Pandora’s Box

I grew up with the luxury of having lots of books at home. I could read about everything imaginable. My father couldn’t pass a bookstore without walking in. He forbade us from looking into some of them though. These were pictures books, with shocking images of war, hidden somewhere on the top shelves. Hiroshima, people being tortured, people being beheaded. The most gruesome photographs: I secretly took those books up to my room and leafed through them. Some of those black and white images I will never forget. The quality was often poor, but this added to their strength. Like they were made from tar. The deepest black possible.

As a young boy, my father lived in a city that had its centre severely bombarded during the Second World War. He has climbed through the chaos of the wiped out city as a 10 year-old. And there he has seen things that have stayed with him forever. My grandmother told me how he went out to look for his best friend, only to find him dead under the debris of his building. He started to stay out for days, and would not tell my grandmother of his whereabouts. She did not have enough time to worry about with a young baby at home and she mostly let him go about his business. Those were hard times. Since my grandfather had been transported off to France to a working camp, she had to make her family get by on her own. One day she stumbled upon my father’s collection of human bones and skulls by accident. He had hidden them in the roof gutter.

He never spoke of those days. What he had seen as a young boy, what had happened to him out there alone, has always remained my father’s secret. He did not tell his mother, his wife, nor his children. I did ask him once. Maybe it was because I was a shy girl, and not very talkative, that he decided to give me an answer that day. ‘I can never talk about it, I’m afraid I’ll lose it if I do,’ he said. He looked at me with his dark earnest eyes. ‘My creativity comes from that source. It’s my Pandora’s Box and I have to guard it.’

At the time I didn’t know what he was talking about. But since then I’ve had a few walks around war zones of my own, and I have a modest collection of bones hidden somewhere deep inside. I think I understand him better. The ugliest of experiences can indeed serve as fertilizer for the soul.