A Friend Found....

My grandfather, having seen the proverbial writing on the wall, put his small family on a train to Sweden for a holiday, and they simply never went back. In those days, Sweden was relatively safe, but the anti-Semitism was overt and prevalent. My 8 year old father was sent to school in Stockholm, a foreigner, a refugee, a Jew, unable to speak the language…an outcast.  And then he made a friend.

The legend in our family is that Christer’s grandfather worked for the King of Sweden. His people, my grandmother said, ‘were somebody’. Christer’s family had been nobility for centuries. His grandfather lived on the palace grounds and they were well respected. Not royalty, but certainly ‘somebody’ in society. And Christer befriended my father, drew him into his circle, and remained his friend for over 70 years until his death.

As you may imagine, this provided some protection for my father and some acceptance during his childhood. But more importantly, Christer was someone with whom my father could be his complete authentic self, because there was nothing to hide. Christer knew the best and the worst of everything my father had endured.

I remember Christer and his family visiting us when I was a child. My father was Gunther to Christer, but this Gunther was safe, happy, even jovial. My father never had many friends, even superficial ones, because he didn’t like or trust most people. But he loved Christer.  Those visits resonated with joy. They would remind each other of the time they shot a hole in the King’s tuxedo (accidentally of course!) or the time they poached pheasants from royal grounds (a serious crime!) and laugh until the tears were rolling down their faces. When my father received word of Christer’s death, it was the first time I had ever seen him cry.

I am privileged through the magic of social media to be able to communicate with, and even perhaps to befriend in some ways, Christer’s son. My attempts to communicate to him what his father meant to my father have been, I believe, inadequate. I hope when he reads this, he realizes that his father’s gift to my father will live on in the story of our family.