Over the summer I went to a church confirmation camp. As part of our itinerary, we had to learn about the Bible, or biblical things for hours at a time. Now, I’ll be the first to say that sitting in church listing to someone preach isn’t always the most interesting thing; but I can say that something our leader told us has stuck with me ever since.  It was a story relating to the Holocaust. He said that the Nazi’s took 30 Jewish infants, who were destine to die, and placed them in one big room. They fed them, read to them, even gave them toys to play with, but there was  a catch. Never, in any condition, could they touch the baby. Not to burp it, not to move it from one place to another, not even to simply hold it. And guess what?  All the babies died. Every last one of them.

That story has always blown my mind; how important touch must be that not  1, not 2, but 30 infants died without it. I get that you can’t live without water, it’s a fact known to everybody. If you go without water for 4 days you are going to die.  The things water does for our body is unbelievable. The water we have in our body helps our organs work, and without your organs working, good luck living (Living Without Water). But, what about touch? Is touch really so important, that you can’t live without it?

Digging deeper into the subject of touch, I figured out that the human touch and stress go hand in hand.  Everyone has stress in their life. For adults, it could be getting a presentation ready for work, yet dropping the kids off at soccer practice, too. For kids, it could be studying your spelling words, and practicing your flash cards in the same week.  For babies, maybe it’s trying to get the toy to make that sound again, or make the food in the bottle go faster. Regardless, we all have stress. And the human touch is scientifically proven to minimize stress hormones, and maximize the “good feelings” that your body wants to put out (The Health Benefits of touch). Everyone needs a stress reliever, and many choose the method of touch. With the babies not being touched, they would have had no way to get the stress to vanish, which then in return could have been a factor in killing them.

Aside from stress, the touching sensation also helps get rid of pain. I know what you’re thinking, how does touching people with your germy hands get rid of health problems?  Not all diseases are just made up out of cells. Many times diseases can cause bruises, aches, and pains (The Health Benefits of touch). Let’s say you’re a baseball player, and the constant swinging of the bat just makes your shoulder swell up. You are going to want someone to give you a massage, to help the swelling go down.  Or maybe when coming down from a jump to try to catch the ball, you land on your shoulder, and it dislocates. The fast and easy “quick fix” for this is someone to pop back in your shoulder, and then continue to massage it to then make it feel better. Health problems are vital to us, many die from them each year, so it’s not surprising that these babies died without touch, as it pertains to health problems.

Stress and pain need touch to heal, but on the flip side, touch is also a very emotional thing. On days when you are just not having it, it always helps to curl up next to someone you love, and just feel them. The warmth from within their skin, warming up you; warming your heart. Touch is an expression of love, and without love, you having nothing. It’s so cliché, the whole “you can’t live without love” thing, but it’s true. The secrets to life are hidden in the clichés. Touch is the way of showing our love. Holding hands, being hugged, and being held are the most important factors of life, and these babies got none of them. They got no love.

Listening to that story the first time, the one about the 30 infants, I just couldn’t imagine living life without touch. We were made to touch, it’s why we have hands and feet. To reach out and touch the world; it’s an important thing, it heals us, relieves us, and shows us love. Touch is amazing, and those infants, even though they only lived for about a month, were being robbed from the most amazing thing in life; touch.

Bibliography

Living Without Water. (n.d.). Retrieved September 11, 2012, from How Stuff Works: http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/survival/wilderness/live-without-food-and-water2.htm

The Health Benefits of touch. (n.d.). Retrieved Sept 12, 2012, from Health and Healing: http://www.beliefnet.com/healthandhealing/getcontent.aspx?cid=13623