For example, a toddler in Sri Lanka heard her mother mention the distant town of Kataragama and proceeded to tell her mother that she had drowned there when her “dumb” brother pushed her into the river. She went on to mention thirty details of her previous home, family, and neighborhood. Professor Stevenson went to Kataragama and found a family that perfectly fit the child’s description. Their two-year-old daughter had indeed drowned in the river while playing with her mentally challenged brother. Professor Stevenson verified twenty-seven of the thirty statements made by the child.

Some eleven million people were killed in the Nazi death camps during World War II, so it is not surprising that camp experiences are sometimes recalled by people who remember a past life. Two such cases were investigated by reincarnation research pioneer Ian Stevenson. Others have been reported or referred to in commercial publications.

Cases

David Llewelyn

Teuvo Koivisto

David Strickland

Yael Shahar

Barbro Karlen

Will

Rabbi Yonassan Gershom

David Llewelyn

Born in 1970, this English boy never stated explicitly that he remembered living before, but showed evidence of past-life influence in the form of behavioural signs and knowledge he had no way of learning normally. His past incarnation was never identified. After seeing Ian Stevenson interviewed on the BBC in 1982, David’s mother Susan Llewelyn contacted him, sharing the particulars of the case. With Stevenson’s encouragement, Susan and David were interviewed on the same BBC program.  Unfortunately, this experience left David somewhat traumatized, so Susan refused to let him meet Stevenson at the time. Ten years later, Stevenson approached the family again and finally interviewed mother and son, now a young man, in 1998. He published the case in his 2003 book European Cases of the Reincarnation Type.1

David’s nightmares featured black pits full of bodies, people with guns and the stench of dead bodies. He sometimes came to his mother crying, and described images of camps, guns and people dying. Once when visiting an aunt who cooked with gas, he said the smell of the gas was ‘like the smell in my room at night; it’s going to smother me’. In the BBC interview, he talked about waking images, which included ‘prisoner-of-war things’ and people living in wooden huts.2

In early childhood, David was averse to sleeping in a small room and compulsively kept the door open and window-curtains closed. When he began writing he wrote right to left, and when he drew he always included a star, though at the same time he had a phobia of stars, particularly the Star of David; once he fled a shop after seeing a Star of David necklace. He had a marked fear of camps; when his mother suggested a family vacation at a camp, he said: ‘No. There is no happiness there. People are caged in and cold, hungry, and frightened. They’ll never get out.’ He told her the people were like skeletons, were bald and had no food. He also mentioned in the BBC interview that they wore ‘stripey things’. In connection with the camps he often asked, ‘Why did it have to happen?’3 He never, however, said that he had been in one, even when directly asked. All the details of his descriptions, including prisoners wearing striped uniforms, were correct for Nazi death-camps.

David demonstrated knowledge of Jewish customs; as a young child he asked his mother if there was any blood in the food she was serving, and at age nine said of a church-like building the family was passing, ‘They wear caps there,’ though no one wearing a yarmulke was in sight. The building was indeed a synagogue.

At age 28, David had come to believe his images were past-life memories, yet he said he remembered little; he still did remember, however, ‘being put in a pit as a young boy and looking up to the top of the pit where he saw another young boy looking at him. He thought the other boy was a companion who might save him. There were other bodies in the pit’.4 He showed fear and anger when seeing Germans either in person or on TV, as it would evoke this scene.

Teuvo Koivisto

This Finnish boy was born in 1971 to a mother who felt she remembered two past lives herself, albeit with no verifiable elements, and so was open to her son’s statements. Unlike David Llewelyn, Teuvo said outright he had experienced life and death in a Nazi death-camp, and gave vivid details, but showed no Jewish-type behaviours. A Finnish researcher, Rita Castrén, interviewed Teuvo’s mother, Lusa Toivisto, in 1976 and then referred the case to Stevenson, who interviewed Lusa in 1978 and Teuvo in 1999. He published the case in European Cases.5

Lusa recalled two dreams prior to Teuvo’s birth that she considered to be announcing dreams; in the more direct one, she was standing in a line of prisoners, then found herself with a man holding a copy of the Kabbalah, among other men who were shooting guns. He said to her, ‘The baby you are expecting is a Jew, and I will save your life’.6

