazis came, we took it with us into our hiding place.

Many sketchy details in the dream were now filled in. The hiding place was not in a basement as I had previously thought. It was a root cellar at my grandfather's place. There was a small space we could get into down there that we planned to conceal with bags of dirt and potatoes. I even remembered how Helene had sewed straps to the backs of the potato sacks, so that we could pull them in behind us to block the entrance to the secret bunker.

As the Nazis were nearing our village, Papa gave me the clock and told me to go, to take it to the underground bunker and hide with Helene, Grampa, and the children, charging me to look after them. He and Mama would stay at their own place.

The Germans came. We entered the bunker. As in the dream, I went outside in the early morning with our little dog. But under hypnosis, more details were now revealed.

After the German soldier shot the dog, he took me inside the house and beat me until I broke down and revealed the location of the hiding place. Grampa, Helene, the children, and I were then arrested and taken away in a truck. For several months we were interred in some kind of ghetto, where we had to barter for food. I remember giving one man my hat for half a loaf of bread. Eventually we were loaded into trucks again.

(Under hypnosis) We are going to a place where the trains are. We are unloaded. We give them our names, Stefan and Helene Horwitz, and they say, "Over there! All of you, go there!" So we go into this car where there are many others. It smells awful. It's hard to catch a good breath of air. They close the door, but we are all together. And the train starts and moves out.

It's been several days and we have nothing to eat yet. We are cold and hungry. The train keeps going.

You start to lose the sense of time and how long. Now we are in another country. They say that this is a camp. (“Are you still in the train?”) Yes, but the train is coming to the camp. It is pulling up…

Each car is unloaded, one by one, and people are pushed and shoved and told to go. We are unloaded, and it is nice to finally breathe the air ... We are walking now towards a station and they stop to ask us our names and they say that the children must go this way, and Helene says, "NO! I want my children!" And they say, "No, the children must go." Grampa is still behind, but he is very weak and very old…

Helene and I are sent to a place and separated. I enter ... I have to take off my clothes. They say that I am a dirty Jew, and to sit, and they shave my hair. It feels awful, falling and hitting my shoulders. I say to myself, why must I do this? They then pass me some clothes. These aren't my clothes ... "These are your new clothes here . . . " They send me to a place with many bunks. There are other people. Their heads are shaven. They look hungry, but they still have a spirit about them. Trust in our God ... (Bruce shivers) It's cold in here…

Today, there is a funny odour on the air. It reminds me of Mama cooking the chicken. It helps soothe the hunger in my stomach. I ask what is that? And they all stare at me. One man says, "You do not know? That is the smell of the dead people. They must dispose, they say, so that we all dont get sick and die." It looks almost like snow out, but it is like a dust. I put my hand out, and it's dusty…

(McAdoo: “How long are you there?”) About six or seven months.

... Now it's spring. It's actually warm, and I'm cold. They call me "Jew." Here there are several of us. And they bring Helene. I see the men on horses, their leather boots and their nice saddles. There must be two dozen of us. They make us walk and walk. They take us out through a gate, with the horses alongside of us. You can feel the people staring and watching. My clothes are so big, I have to keep hauling them up. I'm not allowed to touch Helene. And they keep walking us. We see behind us, in the glimpse of our eye, the camp…

We come to a place where there is a trench, but I can't see into the trench. There are people in front of us, and they are being shot and pushed into the trench and they fall. (Bruce gasps, inhales sharply.) I know what is going to happen ... I see people…so many people in the trench. Some are still moving (breathes heavily). Then all of a sudden I feel it, like a hot knife going through me. And they shoot me through the back and I fall. (Takes a deep breath.) I'm not dead yet. I have others fall ... on top ... of me. They're getting so heavy ... I can't breathe.

At this point in the session, my breathing became very laboured, and I began to shiver and sob in fear. You can actually hear it on the tape. It really was hard for me to breathe, as if I were reliving it all over again. George McAdoo, the hypnotist, intervened with suggestions to "let go of the physical." He then asked me where I was in relation to my body from that life. At that point, the whole scene changed into a vision of light:

I am above ... floating in white light... Helene ... our hands are outreached. It is like a peace after such a long time... Grampa is reaching down, telling us come this way, come this way ... and we are floating in a bubble, safe. What's happened below is so far away now

It is like we are going through a wall, but it's clear and I am very thin. It's like the bubble is going up through it and it just opens! And here is a place, you hear the laughter and you hear music. There's lots of blue color, but it seems so big, like a massive big hall. It's a place of such peace and quiet ... (surprised I'm not hungry).

It's like floating, just floating down or straight ahead ... There are just people everywhere, and a bright light. The light is so bright, away in the distance. There are so many people, some waiting to go and some just arriving, like us. The light is so bright it's warm, it feels so nice . . . it's so intense. People are going into it, they're just blending into it, but you can hear them, like children on a school field, playing and laughing.

We are getting closer to the light. A h h h, it just feels so good to enter into it, it's like a kaleidoscope of white lights, and you're just floating and you're just there ... it's all feeling, it's not so much sight, it's feeling.

I hear trumpets and horns, but there's a deep, deep blue light. As the horns play, I hear them just calling, it's a sound of calling ... and everybody is drawn into the light, into the sounds, very deep into the light..

(McAdoo: “Is it your time?”) It's everybody's time. Everybody's being drawn at the same time, just deeper into the light, towards this sapphire blue color ... There's a massive flame, and it's in the distance, but it's so bright you can't look. It radiates… so intense, so pure looking. And the trumpets and horns are still blowing... There's a voice, a large voice coming forward, saying, "You are now here. Here you are now. Be forever, light eternal." The voice just goes. We feel in awe. No one is saying anything. You don't see anything ... you are just here now. It's like you need not say anything ... There's now a waiting place, a time to examine what you've learned and how you've grown.

(McAdoo: “Why did you choose to live in that part of the twentieth century?”) I was sent there…o obtain a higher level of peace…to gain strength and knowledge…to grow… to be able to teach and to guide others.

McAdoo: “Did you accomplish all of those lessons?”) Yes.

After that magnificent vision of the afterlife, I was finally able to let go of the pain and fear from the Holocaust memories. And the clock? It's still for sale, at a different store in another province. They are holding it for me until I can afford to buy it. It's amazing to see that after four years it still has not been sold, as if it is waiting for me to come and finally take it home.

(EPILOGUE: The clock itself is an expensive antique, beyond the family budget of the Whittiers. When Rabbi Gershom told this story from place to place, many people donated to the "ransom the clock fund" in order to help return the clock to Bruce and be a part of this amazing past life story. In May 1996, the clock was finally redeemed from its long exile and brought to the Whittier home, where it now sits in a place of honour.

Originally Published:
Gershom, Rabbi Younassan. From Ashes to Healing: Mystical Encounters with the Holocaust. A.R.E. Press, Virginia Beach. U.S.A. 1996.
Pages. 12-21