Holding a copy of her book translated into Norwegian, Atefeh Sebdani published a video about the heart-breaking story behind the photo on the cover of the book:
A poor, lonely refugee mother in a foreign country took one day a photo of her beloved children. Children she had scarified and done everything for to keep them alive. But shortly after she would lose them. Manipulated by a cult to think it was for her best as well as for her children. Every day -that was a day of sorrow—she would hear that they had it better off without her.
When truth was that they were living in a hell. Amongst the few things they had got from their mother after being kidnapped by the cult was this photo of them.
About three decades later the daughter of the mother -the girl in the photo- would be asked to write a book. Thereafter a foreign country would ask if they could use tis photo.
The daughter in the photo called her mother and brothers and said:
-I want to show you something before the rest of the world gets to know.
She showed them the translated book, everybody smiled and the mother said:
I don’t know what got into me that day when I just felt I had to take a photo of you in the midst of all hardships.
The daughter knew and said:
It was because of this. But we didn’t know it then. See how life became. Did you ever think… the picture you took that day just before the catastrophe that it was because it one day would become the cover of a book?
Atefeh’s biography titled “My hand in Mine”, “Min hand i min” in Swedish, was first published in the summer of 2023, in Sweden, where she grew up as a survivor of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK/ Cult of Rajavi). Her life story was widely welcomed by the Swedish community.
Today her true story as a little girl who was traumatized by the MEK cult, has opened her way to the Norwegian community. The Norwegian title of the book is “På egen hand” meaning “On your own”.
This is what the Norwegian author website, Ark.no, states to present Sebdani’s book:
When the young Iranian girl Atefeh comes to Sweden with her two little brothers, she does not encounter safety and freedom, but abuse and betrayal.
This is the story of Iranian Atefeh Sebdani who, aged five and together with his two younger brothers, ended up in Sweden while his parents worked in the People’s Mujahedin in Iraq in opposition to the Iranian regime. The book is about being on your own and experiencing betrayal upon betrayal from adults, parents, foster parents and the Swedish authorities. With her foster parents, who were also part of the People’s Mujahedin, or the sect as Atefeh calls it, she experienced several types of abuse. She survived.
Pax.no is another website to introduce the book. There, the review of “On your own” is as the following:
A little girl clings to her mother, but is torn from her mother’s embrace. Later, the girl sits on a bus driving along dusty roads towards an unknown destination. She holds her little brothers around and comforts them with her mother’s last words: We’ll see each other again soon.
Atefeh is five years old when she and her brothers are smuggled to Europe. The parents are soldiers in an Iranian resistance movement and remain in the organization’s military camp. In one fell swoop, the five-year-old is the mother of her brothers.
On my own is a story about growing up with no one to trust but yourself, about abuse being glossed over, and about a society that time and time again fails to see the vulnerable child. But it is also a story about an indomitable will to live and about the courage to finally break free.