Editor’s Note: This entry for June 30, 1934, written by the Swedish novelist Gustav Sandgren, offers a timely reminder of the precarious nature of freedom.
Headline: “Wanderers on the Face of the Earth” [Sweden]
The train moved out from the small station. He sat on the bench opposite me, his little dark-clothed body nervously twitching, his long white hands moving like disturbed birds. His eyes blinked behind silver-bowed eyeglasses. And I listened to him, while the landscape glided by as in a dream, silent and contourless.
“I tell you I am afraid,” he said. “You know I am an emigrant, and that I have saved my life by running away from Germany. Still it is not those facts that upset me. I am not afraid of anything happening to my body, it is not death I talk of. It is something other. Something dreadful beyond words. Something that happens not only to me, but to the whole world. You understand?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes, yes,” he said. “Pardon me I — I mean I have seen and felt ten millions of respectable citizens, of kind, labouring folks suddenly turn bandits, bloodhungry animals, craving for men to put to death by kicks and blows. I say to you, I have felt it, seen it, seen my best friend and neighbour, a peaceful clerk with ink-spots on his fingertops turn wild, heard him hammer at my door with an axe to get in and kill me. Yet it is not the facts I shrink from — it is the thing behind it, the evil power, the nothingness of all that we called human thoughts and feelings. We have been cheated, we are cheated, the whole of mankind. We have lived on illusions and now they are withdrawn from under our feet… ”
“But in this country you are safe,” I tried to soothe him.
“Nobody is safe, I am afraid. I say I am afraid. It is nameless ugly things that begin to darken over us, that are to come. I seek to calm myself, but I can’t, I can’t….”
His poor little figure hooked in the corner, his clammy hands fastening to the window strap. The train moved very fast, it was as if we were thrown forward through a mist of green, through a green dead dream.
And I felt his fear.
This piece appears in 365 Days, an anthology of what we would today call flash fictions, inspired by a newspaper headline and story for each day in 1934, that was edited by the American writer Kay Boyle and her then-husband Laurence Vail, along with their Irish friend Nina Conarain.