To Honor Shabbos

From Mishpacha Magazine on Rav Neuwirth z"l the author of Shmiras Shabbos Ki-hilchasa who passed away last week:

During the Holocaust, after the Neuwirth family had escaped to Holland, Rabbi Neuwirth’s father, suffered from severe pains and went to the local pharmacist to request medication. In addition, the father requested poison to kill the mice that visited his home in large numbers. That Shabbos, the father was supposed to take the medication for the first time, but after he smelled the medicine he concluded that it must have a bitter taste. And in a split-second decision— in order to honor Shabbos—he decided he didn’t want to consume something with a bad taste, and chose not to take the medication. Only after Shabbos did it become clear that the pharmacist had mixed up the packages; instead of pain killers that package was full of the poison against mice.

.......

Rabbi Neuwirth explained: “I went through the Shoah with my parents, two brothers and a sister in Holland in a room where we lived for nearly three years. There I had a gemara of Ksubos and the 3rd section of the Mishna Brura. We were forbidden to get close to the windows. There was nobody there besides us. The European winter cut our flesh. We didn’t even dream about davening with a minyan. All that we had was Shabbos and the sforim that were with us.

“In 1946 we were released and arrived at the port near Marseille in France. It was Shabbos when they told the group of refugees I was with that there was a ship setting off for Israel. They said that this was our only chance to get to Israel. Since I did not know what was going on in the world, and there was good reason to think that this was a matter of life and death, I allowed myself to travel. On the way, I took upon myself that if Hashem would enable me to get to Israel, I would write a book that would increase the honor of Shabbos.”