Peace Stories
April 2003
Banner photo: Nara, Japan [©SEKAI BUNKA PHOTO]
A Turning Point
My parents emigrated from Norway to the United States in 1923, when I was three. My mother was very homesick for Norway and used to talk a lot about how beautiful and right everything was in our native country. As a child I was very frightened by movies about World War I that showed people dying from gas attacks. I vowed that if ever there would be another war, I would escape to Norway, where I would be safe.
When I was a senior in college, World War II broke out and Hitler invaded Norway, my safe place. The fact that the safe space of my childhood was gone really shook me up. I came to realize that there could be no safe spaces on Earth unless there were people who could make them safe. What would that take? I had not yet met any peace activists, but I thought a lot about how one would make peace. I discovered there was a little Quaker group that met in the chapel of our college. I had read about Quakers in history books. Weren't they extinct? No, they were very much alive!
About the same time, Baroness von Trapp and her seven children who had recently escaped Nazi persecution in Austria came to our campus for an afternoon, and interested students were invited to come and meet them. They said nothing about the dangers they had escaped, only spoke of the opportunities for them to contribute to a more peaceful future by traveling across the United States singing and telling stories about the peaceful life they had known in the Austrian mountains before the war. Why were they doing this? To remind Americans that peace could be rebuilt and that we must not let war distract us from the most urgent task of all--to begin rebuilding a world of peace through our own actions right where we lived.
As this beautiful family talked and sang--even the youngest of the children participated--I realized that I too could be a peacemaker! In the year after graduating from college I became a Quaker, took training for peace service in a Quaker civilian training unit for women, met and married Kenneth Boulding, newly arrived from England and already an internationally known peacemaker. He was my teacher, and I have worked for peace ever since.
Elise Boulding is professor emerita of sociology at Dartmouth College and a founder and former secretary-general of the International Peace Research Association.
