The Memory Generation
Episode 2: Julie Lindahl
INTRO
Rachael Cerrotti: Hey Everyone, I’m Rachael Cerrotti. Welcome to The Memory Generation – a podcast about the memories we inherit and the stories that are passed from one generation to the next. Back in 2016, my late-husband, Sergio, called me up to tell me that he heard someone on the radio that he thought I should know. Her name was Julie Lindahl and she had spent years traveling around the world to search for the stories about her family’s Nazi past. At around the same time, I was in the thick of my own research and had been traveling across Europe searching for the people who helped my grandmother survive the Holocaust. Julie and I quickly developed a friendship and right away began delving into conversations about how World War II is still such a deep part of our lives today. Our friendship has helped me understand the importance of building relationships between the descendants of perpetrators and victims and how we must see ourselves as part of the same story.Julie was born in Brazil but spent her life moving from one country to another. She currently lives in Stockholm, Sweden and in 2018 published her book, The Pendulum, which tells the story of her uncovering the family secret.
INTERVIEW
Julie Lindahl: My name is Julie Lindahl. I'm an author, democracy activist and educator living in Sweden. I'm a multinational. Part of me is American. Other parts belong to Europe and and even Brazil. And I'm delighted to be here in Maine, visiting with my colleague and friend Rachael Cerrotti.
Rachael Cerrotti: Thank you for coming to visit me in Portland, Maine. This is the first time in a number of years that we are seeing each other. We have been talking privately and publicly about family history and the repercussions of world war for over five years now and this exploration of how the events of World War Two specifically reverberates in the lives of the grandchildren of both victims and perpetrators. And so I think right away we should acknowledge that we are sitting down for this conversation on March 7th, 2022. It's a Sunday and we're nearing two weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine and a war has started on European soil where you live?
Julie Lindahl: Yes.
Rachael Cerrotti: And we both have been following this meticulously, with fear and with some questioning of what this means for how we tell our own stories.
Julie Lindahl: Yes. I think for me, it's about how we tell our own stories, but also about trying to understand the way that storytelling about history and memories of history because after all World War Two is the last major war in Europe – if we discount the Bosnian War – was almost 80 years ago. And yet the inherited memory of that time, I believe, deeply affects the behavior of people in Europe, certainly Eastern Europe and in Russia today.
Rachael Cerrotti: And I'm going to work really hard not to let this topic distract our conversation, but I just want it on the table for you and I to address because it certainly influences everything — everything that we talk about and it creates a perspective on the events of the past that would actually be irresponsible to separate ourselves from.
Julie Lindahl: Yes, exactly.
Rachael Cerrotti: So, you're born in Brazil to a German family.
Julie Lindahl: To a German mother and an American father.
Rachael Cerrotti: German mother and an American father. What was it like growing up? How do you remember your childhood?
Julie Lindahl: Well, I would say that I remember it in a way that creates a dissonance in me because on the one hand, I see the images of, you know, a happy, chubby little child with her mother in swimming pools and on beaches in Brazil. Also with her grandmother, who was there, who lacked nothing who had in some ways a very privileged upbringing. And on the other hand, I feel in my heart and remember the anger, the indignation, the inability to speak about a certain person, namely my German grandfather and the shame that I bore from a very early age.
Rachael Cerrotti: What was your grandfather's connection to the war?
Julie Lindahl: He was part of what was known as for the longest time the Allgemeine SS, which means the civilian SS. Of course, everyone was sucked into the military wing of the SS during the war which he was too. But his role was essentially to transform western central Poland into the breadbasket of the Third Reich with other Germans, other Nazis, some of them SS.
Rachael Cerrotti: When you say breadbasket, can you just explain what you mean by that?
Julie Lindahl: Well, Hitler recognized before he launched his war that he needed to be sure he could feed his people and so one of the early goals of the war was to seize a fertile, productive land and turn it to food production. And while this can sound like a benign task, you know growing potatoes and carrots or the like. It also meant forced labor, deportation and engagement – heavy engagement in the racial war, which of course, included murder. So, my grandfather in the areas where he overtook and ran estates became associated with those things.
