RETURN AND RECOVERY

A psychotherapist's personal experience of the Holocaust

in

words and images

By

MARIKA HENRIQUES

FOREWORD

My intention was to chart an inner journey rather than write an autobiography or a professional article.

I was shaped and my profession was determined by history. I was born in Budapest in 1935. During the Holocaust in 1944, separated from my family, I became a hidden child. I was nine years old. These dark times had a profound and lasting effect on me. That being a Jew was shameful and had to be hidden remained etched deeply into my being for decades.

Fascism was followed by communism. Persecuted once more, now for my middle class background, during the 1956 uprising at the age of twenty-one I escaped from Hungary. I crossed the border on foot amongst mine fields in minus 25 degrees Celsius. Eventually I arrived as a refugee in England.

In 1961 I married a Swedish Jew. In time I found my vocation and became a Jungian psychotherapist.

Occasionally I quote C.G. Jung, who was the founder of Analytical Psychology, best known for his archetypal theory and the collective unconscious. I refer to him at times, because his ideas were an integral part of the process of understanding myself and my images.

There were to be other major endings and beginnings in my life. The images, drawings, tapestries and poems, are woven together with my writing to tell my story. The story of wounding and healing. Myself and others.

To return to my tradition and to my people was a painstaking journey. It started with a major surgery and ended twenty years later on the pulpit, the bimah of a synagogue.

The content of my website is now available as a book (see below), which bears a different title:

THE HIDDEN GIRL

The Journey of a Soul

It can be acquired online from the website of the publisher:

www.shepheard-walwyn.co.uk/product/the-hidden-girl/

and from Amazon:

www.amazon.co.uk/Hidden-Girl-Journey-Soul/dp/0856835226