[Svaneska]

Hello Bassim

here is the rest of your story. . . I hope I have been able to do it justice :

Since I came here I have been asking myself what is wrong with this place. The city is just like any other urban area with streets, shops, people and vehicles. There are thousands of students, youth, workers and immigrants from dozens of different countries. The air is clean, the streets without rubbish, and whenever one goes everything is well organised.

However, something inside me, told me on that sunny spring day, when I took a stroll through the streets that something was wrong. I felt a pain in my soul and could not find the reason. I walked and saw beautiful women enjoying the first sunbeams after the long winter; their blond hair gleamed under the sun and looked like gold. They joked and laughed loudly, their healthy teeth white, like pearls. Hundreds of youths sat on the river bank talking, hugging and kissing. Families with children ate ice-creams or simply enjoyed the sun.

It was an idyllic scene, especially for someone who had just left behind a prison camp, shooting, bomb explosions and ethnic cleansing. I had my own flat now and enough money to live an ordinary life and there was no reason for worries, but something heavy hung over me, heavier than lead.

Once, when I was a teenager I visited a prison camp in my home town, where hundred of thousands of people were killed during the Second World War, many of them slaughtered like animals. I felt such a pain, although of the former prison camp there was almost no trace, but suffering still lingered in the air.

Now, many years later, I felt the same. Something terrible had happened in this beautiful town; injustices had been done to the innocent. As time passed, I met a Swedish woman who told me that this place was well known for its executions in the past. She led me to the place of execution. We went through the forest following a narrow path which went a short way up a hill and when we reached the top I understood why that place had been chosen. One could gaze over the whole town as far as the eye could see. The condemned would have stood under the gallows waiting for the executioner to remove the ladder from under him and the last thing he saw would have been the town and the sky meeting on the horizon. How many of them were innocent? How many of them were "witches", innocent women who were victims of envy and blind hatred?

A few years later I read a book about Sweden, of an English journalist who spent about twenty years in this country and it was the first time I heard about sterilisation of men and women. The last time this operation was performed was in 1975 and I was horrified. More then 63,000 people were victims of the idea that people who are not "suitable" should not have the chance to have a child. It means that many patients in this hospital were among them. Probably, there was a similar bench in the same place where I used to sit, and there a chief of the hospital sat thinking of how many of his patients were going to be sterilised in the following weeks.

I wanted to know where this idea came from, and using the Internet I discovered that already in 1922 these operations were performed/they did these operations on people. Sweden was the first country in the world to establish a National Institute for Race Biology. They started to take pictures of different people and measure their body parts. The idea was to eliminate all "wrong" elements from the Nordic race, which they saw as superior to other races. What is interesting is the fact that the city university and many German universities had a very close cooperation/association. It is not difficult to understand from where Hitler and his henchmen had taken their inspiration. Although we cannot condemn the professor who had good intentions, he wanted to create absolute beauty, but the final result were the gas chambers of Auschwitz and the Holocaust.

Not even Alfred Nobel could have known that the dynamite he created would cause so much suffering in the world.

Once I found some even more interesting information. Already in 1938 students demonstrated against the Jews and wanted to see them expelled from the town! The Second World War had not even started when /before the Second World War even began young men and women who should have been more progressive, behaved instead as narrow-minded idiots.

By chance, I met an old Swedish man who was a teenager at the beginning of the Second World War and asked him to tell me honestly how people behaved during that time. "My dear boy," he said, "I have seen them gathering and celebrating Hitler's birthday and singing songs."

"And what about the Jews?" I asked. "They lived in fear knowing that if the Germans ever occupied Sweden they would end up in gas chambers. By the way, there were already plans for a prison camp for about 8000 Jews where they would await transport to Germany."

Today when I walk the streets and meet older men and women I ask myself how many of them loved Hitler and his ideology. How many of them believed in the supremacy of the Aryans? They must boil/rage inside when they see so many black people and other immigrants on the streets. They must regret the old times when everyone was blond and there was no smell/aroma of curry and other strange spices on the street.

One thing a stranger notices when he meets Swedish people, is that the majority of them have very healthy teeth. I am a person who likes to analyse things and wants to scratch beneath the surface and see what is hidden behind and suddenly/unexpectedly found the information about an experiment conducted by a group of Swedish dentists in the late forties. They wanted to see how sweets affected teeth: they gave huge amounts of candy to a group of mental patients who ate it day after day without ever brushing their teeth. The final result was each one of them/everyone completely destroyed their teeth and the Swedish professors were very satisfied with their experiment. What is horrible is the fact that none of the patients got help with their destroyed teeth and one can only imagine the suffering they had been forced to endure for years. There were about 700 involved and probably many of them came from this hospital.

. . . it won't allow me to post all the text into one box so I shall put the rest into another post. . .