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The faith of Jewish refugees during WWII was tested in ways most people cannot imagine. Their families were torn apart while their children watched their parents disappear as starvation and fear dwelt within them.

Yet many survivors speak of something mysterious that kept them going, describing a strength that did not come from food or safety.

This strength came from something deeper–one that followed the old truth that man shall not live by bread alone (Matthew 4:4).

They learned to live not on bread alone, but on the promise of God, which became a lifeline for those who had nothing left.

When their stomachs were empty, their spirits were full.

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Finding Strength When the Body is Weak

Hunger was a daily reality in the ghettos and camps, where people only received tiny rations of bread and watery soup.

One survivor, Joseph Hisiger, weighed less than one hundred pounds when the camps were liberated. He had worked on railway crews and in fields while his body wasted away, slowly and painfully. But Joseph had something that the guards could not take. On his person, he had a small Bible, which a fellow prisoner had offered to trade with for a week’s worth of bread. Without hesitation and doubt, Joseph agreed immediately, having found an anchor to ground him for survival.

That decision saved something more important than his body: his soul.

Every night, Joseph hid under his blanket to read, and, whenever he could, he carried the Bible against his chest during the day. Once, he forgot it in his cell–and when that happened, he prayed desperately and convinced a guard to let him search for it.

Miraculously, the Bible came back to him.

Joseph later wrote that he learned the real meaning of Jesus’ words during his time at the camps: “Man must live, not on bread alone, but on every utterance coming forth through Jehovah’s mouth“.

For Joseph, reading Scripture was like eating, and it gave him the energy to face another sunrise.

John W. Weiser wrote in A Thousand Kisses about families who shared their last crumbs. Though they had almost nothing, they still gave to strangers without hesitation. This altruistic spirit is not based on logical consideration but is rooted in the spiritual.

The act of sharing was a reminder to them that they were still human and still had humanity. They were still capable of love and still connected to God.

Community as a Form of Worship

No one survived the Holocaust completely alone. People gathered in secret to pray, singing hymns in crowded barracks and doing whatever they could to stay connected with one another and their faith.

At the Ravensbrück camp, prisoners met in Barracks 28, where the guards stayed away because of fleas. Inside, women read Scripture and sang together.

Corrie ten Boom described watching “the light leap from face to face” as they read God’s promises, writing much later that they were “more than [the] conquerors.” And not in the future too, but right then, and rein that terrible place.

The Jewish community in Shanghai also showed this truth. Thousands of refugees fled to China when other countries closed their doors, with some even moving there to continue their religious studies. Students and teachers kept the Sabbath, praying together and giving each other reasons to live. Though one survivor named Sigmund Tobias later lost his faith after learning about the full scale of the Holocaust, he never forgot the power of community, writing that “close ties to family, friends, and a caring community” were greater comforts than any distant divinity.

Even without belief in God, he still believed in people.

Christian prisoners also formed communities with Jehovah’s Witnesses meeting in secret bakeries to study the Bible, and pastors like Dietrich Bonhoeffer chose to resist Hitler. Bonhoeffer himself wrote about the cost of grace, believing firmly that faith without action is dead. He was executed for his beliefs. Though his body died, his witness lived on.

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Secret Prayers and Hidden Scriptures

Finding a Bible or any piece of religious literature in a camp was like finding water in a desert, and prisoners hid pages inside their clothing, memorizing verses and whispering them to children. Spiritual nourishment often came in tiny pieces: a single psalm here or a line from Isaiah there. The words had to fit inside a crowded mind because paper was too dangerous to keep.

One Jewish man named Yossel Friedenson tried negotiating for extra flour before Passover, and he and other prisoners baked matzah in a labor camp. The German commandant of the camp walked in on them, shouting: “Eat bread! These crackers give no nourishment!” and mocking them for following God’s law when God seemed to have abandoned them. A prisoner named Akiva Goldschtof answered, “God has not totally forsaken us. He has temporarily put us in this situation, but not totally and not forever”.

Those words spread through the camp, and prisoners repeated them for months. They were not eating bread because they were eating hope.

Another survivor named Tzila escaped with her mother and a group of orphans. German planes bombed their ship, flooding the lower deck and drowning kindergarten children. Tzilia only survived because older children pulled her to safety. Her mother never stopped crying for those lost children, but she also never stopped praying.

For Tzilia’s mother, faith was not about understanding why bad things happen: it was about getting up the next morning and still believing that life has meaning.

When the body has nothing, the soul reaches for God. This is not a weakness but the deepest kind of strength.

The stories in this article only scratch the surface of how faith sustained people through impossible times. To read more powerful accounts of survival, hope, and the human spirit, pick up John W. Weiser’s A Thousand Kisses: A Family’s Escape From the Nazis to a New Life.

A Thousand Kisses: A Family’s Escape From the Nazis to a New Life brings to life the daily struggles and quiet miracles of a family who refused to give up. Order your copy today and discover how spiritual nourishment can carry you through any storm.