The Hidden Girl

Marika Henriques was born in Budapest in 1935. During the Holocaust in 1944, separated from her family, she became a hidden child. That being a Jew was shameful and had to be hidden remained deeply etched into her being for decades. Fascism was followed by communism after the war. Persecuted once more, now for her middle class background, she escaped during the Hungarian uprising in 1956. She crossed the border on foot through mine fields in temperatures of minus 25 degrees centigrade. She arrived as a refugee in England and married a Swedish Jew in 1961. In due course she found her vocation and became a Jungian psychotherapist. Jung's ideas were an integral part of the process of understanding herself and after undergoing psychoanalysis, drawings and poems poured out of her as part of the healing process. The drawings emerged unbidden and were drawn quickly, without fully under-standing what they signified. But over the years she has stitched 19 of them as tapestries. The gentler pace of stitching was all a part of the healing process, and they are woven together with the drawings and poems in the book as she unfolds her story.