Island of Saints: A Story of the One Principle That Frees the Human Spirit

by Andy Andrews

  “You have got to be kidding,” I gasped. “These are . . . they are incredible. I’ve never seen anything like this. How many are there?”

  “We have about six hundred left,” Helen said proudly. “There’s a store in New Orleans that we allow to sell two pieces a month. They haven’t gotten less than fifteen hundred dollars for one in more than three years now. The money goes to education for children like Danny.”

  “Hey, look at this,” Josef said, digging in his pocket. “This is my favorite. It’s the first thing he ever did. I wouldn’t take a million dollars for it—not even for charity.”

  I took the small item from the old man and recognized it immediately as a speckled trout. The piece was small. Worn and nicked from the years spent in Josef’s pocket, it did not possess the sophistication of the artist’s later work, but because it was the very first “Danny Gilbert” and treasured by the owner, its value was indeed priceless.

  I didn’t want to make the old couple sad, but I was curious. “When did Danny . . . ahhh—”

  “Danny died in 1961,” Helen said, smiling. “He was forty-nine.”

  WE TALKED FOR HOURS . . . THROUGH LUNCH, WHICH WE ATE on the back porch, and on into the afternoon. It seemed I actually did have a thousand questions. “Is your name really Newman?”

  “No,” he said. “The fishermen at the docks all called me the ‘new man’ for a long while. Then it was ‘Josef the new man’ and finally just ‘Josef Newman.’ When Helen and I got married, I put ‘Josef Newman’ on the certificate, and no one ever questioned it.”

  “So you are really married?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Helen replied, “but not until 1947. It was well after the war before we felt safe enough to try to get the paperwork.”

  “Wan made that happen,” Josef said.

  “Wan was your best man, sweetheart.”

  “That’s true. That’s true.”

  As the afternoon wore on, I found myself attempting to keep all the stories straight. The conversation was moving in ten different directions at once. I thought then, and still do, that it might have been the first time Josef and Helen talked about some of this. “Wait,” I said. They looked at me patiently. “You mean Wan . . . the same guy who shot at you with the pistol?”

  “Yes.” They laughed.

  “What about the English accent?”

  “What about it?” Josef asked.

  “What happened to it? That’s such a great part of the story.”

  Josef grinned. “I kept it up for years.” He shrugged. “But it faded away. Along with all the people who remembered it, I suppose.”

  I asked permission to change the subject and started down another path. “Can I ask what you did with Schneider’s body?” Josef grimaced, and Helen looked very uncomfortable. I backed up. “That’s okay, I just—”

  “No,” Josef broke in, “You’re fine, it’s just . . . you know . . . not really anything I ever thought I’d be talking about.”

  “I understand.”

  He looked at his wife. “You okay?” She nodded, and he turned back to me. “We just dragged him off and buried him. I mean, we got out a ways from my little cabin.” I must have been frowning. Josef continued to explain, “You got to understand. That was a different time. No forensics, a deputy in on it . . .”

  “In on it?” Helen said. “Wan shot him.”

  Josef nodded toward her. “You know what I mean. Like I said, it was a different time. Anyway, I still feel like Wan did the right thing.”

  “I do too,” Helen was quick to add. “I didn’t mean to intimate that he didn’t.”

  “And it wasn’t like anyone was looking for Ernst Schneider.” Josef shook his head as if to rid himself of a nasty memory. “He was a bad one.”

  “And nobody ever found out?” Neither spoke. I asked again: “So you don’t think anybody ever knew?”

  Helen couldn’t stand it. She answered, “I think Billy knew. I think Wan told him.”

  I looked at Josef, who nodded in agreement. “Yeah,” he said, “I think so too. I think Wan felt like he had to tell him.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “After we buried Schneider—that very day—Wan went and arrested Harris Kramer. He found the radio Schneider had been using up in Kramer’s attic and pinned it on Kramer. He’d been trying to get Kramer for a long time anyway. And he was guilty . . . Wan just got him for something else.”