Lusa reported that Teuvo, at the age of three, had told her he remembered a big furnace in which people were piled in layers. He had been taken to the ‘bathroom’, where people were having personal objects such as glasses and golden teeth removed. They were then undressed and put into the ‘furnace’, where gas came pouring out of some place in the walls. He could not breathe, and knew he was going to be put into the furnace. He also described an ‘oven’ with children in it, and being caught on barbed wire. His mother found the vocabulary he used in describing these scenes surprisingly extensive. He became terrified when relating this, to the point that she tried to distract him with a fairy tale. He continued to repeat these statements for about six months, always when he awoke in the morning.

Teuvo had a fear of the dark up until age seven, and often concealed himself where he could not be found. He also sometimes knocked holes in the walls (which were extremely thin). Starting at age three he began to describe having being gassed, and had occasional breathing difficulties, in which it seemed painful for him to inhale. A physician ruled out asthma. Teuvo was otherwise healthy.

To exclude the possibility that Teuvo had received this information normally, Stevenson looked carefully into what media he could have been exposed to prior to age three, whether he could have heard about death-camps from adults around him, and even how many Finnish Jews had been sent to the camps. He satisfied himself that Teuvo could not possibly have learned the details he described by normal means. Stevenson also found that the given facts were all accurate except that gold fillings were removed after the victims were gassed to death, not before, and that people were gassed before being placed in the furnace. He noted that Teuvo’s hiding and wall-breaking behaviours resembled the tactics of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, who broke down walls to create passages to the extent that, as one survivor described, ‘we could move around an entire residential block without once going into the street’.7

Teuvo grew up to become a professional musician and music teacher. In 1999, he told Stevenson he no longer experienced memory images of the previous life. The breathing problems ended at age five, but the hiding behaviour lasted until age thirteen or fourteen, and in fact even as an adult, he did not like the fact that his residence had no hiding place. He still felt anxiety at the sight of Nazi uniforms or the Nazi flag.

David Strickland

The case of David Strickland is one of several cases described by Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick in their 1999 book Past Lives: An Investigation into Reincarnation Memories. Despite not having been raised Jewish, David was so fascinated with Judaism that he studied the Kabbalah and learned Hebrew well enough to read it. At the age of thirteen, he became morbidly fascinated with the Nazi death-camps, saying: ‘I just had to outstare the horror photos of tortured, mangled bodies. … it took over my life and took away my carefree childhood completely. I had to face down and spiritually confront this evil.’ This led to depression so severe that at age eighteen he joined that ‘devastated’ his life.8

Later on, Strickland had a spontaneous flash of memory of life as his own great-great-grandfather, which provided an answer to why he had had a lifelong fascination for trains and railways. He then learned to meditate, repeatedly revisiting a peaceful life as a Native North American. These lives helped him make sense of himself. Then one more past-life memory came to him:

I had vivid flashbacks of being inside a prison cap with rows of barracks.  I was a thirteen-year-old girl in a ragged grey frock, barefooted on a muddy ground, my left hand holding the right hand of a little brother. The two rows of barracks on the left and right ended at a T-junction, with a building going across my vision. The year was 1944, and I knew I was going to die and that I would never see my brother again. I had another vision where I was ill and being carried on a stretcher at an obscene pace to my place of death. Lying on my back, the roofs of buildings swept past my vision, and the last thing I saw was a tall chimney with black smoke escaping from it.9

A few days later, Strickland received a letter from a friend with whom he long corresponded on spiritual matters. The friend wrote that it had come to him that both he and Strickland had been victims of the Holocaust.

Yael Shahar

Born in Texas, this author gives the remembered name of her past-life self, Ovadya ben Malka, as co-author of her 2014 memoir, A Damaged Mirror.10 As a child, she was haunted by dreams of living in the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau as a Greek Jewish teenage boy from Thessaloniki. He was brought to the camp on a transport train, separated from the rest of his family who were all immediately gassed to death, and made a member of the Sonderkommando, the cohort of Jewish prisoners who were made to haul corpses, grind bones, sort the possessions of the dead, et cetera. Eventually he was beaten to death by his captors.