Rachael Cerrotti: And your discovery of all of this really started with conversations with your grandmother. Right?
Julie Lindahl: Yes. Well, my grandmother and I had a very close relationship. At the same time as we had this affectionate relationship, she would sometimes toss out remnants of an old ideology or memories that would have my ears pricking up and frankly make me feel like a bystander. For example, once she tried to convince me that the Holocaust didn't happen or at least wasn't as bad as as she said the media claimed it was.
Rachael Cerrotti: That must have felt confusing.
Julie Lindahl: Well, it was worse than confusing. I knew very well that it had happened because at the time I was studying it at university. What it made me feel was ashamed that I didn't speak up against her. I had a feeling when she said this and I listened to her that if I opposed her that I would lose her love. It was quite simply that. And so I remained quiet. Plus, she was already aging, but she had a clear mind. She wasn't sick. She lived until she was 103. So I felt extremely torn about what to do about the knowledge – the facts that I knew versus my affection for her and my desire not to destroy this very important relationship. But I want to go back to the term dissonance. I have a dissonance of memories. What I do through my writing and speaking and reflecting is a constant working through of perhaps a naive effort to get rid of the dissonance, to be able to make sense of how these different sides of my experience, namely the happy privileged childhood, the kids splashing in the pool and so on, with the anger and the indignation and the inability to speak about the family's history. I mean, these are – these memories coexist for me. So holding those together has been something that has formed who I am today.
Rachael Cerrotti: When I was thinking about this conversation, and you and I have talked publicly together a number of times over the years, and I was starting to think, OK, how do I want to structure this conversation with you because I think you and I have a habit of really embracing the web of thoughts that live in all of our minds. And I thought it would be quite interesting to treat this as a timeline starting back in 2009. We were introduced in 2016. And by the time that we met, we had both spent over half a decade at that point deep inside our family histories and not only through photographs and through documents, but literally by following – physically following – in our family's wartime footsteps. We both literally crossed country lines and even continents to do so. So in 2009, I first asked my grandmother to tell me her story. And I was going into my junior year of college and that for me is what began what has become my life's work and also the way in which not only I see the world, but really I experience the world. So take us back to 2009 for you. What did you know about your family history at that point in time? And where were you starting to follow it?
Julie Lindahl: Well, I really didn't know that my grandfather was a member of the Nazi Party or the SS. What I knew was that the inability to speak about certain things were devouring our relationships and things really came to a head with my father's passing. That was in 2007 and this made me very sick. So I got into a state of depression and my husband asked me, you know, whether I needed psychological treatment or help. My first reply to him was, No, I actually have to go to the German federal archives – the Bundesarchiv. I knew I needed to go there because I'd spoken with my grandmother so much and I knew so many pieces. She hadn't told me the core of the truth, namely the engagement in the party and the SS and what they had really been doing there. But at the same time, she didn't hide their lies from me. I was perhaps the only person in the family who was really interested in hearing her stories, so she offloaded quite a lot. And of course in that process, she also offloaded a bit of her ideology which made me realize that, well, perhaps our family had been engaged as perpetrators.
Rachael Cerrotti: As you started to engage in those conversations with her. Was this an immediate, you know, consumption of your time and your energy, or did this - I’m gonna call it an obsession - did it start off that strongly or did this interest creep in a bit slowly with conversation by conversation with her?
Julie Lindahl: Well, I began to have these conversations with her when I was a teenager. This built up over a long period of time, and when I was doing my master's degree in the late 1980s/early 90s, I was having these conversations with her and the questions started to come. So I asked my father who came to visit me who my German grandfather was because at that time I already began to suspect that he had some engagement in the Nazi Party. My father's reply was, I forbid you from looking into this past. Now my father was not an authoritarian type, at least not with me. So for me, this was quite a shock.
Rachael Cerrotti: And your father was American.