  I shook my head in amazement.

  “Anyway, when Wan took old Kramer in, Billy put two and two together—connecting one German spy with another—and was about to make a big stink about it—you know, get the posse, let’s go find this other one—but nobody else knew there was another one . . . much less that he was already dead. So Wan told Billy what happened in order to keep him quiet.” He paused, then added, “Kramer yelled bloody murder about another Nazi ashore, but everybody figured he was trying to save his own skin. Nobody believed him.”

  “And Wan never said anything about you?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Nope, never did. Probably as much out of respect for Helen as anything. He’d heard me through the window that day, telling Schneider that I loved her . . . I don’t know. Maybe that was it. He didn’t take his eye off me for a long time, though. He loved Helen too.”

  “Oh, Josef . . . ,” Helen scoffed.

  “It’s true. You know it.”

  “Well, I’m just glad Shirley came along for Wan.”

  “Who’s Shirley?” I asked. My mind was swimming.

  “Shirley was a local girl,” Helen said. “From Robertsdale anyway. She and Wan were married before we were. Nineteen forty-six, I think.”

  “Sounds right,” Josef agreed.

  “Is Wan still alive?” I asked.

  “No,” Josef said. “Wan got cancer. Passed away about fifteen years ago.”

  “Shirley’s still alive, though. She’s not a Cooper anymore.” Helen smiled mischievously. “She’s a Warren now.” She waited for what she’d just said to sink in.

  It did. “Oh, come on!” I exclaimed, as Josef chuckled. “Seriously?” I said. “Shirley Warren that works at the state park? That Shirley Warren?”

  “That’s the one.” Helen grinned.

  I couldn’t stand it. I had to ask, “Does she know that you—”

  “Nooo. Nooo,” they said. “Wan never told her.”

  I was curious about Josef’s friends and family left in Germany. “Did they ever know you made it off the sub?”

  He shrugged. “No family left. And as for friends, there was Hans Kuhlmann, of course, but everyone else in Germany was so displaced by the fighting that when it was all over, people just assumed that the friends they no longer saw—were dead.”

  “What about Kuhlmann . . . your sub commander? Did you ever see him again? Or communicate to him in some way that you were safe . . . alive?”

  Josef spoke softly to Helen, then turned to me. As he continued to talk, she slipped from the table and out of the room. “I never saw Hans again. Neither did I hear anything about him for years.”

  Helen walked back into the room and handed me a copied article from a newspaper. It was an Associated Press article, carried by the Birmingham News, dated June 9, 2001. The headline read: “Remains of Sunken WWII German Sub Found in Gulf.” I glanced at Josef, who remarked, “Hans never made it home.”

  Reading just the first two paragraphs gave me chills:

  New Orleans. A sunken World War II submarine has been discovered 5,000 feet deep in the Gulf of Mexico, rerouting a planned oil company pipeline and rewriting a bit of wartime history.

  BP and Shell Oil Company, which had been surveying the Gulf floor for a joint pipeline project, announced the discovery Friday of the U-166, which was sunk in 1942 after it sank an American ship.

  “She was sunk by depth charges dropped from a navy patrol boat,” Josef said. “The U-166 attacked and sank the Robert E. Lee, then was herself attacked and destroyed from above.”


  “Tell him about Gertrude,” Helen prompted.

  “Gertrude?”

  “Gertrude was Hans’s wife,” Josef said. “Beautiful girl. I was in their wedding. I talked to her as recently as last year.”

  “She’s still alive?” I asked incredulously.

  “She was last year,” Josef said. “After the sub was found, I made an effort to find her, and did. She is still in Cologne . . . invests quite heavily in the stock market. All blue chip American companies, she says.” He laughed as I shook my head in wonder.

  At one point, I asked Josef what he had meant when we first started talking and he made a comment about what his wife could do. “You said that Mrs. Newman could help people take an unhappy life and turn it into a great one.”

