"How does this end?"

Reflections on ending conflict

“How does this end?” is undoubtedly the most important question that events since October 7^th raise. In this piece, I draw upon others I have written and what I have learned about such endings, always from the perspective of a granddaughter of perpetrators, who, for years, has worked in close partnership with survivors and their descendants.

Two days after Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel, I again found myself on a stage with my friend and colleague, Helena Trus, a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. Before us sat 120 9^th graders who attend school at the world’s largest youth center, Fryshuset. That evening, we repeated the performance for a group of youth leaders on the same premises. I am guessing that it was because there were young Muslims in the audience, who already feel unheard, even persecuted, by the current Swedish government, which includes members of the openly anti-Muslim far-right Sweden Democrats, that we were asked not to take up the recent events (if you haven’t yet done so, for more background please read my previous piece, Show me a book that is not us, a conversation with a friend who is the spokesperson at an Islamic center in Stockholm). Such is the thorny global ecosystem of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in today’s world.

Yet, if Helena and I, two veterans of bridge-building, could not address current events in a meaningful way, who could? Each of us has spent more than a decade researching, writing, and speaking about our families’ WWII fates, and in 2019, we joined forces to counter the polarization and “alternative facts” that have destabilized the world in the opening decades of the 21st century.

Maybe our message was so relevant to the moment that we were doing exactly as we should by just turning up, doing what we always do, and flying steadily through the electric atmosphere of the storm. But, I felt a responsibility to do more: For the first time, I sat beside my friend and, while insisting to myself that she must, without fear, be able to continue to wear her Star of David pendant, inherited from her grandfather, who was a resistance fighter in Poland during WWII—we two together must make this possible!—I wished that I could shield her as she walked through the streets wearing it. Even before the latest gruesome attack, anti-semitism is once again, rising even after generations have been taught the lessons of the Holocaust. Helena’s grandmother was well aware of this long before her death during the COVID pandemic, and warned her grandaughter to take it off: “Don’t advertize your Jewishness,” she said, barely holding down the grief and self-imposed guilt of being the only member of her family to survive the camps.

Ultimately, I didn’t abide strictly by the organizers' wishes and spoke up my way. But when I returned home, I realized that after we condemn terrorism—for, condemn it clearly and unequivocally we must—the larger question still looms: How does this end? By this, I mean the killing and the fear, but also the mistrust and the festering of shame and guilt which poison the hearts of generations.

My thoughts returned to two of my most important mentors, Emerich Roth and Hédi Fried, Holocaust survivors who became democracy and human rights giants in their adopted home of Sweden. Both passed away in 2022, in their late nineties, one as the year dawned in January and the other as it set in November. That year began a profound process of thinking about what I had learned from them, our relationships, and their legacy.

Without their unwavering belief that history will only offer us peace when we have made the effort to listen to every truthfully told story, I doubt that I would have sent my memoir, The Pendulum, to any agent or publisher. Instead, it would most likely have remained in a file on my computer, perhaps to be revisited with regret or maybe even irritation, which might have bled into anger for feeling trapped by the same crippling shame that had previously stopped me from speaking up.

As a result of this experience, I am convinced my mentors would agree that for the dead of this conflict, every name, every face, and every sincere story, even if it belongs to the short life of an infant—its parents’ longing, its first look, its tiny hands’ first grip—must be heard. Then there are the personal stories of the living, their inherited traumas, losses, grief, and joys.

They would not limit this rule to their own faith or people but rather emphasize that it extends far beyond that, including those on ‘the other side.’ For, under the microscope, sides in conflict blur, at least when it comes to people. If there is a real clash, it is between ideas: the sanctity of the individual, the most important principle to emerge from the Holocaust, embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; and the subjugation of the individual to the will of the collective, decided by the few. The latter cannot tolerate sincere individual stories because they make the dehumanization of ‘the other’ impossible.

Another closely related lesson in the invaluable legacy my mentors left to me was the one that concerns suffering.

At Emerich’s passing in January, I wrote a poem about his life’s passion: saving young men from the jaws of right-wing extremism. After an encounter with some young neo-Nazis on the streets of Stockholm and Malmö during the 1990s, he devoted the rest of his life to nurturing The Emerich Fund against Violence—for Compassion and a program called EXIT to help youth, such as those he had once met on the streets, to leave the dangerous movement they had misguidedly become caught up in.

Based on his thirty years of experience as a social worker and the childhood stories of history’s tyrants, which he had studied meticulously, Emerich had reached the conclusion that men with abusive or absent fathers were the most vulnerable to extremism. In some ways, I think he offered himself as a father to all the troubled youngsters he met. Whenever he spoke to school children (he visited ca. 1600 schools), he’d tell them the story of the young SS man, another misguided youth whom he chose not to shoot when he had the chance to at the war’s end.

The Boy

Look the tyrant in the eye

And you will see a fatherless boy,

Or one whose father, called away,

Left the gaps that filled with hate.

Don’t be tempted by your fear,

See the boy’s loaded tear,

Falling, without a father’s notice,

Into the mud of gangs and mobsters.

Pierce forthrightly into his soul,

Inject the vial with even flow

Refill the gaps with all you know,

Love that boy, never let go.

2022/01/23

I, too, was the recipient of Emerich’s patient compassion and dedication to seeing humans past all labels. On one of the many occasions when he and his wife hosted me at their home, when Emerich was usually feverishly engaged in writing one or another newspaper article about current events and his theory, he made time to listen to my travails of living in a family that had not faced up to its history and thus not left fascism behind. At the time, both Emerich and I were working at the grassroots in a fraying society: he was over ninety, having survived five concentration camps; I was in my forties, having endured several years of grim discoveries about my grandparents’ past and a lifetime of difficulty in a family which had resisted acknowledging it. We both worked in the field, but the imbalance in our backgrounds could sometimes grate on my conscience—did I even have the right to speak in the presence of one such as him? Whether he read my mind or not, he had the insight and strength to ask me a question that has forever convinced me of the power of daring to meet another person in their place of suffering: “However do you manage?” he asked. In that question, I, too, felt his pain, and since then, I have been convinced that the courage to venture out into that wild space of suffering, trusting that common healing can emerge, is the magic potion that makes the bonds between us, whatever our backgrounds, unassailable.

My other important mentor, Hédi Fried, expressed a similar sentiment during our decade-long friendship. In a longer prose piece, Infused by the Light of Hédi Fried, which I wrote at her passing in November 2022, I recalled:

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.”

Hédi and Emerich’s legacy leads me back to the epigraph I chose for The Pendulum, a quote from Isaiah, which I had first heard rendered as a beautiful Hebrew song at a service Emerich invited me to.

Umacha Hashem dim’a me’al kol panim
God will wipe the tears from all faces

—Isaiah 25:8

I chose it because, after many years in which I discovered the pain and sorrow of my grandfather’s victims and began, at the same time, to understand the agony his violence had also left in my family, I realized that the only way conflict truly ends is with what this deceptively simple phrase expresses—the very same thing that Emerich and Hédi insisted upon: all suffering matters and must be tended to. For this to occur, each of us must find the god within ourselves, as they did: the one that gives us the strength to resist division, de-individualization, and dehumanization that extremists and corrupt power-seekers would have us feed upon; the one that says Helena’s fate is also mine; the one that knows the tears of each Muslim in the audience belong to me too.

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