Julie Lindahl: My father was an American which was also the reason I felt safe asking him. But he steered me clear away from this and basically said put your thoughts elsewhere which is what I did because I respected my father. I tried not to think about it. And I think this is the interesting point. It wasn't that I was obsessed from the earliest time I could potentially start thinking about it. It was that it became unavoidable.
Rachael Cerrotti: And so you were having these conversations. You started going to the German archives and then you started saying, I have to go to these places, these physical places that you found in these documents where your grandparents had lived in occupied Poland at the time. When did you start traveling?
Julie Lindahl: I started to travel in 2012 when I first took myself to Germany to start to visit some of the places they had lived in before the war. You can receive an initial tranche of documents from the German federal archives, but usually that doesn't explain the whole picture. It's a beginning. And by the way, you're very lucky if you find anything there because the Nazis were great at destroying their own documents. But I received in this first tranche, there were bits and pieces, but I, in order to know where to go, I had to seek out the help of others.
Rachael Cerrotti: And I know from your book that there were a number of academics and researchers who you partnered with at various points who helped you navigate the meaning behind a lot of these documents.
Julie Lindahl: Oh, absolutely. Without them, I would have got nowhere or the story would have become very inaccurate. And particularly, I should credit my friend Robert Nowicki in Poland who was a very kind archivist I met at the Institute of National Remembrance who broke all the rules of the archives which are that archivists are not supposed to engage themselves in the people to whom they hand documents and their stories. And he thought that mine was interesting because they rarely got any descendants of Nazis coming in anymore. Most people who came into their archives were people who were seeking to learn about what their families had done under communism, whether they had informed on them.
Rachael Cerrotti: So take me to Poland, and I'm going to ask you to retell a story that I've I've heard you tell before about when you were in this part of rural Poland where your grandfather say, ran the land and you met an elderly gentleman there who had a scar on his forehead that came from your grandfather. Can you just tell us that story and start with at what period in your research did you meet this person?
Julie Lindahl: Well, Robert Nowicki, the archivist, invited me into the kitchen at the archives and he said, What are you going to do now? And I said, well I just have to go find these people who are named in these documents. Maybe they're still out out here. And he said, well, these people live out in the countryside in rural areas. I mean, no one will speak English. They might speak a smattering of German. You won't be able to speak with them so you won't be able to do this by yourself. So he said, I'll come with you. And Robert managed to track down eventually five families and the one that you're referring to, the gentleman you're referring to was probably the most, the most willing to speak and share his experiences, but also he did something well beyond that. As I was journeying through the countryside and met these people whose lives had been – their early lives had been destroyed by the Nazis and specifically my grandfather whom they remembered very well which is interesting. And so I started to build up a sense of a very strong sense of guilt and a desire to ask for forgiveness. And this man could see this coming over my face during the time that he explained what my grandfather did and explained that he had been beaten over the head by my grandfather when he passed by this boy who forgot to remove his cap. So at the end of this conversation, this man who was then in his 80s held my arms and I mean, I felt as though I wanted to fall to my knees and beg for forgiveness. And he kind of held me up. He was much smaller than me, by the way, so he was strong. He kind of held me up and shook my arms a bit and said, ‘this wasn't your fault. And we need to go out into my garden and I want you to experience how beautiful the world can be.’ And since that time, this entire journey has become something else. It's become not one of seeking forgiveness. It's become one of attempting to take responsibility.
Rachael Cerrotti: Were you searching for that permission to let it go? Let it go is not the right, the right way to put it, but you know. Did you feel like it was your fault?
Julie Lindahl: Well, I didn't originally feel that it was my fault. My point of departure was that I felt ashamed of myself, but I didn't know where the shame came from. But as I received these documents and started to go out in the countryside and met all sorts of families that have been impacted, then the guilt started to arise and the desire to somehow find a way to apologize on behalf of my family started to become very strong in me. One other thing that this elderly gentleman and some other families I met taught me was that really, I can't seek forgiveness for things and acts that I have not committed myself. I think ignoring all the signals and accepting the things my grandmother told me are things that would be unforgivable. Those things I would need to seek forgiveness for if I just stayed passive and quiet and accepted and didn't reflect. I think it's my response to people who say to me, How could you betray your family like that? How could you go behind their back and research all this stuff without consulting them and without –
Rachael Cerrotti: And you were specifically told not to?