  “Helen understands and harnesses the principle of forgiveness in an unbelievable way.”

  “Can you explain it?” I asked.

  Josef pointed to his wife and smiled. “Let her explain it.”

  An expectant smile on my face, I turned to Helen.

  “Very simple,” she said. “It wasn’t so simple for me a million years ago, but time and experience have given me an honest grasp on the concept, I truly believe.”

  “Shoot.”

  “All right . . .” She paused an instant, collecting her thoughts, then laid it out in a way I’ll never forget. “Remember this,” she said. “Forgiveness allows you to lead your own life and choose a joyful existence rather than giving it over to the control of others less qualified.

  “For years, I was reluctant to forgive because I did not understand the difference between trust and forgiveness. Forgiveness is about letting go of the past. Trust has to do with future behavior.

  “I believe,” Helen said with a beautiful smile on her face, “that Josef and I are an example of the incredible power of forgiveness.”

  “I believe it too,” I responded. “How do we harness this power?”

  “By deciding to harness it,” she said simply. “So many people allow their emotions to dictate their decisions rather than the other way around. When we decide to forgive, our lives begin anew.”

  I remained silent in hopes that she would continue. She did. And in a direction that surprised me. “Have you heard of the new method being touted with which to deal with our bitterness and resentment? ‘Anger management,’ I believe it is called?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I have. Companies, professional sports teams . . . everyone is using it. It’s a big deal.”

  “It’s a big crock.”

  My eyebrows rose about an inch. “Excuse me?”

  She smiled calmly. “You heard me. I said, anger management is a crock. Ridiculous. A waste of time.”

  Obviously I was curious, but just as obviously I did not understand. “Go ahead,” I prompted.

  “Imagine this,” she began. “Suppose you say, ‘I have this deep-seated bitterness . . . this resentment, perpetual anger . . . this consuming rage that exists inside me. It causes me to do things that are ruining my reputation, destroying my marriage, ending effective communication with my children . . . This anger might result in the loss of my job or even a prison sentence . . . But still,’ you say, ‘it’s my anger. It’s part of who I am. So I’ll just keep it here inside me and learn how to manage it!’”

  I laughed as she asked, “Andy? How crazy is that? Anger management? Forget anger management. It doesn’t work. We need anger resolution. We don’t need to deal with our anger . . . we need to get rid of it!”

  “Forgiveness?”

  “Exactly. How many times have you lay awake at night imagining the aggravation someone put you through during the day . . . thinking about what he said . . . what you should have said . . . what you’ll say if you see him again?”

  I chuckled and admitted that, yes, I had done that more than a few times.

  “And, of course, that person is sleeping peacefully without any idea that you are awake, thinking about him! So, at that point, whose life is being ruined, consumed, and wasted?”

  Helen looked at Josef and said, “It’s something we’ve discovered together . . . this secret.”

  “What secret?”

  “The special secret of true forgiveness—anger resolution. Here it is: For you to forgive another person, it is not required that he ask for your forgiveness.”

  My gaze narrowed.

  She said, “For you to forgive another person, it is not required that he deserves your forgiveness.”

  Helen paused, looking me right in the eye, and added, “For you to forgive another person, it is not even required that he is aware he has been forgiven.”

  “So you’re saying . . .”

  “What I am saying,” she interrupted, “is that there is not a shred of evidence from experts or books—including the Bible—that demands a person ask for, deserve, or be cognizant of the process before you can forgive him. Forgiveness, it turns out, is a gift that means more to the giver than it does to the receiver.”

  I was amazed at the wisdom of the beautiful old woman, but she wasn’t finished.

  “Incidentally,” she said, “it is important that we forgive ourselves. Most of us over thirty years of age have had plenty of time to get good and mad about the things we’ve done or haven’t done. We made promises that we didn’t keep, or we had intentions that were never fulfilled. We set goals we didn’t reach, and now, we’ve disappointed ourselves so many times that somehow—sometimes without realizing it—we’ve decided that we just won’t make any more promises, have any good intentions, or set any goals. Our failures have paralyzed us.

