Trump pardons Biden-hunted 89-year-old death-camp survivor
Last Thursday, a day before the 52nd annual March for Life in Washington, D.C. (at which Vice President J.D. Vance spoke), President Trump pardoned 24 peaceful pro-life protesters who the White House says were unjustly targeted for prosecution by the Biden-Harris administration.
The Biden-Harris team were hellbent to make examples out of those 24 pro-life activists with the intent to intimidate them and others. They even used SWAT teams to round up some of them, as well as sought prison terms longer than the usual six months for first-time offenders.
Biden minions convicted them of violating the FACE Act, a Clinton-era law that made it a crime to sit or stand in front of the doors of an abortion facility. According to federal stats, 97% of FACE Act prosecutions from the Justice Department were against pro-life Americans.
Detroit Catholic explained, “By statute, FACE Act convictions with the conspiracy charge added can result in prison sentences of up to 10 years. But the longest sentence imposed so far has been 57 months for Lauren Handy, 31, of Alexandria, Virginia, convicted in 2023 of a blockade at Washington Surgi-Clinic in 2020 in Washington.” (Handy, a Catholic, was serving her five-year sentence in federal prison in Florida when Trump pardoned her.)
Some of the other activists who were imprisoned and then pardoned by Trump include: John Hinshaw (sentenced to 21 months), William Goodman (27 months), Jonathan Darnel (34 months), Herb Geraghty (27 months), Jean Marshall (24 months), Joan Bell (27 months), Bevelyn Williams (41 months), Heather Idoni (24 months) and Calvin Zastrow (6 months), according to the Daily Wire.
Fox News confirmed over the weekend, those who were released via the pardons were:
1. Lauren Handy
2. Jonathan Darnel
3. Jay Smith
4. Paula Paulette Harlow
5. Jean Marshall
6. John Hinshaw
7. Heather Idoni
8. William Goodman
9. Joan Bell
10. Herb Geraghty
11. Chester Gallagher
12. Calvin Zastrow
13. Coleman Boyd
14. Paul Vaughn
15. Dennis Green
16. Eva Edl
17. Eva Zastrow
18. James Zastrow
19. Paul Place
20. Caroline Davis
21. Joel Curry
22. Justin Phillips
23. Bevelyn Beatty Williams
24. Christopher Moscinski
Hinshaw, Bell, Harlow, Marshall and Idoni were all in their 60s and 70s around the time of their imprisonment. A few were even older!
“Biden prosecuted pro-lifers – including an 89-year-old concentration camp survivor – for singing hymns in a clinic hallway,” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., wrote on X. “And then Biden turned around & handed out pardons for criminal murderers [and 37 commutations for death row inmates, including a serial killer] … President Trump can & should right these wrongs.”
While signing their pardons, Trump said, “Twenty-three people were prosecuted who should not have been prosecuted. Many of them are elderly people. They should not have been prosecuted,” the president said. “This is a great honor to sign this.”
The same day, Hawley delivered a speech on the Senate floor calling the pro-lifer prosecutions a “dark period of our history” and “a grotesque assault on the principles of this country.”
Hawley added on X, “No administration in history has targeted Christians like the Biden Admin. We saw one persecution after another, from shutting down churches during COVID to raiding pro-lifers homes at the crack of dawn. EVERY pro-life prisoner Biden wrongly imprisoned should be pardoned.”
Yet, of the thousands of prison inmates Mr. Biden commuted or pardoned in the weeks before he left office including his own family (a record number for any president in U.S. history), he couldn’t even see fit to pardon an 89-year-old hymn-singing concentration camp survivor who peacefully protested against abortions? Tragic.
Her name is Eva Edl, and her biography, “She Looks Like My Little Girl,” and website include details about her upbringing in her homeland of Yugoslavia:
Eva was only six when the Nazis invaded.
After the Nazis kidnapped her father, when he was sick in an infirmary, he contacted them and left a message. He urged them to flee east. The Red Army was coming, and they would be brutal.
They did not get out in time.
The Soviets and the Nazis had begun the war as allies, but when Hitler invaded Russia and slaughtered millions of civilians, the Russian lust for vengeance ran hot. Armed with the weapons and moral authority of the Grand Alliance, the Red Army invaded from the east, driving out the Nazis.
Terror came in Stalin’s bloody wake.
Hitler’s betrayal fueled a rage and a hatred against Germany that would flood Eastern Europe with the blood of the innocent and the cries of the violated for years.
Eva Edl and her people were called Danube-Swabians; they were Yugoslavian by birth but German by heritage and language. The new communist government first dehumanized her people in the law. Then, empowered by the Grand Alliance, they unleashed a violent, genocidal campaign against Eva and her people.
The Soviets kidnapped her mother to dig trenches for the war effort. With her protector and hero gone, fear began to torment Eva’s soul.
Her two older siblings were led by bayonet to a forced labor camp, run by the brutal local communists. … Unlike the Nazi concentration camps, the communist concentration camps did not shut down when the war ended. They were just getting started.
[Eva later explained that she and her family were crammed into cattle cars and forced into camps to die.]