Julie Lindahl: I was told not to. So I was going against their wishes and my answer to that is that I would have been a totally irresponsible person not to do that.
Rachael Cerrotti: I think that's a really important distinction that you just made that a lot of society is grappling with now, especially us Americans who are trying to figure out what is our relationship to the events of the past in this country whether it's the genocide against the Native Americans or slavery and Jim Crow laws and I see a lot of my generation asking themselves what is our responsibility in grappling with a history that we may have not been a part of, but we inherited? And I think that you just made a really important distinction of like, you're not looking to be forgived of what you weren't there for, but you do feel like it's a responsibility to reflect on it, to know it and to not ignore what happened.
Julie Lindahl: Yes, because you become I don't know if you can call yourself a perpetrator, but I mean I think it was Elie Wiesel who said something like, we murdered the victims again by not remembering them. And I think he's absolutely right. A lot of people can become defensive about this and say, ‘Well, I had nothing to do with that. That was a long time ago. It has nothing to do with me.’ That's not the point. The point is, we've all got a responsibility to work with our personal family histories, but also with the history of our societies.
Rachael Cerrotti: So I'm going to keep following your path of travel now. So your travels take you from your grandmother's living room to the German archives, from the German archives to Poland. And then it takes you to South America which is where you were born.
Julie Lindahl: Yes
Rachael Cerrotti: In Brazil. I want to bring in another family member here. You had an uncle that you had always heard about. His name was Uncle Hardy.
Julie Lindahl: Mmhmm
Rachael Cerrotti: Right? You had been told that this uncle had passed away. Not to spoil the story, but that's not true.
Julie Lindahl: No. Well, I never thought that I would get to Latin America, mainly as my resources were running out after several years of doing research. I think you're familiar with that problem.
Rachael Cerrotti Oh yeah, anybody who digs into their family history especially for an extended period of time. It's hard to fund this work, to put it lightly.
Julie Lindahl: Exactly. So I was delighted when my alma mater, Wellesley College, stepped into the breach and said, You're not going to stop this work, we are going to give you a fellowship. This took a lot of preparation because I hadn't been to Brazil in 45 years. I didn't speak any Portuguese anymore. I had been told that the areas I was going to could be quite dangerous. There was the drug trade. People were armed. I mean, we're talking about going out into the interior of Brazil on the border with Paraguay.
Rachael Cerrotti: Okay
Julie Lindahl: But in the planning phase in the months before, the Zika crisis broke out, as you might remember. And simultaneously, I ended up in hospital with a half paralyzed face because of the stress of this work. People thought it was a stroke, but it wasn't. It was just simply the stress of the work. And so I sat in the hospital watching the Zika crisis break out in Brazil and wondering whether I would ever get there. At the same time, a Brazilian IT expert who I was friends with, he and his wife, was over for dinner one night at our home, and I had no idea that my uncle was actually still alive. But the stories about him just didn't make sense to me so I'd always kept an eye out for him. And this I.T. expert was just fiddling around on his iPhone and was into a Latin American social media site. And in there, he found an image of a man who had the same name as my uncle, an image of him marrying off his daughter. And he said, ‘could this be your uncle?’ There, of course, was a strong similarity because it was him. So eventually we tracked down his children via social media. We can damn social media as much as we like, but it's actually quite useful. And there we were. So I plan to go to Paraguay first to see them and that was quite a revelation. I learned that it was common knowledge in his family that his father was in the SS.
Rachael Cerrotti: So I have two follow up questions: one is I'm curious what you had heard about his death. What stories you've been told? And then also, if you could just give us like the briefest of explanations of why so many SS families were fleeing to Latin America
Julie Lindahl: Mmhmm. Well, I guess the most grim story I heard about my uncle's death was that he ran essentially my grandfather's fairly large estates in the interior of Brazil because he spoke Portuguese as well. He managed that – my grandfather refused to learn to speak Portuguese because of his racist perspectives, I suppose. But they fought a lot and my uncle decided to take off. So the wildest story I heard was that he was dumped in a ditch by drug gangs and that his body was ripped to pieces by wild dogs, which —
Rachael Cerrotti: Wow
Julie: Of course, is, I mean, no one had seen it, of course. And to me, it sounded all very strange.
