Freedom looks like disorder, It smells like decay, And still, it is freedom.
The Scent of Freedom
In the final years of communism, a system built on control, my grandmother—a nurse at a psychiatric hospital in central Poland—used to take me with her to work. I was a child, watching quietly.
The hospital had been established decades earlier, in 1933. During WW2, head of the clinic, Karol Mikulski, took his own life in protest against Germans, who told him to create a list of patients ‘”unpromising recovery”, to exterminate them. He declined.
As a child, I spent hours watching the female patients. Their bodies were managed carefully—restrained, sedated, quieted—so that nothing unexpected would happen. Disorder was feared more than suffering. Order mattered more than freedom.
Yet, “The soul is not a body, nor a name.” *
Escapes happened often.
One day, while sitting on the stone steps outside the building, I stared at a vast bed of red roses in full bloom. Suddenly, a naked woman burst through the doors and ran into the garden. She leapt straight into the roses and rolled among them—like an animal released after years of captivity, touching the world again for the first time.
Sounds rose from her body—raw, instinctive, uncontrollable.
Sounds of joy.The thorns cut her skin. Blood appeared. At the same time, soft petals covered her, falling gently, as if offering comfort. Pain and beauty existed together, inseparable.
It took several minutes before the staff noticed her absence. When they did, they ran. They pulled her from the roses and dragged her back inside.
But for those few minutes, she was happy.
She was free.
Freedom looks like disorder.
It smells like decay.
And still, it is freedom.
Because ‘the soul is not a body,
nor a name’.
Monika K. Adler, The Scent of Freedom. 2026.
* Quote – Jaroslaw Bzoma.
