The last time I saw Livia, we met at her Stockholm apartment on a memorable, warm late summer afternoon to discuss the life of our mutual friend, Pacsi, who had passed away during the pandemic at the age of 98. "Pacsi," or songbird, as she was nicknamed in Hungarian, for the beautiful voice she'd had before Auschwitz (where, it was said, the bromide added to the water to placate the inmates caused her to lose her voice), "was a bit special," Livia said, in her haunting soft-spoken fashion that made me want to know all about her rather than the albeit interesting person I had come to talk to her about. After the war, Livia, her sister Hédi, and Pacsi, all having survived Auschwitz and other camps, ended up as refugees in barracks on the idyllic Swedish island of Lovö, not far from where I live. Most thought Pacsi was crazy, but Livia would never have said that because she'd met too many people in her 96-year-old life to make such sweeping judgments.

We'd met on numerous occasions through the years, intersecting through her more vocal and visible sister, Hédi, who, by all accounts, had narrowly saved her teenage sister from gassing by disguising her illness when they were in Auschwitz. For forty years, having cast off the pall of the Nazis by her love of life and bringing a large family into the world, she visited schools, speaking of her experience in hopes of preventing history from repeating itself. Despite all the many times we met, including at my house, where my husband and I once hosted Livia, Hédi, and Pacsi for lunch, until I listened to her unforgettable program on Sommar, a Swedish summer radio program in which outstanding Swedes or friends of Sweden share their experiences and favorite music in a 90-minute program, I only knew her story through Hédi, a human rights icon and psychologist who published several books about what she and her sister had endured.  Livia was always the enigmatic, quiet one, both warm and reserved, until I heard that program, which, for me, ranks with Ingmar Bergman's Sommar program that once brought Sweden to a halt.
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When the final draft of my book, The Pendulum, was ready, I shared it with Livia and Hédi, doubting that I should publish it at all. It isn't easy to go out into the world with a family perpetrator story, and they both understood this, despite or perhaps because of what they had endured. "I really think you should be invited to speak on Sommar, and I told them so," Livia said as we sat on the terrace of her apartment on that warm summer afternoon. I didn't know what to say. Would I have been able to show the same generosity of spirit had the tables been turned? This is the challenge Livia leaves me with, the challenge she leaves all of us with. Meeting it is the only thing that will save the world.
 
*When Hédi died at the age of 98, soon three years ago, Livia said that, when her time came, she knew her sister would be waiting for her, there to show her the way, as she always had. Here is the short reflection I wrote about Hédi on her passing in 2022.

You lapped the water from the stream
For the first time, in this new time,
Shining in the lemon sun
Among the leaves in waiting.
 
Once, twice, three times,
I saw you skirt the water’s edge,
Prance against the sparkling flow,
Crane your neck to taste the stones.
 
I wanted you to drink for me
The things I felt so long ago
To lap them up, so once again
I could be lithe, without thinking.
 
On watching a young puppy taste the fresh water from a mountain stream for the first time.

When we were mermaids,
All the world was soft and swaying,
And you and I, swirled in eights,
Captivated by our shimmering tails,
One another and the mysteries.
 
Our treasure was in the shells,
Miracles we cupped in exalted hands,
Like a blessed rag-tag of children,
Or dreams of the city we’d build.
Rainbowed by sparkling schools of fish.
 
When the blinding surface broke and cut
We nursed our wounds in the lapping cave,
Let our tears join the undertow,
Fed each other laughter soup,
Restored one another with seaweed crowns.
 
Grown-ups, we are on the shore,
But “be careful,” we warn,
For there are mermaids below,
Swimming with the white whales,
In the paradise of two we carry with us.
​
For Evelyn at 55.

What language was my first word in?
I don't remember, do you? Does it matter?
Weren't we both speaking the same bewildered language of instant recognition?
I know you as I know myself, so who are you?

At Jesus' baptism on the Ephiphany,
Kings knew he was the one, one with the one
Who is all sounds, all meanings,
All and no language, though poets will never stop trying.

I cannot say what I believe--
The moment I do, it's empty dogma.
Believing is the censor's juicy black marker
Though this is language too.

You hung a handbag over my dimpled arm,
Tied a silk scarf around my short neck, so we'd match.
It was all too heavy for me, too tight, too something.
I cried, and it stung us both because there was love beyond belief.

Reflections on one's birthday.​

Burnt orange taffeta, crisp and shining in the low lamplight
of a room that some say is small
but that seems to me to be spaciousness itself
this morning when winter bears down
on my eyelids, my stomach, compressing the light 
to this one point, this room, this tulip
with its roaring waves of flame, somehow serene,
somehow beyond naming,
the pointer to the space 
beyond and within space, the vastness in me, in you,
​when all the world obsesses with endings.

Courage, she says to herself in a giddy voice:
to look clear-eyed into the darkness 
and see the dragonflies fluttering low over the water in pairs,
wings shining of satin because they dare the wind
in the last rays of the summer sun before autumn narrows the aperture.

Loneliness is the precondition, the steadfast friend that says, "Stand up:" 
to plant and to harvest, to reach for the sunflower that wills the ink to the page
where the tapestry of hours and ages weaves
faith into words that become the way, the path to the core of the story
where the blinding brightness all poets have ever sought resides.

On the moors of the mind it is frightening,
The dankness smells of death, the fragile neck of life about to be broken,
the sunflower taken down so one cannot but obsess over the horror of it.
The courage of all things is the tragedy of knowing
borne across the glistening water, the hymn of endings sung to the skies.

He waved at me from a distance,
faceless.
Only the hand said goodbye:
"I have lived and loved this earth.
Now I return to the Mother."

Through the years, we smiled at the sky
over coffee in the sun,
a pack of biscuits split open
so the foil inside gleamed in the rays.

In our sweet-soaked white uniforms
zipped down to the mid-riff,
we laughed at the swelling of our fingers,
reveled in our tireless winged comrades. 

Sometimes I think all I know about joy
Comes from that birthing table.
Take some with you, you hear,
Leave the tools with me.

Lean on the Mother
when you don't know where to turn.
It's alright if you are small again,
Look what you have left behind.

On a form of goodbye to a devoted, beloved beekeeper, my teacher of nearly twenty years, provoked by the sight of these sunflowers on my farm.

Planted only for your beauty,
for the imperceptible way you follow the sun,
and keep yourself trained on life and its source,
unafraid to become the warm rays,
statuesque and unabashed by the murmurings below
that you have taken too great a risk
in refusing to be anything but yourself.

On the opening of the sunflowers on my island this August.
​

It was only a moment
when, at the water’s edge
the swallow hopped through the water reeds
over the fallen, the golden, from which it would make its nest;
only a crack in time,
when the garlands draped over the stone terraces
were loudly buzzing metropolises,
trading hubs for gleaming wings and quick appendages.
 
It was only a hollow in cruelty
when the swan with the torn leg grazed in the bay
and shook the water from its impossibly graceful neck
like nature’s Miles Davis or the doyenne of the dance;
only a hint of the passing scent
of cool white jasmine in the shade
or the sweet claws of honeysuckle in the blazing sun
or lavender’s insistence upon marrying the tangerine rose.
 
It was only a second in the universe or the universe in a second
when I saw the unsettling familiarity in the deer’s brown eye,
or the forest’s silhouette in the midnight sun
or the view from the lake’s surface under the gull’s cry.
 
A reflection on Midsummer’s Eve.
​