Rachael Cerrotti: And very dramatic
Julie Lindahl: Very dramatic and very suspicious. So to your other point about the kind of postwar flight of former SS to Latin America? Well, I should say that my grandparents didn't flee with the first round or the earlier rounds that either fled even before the end of the war or immediately afterwards. My grandfather managed to evade any prison time although under the deNazification laws and process, he was to be punished. But he actually managed to get out of that as well because the Cold War set in. And the allies became much more concerned about building up a strong West German society rather than weeding out every last SS person and actually a number of SS and Nazis became members of the new government and flooded back into public life which to us today is rather shocking, but the allies were less concerned about them than they were about the threat of communism. But later in the 50s, the mood in Germany or in West Germany started to change for various reasons. Basically, it became insupportable for Germans not to begin to try their own. So previously, war criminals had been tried by the allied powers. Now, Germans had the power to try their own and they were forced to it. It was nothing they really wanted to do. so things became rather uncomfortable for people like my grandfather at that time. And then in spring of 1960, when Adolf Eichmann was caught by Mossad, everyone knew there was going to be a trial the following spring. And it was exactly at that time when my grandfather's son went off to Brazil to try to find somewhere for his parents to be. They tried to get rid of their property in Germany rather quickly and they were on the boat off to Latin America in December 1960 well before the trial opened. And the fear was that, you know, as far as the Eichmann trial goes, that Eichmann was now going to have to name a number of people. And I mean, I don't think my grandfather was senior enough that he would personally be named, but you know, you might get tripped up by association somehow. But I think it wasn't just the Eichmann trial. I think it was the entire mood in the country. You have to remember these trials were headline news all around the world. They surrounded everyone's everyday and so life became really quite worrying for someone in my grandfather's position. And I would say that my grandmother also became concerned because she had been a member of a Nazi women's organization and certainly had been an adherent of the movement.
Rachael Cerrotti: I wanna move forward a couple of years in time now to 2018, and you publish your book, The Pendulum. And so I'd love for you to read a piece of it if you're willing.
Julie Lindahl: Yes. Rachael Cerrotti: So I'm going to have you read on Page 118. At this point in the book and please fill in anything that I'm missing here –you've already started digging into your family history. You've already begun to confront the reality that they were in the SS. And in this passage, you're sitting with your grandmother in her home, and she understands that you're digging into this history that you've been explicitly asked not to.
Julie Lindahl: That's right, and I've actually tried to offer her the opportunity to reach a point of remorse with me about what they were engaged in. And this is a little bit of her response.
“You are a direct descendant of your grandfather. Yes, you are. Oma insisted, as though I had attempted to deny it by my discoveries. It sounded like the same accusation she had hurled at M throughout the years and I could feel how it hurt. And now you should let him and this history rest in peace. I don't know why you look into it. You know nothing about that time. It doesn't belong to you. In the barrage of disconnected statements, these last words stayed with me like a bullet in the flesh that could not be removed. Did any chapter of history belong to certain persons and not to others? I pictured Oma sitting next to her thick tome War and Peace which occupied a proud place on her bookshelf and I was certain she never wondered whether she had the right to read it. All the same. I could never escape the inborn naivete of my generation. We had not lived in our grandparents' times.”
Rachael Cerrotti: Do you think that there is a history that we don't have a right to?
Julie Lindahl: I think we don't have a right to it if we do not strive to constantly catch a glimpse of the truth. Rather, we make up stories that don't bear any relationship to fact. Then I think we relinquish our right. But the irony of what my grandmother says here is that she was herself avidly interested in history, especially the history of the Napoleonic Wars which she read in War and Peace over and over through the years. And what went through my mind when she said that was. Well, does that mean that you don't have the right to that history? Because she used to constantly remind me of how terrible the Napoleonic Wars were. And see, we Germans weren't as bad and so forth. So of course we have the right but with every right comes a responsibility. And I suppose I keep returning to this word all the time that if we decide to look into history, we also have the responsibility to be sure that what we're saying is – is as close to the truth as we can get.