Shahar recalled the number that had been tattooed on her previous incarnation’s arm, which would have confirmed his identity had the record still existed, as some still do. She was not so fortunate. Devastated by guilt for having cooperated with his Nazi captors in committing genocide on her own people, and feeling unworthy to worship God, Shahar undertook a journey of healing which led her to engage the help of a rabbi, revisit the camp to perform a confession ritual, and ultimately settled in Israel.

Of her visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Shahar writes: 

I read the sign near the krema [oven]. It conveyed nothing. It said not a word about the screams from behind the sealed door, or the way the lift creaked and protested as it raised its load of corpses to the upper floor. Or of the mad scramble to empty out the gas chamber before the corpses could grow stiff and make our job more difficult. The sign said nothing of the stench or the need to get the place clean before the next transport arrived. It said nothing of the fear, or the deadness of soul that allowed us to eat surrounded the corpses of our own people. Nor of our inability to feel or weep…11

Barbro Karlen

Barbro Karlen’s case is the one extant famous past life related to the Holocaust, as she claims to have been the iconic Jewish teen diarist Anne Frank.12 A child prodigy writer in her native Sweden, Karlen published her first best-selling book at the age of twelve, and eleven books in total by the age of sixteen. By her own account, as far back as she could remember she had nightmares of men and dogs kicking down the door of a small room she was in; then at the age of ten, during a visit to Amsterdam with her parents, she was able to lead her parents to the house where Anne Frank had lived, and apparently knew it as it had been before, noticing a set of stairs had been changed and pictures that had been on the wall of the room were missing. Karlen writes also that she was introduced to Anne’s last living relative, the actor Buddy Elias, by a publisher who did not say anything to either of them about how they might be connected: according to her own account, the two recognized each other immediately, had a tearful reunion, and remained close thereafter.

Will

All past-life experiences of the Holocaust are not from the side of the victims. Writer and reincarnation researcher KM Wehrstein has investigated the cases of ‘Will’ (not his real name), an American who recalls a past life as Wilhelm Emmerich, a member of the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) whose job was helping supervisd the ‘processing of cargo’, as he refers to it when reverting to past-life idiom, mostly at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Wehrstein published a paper on Will in 2019.13

When she was pregnant with Will, his mother acquired an aversion for the smell of burning meat which stayed with her to the end of her life. As a child, Will was afflicted by nightmares of ‘skeleton people’, humans so emaciated they looked like skeletons who might ‘get him’ – a fear that was apparently guilt-induced – and associated it with what he termed the ‘smell of death’. He was fascinated with Nazi symbols and began collecting Nazi memorabilia as a child despite parental disapproval, and continues to this day. He did not realize these phenomena might relate to reincarnation until he was exposed to the concept as a young adult.

Will identified his SS incarnation by retaining the memory of an unusual event in the Auschwitz camp: a female Jewish prisoner snatched a gun away from another SS man and shot Will’s previous incarnation, leaving him with a permanent limp. Only Emmerich is known historically to have had this happen to him; other facts matched also, including Emmerich shooting a prisoner who made a panicked run shortly before the Allied liberation of the Bergen-Belsen camp, an interrogation of Emmerich by a French interrogator after the liberation, and Emmerich dying of an illness whose symptoms resembled those of typhus, which the historical record gives as his cause of death. Many of his verifications came from difficult-to-access sources which he had no way of accessing as a child or a teen. Will has a limp with no clear current-life cause, which worsens when he talks about Emmerich, to this day.

Rabbi Yonassan Gershom

Rabbi Yonassan Gershom is an American Neo-Hasidic rabbi and author who began to hear accounts of past lives of Holocaust victims in 1981, and since then has received thousands of them, either told to him or sent in letters. He did not investigate these cases or attempt to identify the past incarnations in the way Stevenson did, but rather accepted the accounts as told. He shared many cases of this nature, explored the processes of healing and the spiritual implications of the Holocaust, in three books written in the 1990s.14

KM Wehrstein

Literature

Ben Malka, O. & Shahar, Y. (2014). A Damaged Mirror: A Story of Memory and Redemption. Alfei Menashe, Israel: Kasva Press.

