MARISOL ESTER ROJAS

Chilean refugee who became a Karolinska children's nurse and hummed through the night

When the plane from Santiago landed at Arlanda in January 1974 it was minus twelve degrees, and Marisol Rojas was wearing sandals. A Swedish Red Cross volunteer gave her a coat, a hat and a cinnamon bun, and she cried, not from the cold but because it was the first time in four months that a stranger had been kind to her without wanting anything in return.

Born in 1951 in Valparaíso, the daughter of a docker and a schoolteacher, Marisol was twenty-two and in the final year of nursing at the Universidad de Chile when the coup of September 1973 changed everything. After weeks in hiding, and with help from the Swedish embassy in Santiago, she left the country with one suitcase and her mother's rosary. She never spoke in detail about those weeks; she spoke instead about Sweden's gift, which she called 'a second life with central heating'.

She learned Swedish in six months, requalified as a nurse at Karolinska Institutet and in 1980 joined the Astrid Lindgren Children's Hospital at Karolinska University Hospital in Solna. For thirty-six years she worked in paediatric oncology, the ward where the nights are longest. She had a way of making the smallest patients feel safe: she hummed Violeta Parra's 'Gracias a la vida' under her breath on night shifts, and children who could not sleep for anything else slept to it.

In 1977 she married Mats Lindholm, a Swedish teacher she met at a solidarity concert for Chile, and they raised Camila and Daniel in a flat in Hägersten, where Sundays meant empanadas, Fridays meant cinnamon buns, and conversation switched mid-sentence between Spanish and Swedish. She co-founded a Chilean-Swedish friendship association that helped hundreds of refugees from Latin America find work, housing and each other. She never moved back to Chile, but visited every other year to see her sister Gloria and swim in the Pacific, 'to check it was still there'.

Marisol died on 21 October 2025 at home in Stockholm, with Mats and her children beside her and Violeta Parra on the stereo. She leaves Mats, Camila, Daniel, her sister Gloria, three grandchildren and hundreds of former patients and families who remember the nurse who hummed.

“Be kind first. The explanations can wait.”