At your feet,
Curled up on the floor pillows,
My spinal fluids carry the message – it’s safe.
 
Half asleep
The smell of sweet tobacco
Drifts over me in our opium den, yours and mine.
 
A storm rages around the corner,
Outside, the smell of fuselage
Threatens this dream of peace with endings.
 
In my room are the empty boxes
Hungry for my doll whose hair I cut away --
For there is no turning back.
 
Your slippers watch “Mutiny on the Bounty,”
Loyal pets beside your reclining chair,
Their parallel-ness is my lifeline.
 
I pound to be let back in,
From the world, I can’t control,
But the air is cold and hard -- you’re gone.
 
Through a hole in the fog of my breath on the window
Our den is a home for mice --
Only your tobacco pouch remains in my pocket.
 
Remembering my father.

Listening to the sounds of his country,
childhood, summer
Once more on the radio.

Tears swell over bloodshot eyes,
Lips quiver
At a voice of his ilk, his time, his stripes.

One that heard the young and the old,
Offered itself as a stage
For an autistic youngster to sing.

The forgotten rhythms of an old way of talking
Charm the heart of a foreigner
Weary of too many me's.

A ditty rings out the golden hour,
Bittersweet as the picture of a gramophone with its shell-like horn
On white linen where a wasp devours a strawberry's flesh.

On watching an old Swede listening to one of the better programs on "Sommar," Sweden's favorite summer radio program.

A thing is at its most beautiful
When it is already dying,

The aura is brightest
In the knowledge of death's shadow.

Hands caress the dance
Because it is not forever.

A mother's birthing cries
Portend the pain of endings.

Only love can bear the burden
Of a petal's mortality.

Some hearts won’t stop beating,
Even a massive dose
Can’t take the Marilyn Monroe out of them.
 
Thoughts flicker,
Candles in the wind,
What was it about her that remains inextinguishable?
 
Two pink bandages
Wrapped around her forelegs, cover the holes they made,
Blood trickles from my forearms.
 
“Live! Live! Live!”
She barks at me from the floor,
Hind legs splayed, heart stilled.

For a beloved creature I once knew whose keen intellect was always guided by her heart.

​

I've looked askance at you with misgivings that I might turn into a pillar of salt that crumbled if I gave you my full attention. You might force me to become another uncharted soul rather than the one I know. You may be God's trap -- just another way to haul me to the cross, where my sins are on full display in those unsightly wounds.

In a room with others who are struggling, I say your names: "Reconciliation, Forgiveness," like two boulders that have been waiting patiently in my garden since the last ice age ended. The act of naming you is a start -- itself a reconciliation with you and a forgiveness of myself for not looking at your faces from the beginning. Even more, it is an exquisite taste of infinity. I look down the long road and begin wanting to understand.

More words fall from my lips without warning, but they embrace my fears like the gentlest mother. Reconciliation is finding a way to meet one's past and the people who have played a role in it; a means of encountering one's shame and guilt with generosity and disarming them so they will never hurt anyone.

Reconciliation births forgiveness and more words fall: Forgiveness transforms difficult, negative feelings about onesself and others into empathy, even love.

Like Dorothy from Kansas, I still possess my soul. What is more, I have determined to make peace with the Cross. I know where I have been and why I have been there.

If only mirrors could whisper, they would say: "Carry on. Do not be afraid."

On visiting Örebro folkhögskola (community college) and discussing Reconciliation and Forgiveness with students whose families have endured war and persecution and the associated problems of social marginalization.

Please be welcome to take a few minutes to listen to Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirrors in the Mirror) to reflect on reconciliation and forgiveness in your experience. https://youtu.be/FZe3mXlnfNc

When letters burned, eyes were struck blind
When pages burned, tongues were muted
When spines burned, songs were silenced
When covers burned, the sweet smell of spring fled.
​
Show me a book that should not be read
Show me a sky that should not be seen
Show me the river that should not flow
Show me the grass that should not yearn toward the heavens.

​Show me the fire that should not burn
But first, show me the book that is not us.

On the burning and banning of books.

The colors won't be still
meandering in water
              Don't look for the lines
                                      believe anyway.

Sounds blend, accents bend
into no particular shape
              Know with eyes
                                and hands.

Flags frayed at the edges
hang crooked from balconies
​              The sun softens
                            all mountains.

Sisters dark and patient
pierce the gleaming windshield
               There is infinity in you
                                              they say.

On driving through the foothills to the Pyrenees.

Light,
a presence like a silk scarf undulating
across the sea floor.
Schools of thought scurry
through the ballerina's adoring wings--
a caress
that helps me out of my one-legged self,
past fear of being seen,
to the shore where our breath mingles.

Inside,
the breeze wanders through the ruins,
the lonely fortress on the grey stage--
what will become of this?
Time
scatters the shivering question like ashes.
The magic is in the layers,
heavy, silent and dark,
where earthworms convert noise
into the listening.

Inspired by the idea of an ecology of humanism.

Hédi left us as the first snow came. She knew exactly when to make her entrances and exits. She understood timing, and because of what she lived through, she also understood our time.
 
