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by Iboja Wandall-Holm (Author), David Short (Translator)
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