Donat, A. (1979) (ed.) The Death Camp Treblinka: A Documentary. New York: Holocaust Library.

Fenwick, P. & Fenwick, E. (1999). Past Lives: An Investigation into Reincarnation Memories. New York: Berkeley Books.

Gershom, Y. (1992). Beyond the Ashes: Cases of Reincarnation from the Holocaust. Virginia Beach, Virginia, USA: A.R.E. Press.

Gershom, Y. (1996) (ed.) From Ashes to Healing: Mystical Encounters with the Holocaust. Virginia Beach, Virginia, USA: A.R.E. Press.

Gershom, Y. (1999). Jewish Tales of Reincarnation. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.

Karlen, B. (2000). And the Wolves Howled: Fragments of Two Lifetimes. London: Clairview Books. [Originally published in German under the title …und die Wolfe heulten’, Fragmente eines Lebens, Basel: Perseus Verlag, 1997.]

Stevenson, I (2003). European Cases of the Reincarnation Type. Jefferson, North Carolina, USA: McFarland.

Wehrstein, K.M. (2019). An adult reincarnation case with multiple solved lives: Recalling Wilhelm Emmerich. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 81, 1-17.

Source: https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/past-life-memories-holocaust 

By Walter Semkiw, MD

David Llewelyn has a Secret Jewish Father but is Raised Christian

David Llewelyn was born in Chester, England, on September 1, 1970. His mother, Susan Llewelyn, was Welsh. At the time that David was born, she was married to Jeffery Llewelyn, but David’s biologic father was Solomon Rosenberg, a Jewish man who Susan had an affair with for a period of two years.

Susan hid the affair with Solomon from her husband, Jeffery. As such, David was raised as the son of Susan and Jeffery. The couple stayed together at least to the time that David was nine years of age and as such, David was raised in a Christian culture. Susan and Jeffery Llewelyn eventually divorced.

Susan noted that Solomon Rosenberg saw David a few times, but he never took interest in or responsibility for David. Growing up, David was not aware that Solomon was his biologic father.

Susan contacted Ian Stevenson, MD about her son’s reincarnation case after she heard him on a BBC television program on reincarnation in 1982. Following a period of correspondence, Stevenson traveled to Chester, England to meet with David and Susan.

Past Life Memories: Deep Pits or Holes with Bodies

As a young boy, David had nightmares of large, dark, deep holes which contained bodies. He smelled the stench of dead bodies and he was afraid that he would fall into the holes. There were people with guns.

At times, David would run crying to Susan describing the camps, guns and the dying people he saw in his dreams. He complained of an unusual odor in his bed room.

Past Life Memories of a Gas Chamber

At home, the family cooked on an electric stove. When they visited an aunt who cooked with gas, David said, it “was like the smell in my room at night, it’s going to smother me.” (1) The Nazis had used gases, such as carbon monoxide or hydrogen sulfide, to kill concentration camp victims.

David also had past life images arise in his mind during waking hours. These images included people who were prisoners of war who lived in wood huts. David thought these people were Jewish.

Past Life Memories: David Recalls Being Placed into a Pit

When Ian Stevenson interviewed him, David said that he had past life memories in which he was being put into a pit as a young boy. He remembered looking up to the top of the pit where he saw another boy looking at him. He thought the boy was a companion who might save him. There were other bodies in the pit. (2) This image recurred many times and David told Stevenson that he remembered the terrible odor of the camp.

Stevenson noted that in Nazi concentration camps, children 14 years of age and younger were killed, as they were deemed unfit for work. Stevenson noted that at the concentration camp of Treblinka, “children were thrown into a ditch, sometimes still alive, where they are consumed by fire. Alternately, they could be thrown into a ‘regular mass grave.’” (3)

Past Life Ability & Knowledge of Jewish Customs: Writing from Left to Right, Kosher Food and Kippahs

A most dramatic aspect of this case is that when David began to read and write, he would spontaneously read and write from right to left, which his how the Hebrew language is read and written. No one had taught him to do so, rather, he was taught to read and write in the usual English manner, from left to right. Though teachers would correct him, he continued to have this Hebrew habit of writing from right to left until he was 11 years old.

