Johan Gabrielsen

It was just a...

Very different atmosphere.

It was like kind of electric.

You can go into their house and they would be all laughing and dancing around.

And other times when you went in there, they were like almost hiding in the room.

It was such a bizarre environment.

I was a little kid.

I went in to their house to experience that kind of trauma that they experienced.

And the weird thing is that Wallenberg, who I did a documentary about, he was born maybe two kilometers from where I grew up.

in this little island outside Stockholm.

So when we used to play in the forest, people used to come and come to what remains of his house and kind of pay their respect.

That kind of Holocaust story is something also that we grew up with a lot of people in Sweden.

Also because of Wallenberg, the trauma of Wallenberg went on for so long because everybody kind of knew that he was alive, but they couldn't get him out.

Yeah, but there was a lot of transport.

They were called the white buses.

And they were instigated by one of the members of the royal family called the Bernadotte buses, who basically collected a lot of the survivors from the concentration camps and took them to Sweden and gave them care.

And usually they went to America.

A lot of people ended up in Israel.

But the first station of being cared for was actually in Sweden after the war.

I like Japanese writing because I think they have some kind of a sentimentality that kind of appeals to me sometimes.