Costa Rica Living in Jaco – Jill’s story and why we should be so grateful.

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We had the pleasure of celebrating Boxing Day with new friends on Wednesday evening. We had met Jackie and Neil about a month ago in Esterillos Oeste where we live here in Costa Rica.

Jackie and Neil have a vacation home they had purchased but still lived in California.

It didn’t take long to establish the fact that they lived just a few miles from where we had moved from in California and where we were going to be with family for the holidays. They invited us to join them along with some of their family and friends the day after Christmas for dinner.

The highlight of the evening was meeting their friend Jill an elegant, classy, gray haired British woman who casually shared a few tidbits of her days in a Nazi concentration camp during much of World War II.

Many who have experienced the traumas of war tend to not like to talk about those experiences and Jill was no exception. She said that friends over the years had asked her to write about it. Recently in the last couple of years one of her nieces asked her to please write her story. Her response to her niece was, “I’m sorry, but it really is not a place I want to return to.”

That would truly be one of those things that none of us could say “I know how you feel”. We throw around that phrase so often when someone is sharing something they are going through or something they have experienced.

It is not uncommon for Veterans to come home from war and never talk openly about what they went through except for when they get together with fellow Veterans and Jill confirmed that to be true. She said it is hard for many to share those memories with anyone other than those who were there themselves and went through the same thing with you.

She casually went on though and shared tidbits of some happy memories during those terrifying years. Jill was 8 years old when the Nazi’s came to the Isle of Guernsey and placed its inhabitants in concentration camps. Jill remained in the camps until she was 11 years old. The women and children were separated from the men most of the time. Jill’s father was the only dentist on the island so he was of value to the Germans.

I asked Jill what her earliest Christmas memory was and she said it was during the time she was in the camp when she got an orange for Christmas. Each family got one orange. They would get one can of condensed milk a week and they would take tablespoons of the milk and add it to a pitcher of water so that it would last all week.

One particular German guard befriended Jill’s family when her father extracted a bad tooth for him. Jill went on to share when she had a bad fever that had lasted for almost 3 weeks her father went to the guard and said he did not know what to do. The guard agreed to help sneak Jill out of the camp and take her to a convent to see if the nuns could help. She doesn’t know exactly how far it was they walked in almost total darkness but she said it took a very long time to reach the convent. The nuns saw that her tonsils were infected and needed to come out.

With no anesthesia available, she sat in one of the nuns laps with the nuns legs wrapped around hers and her arms held back while another of the nuns held her mouth firmly open. She remembers then a man in a white coat coming into the room and coming towards her reaching into her mouth with cutting tools. She remembered pain so fierce that she passed out. She said that passing out was a blessing.

She remembered waking up staring at a clock on the wall and vividly remembers it being one hour later. Still in extreme pain, the guard helped her and two other children that had come along for medical treatment make their way back under the cover of darkness to the concentration camp. The guard found an old stroller and with one child in the seat and Jill standing on the back, the guard carried the third child the long journey back through the black of night.

Jill had a sparkle in her eye when she shared that the guard who saved her life that cold dark night, many years later attended the wedding of her daughter. They had remained friends throughout those many years following the war.

Jill’s story reminded us of how much we have to be thankful for and how thankful we really should be for the smallest of things. We really are blessed beyond measure and even with all of the turmoil and trouble in the world today it’s always good to stop and remember those blessings.

We hope that your Christmas time this year has been as blessed as ours and that the New Year brings even more incredible blessings to you and your family.

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Andrew Makarik

to@welovecostarica.com

Andrew Makarik is the main editor of WeLoveCostaRica, a fan of this sunny country. He is also a loving husband and a has a lovely daughter. By being a devoted family man and the biggest Costa Rica fan, he wants to make more people feel at home there. WeLoveCostaRica unites people and helps them find new home or a new travel destination. This website is a friendly community where everyone can find not only information, but also new friends and travel pals. Andrew is also passionate about IT and programming, so he himself maintains a friendly atmosphere in this cozy environment of WeLoveCostaRica.com.