It all started with the sinking of the Titanic.
Muriel Gardiner, 11, was incensed by what she read in the chronicles: a few deaths with first and last names and the vast majority of victims described only as "
people on board"
, which her mother translated as
"normal people ”
.
For her, born into a rich family in Chicago, the Morris-Swifts, the issue was very unfair, and sowed the seeds of what was to come.
Graduating from Wellesley College, she traveled to Europe, enrolled at Oxford University and later went to Vienna, where she was part of Sigmund Freud's circle (she would later be the founder of the Museum that bears her name in London together with Anna Freud), where received from a doctor.
Her rebellious spirit led her to get involved in the fight against the fascist dictatorship in Austria, and with Mary as a "nom de guerre" she began to work in the resistance: she obtained false passports for those who had to flee the country, and used the contacts that her wealth granted him to
remove people by legal methods
.
They say that one winter night she boarded a train and climbed a mountain to deliver a document in person.
After two failed marriages and a daughter, she married Edward Buttinger, leader of the Austrian Revolutionary Socialists: he and Muriel's daughter would later go to the United States.
Already received as a psychoanalyst, she would meet them there again.
At the outbreak of the Second War,
she dedicated herself from there to obtaining visas to get Jews persecuted by the Nazis out of Europe
, as well as to facilitate their insertion on American soil;
they say that hundreds of her survived from her thanks to her.
When Lillian Hellman published "Pentimento", the book that would make it to the cinema as "Julia", and for which Vanessa Redgrave won an Oscar, Muriel thought she recognized herself in the character, and she asked Hellman.
She never received an answer, but no one doubts that
she was the inspiration
.
In a low profile, Muriel liked to quote what Anna Freud wrote to her in a letter in 1972:
"I love the life I had, but if I had to choose another, that would be yours
. "
She died in 1985, at the age of 84.
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