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been on a tram, when a group of Red or White revolutionaries, I don’t
remember which, had pulled out everybody who looked Jewish and hanged
them from the nearest lamp post. For some reason, they had overlooked
him, although he looked very
Jewish.
She
moved to Germany in the 1920’s and then had to flee from the Nazis in
1934. First she went to Denmark, and then had to continue to Sweden in
1943 with two small
children.
She was
upset; very upset. I could not see her face from my position under the
table, but I could hear her voice shaking. When she got to the part
where she had to tell about the loss of almost her entire family in the
concentration camps, I wished I’d stayed in the rays of sunshine by the
door. It was horrible to hear of the death of her beloved relatives, and
it was terrifying to cope with the knowledge of human brutality and
cruelty and especially with the total lack of reason.
When she’d finished, I remember the silence that followed and the sound
of the clock ticking - and in those few seconds a great part of my
identity was formed. I realized that I was one of THEM; someone who
could be persecuted for no reason at all - even killed for having done
nothing, except for being who I was.
To be or not to be ... who
decides?
It was too big a revelation and for several
years, I tried to ignore it, until one day, a teacher decided to show
us, a group of 15-year old teenagers, “Nacht und Nebel” – a documentary
about what the Allied and Russian troops saw when they reached the
concentration camps in Germany at the end of the war. Then I clearly
remembered my mother’s stories, and now I was too old to just push the
thoughts aside. I was a Jew, I had to accept it, like it or not. It was
not because I was brought up in Judaism, especially since my father was a
Danish vicar and I was baptized, like the rest of my Danish family. And
it was not because I was an integrated part of the relatively strong
Danish-Jewish community – my mother herself, having been brought up in a
very secular culture, had never had much to do with other Jewish
people. The reason I was Jewish, was solely because someone else had
decided so! I couldn’t do much about it, so I tried to pay as little
attention to it as possible. Not until I gave birth to my own children
and they grew older, did I realise, that even though I tried to keep
that part of my story really low-key, it still had an enormous impact on
how I brought them up. The fear of being persecuted, deprived of one’s
dignity and even killed, kept me in a constant state of stress, and I
passed that on, unwittingly, to my own children.
This story of a history which was not even my own, but my mother’s,
filled and controlled a great part of my life and my way of observing
the world. I would always buy lots of dried food, such as beans and
rice, so we would have supplies if we needed to escape. I would have
nightmares of having to live on the road, and would always worry if we
all had good boots to wear, just in case … I would be very concerned
with how my family was regarded by others – they should do well in
school, be polite and well-behaved. It was certainly time, I discovered,
to confront myself, if I did not want my kids to inherit the story I
had inherited from my mother! And so I did.
Other People's
Stories
I started reading a lot of literature about
concentration camps, which I had, up to this point, avoided.
Immediately, essential questions started to pop up.
Why is it, that some people can go
through horrible experiences and come out stronger on the other side,
whereas others fall apart?
How is it possible to make one
group of people hate another group, when they have lived peacefully
side-by-side with each other before?
And here my journey began into the universe,
that would end up being my trilogy, “The Mira Chronicles”.
My work has always been very inspired by folk-tales, myths and legends.
For me the non-realistic universes offer the best metaphors for what I
call “the inner landscape” – the emotional, subconscious world I imagine
we all share, no matter where or who we are. The challenge is always
how to find the right symbols and images that represent the essential
elements of the story I am working with – symbols and images which
hopefully will strike a chord with my readers.
The first question “Why is it, that some people can go
through horrible experiences and come out stronger on the other side,
whereas others fall apart?” led me to books by Otto Frankl,
Jean Amery, Primo Levy and others who had actually survived the
concentration camps. The main message from the survivers seems to be:
You have to keep looking out through the fence and hang on to the idea
that your suffering, on some level, has a meaning.
Imre Kertez’s story of how he, having survived the Holocaust, came back
to Budapest, made a great impression on me. When he told his few
remaining relatives, what had happened to him, they felt deeply sorry
for him, but he insisted that his survival through the horrible years of
concentration camp was meant to be. He had been chosen to be a witness
and had been given a mission to tell others what had happened. In that
way, he took on his history and made the cruelty and inhumanity part of
his own story. So he transformed himself from being a pitiful victim to
somebody with a mission: to tell the story of the cruelty he had seen
and suffered.
