1) MEMORIES FROM THE PAST
The darkness closes tighter and tighter around her, she is weeping and afraid. Her little body is shaking and she is drenched in sweat.
She can hear them running up the stairs, the shouted orders pierce her body like knives. Dogs are barking and with a crash the door is kicked in.
She wakes up. It is almost light outside. The birds are singing and everything is quiet. Still not quite out of her dream she dries away the tears from her face.
She was not yet five years old, but she had been living with these dreams for as long as she could remember. She had tried telling people about what happened to her at night but no one seemed to understand how in some strange way she was living in two worlds at the same time. Her parents insisted on calling her Sara, even though her name was really Anne. She thought that was odd. She had often tried to explain to her mother why she didn't respond when they called out 'Sara'. She hadn't got used to her new name yet.
Sara soon realized that it was not natural at all to those around her, like it was to her, to remember the life they had lived on earth before they were born to this one. For her it was quite natural to remember her family from before. She missed her father, whom she loved and looked up to, but whom she hadn't seen for a long time.
To begin with she thought she was perhaps just on a short visit to the kind people she was living with and who for some strange reason she was supposed to call Mummy and Daddy. But as time went on Sara realized she wasn't Anne any longer and that her father from that life was not going to come and fetch her. She tried to talk to the grown-ups about how weird she thought this was, but she noticed that they just became frightened and that her questions upset them. So she stopped talking about it and kept her questions to herself. It must be a bad thing to remember who you were before, she thought to herself. And as she pushed the memories to the back of her mind, the feeling that she didn't belong in her existence as Sara gradually receded.
But she could not get rid of the dreams. No matter how many years went by, they returned again and again. Almost always with the same fear.
She is trying to hide but is pulled out by a man in uniform. She calls for her father but there is no answer. There is a terrible racket going on. Things are being thrown around the room, furniture is overturned and there are men in uniform everywhere. In her dream she is desperately clutching a book with a red cover, but it is torn from her hands as she is taken away.
Even though she knew that these horrors belonged to another time, she could still not overcome the fear which certain things in everyday life aroused in her: people in uniform, taking a shower, playing hide and seek. Not to mention that to have someone chase her for fun was one of the worst things she could think of. Even though she knew it was a game, she always panicked and began to cry. It was just as embarrassing every time it happened!
Nor could she bring herself to eat certain things---brown beans for instance. She could remember clearly the strange look her mother had given her when she had told her why she couldn't eat brown beans: 'I really ate myself sick on them last time.' Her mother, who had never offered her daughter brown beans before, had just shaken her head and taken the awful beans away.
Sara herself didn't think there was anything strange about these memories at all; she knew where they came from. But her parents were all the more worried. In the end they were so worried that her mother took Sara to a psychiatrist to see if he could possibly explain her behaviour, which was so peculiar sometimes, to say the least. Her mother wondered whether perhaps she had an imaginary friend she called Anne?
The psychiatrist was none the wiser either. Sara was careful not to say a word about her dreams or about her memories from the life she had had before this one. She knew that he wouldn't understand. Just like all the other grown-ups he would only get irritated and try to silence her. So she was perfectly 'normal' when he talked to her. After the examination he could only say that Sara was just like any other six year-old! When Sara started school she learned to read and write quickly. Now suddenly a whole new world opened up to her. New and yet familiar. It seemed perfectly natural to write down all the thoughts that went round and round in her head. She woke up at night, got up, sat down and wrote until the early hours of the morning. She wrote poems and stories. And she wrote in her diary, which she could talk to about everything.
She threw away a lot of what she wrote. Not because she wasn't satisfied with what she had written but because the idea of writing it was just to pour out all the thoughts there were inside her head. The idea that anyone might want to read it never crossed her mind. She liked school and had lots of friends, but she kept her writing to herself.
When Sara was ten years old, her parents took her on a trip round Europe. They were going to visit the big cities like Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam. Paris and Brussels were a bit frightening, she thought, so big and alien. But when they got to Amsterdam she felt as if she had been there before. But she didn't say anything to her parents; they would have been uneasy about her strange ideas.
When they had settled into their hotel, her parents wanted to start by visiting Anne Frank's house. They wanted to see what the place where the Jewish girl had hidden with her parents looked like, and where Anne Frank's diary had been found.
Of course Sara had heard of both the house and the diary, but it had always seemed very strange to her to talk about Anne Frank in school. She couldn't understand how other people also knew that there had been an Anne Frank. And she couldn't bring herself to read the diary they talked about. Sara felt that she wanted her memories left in peace. She wanted to be absolutely sure that she wasn't 'remembering' anything which in fact she had read somewhere.