David, as a child, surprised his mother by asking whether food she was serving had blood in it, an apparent reference to Kosher processing of meat. No one had told David about Kosher customs. When he and his parents went to another city when he was nine, David looked at a building that looked like a church. He told his parents, “They wear caps there. Jeffery, Susan’s husband, then noted that the building was a Jewish synagogue. David was referring to Kippahs that Jewish people wear.

Past Life Phobias of the Star of David, the Color Yellow, Camps & German People

When David drew pictures, he would always include a star, though at the same time, he seemed to have a phobia of stars. When he was 12 years old, Susan took David into a shop where he saw a necklace with a Star of David attached to it. David then started to cry and ran out into the street. Susan ran after him and asked what disturbed him. David said that the necklace with the Star of David was “beckoning to him.” (3)

David also had a strong aversion to the color yellow. Susan stated that David “hated” yellow. The Nazi’s made Jews wear yellow stars on their clothing, so that they could be distinguished from gentiles. David also had a strong fear of camps. When Susan told him that people have very pleasant vacations at camps, David replied:

“No. There is no happiness there. People are caged in and cold, hungry, and frightened. They’ll never get out.” (4) David said that the people in camps were like skeletons, they were bald and they had no food. David would say in despair, “I’m worried for the other people. Why did it happen? Why did it have to happen?” (5)

Susan, David’s mother, insisted that David did not learn of the Holocaust, Nazi concentration camps or Jewish customs as a child in their home. When David was older, she noticed that when David saw Germans on television, he became fearful and angry. Similarly, he displayed fear and anger when he saw German people on a vacation trip that he took with his mother to the island of Corfu.

Summary & Past Life Case Analysis

David’s past lifetime in a concentration camp could not be validated historically, as he did not remember his name or give other specific details from which could allow verification.

The strength of this case rests on David having innate knowledge of Jewish customs, such as reading and writing from right to left, and memories of scenes characteristic of Nazi concentration camps. David’s mother, Susan, strongly denied that David could have learned this information by normal means.

Regarding whether David somehow acquired this knowledge from Solomon Rosenberg, his biologic father, through some type of genetic memory, Dr. Stevenson commented:

“Even the most ardent geneticist would not suggest that genes would transmit the habit of reading and writing from right to left, concern about whether food has blood in it, and images of a concentration camp.” (6)

Principles of Reincarnation & Understanding Past Lives

This reincarnation case demonstrates the following features:

Past Life Talent & Knowledge: When he began to read and write in the English language, he did so from right to left, which is the technique used for the Hebrew. Though teachers tried to correct this practice, David persisted in this practice until he was 11 years of age. He seemed to have innate knowledge of Kosher food and Kippahs.

Past Life Phobias: David had fears of the Star of David, the color yellow, vacation camps and of German people.

Change of Religion and Ethic Affiliation: In his past lifetime, David died as a young Jewish boy in a Nazi concentration camp. In contemporary times, David reincarnated into a Christian family. Though David’s biologic father, Solomon, was Jewish, David as a boy was not aware of this paternal relationship since Susan, his mother, kept her affair with Solomon secret.

A dramatic and very compelling reincarnation case of this type is the Anne Frank | Barbro Karlen reincarnation case, as Anne too was persecuted as a Jew in a Nazi concentration camp, yet she reincarnated as Barbro Karlen to a Christian family in Sweden. If the Nazis and German people knew that one could be born Jewish in one lifetime and Christian in another, the Holocaust could never have happened. In this way, evidence of reincarnation can help create a more peaceful world.

Source:https://www.reincarnationresearch.com/past-life-story-with-phobias-innate-talent-religion-change-reincarnation-case-of-a-young-holocaust-victim-david-llewelyn/

Steve’s memories of dying in the Holocaust began as childhood nightmares. Throughout his life, these dreams and memories lurked just below the surface of consciousness, affecting him in many ways: as phobias, physical ailments, and an innate talent.

