Falun Dafa is Good!

Falun Dafa is Good!

法轮功学员的故事 Stories of Falun Gong Practitioners

Saturday, February 21, 2015

Singing Songs No One Hears: Ethan Gutmann’s New Year’s Greetings to the Chinese People

While she was in prison, a thought kept running through her mind: will the world ever know what happened here?

By , Epoch Times | February 18, 2015
Young women dressed in traditional Chinese gowns walk in the Lunar New Year Parade in Flushing, New York, on Feb. 8, 2014. (Samira Bouaou/Epoch Times)

In my mind, Chinese New Year usually announces its presence through a long-forgotten song. The first notes–often something I accidentally hear on the street–acts as an emotional tripwire. Just for a moment, strangers are transformed into fellow passengers on a breathtaking journey. So I know of no better way to express my New Years greetings to Chinese people across the world than to tell a story about people singing together in extremely difficult circumstances. The following account was told to me in Bangkok, by five religious refugees from China:

The doors to the caged balcony of Heizuizi Female Prison had not been opened for a year, but an irresistible, almost itchy feeling was sweeping through the cellblocks as a warm afternoon wind blew in after the heavy snows of 2004. The guards checked their watches, unlocked the massive steel gates, and threw them open. Streaks of sunlight illuminated the concrete floors and all the prisoners from seven cells stepped out at the same time. For a change, everyone was together: All the religious prisoners, many with the scars of electrocution on their faces, side by side with the hardened criminals–drug addicts and prostitutes in the main–who served as the daily masters of routine punishment. 

 Everyone remembers how quiet it was. Everyone just breathing the air as if one could drink in traces of oceans and steppes and the Himalayas. Beyond the cell blocks and guard towers, vast clouds were tumbling across the horizon, and even patches of grass and tiny white flowers seemed to be waving toward the heavens. 

 Spontaneously, softly at first, a young religious prisoner began to sing a spiritual hymn in a spacious falsetto. Normally the hardened criminals would stop her and make her assume the airplane position for such an infraction. Yet looking out at a world they could not attain, the criminals stood reflectively listening as the religious prisoners in the other cells began to sing along. And as they reached the chorus, the young religious prisoner’s voice swelled and trilled … 

 “Coming from far away, again and again, I come for you, I come for you…” 

 …and the hardened criminals joined in. Tentatively at first, then loudly, with great spirit. And as the chorus drew near again…

 “…I come with love for you.”
…they began crying. Then everyone was. Across seven cells.

 Then the guards said, “Okay, okay, get back inside.” And everyone did. And the guards locked the steel gates and never opened them again.
Jing Tian is on the far left, Ethan Gutmman center. (courtesy Ethan Gutmann)
 Jing Tian is on the far left, Ethan Gutmman center. (courtesy Ethan Gutmann)

 I saw one of the women who told me that story quite recently. Jing Tian lives in Vancouver with her husband (who had also been incarcerated for his beliefs). Instead of dwelling on the past, we celebrated in a hot, crowded, and noisy hotpot restaurant where we ate endless plates of lamb and told jokes until my stomach hurt. But Jing said one serious thing that stuck with me. While she was in prison, a thought kept running through her mind: will the world ever know what happened here?

 Those who sing songs that no one can hear will justifiably ask that question. Yet Jing is not full of bitterness. Jing is full of hope. As the women in those seven cells were, if only for a moment. So let us pause, from our steaming hot pot, our jokes, our politics, and our differences, and let us hear their song, and reaffirm, if only for a moment, that faced with the promise of Spring, perhaps we are not strangers at all.

 Ethan Gutmann is the author of “The Slaughter,” currently available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Random House.

 Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Epoch Times.


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Saturday, February 7, 2015

‘Never Again’ Is Here Again

A reflection on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz

By , Epoch Times | January 27, 2015
A watch tower stands along a barbed wire fence at the memorial site of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp in Oswiecim, Poland, on Jan. 26, 2015. (Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images)
A watch tower stands along a barbed wire fence at the memorial site of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp in Oswiecim, Poland, on Jan. 26, 2015. (Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images)
I was born in Croatia a year before the second world war ended. I don’t remember much, but I still have the sense of fear and terror down to the deepest level of every cell in my body. I sucked it with my mother’s milk.
I still have a heavy album full of black and white pictures of people whose names I don’t know. They are all my family MEMBERS, but I don’t recognize them. I never dared to ask my mother. Every weekend over Saturday family lunch she would tell lively stories about uncles and aunts and cousins. I loved the first part of these stories, but they all ended with the same sentence: “But they all have gone in the war.” I didn’t understand what it meant, but I didn’t dare to ask her.
As I grew older I did ask her once, “What does it mean?” and she said with a gloomy voice: “You know, in the ‘lager’ (the word for concentration camp in Croatian).” It didn’t make it clearer for me. I guess I just didn’t want to understand, as the true story was too horrifying and too painful to grasp.
I remembered all this as I was planning my trip to Poland for the ceremonies of the remembrance day on Jan. 27, which marks 70 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, the most notorious concentration camp. Growing up in Israel with the family memories of the Holocaust, I preferred to forget everything related to the Holocaust except one thing: The vow “never again” to anyone on any place on the planet, which was set deep in me.
I never really healed from the trauma of the holocaust until 2003, when I found a spiritual path that completely changed my life. The name of the practice is Falun Gong, also called Falun Dafa, which originated in China in 1992 and spread all over the world. It basically asks you to improve your behavior and moral character by adhering to the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. It also includes five meditative exercises. The combination of these two completely eliminated all my endless health problems and healed my heart. I also believe it really made me a more tolerant and easier-to-live-with person.
That’s why I was shocked to find out that this practice, which was so praised in the beginning by the Chinese regime, has been severely persecuted in China since 1999. The then-head of the Chinese Communist Party, Jiang Zemin, panicked because there were an estimated 70million–100 million people who are trying to live by the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, which are not the principles of the Communist Party. The persecution started almost overnight and the systematic methods and their severity brought back all my bad memories.
Overnight Falun Gong practitioners were labeled as enemies of the country—as Jews had been labeled—using all the mass media. They were detained, arrested, and sent to forced labor camps and tortured to death. And very similar to the dark days of the Holocaust, a special office was set up “The 610 Office,” to persecute Falun Gong to this very day.
Who wanted to interfere with Germany, then a big, rich country? And who wants to interfere with China today?
And there is one more horrifying detail. Tens of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners are being used as a living organ BANK: their vital organs (hearts, kidneys, livers) are being forcefully ripped out and sold for high prices and their bodies are cremated.
Who believed the stories about the Holocaust when they started to come out? They were so much against human values that it was impossible to believe. Unfortunately they were all true, as are the stories about the persecution of Falun Gong.
That’s why I came to Poland, to remind all of us of the vow “never again,” which I believe everybody vowed after the horrors of the Holocaust.
In a follow-up article I hope to tell you about what happened during this trip to Poland: my meeting with Marek Kuchcinski, the vice chairman of the Polish Congress, to tell him about the persecution of Falun Gong and ask for his support and help to stop it; an interview with David Matas, an international human rights lawyer who investigated with David Kilgour, a former Parliament MEMBER in Canada, the organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners and published it in the book “Bloody Harvest;” and a press conference. And of course the ceremony in Auschwitz.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Epoch Times.
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