Some years back I read a book with the title, And the Wolves Howled: Fragments of Two Lifetimes. The author was Barbro Karlen, a Swedish woman who claims to be the reincarnation of Anne Frank. Anne was the Jewish Dutch girl whose diary, found after her death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, made her the most famous victim of the Holocaust. The diary was found in the attic of the house in Amsterdam where her family had hidden until an ill-wisher betrayed them to the Nazis. It was translated into many languages and became emblematic of personal resistance to the organized machinery of evil.

Though I’d read Barbro Karlen’s book some years ago, recently I’d felt an urge to read it again. Unable to find my original copy in the overstuffed bookshelves that surround most rooms of our home, I sent for a new copy. It took some time to get here and seems different in certain respects from the edition I had read earlier. 

For example, in the (I think mistaken) belief that this will make her account more objective, here the author tells some of her story in the third person. Even her own name is changed. Since, midway through, we find photographs of Karlen from the age of two up to the time of the book’s publication, the author’s identification with the story she tells can’t be overlooked – not even provisionally.

In addition, this account omits one incident from the first version that I thought possibly probative. Her book had come under attack from numerous quarters, including societies formed to commemorate Anne Frank. Meanwhile, for some practical reason, she had gone to see someone (a cousin I think it was) with whom Anne Frank had been close. He now lived in Switzerland. When she knocked on his door, getting ready to explain her presence to whichever stranger might answer her ring, there was the cousin himself standing at the door. Instantly and tearfully they embraced!

Why do I feel so gripped by her story? Well, over a span of years I’d been visited by a sense of having been, in the early 1930’s, a young German-Jewish woman living in hiding from the Nazis. A neighbor had betrayed me along with others. All were loaded into the back of a truck parked in the street outside. The truck was sealed and carbon monoxide was then pumped into it.

One incident from that supposed memory remains vivid. As I exited my body in death, I rose high enough to get a wide view of events on earth. I could see the earth’s curvature, yet take in the human actions far below. And what became visible was the global extensiveness of this murder-the-Jews project. Because of certain weaknesses in the German social fabric, it had first become actionable there. But, as a phenomenon, it was and would be world-wide. Here’s what I thought as I saw this:

This is an outrage. 

It should not be tolerated.

I resolve to come back and fight it.

My tools have been the two books I wrote, and probably some of the talks that I’ve given. Of course, I’m not a Nazi-hunter but I have fought it – the murder-the-Jews project – and fought it most earnestly, to the extent that I was able within the frame of ordinary life.

And Barbro Karlen? Personally, I’m inclined to take her at her word, whatever that comes down to in real-life terms. In this life, she’s had to fight calumny and persecution in work situations (where she was a mounted policewoman and dressage competitor) unrelated to any past-life claims.

I can dredge up analogous experiences – in fact quite a tediously long train of them – from personal and professional life. Also, for some years, small incidents would occur that appeared to affirm the reality of the past-life memory that I’ve described. Then, at a certain point, the confirming incidents ceased, so that by now even their colors and contours have faded from memory.

What can we make of such seeming memories? They may reflect sympathetic identification with some sufferer, known or unknown, from a bygone time and place – a past time that it now becomes safe to remember. Such memories, however regarded – veridical or not – strike me as a responsibility.

In the lives we live today, the evil thus remembered should find –

no rationalization or shelter –

no hiding place.

Related Content: Confessions of a Young Philosopher | A Good Look at Evil | God and the Care for One’s Story Discussion