The Link, Vol. 1

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Excerpt from The Link, Vol. 1: October, 1943 There is no need here to retell the story that put John F. Bartek on the front page last December - the story of those frightful twenty-one days during which eight men drifted helplessly about in three little rubber rafts under a burning tropical sun. It will be told and retold, filmed and dramatized. You can read that story in three different books that have already been published: Seven Came Through by Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, "We Thought We Heard the Angels Sing" by James C. Whittaker, and "Life Out There" by Johnny Bartek himself. Johnny Bartek's story is the story of a boy who was brought up with a Bible in his hand, a boy in whose life the Bible played a major role, a boy whom his comrades on that ill-fated plane had seen reading his Bible before there was any intimation of danger or any hint of the need of a raft. At a party for service men in Buffalo, N. Y., last Christmas day, Johnny Bartek and his sister Esther were the special guests. Responding to a toast Johnny said: Everyone asks whether I was very deeply religious before our three weeks in the Pacific. Truthfully, I must answer, not very. I always went to church but I did not have that all-out mystical feeling many people have. I don't know that I Reviewed in our August issue. have it even now. But I do know more than ever, now, that there is a God and a hereafter. Those three weeks and what happened in them, in answer to our prayers, left me forever with a deep faith. I'll never lose that." Because he was just a private, Johnny was a bit hesitant about reading his Bible on the raft. In his Buffalo speech he said: The next day, the sixth, things looked bad. I decided to take out my Bible. Captain Rickenbacker and the others seemed a little relieved when I started to read. I know I was. The next day I took out my Bible again, reading from it at random. Some of the parts I read seemed to fit exactly our predicament. I don't remember what they were now, but I knew then that something or someone was turning the pages to some very enlightening passages. "The rest of the days went by with us praying and still hoping. Without the Bible we might have given up. But every so often we'd run across a passage that would force hope back into us like a dry sponge in a basin of water. I'm glad that plane fell - it took a lot of nonsense out of my life." Now I wanted to know what was behind all this - behind the story of a boy who felt this way about God and His word. So I went to his home. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.