Overview

From the fantasy worlds of childhood games, to merry singing with friends by the River Váh, The Mulberry Tree is a powerful account of how an idyllic life in Northern Czechoslovakia is shattered as the Third Reich sweeps across Europe. Iboja Wandall-Holm writes with a lyrical power of the hopes and follies of youth, of intellectual and romantic awakenings cut short by a world twisting out of shape - where trust, tolerance, joy, friendship, and laughter are suddenly mere echoes in a ravaged land. Suspicion follows Iboja and her sister as they seek refuge in foreign lands, learn new languages and new songs, until they're flung in a train cart bound for a terrifying unknown. One of the Holocaust's last living witnesses, she recounts her brutal passage through the Nazi concentration camps. As a horrifying new normal takes hold - black smoke billowing up daily from the crematoria - she searches for fragments of hope in the resilience of her comrades, even in the disfigured hearts of her oppressors. Yet it is Wandall-Holm's love of music, poetry, philosophy and of course, humanity, even in its ugliness, that elevates The Mulberry Tree beyond its bleak horrors and infuses the reader with a deep and enduring sense of solidarity. Originally written in Danish, this book has also appeared in the author's own translation into Slovak, her mother tongue. ""Wandall-Holm's eye for the individual, her vivid language and her admirable lack of sentimentality rescue European humanism and carry it into the 21st century."" - Lilian Munk-Rösing ""Her book is a poem about surviving under constantly changing conditions, participating in their progression and avoiding petrification and becoming one's own fossilized abstraction. It is now time for us to get to know the story of Iboja Wandall-Holm. At first sight, it might appear that we owe it to her. That is not true. We owe it, above all, to ourselves."" - Ivan Laucik

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Reviews

""After reading the memoir, you will not want to have lived the author's life, but you will want to have her ability to recall and formulate memories into words. For most of us, memories are only random fragments in the brain. For Iboja Wandall-Holm, they are not."" - Martin Ciel ""...it is an ethical illumination of experiences where person and time intersect; a reworking of history where past and present are not closed entities, because life experience is used and respect for the human being prevails. This makes the book beautiful, present and necessary."" - Chr. Mailand-Hansen in Informationen ""Her voice is filled with a painful knowledge and yet moving faith in humanity. It is important to listen to, not least at a time when neo-Nazis are trying to whitewash the past and inflame people's xenophobia."" - Vibeke Blaksteen in Kristeligt Dagblad ""...a valuable book, a memoir whose literary qualities make it deserve to be called more than just a story...a beautiful picture of a rich life."" - Annelise Vestergaard in Jyllands-posten ""I have not read such an impressive book in years. In spite of the horrors experienced in the concentration camps, it is written with humour and love of life..."" - Mogens Kofod-Hansen ""...a significant piece of European cultural history."" - Ib Falkencrone in Vendsyssel Tidende

Author Information

Iboja Wandall-Holm is a Danish writer and translator born in 1921 in Czechoslovakia, one of the few democracies arising after World War I from the dissolution of the three European empires: Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary. In 1942, she fled with her younger sister Lila to Hungary to escape deportation to the Nazi death camps. She was caught, but then survived Auschwitz, Birkenau and Ravensbrück. After the war she studied Political Economics in Prague and worked for Czechoslovak Radio there. In 1947 she married a Dane and became a Danish citizen. In 1956 she moved to Copenhagen, where she still lives. As the wife of a United Nations ambassador, she has also lived in Africa, Iran, the USA and Austria.She writes in both Danish and Slovak. In the early 1960s she began publishing poems, short stories, essays and translations from Czech and Slovak literature. Her first collection of verse, Digte, came out in 1965, to be followed by more collections. She joined the Union of Danish Writers and collaborated with Danish Radio. She has also written children's books and collections of songs, translated Slovak fairy tales, as well as Slovak, Czech, Polish, German and Hungarian prose fiction and poetry. In addition, she has written a series of lectures, chronicles and other productions for the Danish Broadcasting Corporation.In 1991 she published her Holocaust memoir, Morbærtræet [The Mulberry Tree] in Danish. It went into a second, expanded edition in 2000 under the title Farvel til århundredet [Farewell to the Century]. In 2003, it was published in her own Slovak translation in Bratislava under the title Zbohom, storočie [Farewell, Century], reprinted in 2016 and 2021 under the original title Morusa.In recognition of her work, Iboja Wandall-Holm is listed in the Blue Book, an encyclopaedia of people who have significantly enhanced the Kingdom of Denmark. David Short (1943-) is a prize-winning translator from Czech and Slovak. He took a degree in Russian and French at the University of Birmingham, followed by a year of Slavonic Philology, after which, in 1966, he went to Prague to acquire Czech, remaining there until 1972. From 1973 to 2011 he taught Czech and Slovak at the University of London School of Slavonic and East European Studies. His translations include works by such major Czech writers as Bohumil Hrabal, Karel Čapek and Vítězslav Nezval, as well as by the author of the first Slovak novel, Jozef Ignác Bajza, in addition to academic works in the fields of art, literature, linguistics and semantics.

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