There in one of the darkest hellholes of a communist death camp, Eva found Jesus.
Eva was miraculously rescued from the genocide of her people and immigrated to Austria, and ultimately to the United States, where she encountered another genocide behind the doors of death camps also propped up by godless laws and funded by the government. Over a million unborn babies, alive by every standard of medical science, were being killed in American death camps.
For Eva, the fight for unborn babies today is simple, based in her faith and concentration camp incarceration eight decades ago: “I wish Christians or caring people would have stood on the tracks” to stop the train that was taking her family away to the death camps.
In her federal court case, she spoke of her own experience as a child “when I was declared [by her communist captors] to be inhuman,” just as people today regard babies in the womb.
The Daily Wire reported, “Holding up a well-worn Bible in the courtroom, Edl said, ‘I believe in this book,’ saying she took it as her guide. Edl referenced the Book of Genesis, saying that ‘human life is made in the image of God.'”
Before Trump pardoned Eva, with her financial penalties, fines and three-years-probation sentence, Eva wondered what her fate might be.
When she was asked last year in an interview, “What is your reaction to the possibility of spending your later years in jail?” Eva replied:
Well, when I was indicted by the government for the federal charge – like a conspiracy to commit the crime, the law that was used against the KKK – [it] carries maybe 10 or 11 years of prison. Well, I wouldn’t live through that. So I just simply started to prepare to die and have my children sell my house.
It became just overwhelming because too much happens in a number of years. You accumulate too many little knick-knacks and memorabilia from the grandchildren and all. So, finally I had to give up and say, “Lord. I just leave it all behind. The children just can take a dumpster and throw away what they don’t want and give away what they want to.” And so now I’m free.
And as far as dying, I don’t want to suffer, definitely don’t want to suffer. But I’m not afraid of dying. I dealt with that as a young child before I was even put in the death camp, because that’s when I heard about sin.
We learned the Ten Commandments in second grade, and I knew I was a sinner and that I was on my way to hell. But, praise God, I also heard about Jesus who loved me enough to come from heaven and who took on humanity so he could pay for all my sins. And if I give my life to Him, I was told, He will take me to Heaven when I die.
So, I lost my fear, and I surrendered my life to Him then, and I haven’t gone back since. He’s well worth it. Suffering is really nothing compared to what He did for us.
Eva sure looks like a criminal who deserves to be in prison, doesn’t she, Biden and Harris?
Please, take a few minutes today to write or call your representatives to urge them to repeal the Clinton-era FACE Act, which has been weaponized against Christians and pro-life advocates for decades. Remember, 97% of FACE Act prosecutions from the DOJ were against pro-life Americans.
Our great friend and mentor, Randy Alcorn, was jailed and also unjustly used as an example in a U.S. court’s largest judgment of $8.2 million against a pro life activist for his peaceful and nonviolent protest in 1990 (before the FACE Act was enacted!). You MUST read his equally inspiring and miraculous story here and here about how good ultimately triumphed over evil!)
Indeed, Eva, Randy and the other couple dozen people who were pardoned by president Trump are of course not alone in their sentiment that a baby in the womb is 100% human and deserves the right to live.
A brand new national poll reveals that 67% of Americans support placing legal limits on abortion, and that 60% support limiting abortions to at most the first three months of pregnancy.
Even a multitude of the greatest scientific minds in the U.S. and world agree.
For example, Dr. Edmund D. Pellegrino, physician, bioethicist, Senior Research Scholar of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown, and also the former Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Ethics and founder and John Carroll Professor of Medicine and Medical Ethics, of the Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University, emphatically stated: “The life of the unborn is of equal value to the life of the mother, and any law that disregards this is unjust and must be opposed.”
Dr. Jerome Lejeune, famous French pediatrician and geneticist, a member and laureate of many international academies, universities and scholarly societies, from which he received countless awards like the Griffuel Prize for his pioneering work on chromosomal anomalies in cancer, rightly said, “The right to life is the first right mentioned in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Every human being, born or pre-born, is entitled to this fundamental right.”
That is why Thomas Jefferson explained in the founding of our country that preserving human value and life was government’s primary role: “The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.”
It is also the reason that Jefferson created and penned in his own hand the words in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government….”
The inherent and enduring value of all humans is echoed in the Bible in Psalm 139: “For You, God, created my inmost being; You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise You because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”
Or as the old classic 1800’s spiritual put it:
Jesus loves the little children,
All the children of the world.
Red and yellow, black and white,
All are precious in His sight,
Jesus loves the little children of the world.
(For more proof about human life in the womb, I highly recommend the article, “Scientific Evidence for the Personhood of Unborn Children,” by Dr. Wayne Grudem, Ph.D., University of Cambridge. Please also check out and read the multitude of super-helpful and informative pro-life books and resources by Randy Alcorn available on his Eternal Perspective Ministry website. Last, for those who are thinking of having an abortion or if you want to help someone who is thinking about it, please also read Dr. James Dobson’s article, “How to Help a Friend Who Wants an Abortion.” Further personal help and counseling can also be found HERE.)