Hidden Girl, The

Finalist in the PEOPLE’S BOOK PRIZE SUMMER COLLECTION 2019 for Non-fiction and First Time Author.

This book charts the author’s long journey of healing from the trauma caused by having to go into hiding as a child and having to deny that she was Jewish. It is not intended as an autobiography or a clinical paper on the healing process but as an account of a very personal inner journey.

Marika Henriques records in words and images how she was shaped and her profession determined by historical events. She was born in Budapest in 1935. During the Holocaust in 1944, separated from her family, she became a hidden child. She was nine years old and those dark times had a profound and lasting effect on her. 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, at the age of twenty-one, in 1956 during the Hungarian uprising. She crossed the border on foot amongst mine fields in temperatures of minus 25 degrees centigrade. Eventually she arrived as a refugee in England and in 1961 she married a Swedish Jew.

In due course she found her vocation and became a Jungian psychotherapist. In doing, so she had to undergo psychoanalysis, during which the drawings and poems poured out of her as part of the healing process. Jung’s ideas were an integral part of the process of understanding herself and her images.

The drawings emerged unbidden, and were drawn quickly, without fully understanding 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, the story of wounding and healing, herself and others.

The culmination of this painstaking journey was to return to her tradition and people. It started with a major surgery and ended twenty years later on the pulpit, the bimah, of a synagogue.

Reviews:

“a therapeutic journey unlike any I have ever read …”

Tania Glynn, New Psychotherapist

“A mis-diagnosis of cancer that led to a major, life-changing operation, might have been the cause of endless resentment. Instead it became the spur to the release of dreams, images and ideas that crossed, to and fro, between her childhood and current life, gradually and through assiduous self-work, offering clarity and relief.”

Lindsay Wells, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist, The Association for Group and Individual Psychotherapy (AGIP) Newsletter

“I believe that this wonderfully honest and thoughtful book can inspire us, and those we work with, to create our own narratives in response to trauma, and journey through a creative act of healing to become who we truly are.”

Elisabeth Hughes MBACP, Private Practice