At the same time I was introduced to a book by French psychiatrist
Boris Curulnik. In Danish, the title translates into “The Ugly
Duckling”, using the Hans Christian Andersen tale as a hint of the story
of becoming a beautiful swan although nobody helps you and you go
through severe suffering in your life. Curulnik very clearly states that
to survive traumatic events whilst retaining your humanity, you need to
be able to re-tell the story of yourself, so that what has happened is
transformed into something meaningful to you. Curulnik presents the case
of a small African boy, who sees his whole family being massacred. For
some reason the attackers overlook him. Paralysed with fear, he stays in
the empty village. A few days later, the militia comes back, and this
time he reacts by hiding himself under a blanket. Although they search
the whole place, they don’t find him. When they are gone, he hurries to
the next village to seek shelter. When he tells his story to two adults,
they are, of course, terrified and clasp their hands in fear, while one
of them says: “Imagine if you had sneezed!” Curulnik meets this boy in a
refugee camp, where he keeps on tickling himself in the nose with a
blade of grass, until he starts to bleed.
When Curulnik reveals his story, it becomes evident that this boy is
trying to recapture his own story. He wants to be able to control a
sneeze at any time. You might say that this boy has been traumatized
twice: first through the horrible experience and afterwards by being
deprived of his story: he actually made it, he survived! Curulnik’s book
became a turning point for me in my writing process. This was a story I
would really like to tell: How do we re-tell the story of our lives so
that it becomes meaningful and establishes us as powerful and active
persons in our own lives, instead of being passive victims of someone
else’s aggression and will?
Which stories do we pass
on?
The next question was more difficult:
What makes one group accept, all of a sudden, that their
fellow citizens are no longer humans but less than animals, not worthy
of living and so dangerous that they need to be
annihilated?
For one thing, Nazism, and all that it brought with it of horrible
deeds, was due to a very specific historical situation. But genocides
have happened both before Nazism and after, so I had to find a way of
explaining how an idea like this could establish itself, more or less
overnight, in a larger group of people.
It was a difficult task – mainly because most of the writing on a
subject like this is very political and closely related to specific
historical periods and what I needed was more of an archetypical
explanation. One could say that trying to bring in a kind of a
meta-layer on political and sociological issues in a fantasy novel is a
bit ambitious, but then on the other hand that was what I set out to do,
and I was rather determined to fulfil it – just ask my editor!
By coincidence, I had a conversation with a woman who works as a nurse
with immigrants to Denmark. She told me about “Memes” – a way of
describing cultural thought-patterns. I went on the internet and found
out that “memes” had 35,800,000 hits! Wikipedia told me: A
meme is any thought or behaviour that can be passed from one person to
another by learning or imitation. Memes propagate
themselves and can move through the cultural sociosphere in a manner
similar to the contagious behaviour of a virus. Apparently,
effective memes hook on to a more primitive part of the brain, outside
the control of the conscious mind, and they seem to spread especially
easily if they relate to sex, food or fear. This made sense for me.
Memes as a term became a good way for me to understand how ideas and
thought patterns can spread like a virus, and why it seems so difficult
to fight against them. But how to use this pseudo-scientific term
“memes” in a fantasy-novel? I really needed some strong metaphors to
show how dangerous these “mental viruses” are – I needed a metaphor that
would evoke the image of something swift and uncontrollable!
For me, demons had the right qualities. Almost every culture in the
world knows demons under one name or another. Their common quality is
the fear of something powerful, that from one minute to the next, can
change your friend into your enemy – into something inhuman and cruel,
and that, by some strange magic, can possess someone’s mind and turn
them into monsters without empathy. The most interesting thing for me at
this point was the fact that the primary channel for new memes and how
they spread like “mental viruses” was through story-telling. Stories
told from one generation to the next, stories spread worldwide through
the media and the internet. It happens SO fast! No doubt: Memes were
“Demons’ Tools”! And if you need proof, just look at where totalitarian
regimes strike first – controlling and spreading the stories!
