“No one has ever become poor by giving”, Anne Frank once wrote in her diary. As you know Anne’s life was short. She wrote about life, love and strawberrycakes. She was 15, when she got killed from the nazis. I have read her diary when I was at the same age and I was deeply impressed by her writing. But in one point she was wrong. Helping can be dangerous. Her helpers Victor Kugler and Jo Kleiman were arrested at the concentration camp Amersfoort (Fortunately they could escape). You definitely can get poor and exhausted by giving. Giving doesn’t protect you from getting abused. In 1977 the german psychologist Wolfgang Schmidbauer wrote about a so called helper’s syndrome, a kind of addiction which can lead to depression.
So when is it good to give and when not? Who should I help and who not to avoid getting addicted to the helper’s syndrome?
My answer is pretty simple. There are two kind of people, that I help. It’s the ones, who also support others: The supporters themselves. As long as you help the helpful, you make sure that the good karma keeps on circulating. And I also support another group of people: The ones in need. This morning an old turkish man collapsed at the bus station Hermannplatz. He fell down on the white cold sidewalk of the Berlin winter and his front slope was bleeding. I immediately stopped writing my next blog on my iPhone and helped him up. I was not alone. So many helpers around who talked to him, gaving him a hand, handing him tissues, trying to stop his face from bleeding. I asked him to show his tongue. I onced heard that the tongue is bended in case of heart attacks. It wasn’t fortunately. But he says, that he has a heart problem and it hurted in his breast. I called the ambulance. I tried not be hectical and even smiled at him to bring calm in this situation. I pressed a tissue against his forehead and noticed how it became red gradually. When the ambulance came and the man entered the car, I cleaned up the red tissues who has fallen to the ground. A woman saw me cleaning and said: thank you for doing all this. I responded to her: No one has ever become poor by giving.