Frederick W. Babbel: 'On Wings of Faith' and the Miracles of Ezra Taft Benson's Postwar Tour of Europe (1946)

Frederick W. Babbel was a Latter-day Saint elder who, in 1946, accompanied Elder Ezra Taft Benson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles on a special postwar tour of Europe to meet with the Saints, assess their needs, and bring them the relief and fellowship of the Church. In his book 'On Wings of Faith' (Bookcraft, 1972), Babbel recorded the miracles and spiritual experiences of that tour. Among the testimonies he and Elder Benson preserved is that of an East Prussian Latter-day Saint mother who, driven from her homeland after the war, lost her husband and—on the frozen trek west—all four of her children, digging each little grave with a tablespoon in the frozen ground. In a Church meeting shortly after, her face gray with starvation and her eyes swollen, she bore a glorious testimony: that of all the ailing people in her saddened land she was one of the happiest, because she knew that God lived, that Jesus is the Christ and was resurrected, and that if she continued faithful she would be reunited with those she had lost and saved in the celestial kingdom. The tour and its testimonies became a lasting witness of the sustaining power of faith in the darkest of times.