When her parents were going to ring for a taxi, Sara could not hold her tongue any longer. 'We don't need a taxi at all, it's not far to walk from here.' She was so dead certain that it didn't occur to her parents to object, they just meekly followed her as she walked off.
'We'll soon be there, it's just round the next corner.' Sara herself wasn't at all surprised when they arrived, but her parents stood there speechless and just looked at one another. 'That's strange,' said Sara when they stood in front of the steps up to the house. 'It didn't look like this before.' She looked wonderingly and her parents didn't know what to say.
They entered the house and went up the long narrow staircase. Sara, who had been so carefree when showing them the way, suddenly went quite white in the face. She broke out in a cold sweat and reached for her mother's hand. Her mother was quite horrified when she felt Sara's ice-cold hand in hers. 'But darling Sara, what's the matter?' Her mother stopped and hugged her. 'Don't you want to go in? Shall we go back?' Sara shook her head wordlessly and continued up the stairs hand in hand with her mother.
When they entered the hiding place the same irrational terrors overcame Sara as she had experienced so many times in her dreams. She found it hard to breathe and panic spread through her body. She had to summon every ounce of her will-power so as not to rush out of the room. She felt so cold that she was shaking even though it was high summer, and she couldn't let go of her mother's hand for one second. When they went into one of the smaller rooms, she suddenly stood still and brightened up a little. She looked at the wall in front of her. 'Look, the pictures of the film stars are still there!'
Her mother stared at the blank wall and couldn't understand this at all. 'What pictures Sara? The wall is bare!' When Sara looked again she saw that this was true. The wall was bare! She felt confused. She knew that the pictures had been there. She had seen them just a second before. But now there was nothing there.
Her mother was so confounded that she felt driven to ask one of the guides whether she knew if there had perhaps been pictures on the wall at one time? Oh yes, they had only been taken down temporarily to be mounted under glass so that they wouldn't be destroyed or stolen. Sara's mother didn't know what to say.
'How in the world could you find your way here first of all, then insist that the steps outside were different and then see the pictures on the wall when they weren't there?' Sara's father was full of questions and really rather irritated. But Sara was quite incapable of saying even a single word. She just wanted to get out of there, she felt that she couldn't stand it a moment longer. She asked to be allowed to go out before her parents and when she promised to wait for them outside they let her go.
Her legs felt like jelly as she went down the stairs. She had never before in her life felt so wretched. The tears ran unrestrainedly down her face, and her legs would not carry her. When she reached the bottom step her legs folded under her and she fell.
For a fraction of a second she saw a man in uniform bending over her. He raised his arm to hit her and Sara instinctively covered her face. When she took her hands away she saw some Japanese tourists standing there looking astonished and staring at her. She got up, embarrassed, and went out into the street. It felt as if she couldn't get enough air. She took long deep breaths and tried to calm herself.
When her parents came out they found her sitting by a tree. She was staring, her eyes red with weeping, at the canal which ran past the house. At first she didn't notice them but when her mother bent down and placed her hand on her arm, she threw herself into her mother's arms. She was so shocked by her experience on the stairs that she tried, sniffing and incoherent, to explain what had happened.
Her parents listened and tried to comfort her but they could not in any way begin to understand Sara's 'memories'. The idea that one might live more than one life was completely alien to them, but after the visit to that house they were obliged to admit that Sara must have been there before. Since they knew for certain that she hadn't been there during this life, must it then have been during a previous one?
'I don't for one minute believe in that reincarnation nonsense, but I can't deny that you must have been there before.' Sara's father felt very ill-at-ease with what had happened. This was outside the bounds of normality and he didn't like it. He decided not to talk any more about it. But Sara's mother tried to understand and comfort her as well as she could. She hugged her little daughter and held her on her lap until she had stopped crying. 'Sweetheart, I don't know and I can't understand what you have been through, but you never need to be afraid again. I promise you that I shall always be there and always help you. You are the dearest and best thing in my life and I love you above everything else in the universe.' Sara's mother's words caressed her soul and her spirits gradually lifted.
They continued their journey, but the incident in that house was not mentioned any more. Sara's mother tried to bring the subject up again after they got home but Sara calmed her fears by saying that she felt fine and that she wasn't going around thinking about what had happened at all.
This was only partially true. She knew what she had experienced and what horrors she had undergone. But she knew now that it was a time long past, and that there was no danger of her having to go through that horror during this lifetime on earth.
She had no idea then that there were other people from that time alive again too, and that their paths would cross hers once more. |