When Steve was born in 1955, he was unable to digest food and spent the first year of his life in the hospital; he was officially “allergic to everything”. He also had frequent childhood nightmares about trying to climb the walls of his bedroom. In these dreams he was always a woman and, upon wakening, would find himself repeating a seemingly meaningless word that sounded like “vendorswagens”. In school he wrote accounts of escaping from camp and being wrongly accused, stories which caused serious concern among his teachers.

At the age of sixteen, Steve “miraculously” started playing quality piano without having been trained! But there was a dark side to this musical talent. Every time Steve sat down at the piano, he had nightmarish visions of playing for many thin, starving children. He would try to make the children laugh but could only cry inside because he knew they were dying. These impressions were so overwhelming that sometimes Steve could not go on playing.

But it was a mysterious phobia which finally drove Steve to consult a hypnotherapist. For some unknown reason, Steve’s neck was always extremely sensitive, and he could not stand to have anyone touch it. The very thought was terrifying. He knew this fear was not logical, but it would not go away. Eventually, with the help of the hypnotherapist, the following story unfolded.

In another life Steve had been a young Belgian woman who journeyed to Paris and got a job playing piano in a Jewish-owned nightclub. Through a series of mishaps, she was deported to Poland and falsely accused of being a Jew. This woman was not sent to a concentration camp at first, but to “a part of town where we were all crowded together—starving, dirty.” Every morning Poles would come with carts to carry away the dead—carts that were called “vendorswagens”, the strange word from Steve’s childhood dreams. While in this ghetto, the woman entertained the starving children with her piano playing, trying to take away some of the sting of the deplorable conditions in which they were forced to live.

But eventually, this woman was deported to a concentration camp. She and a friend attempted to escape, were recaptured, and then hung. At the moment of death, this woman felt ashamed to face anyone, as if she had somehow let them down by failing to escape and get help. This feeling, along with the choking sensation of hanging, apparently carried over into the next life, which accounted for Steve’s sensitive neck.

Steve’s story is particularly interesting, because he had all three signs of past life dreams: his dreams were vivid and coherent, recurring, and he saw himself in a distinctly different persona—as a grown woman. Knowledge beyond experience was evident in his touch of xenoglossy: the word “vendorswagen”, which represented the essence of all the horror he had witnessed during the death watch in the ghastly ghetto—so much so that it stuck with him into this life. Steve had physical traits relating to his hanging in the past, and a natural ability to play the piano, just as he had done in his former life. As a child, he even wrote stories about escaping from camp and being falsely accused—which, he later found out, was exactly what had happened to him in his past life.

But no one recognized these signs of Steve’s past life memory. What if his parents had recognized the clues, if they had pieced together his story while he was still young by translating the strange word, and taking seriously the stories he wrote of escape and being falsely accused? It wasn’t until Steve was an adult that he sought the help of a hypnotherapist to understand the sensitivity in his neck. With the hypnotherapist’s help, his full past life story was revealed. The shame and guilt that shrouded his past life death was finally shed.

Rabbi Gershom found that Steve’s problem was not unique, because “the parents of children with these innate fears are often puzzled by their behavior, because there does not seem to be anything in their son’s or daughter’s present life that could account for such terror.” And, most parents don’t know that past lives are even possible. So they unwittingly compound their children’s fears and confusion by assuming that their dream must be a re-play of something absorbed from the radio or TV, or a symbolic representation of a repressed urge or fear. But, in truth, many of these dreams and nightmares are not symbolic fantasies, or a re-hash of everyday life. They are literal memories of real experience from the past.

Note: We wrote up this case to be featured in the Dreaming Up the Past chapter in Children’s Past Lives. It was edited out to make the chapter shorter (we cut the original manuscript of the whole book by a third).  It originally had the sub-heading “Look to the Literal” because it demonstrates how a past life memory that appears first in dreams can haunt waking life and affect behavior, especially if not treated. This case is from Rabbi Gershom’s book Beyond the Ashes. 

Source: https://www.carolbowman.com/library/vendorswagens