The story of a life before and after the Holocaust
The Mulberry Tree is testimony to how democracy can inconspicuously turn into totalitarianism – fascist, national-socialist or communist.
The Mulberry Tree is testimony to how democracy can inconspicuously turn into totalitarianism – fascist, national-socialist or communist. As one of the last living witnesses to the events leading up to World War II and the Holocaust, Iboja Wandall-Holm (1921-) describes how the unthinkable can become normalized, with catastrophic consequences for mankind.
The memoir tells of growing up in inter-war Czechoslovakia and believing in freedom, equality and human rights, of expulsion from the childhood paradise of her multicultural, multiethnic Slovak hometown, of participation in the resistance movement, and of all the dying in Nazi concentration camps. It describes irreplaceable losses, but also solidarity, hope, honesty and the survival of one’s self-esteem and dignity against all odds.
Originally written in Danish, this book has also appeared in the author’s own translation into Slovak, her mother tongue.
“The book’s fascination lies not least in the fact that it contains the two great narratives of 20th-century Europe: the utopian and the dystopian. Humanist Europe survives Auschwitz –inside someone who has been there. That a person with a concentration camp tattoo on her arm can be so full of unsentimental and undogmatic humanness signals an uncommon integrity. 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 Laučík
TO BE LAUNCHED: 4 July 2025
EBOOK available as pre-order.
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 Moruša.
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.
