A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz (10 page)

Not now and not later.

In the spring of 1943, Czesław Miłosz writes about the carousel in Krasiński Park in Warsaw. It’s a carousel that has been the subject of much writing and testimony. From the carousel in Krasiński Park in the spring of 1943, you can see and hear the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto. The carousel doesn’t stop while the ghetto is liquidated. Nor does the music. The Warsaw ghetto is liquidated to the music and laughter from a carousel in a park just outside its walls. This is on the days after Easter, and the last Jews in the ghetto have begun an uprising, and German soldiers are burning house after house, and the people whirling around on the carousel in Krasiński Park are enjoying the spring and the warmth as the last Jews of the ghetto are liquidated before their eyes.

Nothing new there, of course, it’s well known that people are capable of living as if nothing’s going on even when the most atrocious things are happening around them. In all wars, even the cruelest, even right alongside the fields of battle and slaughter, people try to live as if nothing has happened: to enjoy a
meal, a night’s sleep, a healthy stomach, a good laugh, a moment of forgetting. It’s not always possible, and not everyone can do it, but life doesn’t stop in the presence of death. Especially not there. In the presence of death, life itself can become the only thing of value. In the big diary of the Łódź ghetto, entries about death transports, fatal shootings, and suicides are interleaved with entries about grass growing, butterflies fluttering, and people streaming outdoors on a warm spring Sunday.

On Friday, April 23, 1943, a stork is sighted in the ghetto in Łódź, and in Warsaw the carousel in Krasiński Park whirls on.

While the Warsaw ghetto burns and the Łódź ghetto delivers up its children and the gas vans in Chełmno air out their compartments, feverish building activity is transforming the place where the man who gets on the train at Radogoszcz will eventually get off to start his life afresh. “Lofty pines, their crowns swept by the wind from the sea for many decades, are now succumbing to the woodcutter’s ax,” reports the local paper as a new part of town goes up in the Näset district below the red-brick station house at Södertälje Södra, where the big trains always make a brief stop on their way to and from the world.

The world’s in flames, and in the little town of Södertälje, in the little country of Sweden, they’re building houses and trucks as never before. Maybe not trucks so much as armored vehicles and tanks. Production of the SKP M-43 armored vehicle gets under way in late 1943, and production of the SAV M-43 assault artillery gun, consisting of a large gun mounted on a tank chassis, starts in March 1944. The chassis derives from a Czech tank
that Scania-Vabis is building on license from Hitler’s Germany, since Hitler’s Germany has occupied Czechoslovakia, taken possession of the tank factory for its own use, and stopped the tank deliveries to Sweden.

What can one say? One man’s meat is another man’s poison?

No, that’s too harsh, though I know there are those who think like that. The world in flames is, after all, out of sight for the people who happen to live here. There’s no need for them to turn their heads away so as not to see. In their world, there are no houses burning in the next street, no neighbors being liquidated behind the carousel. They can imagine a summer following this one, and another beyond that, and feel the spring breezes from Havsbadet caress their cheeks, and hear the ax blows echoing through the pines, and be happy about all the houses that must be built to make homes for all the people coming to the little town to build all the armored vehicles that a world in flames demands. And eventually the trucks that will be in demand to help rebuild a world in ashes. In a place like this, the world can remain what it has always been and simultaneously become better than ever. The new houses rising in the cleared area below the railroad station all have laundries with washing machines and electric mangles, and the new apartments all have central heating and a bathroom and a kitchen or kitchenette, and between the kitchen and the hall a sliding, wood-veneer door, to save space. The installation of radiators and sinks in the Gondola quarter has unfortunately been delayed by a shortage of materials, by road haulage problems, and by military call-ups. A single day sees the call-up of twelve workers at the Edoff engineering firm, which is building houses both for the HSB housing cooperative and for itself, “and you can imagine how that might turn out.”

The shortage of materials we can also understand; there’s a war going on out there, after all, and the road haulage problems can be explained by the fact that the trucks have been called up too. But confidence is high, and the Gondola quarter is ready for its tenants to move in as scheduled, on New Year’s Day, 1944, and the little town with the big factory is experiencing a boom, and there are far more employment opportunities than housing vacancies, and below the railroad station they’re building not just a new town district but actually a new cityscape.

Yes, that’s the word, cityscape. A bit unfamiliar still, but the language, slowly but surely, is adapting to the new frontiers. The apartment blocks in the new cityscape have two staircases and three floors, extending sideways rather than upward, but even so, the blocks are generally referred to as high-rise buildings. Buildings more than two stories tall are emblems of a new age, signaled by their name: high-rise. There are also plans for a skyscraper in the area, that is, an eight-story tower block, which indicates the lofty ambitions for the emerging cityscape. Nonetheless, another ambition is that the apartment blocks are to be built “with such space between them as to make the living quarters light and pleasant.” Admittedly, plans for a park are abandoned to make way for more high-rise blocks, but who needs a park when the forest begins where the cityscape ends?