Which stories do we live
in?
Little by little - the theme of my new book
formed around two main topics: How do you re-tell your own
story, so your life becomes meaningful in spite of horrible
traumas?; and, which stories do you accept and pass
on?
Setting the universe in “fantasy-time” gave me the freedom I needed to
create an “Inner Landscape” covered with rough mountains, wild rivers,
maze-like swamps and fragile floating islands. Mira – my main character –
is a girl from a wealthy family with a happy life in first class. She
lives in a well-regulated city. But times change and, all of a sudden,
she becomes a victim of the story of her tribe. She has to flee into the
wilderness and, to save herself and her loved ones, she has to get in
charge of her own story. To do that she has to learn to control the
demons that spread the evil and keep them on a leash. And no – you can’t
rid the world of evil and cruelty, but you can consider how you want to
deal with it!
In the course of telling the story, it becomes clear to Mira that it’s
possible for her to change her story. If she chooses to stick to the old
ideas about herself and the rest of her tribe as powerless victims of
demonically possessed tormentors, she, and many of those she loves, will
die. On the other hand, if she dares to create her own story, starting
out from her actual experiences, the story about “the others” becomes,
firstly, more diverse and positive, but also, she reinforces an active
and human picture of herself which others can relate to.
Working with this novel became a real eye-opener, not only about how
much the story of my life – told by my mother – became the story of my
life without me questioning it before very late in life, but also about
how important my job as a storyteller is. For me, there is no doubt: the
more stories people of all ages are exposed to, the more possibilities
they get to create a nuanced story of themselves. And the better we
become at editing the stories ourselves, the less we get locked into an
inability to act and into repeating patterns. So I’m on a mission! I
want to give to my readers a message: Be the author of your own
lifestory! And to do that, children need stories. Lots of them! They can
never have enough tools in their “story toolbox”. Life isn´t easy and,
for a lot of children, it’s a struggle. We can’t take the burden off
their shoulders, but we can give them hope by telling stories that can
help them map their own “Inner Landscape”.
The Crystal Heart
In “The Mira
Chronicles”, story-telling is used as a way of teaching
youngsters about life. Mira, like all the other young children, has to
have the tribal mark branded behind the ear. It hurts and to help her
deal with the pain she is told this story:
Once upon a time, a king and a
queen had a child. A little princess. They gave her everything she could
possibly wish for to keep her happy, but then one day, when she was
fifteen, she started crying. Nobody understood why, but finally she told
them that she could not bear the thought that winter was coming and all
the flowers would die. They tried to comfort her. The flowers would
come back the following spring, they said, but she couldn’t stop crying.
She wanted summer to last for ever. Her parents had to send for the
Wizard. But even though he was very skilled, he couldn’t stop the
changing of the seasons. Then the princess cried even harder. Her
parents fell on their knees and begged
him.
“Do
something! Solve this problem! Our daughter has to be
happy!”
“I
can help you,” he said, “but you might regret it
later.”
“Just
do it. We can’t bear to see our daughter in such pain.”
So the wizard took
the young girl’s bleeding heart and exchanged it for a new heart of
shining
crystal.
“Now
she’ll feel no more sorrow and pain,” he said.
And so it was. The
princess was again happy – smiling and giggling. After some years her
parents thought it was time to find her a husband. Lots of princes
passed through, but she never really cared for any of them. Finally the
Wizard was brought back
again.
“Please,
make her love somebody,” they asked
him.
“I’m
sorry,” he said. “Once you’ve chosen the crystal heart to avoid the
pain and sorrow of life, then you’ll never be able to love.”
And to all of you reading this: Bring stories to
childen and young people that open their hearts and minds and tell them
how to overcome struggles; give them the tools to take charge of their
own lives instead of becoming the victims of others. A Danish author,
Vagn Lundbye, once said: “It’s never too late to have a happy
childhood.” He’s right; you can’t change whatever terrible experiences
you have been through, but you can keep your heart open and choose how
you will incorporate what happens into your own story – will you give
more anger and revenge to the world, or will you pass on stories of
empathy and forgiveness?
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