Rachael Cerrotti: And it strikes me that in this passage, in the same breath, she essentially says, This is your history, but you have no right to it. You are a descendant of your grandfather, but you have no right to this story. And that's why I pulled out that paragraph because I was like, wow, what a contradiction in itself. This is a part of you. Don't ask questions.
Julie Lindahl: It's like asking a person to live in a cage or in a dark room, to walk blindfolded through life. It's probably one of the more damning things you can do to a person.
Rachael Cerrotti: How did your family respond when this book came out? Because this was a forbidden story.
Julie Lindahl: I mean, I haven't spoken to all of the members of my extended family about how they feel about it. At the same time, I've heard from enough people to know that to some extent, their responses are divided between the generations. I would say that for my generation, so the generation of the grandchildren, it's been fairly important for us to know because a number of us have experienced difficulties in communicating with our parents. And had we known about these things earlier, we might have been able to sort that out or perhaps those communication difficulties would never have arisen. So I think there is a sense of relief that we can finally talk about what it in fact was. Then it gets more complicated in the generation that came before me. Some reject this and say it's fiction and others say, well, it really wasn't so bad. And there are others I haven't spoken to, so I don't want to sort of generalize too much. But I would say it's been a very mixed response. And I know for example, from my Paraguayan cousins, the cousins who I met during my travels and I had no idea of their existence before I began this work. It was very important for them. They had no idea who their German family was. Their father had never spoken about his family. They had experienced grave difficulties with their father. And it had left a sort of gap in them. This was the opportunity to try to understand what had taken place.
Rachael Cerrotti: So, you've done a lot of work with descendants of Holocaust victims. I see you doing it both here in America as well as in Europe. And one of the gifts that you've given to me in the way that you talk about all of this is your perspective on the idea of sides of history. And I would love it if you could just talk a bit about your philosophy there, that there aren't actually sides of war.
Julie Lindahl: Well, I think what provoked my reaction to that term was when you and I were invited to participate in this NPR series and we were told I think to sit down on either side of a couch and said, well, you know, it's interesting to have a discussion between the two sides of the war, something like that. And my immediate response was, well, Rachael's family were not on any side. They didn't sort of take up arms and go to war for something. They were people who were living peacefully in their communities. I understand that you could say that there were the allies and the axis powers and that sort of thing. But in conversation with Holocaust survivors or their descendants, I don't see any sides. What I see is that your families were victims of something terrible that my grandparents participated in perpetrating and that in fact, today you and I and others whom I work with are on the same side.
Rachael Cerrotti: Yeah
Julie Lindahl: We're on the same side. I feel very often that I have a deeper understanding with you and others who are descended from survivors than I do with many other people.
Rachael Cerrotti: I love that. And it's been such a gift for me and how I think about all of this as well because I catch myself using the word sides all the time. And I mean, even just we mentioned at the very start of this conversation that it's hard to detach from the reality of what's happening in the world today and that there's a war on European soil again. And like even in just the casual conversations I'm having with oftentimes strangers trying to process the events that we're reading about in the news, I find myself often using the word sides, and I always kind of have a little voice of you in my head being like, be careful. Be careful. because how we talk about it, it changes the narrative. We're telling stories to each other and as soon as you pit people on two different sides, you're telling a very different story than someone who has no choice.
Julie Lindahl: Absolutely. And I think it's important. Just briefly, in what we're experiencing today and looking at the Ukraine, if we said that the Russians are on a particular side, we've already lost the war because really what we're hoping is that many Russians or a sufficient number of Russians will not continue to support it.
Rachael Cerrotti: Hmm.
Julie Lindahl: Right.
