The Night President Uchtdorf's Mother Found Her Children on the Refugee Train (1944)

During the cold winter of 1944, with World War II raging around them, the mother of young Dieter F. Uchtdorf — decades before his call to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles — decided to flee from her home in Czechoslovakia to Germany, where her parents were living. She bundled her four children up and somehow managed to get them onto one of the last refugee trains heading west. Traveling at that time was dangerous: everywhere they went, the sound of explosions, the stressed faces, and the ever-present hunger reminded them that they were in a war zone. Along the way the train stopped occasionally to get supplies. One night, during one of these stops, the mother hurried out of the train to search for food for her four children — and when she returned, to her great horror, the train and her children were gone. Weighed down with worry and desperate prayers, she frantically searched the large, dark train station, urgently crisscrossing the numerous tracks while hoping against hope that the train had not already departed. She knew that if she did not find the train, she might never see her children again. Her faith overcame her fear, and her hope overcame her despair: she did not sit and bemoan tragedy — she moved, putting her faith and hope into action, running from track to track and from train to train until she finally found their train, which had been moved to a remote area of the station. There, at last, she found her children again. President Uchtdorf recounted the experience in his October 2008 general conference address "The Infinite Power of Hope" as a witness of the infinite power of hope — how faith and hope, exercised in the blackest circumstances, can overcome fear and despair.