  “The answer for you and me is the same as it is when we deal with someone else who has offended us . . . forgive the offender and move on.” She must have noticed my expression. Helen smiled wisely and asked, “Have you ever felt this way?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I answered. “I just never knew what to do about it.”

  “You tried to manage your disappointment in yourself?”

  “I guess I did.”

  “Well, don’t manage it; resolve it.” She reached across the table and took my hand. “Andy,” she said. “I am not mad at you. Josef is not mad at you. God is not mad at you. Who are you to hold a grudge? Forgive yourself and move on.”

  IT WAS DARK WHEN I FINALLY LEFT WITH A PROMISE TO RETURN. I was exhausted, my mind still reeling from what I had discovered in the lives of these two extraordinary people. That day was a conclusion of sorts—the unveiling of a mystery whose answers for so long had remained just out of reach. But it was also a beginning. And I am encouraged by what I find and what I feel when I put the principle of forgiveness into practice.

  Josef had already said good-bye when Helen walked me to the door. She hugged me and told me how much she had enjoyed the day. “It is a bit strange to talk about that time,” she said thoughtfully, “. . . after all these years.”

  I stopped on the front porch. Now that Josef wasn’t around, there was something else on her mind . . . I could feel it. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. Just . . . tired, I suppose.” I waited. “Andy?”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Are you planning to write about this? Our lives, I mean?”

  So that was it. “Well,” I answered carefully, “I won’t if you don’t want me to.”

  She thought a moment. “Do you think our story could help? By that, I mean, could we make a difference somehow?”

  “Mrs. Newman,” I said earnestly, “I believe that there are people who struggle every day with the challenges you and Josef have conquered. And frankly I am one of them. Yes, I think your story will help. Who benefits when we come to understand and harness the power of forgiveness? Children, marriages, careers, nations . . . the list goes on and on.”

  “I don’t want Josef to be hurt. He’s lived in America for so long now. What if there are those who don’t understand?” Then she brightened. “I have an idea . . . if you write about this, can you change the names?”

&nbs
p; “Sure.” I nodded. “That won’t be any problem.”

  Helen sighed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to act scared. I’m an old woman now, and I just get like this sometimes.” She hugged me again and wiped what I hoped was a happy tear from her cheek.

  “Listen,” I said in farewell. “I promise, you will not have cause to be fearful or embarrassed by anything I write. And besides,” I added, “I will make sure the publisher classifies the book as ‘Self-Help’ or ‘Personal Growth’ or one of the other ‘Fiction’ categories. No one will ever believe a word of it.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  HAILED AS A “MODERN-DAY WILL ROGERS WHO HAS quietly become one of the most influential people in America,” ANDY ANDREWS is a best-selling novelist and in-demand corporate entertainer for the world’s largest organizations. The Traveler’s Gift, a featured book selection of ABC’s Good Morning America, has been translated into nearly 20 languages, and was on the New York Times bestseller list for 17 weeks. Andy has spoken at the request of four different United States presidents and toured military bases around the world, being called upon by the Department of Defense to speak to the troops. Arguably, there is no single person on the planet better at weaving subtle yet life-changing lessons into riveting tales of adventure and intrigue—both on paper and onstage.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  IN AN UNDERTAKING OF THIS SORT, THE LIST OF PEOPLE TO whom gratitude is owed can be overwhelming. I am blessed to be surrounded by friends and family who have become a team of which I am thrilled to be a part. If one perceives me as a person who makes good and informed choices, it is only because of the reliance on the counsel of these people. Thank you all for your presence in my life:

  . . . To Polly, my wife and best friend,

  . . . to THE Robert D. Smith, my personal manager and champion,

  . . . to Gail and Mike Hyatt, who gave life to my career as an author,

  . . . to Brian Hampton, my editor, whose careful eye and quick mind made this a much better book,

  . . . to Todd Rainsberger, who helped shape the narrative,