Rachael Cerrotti: Yeah. Back to your book. Your book has been out for a couple of years now. Has putting it out into the world felt like a form of release? Like have you been able to let go of some of the heaviness and some of the space it's taken up in just your physical being while doing all of this work?
Julie Lindahl: I think that it continues to occupy a lot of the space in my life, and I suspect that it will continue to do that even though there are lots of people close to me who wish that that space would be minimized. I think that the kind of world we've woken up to in the 21st century will demand that it continues to occupy quite a large space which is something I think you are finding yourself. With all that said, though, I think what is one of the interesting outcomes of this that actually helps me internally is that I used to feel quite a lot of anger towards certain members of my family about lying or even anger about their behavior before I knew anything. And it's interesting that by working through this history, by continuing to work on it because I continue to write and I continue to speak, the anger has almost completely subsided. And I think it's important for this to happen. Anger is a very important spur to action. We need it. But if we allow it to persist, it festers and it becomes harmful. The absence of anger has created more space for me to see the real people, to see even the perpetrators from different dimensions – not to excuse anybody, but really to try to see them as people. You know, very well that I have a problem with calling a person evil mainly because it's an excuse that we can use to then just brush off that person and say they were evil and not try to figure out, so what happened in this person's life? People aren't born evil. I don't believe that. That said, there are certainly evil deeds committed by people and there is no question that what was done to your family was evil, for sure. But I try to leave that aside and the reduction of my anger or the, let's say, the absence of anger now has helped me in that regard to try to see rather than to put labels on people.
Rachael Cerrotti I'm glad for you that some of the anger has subsided. I mean, just even as you've shared some of the health problems you've had because of this story – anybody who's grappling with something deeply emotional knows how much it lives in our body and how much anxiety and anger and all that like really does, you know it hurts your back and it hurts your bones and it hurts your head in all these ways and we do have to figure out how to release ourselves and also like the gentleman in Poland did for you, release each other from some of it. So before we close this conversation, I want to ask you one last question, which is – we both know that the world feels incredibly overwhelming right now, and to be fair, it's kind of felt overwhelming since we've met each other, I think. But I love to know what is something that is happening right now in your world that you think will be a memory that outlives you.
Julie Lindahl: As you know, I will shortly get on a plane and go back to Sweden to Stockholm which isn't very far away from St Petersburg, and so of course what is going through my mind is the Ukraine conflict and I really hope that what people will remember from this time is that this was a time when a world that seemed to be adrift that seemed to have lost touch with what we had achieved in terms of recognizing the sanctity of the rights of the individual, recognizing the importance of the rule of law, that somehow we recaptured that. We recaptured the importance of it and we decided to stand up for it. That we will say at some point in the future that that was the moment when the world stopped drifting. We realized how valuable those things were. And the other thing I hope that will become a memory for people of this time, which has been a discovery for me, is that patriotism is something that can actually support a global community. That is to say you can have a love of your people which is not at the expense of other peoples. You can love your country and at the same time as a consequence of loving your country show respect for others and the rest of the world. Patriotism can be about a strong desire for peace in the rest of the world. And that's on my mind a lot because it's a sea shift for me, a person who was always extremely skeptical of anyone who said they were a patriot.
Rachael Cerrotti: Julie, it's so good to see you. And I want you to know that having you as a friend and as a thought partner in both life and work has been very transformative for me. And I thank you for that.
Julie Lindahl: Thank you Rachael.
OUTRO
Rachael Cerrotti: Thank you to Julie for joining me today. If you’d like to read, watch and listen to the first series of conversations Julie and I participated in back in 2017, you can find the link on our website or search NPR for “Beyond Sides of History.”
This show was created in partnership with USC Shoah Foundation which is home to more than 55,000 testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide. You can learn more about their work and the Visual History Archive at sfi.usc.edu.
You can find additional links, book lists, testimony clips and all types of other resources and stories on our website: memorygenerationpodcast.com.Our editor is Lene Bech Sillesen. Our executive producer and co-creator of this show is Stephen Smith. The music is from Kodomo.
I’m Rachael Cerrotti. We’ll be back next week.