P.S. from Tante Maren...

I received this email from my cousin Solveig on Sunday, following our trip to Norway, and it was too meaningful not to share... (I just wrote about Tante Maren last week, she is my aunt who lived through concentration camp)...

Solveig translates into English:

"Hi, I just phoned mother and translated your blog for her and she wanted me to send you some words. She still have the little "book" of recipes. They were collected in a piece of velvet from some clothing and stiched together with small threads. About bitterness she said that she don't have the genes for becoming bitter. In the c.camp the great fear was to be sent to extinction camps (Arbeit macht frei) and she had at first much anxiety about that. Then some evening in bed she remember she folded her hands and prayed to God to help her in the agony and had an immediate feeling of response and had never thereafter any fear of being sent. And she wasn't sent. She also told the story about one Christmas eve in camp. They had put some white paper on the table and saved some food for the Christmas dinner to share. Then some of the girls that went with the enemy came and mother first reacted on that (as you know the norwegians didn't like that the girls went with the soldiers) but her mother in law (my grandmother) said that these girls were to be pitied and should be treated with some dignity too and invited them to the table. This learned mother to look on a person as a person and an act of doing per se. She also said to me once when I asked her about the treatment of this women after the war, if she felt anger towards them. Mother answered that the people that persecuted this women most, were the ones that were passive or fraternizing themselves during the war. "We who really was in the battle and had to sacrifice security, life and property understood that it is never that simple. You must be able to forgive."

That's my mother."

Love from Maren and me"...

No wonder we all love Tante Maren!