Voice Transmissions With The Deceased
by Friedrich Juergenson

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80 CHAPTER 18

Back at Nysund – Bitter memories – For me there remains only one task, only one goal

Three days before Easter our whole family including dog and cat drove again into the country to our property in Nysund by Moelnbo. I had taken my tape recorder and a new radio receiver with me, and installed both in the attic right away.

The weather was unusually beautiful. There was a slight wind from the south and bright cumulus clouds moved across the light blue spring sky. There was a scent of sap, pine needles, moss and thawing earth in the air and though the porous snow hadn’t melted yet, the birds sang with the tireless happiness of spring’s arrival.

Especially here by the forest hill, they were singing the liveliest. It was a wonderful concert of many mating calls with their whistles, trills and chirping introduced around three in the morning by the thrushes and reaching its climax at dawn.

The caretaker of the greenhouses on our property, our friend Hugo F., had also arrived and dove as usual into his work with ambition and delight in gardening. In such semi wilderness spots in the country as in Nysund, where there were not enough people around, the forces of nature always threatened to turn the property into a luxuriant jungle.

But Hugo was tireless and took up the constant battle anew. Nothing could dampen his industrial ness, not even the circumstance that his visual ability had deteriorated dramatically. There was no work that Hugo avoided, he poked around in the greenhouses and in the garden and caulked the windows in the greenhouses, where he fell through the glass roof every now and then. 81 He would then stand up unfazed and continue to work undistracted. Hugo was 73 years young and he had remained the optimist of his youth, which made him so likable.

During the week of Easter we were suddenly surprised by a message that medical counselor, Felix Kersten had died in Germany. I had just recently visited Felix at his home in Stockholm. He was suffering from kidney stones, but participated in our conversation despite the pains. He looked tired and overworked, but his patients were impatiently awaiting his arrival. It was the same old story about doctors. He was not allowed to be sick, because he didn’t have the time for that.

It had become late. We were talking about my tape recording contacts and about the apparent bridge to the unknown living-plane. Felix gave me his book, “Conversations with Himmler”, and wrote a few sentences as dedication into it. We were speaking about the south and about a villa at the Mediterranean, surrounded by pines, and cypresses. For many years I enjoyed Felix’s friendship and knew his childlike, generous ways, and knew what this corpulent man with his small gentle magic hands had achieved in the world of death and misery. Anyone who had a chance to get to know Felix Kersten would most certainly take a liking to him.

No one would have thought, when we said our goodbyes that evening that it would be for the last time.
Considering death, it is very curious. I remember as a little boy being led by a nanny for a walk through the city cemetery in Odessa. Even then I sensed, without of course being able to clothe the feeling into thoughts about the contradictions that were reflected from the graves, crosses, marble plates and monuments. 82 I knew instinctively that everything was pretense, illusion, deception and a staged lie.
In contrast there was light, warmth and movement from the clear sky, from every reed of grass, birds, trees and flowers.

I was to learn about death from a different perspective, when after years, the terror of the civil war came crashing down over Odessa like waves gone wild. At that time, starvation, typhus and cholera existed in the city, and you could helplessly witness the daily death of many people in the street.

It was especially bad on the streets after bloody hand-to-hand combat, facilitated to “liberate” the city by some power hungry people. I remember when one day I had a glimpse of the municipal mortuary, where hundreds of bloody corpses were laid out to be seen by the public. It was a cloudless beautiful spring sky. In the streets, the acacias were in full bloom, and their magic scent filled the whole city.

But my mood was miserable, and a cold cramp tightened my throat. The contradiction was too overwhelming, here blooming life and reincarnation, and there senseless destruction and murder. Despite fear and misery, I didn’t close my eyes in the face of death. I wanted ever more to solve the riddle and to uncover the big contradiction. I still remember, when I later encountered death, I was filled with the feeling I had as a little boy in the cemetery.

After Easter, as my wife drove back to the city with the children, I decided to stay at our cottage with our poodle Carino, and the cat Mitzi, for the sole purpose to devote my spare time to the new task.

83 The work totally absorbed me, it fascinated me in such a way that I often forgot to have meals. I experienced routine insignificant housework as a comforting change because it brought some flexibility to my joints that were stiff from sitting all the time.

Also, Mitzi made sure that I would not sit uninterrupted on the chair because the cat had made himself right at home, at the particular spot where I fed the songbirds. With that I had to be constantly on the watch over the cat in my cottage. At first, Mitzi would sit for hours on end by the kitchen window, with flashing eyes and fletching teeth he would watch the pecking and fluttering birds. After I covered his view with a sheet of cardboard, he revenged himself by relieving himself on my floor.