My first reaction to hearing of her passing was to buy candles, many of them, and light them inside and outside my house, joining her revelry of light. It was a continuation of what she had called upon us to do in her lifetime—called upon me to do. In our many correspondences, she always asked me how I could manage everything I was doing, asked after my family, and when I would find time to rest and enjoy life. I could have asked her precisely the same questions, but she took the initiative as a reminder that neither of us must let the stories of the dark that both of us worked with steal our light.
 
When I first met Hédi, she was in the front row, and I was on the stage. It was a wild and disorganized performance, reflecting the inner turbulence of someone who has just discovered mid-life that their near family were perpetrators of the Holocaust. In the end, she raised her hand and pointed out that the Swedish word I had used to describe a survivor, “överlevare,” was not a good term (though, to her dismay, it is all too often used by the press). Better would be “överlevande,” which does not bear the implication, as the other term does, that some survived because they were stronger. In a state of emotional meltdown, I wondered who this crusty old dame was.
 
She never let me out of her sights, and later I was to learn just how strong she was, although not in an exclusive sort of way. She shared her strength so that all of us felt strong. This became clear to me on at least two other occasions. One was the first time I presented my story to a group at the British Embassy, which had generously agreed to let me do a test run and receive critique before a presentation at the London School of Economics. My heart was in my throat, but Hédi was right there in the front row again. Throughout the talk, I hid behind my manuscript as if, somehow, I could manage it without anyone seeing me. When it was time for comments, there was silence, I imagined a feeling of pity among some until Hédi shot out of her seat and declared that this was an extremely important story and that, with time, it would become easier for me to tell it. Time and timing—she was always so aware of them.
 
On another occasion, shortly after my book “The Pendulum” came out in Swedish with her ringing endorsement on the cover, I learned just how far, how deep, and how much darkness her strength could penetrate. The town of Ludvika in Dalarna, Sweden, was in trouble. The NMR, Sweden’s Neo-Nazis, threatened the very existence of the town by terrorizing its citizens, some of whom were contemplating moving out. Hédi summoned all the best forces she could find and brought them there. In the car on the way back from one of those visits to Ludvika as part of her “team,” I felt both exhausted and charged with new determination. Within a year, the problem in Ludvika had subsided. The approach that was taken to strengthen the community to stand up to extremism is now called “The Ludvika Model,” although sometimes I think it should have been called “The Hédi Model,” she would never have ​allowed it.
 
There is an awkwardness that comes with being the granddaughter of perpetrators who chooses to step out and tell her story. Why would anyone do such a thing? That was a couple of generations ago, it has nothing to do with you, think of your poor family—such are the arguments. Very few people know what goes on in families like mine. For this reason, the decision to speak out awakens suspicions, and in the early days of trying to express the results of my years of research, I thought I could see these in the sharp flashes of light reflected off retinas at gatherings I was invited to.  Whether this was my imagination or not, Hédi knew how I felt--I didn't have to tell her. She must have experienced similar emotions only decades before, when many publishers rejected her account of surviving the Holocaust and when people wondered why anyone who had endured such misery would want to talk about it publicly. Behind this was, no doubt, a distaste for being reminded that the world had generally stood by while her people were murdered. But she was patient. As a psychologist, she knew these stories didn't just go away—time, always time. At one of the gatherings she asked me to attend when she had brought together many talented individuals to form a nationwide democracy network, she cut across the crowded room, took my arm under hers, stroked my hand, and led me confidently into the heart of her project.
 
I was not the first descendant of perpetrators she came to know and collaborated with. She knew that what motivated those of us who had chosen to spend time reflecting on our families’ troubled pasts was intense life-long pain. I did not dare to mention my experiences to her as they could never compare to hers. Yet she chose to take it up with me to clear the air and assure me that sharing my story was necessary. “You cannot compare suffering,” she said, adding, “My suffering is as real to me as yours is to you.”
 
I happen to live in an area where Hédi, her sister Livia, and another dear friend who survived and has now passed, Adéle Schreiber, were sent to live in barracks not long after they were brought to Sweden, emaciated and sick in 1945. My husband interviewed the three ladies, all in their nineties, for a book he wrote about distinctive personalities who had lived in our area, which includes Drottningholm Palace, the current home of the King and Queen of Sweden. We had lunch in our house, and what I remember most was Hédi, Livia, and Adéle sitting on our couch, laughing like the young girls/women they had once been in this place. There was no way to restore laughter to their youth, and yet they infected my husband and me with their playful high spirits.
 
When we last met, she had moved out of her apartment and into an elderly home. I refused to accept this turn of events and wanted, somehow, to snap her out of it. We sat on an enclosed terrace near her room, which was flooded by the early autumn light. Desperate to keep away all thought that we might one day be without her, I tried to fill her ears with all the initiatives I was taking, all the good work that was being done, and that she could rejoin when she was ready. She sat and listened quietly, and when she eventually spoke, she directed my attention to the geraniums, commenting on how pretty they were and what a wonder it was that they could bloom so late in the season. She had not lost her mind or her senses, she simply understood time and timing.
​
I drove home in tears but was infused with the grace and the light about her. Today I feel the same. I have often doubted myself and what I do, but Hédi reduced those doubts. When I think I cannot write or say another word, I see those mild yet resolute eyes, and a delicate yet strong arm takes hold of me. Do not be afraid, she says.
 
Written in memory of Hédi Fried, friend and mentor.