Summer 1943 sees the completion of the main street between the mushrooming rows of high-rises. Lofty ambitions here, too. On each side of the nine-meter-wide roadway are a pavement and a cycle path, each two meters in width, the pavement naturally farthest from the street. Between the cycle path and the street lies a protective strip of grass, two meters wide and planted with rowan trees. When it comes to the street paving, ambitions have had to be lowered a bit due to the war and the
resulting asphalt shortage, and the cityscape must make do with paving stones. The stones have been given to the local authorities for free by the government, which has ample stocks of them, but they’re more expensive to bring in and more labor-intensive to lay, and they simply don’t feel quite right for a cityscape of the latest design. Paving stones cause more wear on automobile tires and are more uneven to drive on and would be out of the question in normal circumstances, but the circumstances aren’t normal and the cycle paths are stone-paved too because heavy cycle traffic is predicted, especially in summer when the caravans of bikes down to Havsbadet are expected to use the new road through the new cityscape. The impression of a route through green spaces between the cityscape and Havsbadet is to be maintained as far as possible, and a strip of forest is to be retained between the railroad and the port area, although plans for the cityscape at Näset are as changeable, and sometimes as unreal, as the reports from the war that is said to be going on out there somewhere. Whenever possible, it seems, the local paper likes to feature news of current plans for the cityscape next to the latest war reports, a bit like the ghetto diary in Łódź, where an entry about the storks’ arrival is followed by entries about the delivery of children to German transports.

On October 22, 1943, the front page of the local paper notes that the lively building activities at Näset have foregrounded the issue of a new junior school in the area. I read this with specific interest since it’s my own future that’s thus foregrounded. On the same front page, in the adjoining column, it’s reported that all remaining Jews in the Netherlands have been arrested and taken to “the concentration camp in Westerborg.” The camp is actually called Westerbork, and those taken there are soon to be forwarded to the gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau, but
there’s no mention of that in the paper. What does receive mention is the new junior school’s planned location on a hill near the separator factory in Baltic, where there’s room for “a good-sized playground.” On January 12, 1944, the paper also reports plans for a Sunday school and a kindergarten in “this hastily built part of town,” and in the adjoining column reports that the Russians have launched an assault on the Crimea and that top Fascist leaders, including Count Ciano (pictured), have been executed in a prison yard in Verona.

What strikes me is how casually the two worlds coexist on these front pages: the small world and the large, the ax blows and the world fire, the survival and the destruction, the self-evident and the inconceivable. I’m also struck by how much of the inconceivable is actually published, sometimes splashed across the whole front page in big black headlines. On December 12, 1942, three columns are devoted to the fact that a million Jews have “died” in Poland. The statement itself is short and laconic, its source the Polish government in exile in London, and there’s no explanation of how and why a third of the Jewish population of Poland has suddenly perished, but it’s still worth pointing out that even inconceivable events are noted in print in the little town with the big truck factory. The next column reminds readers that the balloting to choose who will wear the crown of light in the 1942 Södertälje Lucia procession will close at nine that evening, and that the candidates will be on display at 7:30, and that this information “may be of interest to those who would like to see the seven young ladies before casting their vote.”

On May 8, 1943, the paper notes that Södertälje “is holding its own as a summer resort,” with the boardinghouses virtually fully booked from June to August, and two weeks later, on May 22, 1943, early season guests may read the following report in the
same paper: “In the fog of war, the latest manifestations of Germany’s persecution of the Jews stand out as a horrific symptom of the barbarism of our age. In Warsaw, the Jewish quarter was firebombed and the water supply turned off to hinder all efforts to fight the fire.… According to one source, which of course cannot be verified, two million Jews have been killed in Poland.”

Jews are certainly not an everyday feature in Södertälje in the late spring of 1943, and it’s by no means clear that any of the residents reading about the two million dead Jews have ever met a Jew in the flesh. The small town with the planned cityscape is at this time inhabited by sixteen thousand people, and in the small country as a whole there are only eight thousand Jews, and there’s no evidence that many of them are living in Södertälje. In fact, you can hardly find any foreigners here at all. When Södertälje counts its foreigners in the national census of February 1939, it locates about fifty. The front page of the local paper notes—with a certain surprise (but still notes)—that “only four people [are] of Jewish descent.” Or is it relief? The little newspaper makes no explicit admissions, but it has hitherto had very little positive to say about people “of Jewish descent.” Or about the people referred to as
tattare
(a pejorative for “travelers”). On March 22, 1939, a month after the Census of Aliens, it’s reported as the most natural thing that “a
tattare
pulled a knife at Tvetavägen.” Pulling knives is what
tattare
generally do, we learn from the local paper. On December 5, 1941, readers are informed that “the knife-wielding
tattare
Torvald Lindgren, wanted since June for his knifing exploits, has finally been caught.”
Tattare
and Jews are people whom the residents of the little town have learned over the years to view with fear and aversion. Jews do not pull knives but prefer slinking around the countryside, tricking gullible housewives into buying shoddy imitation goods at
exorbitant prices. “Beware of the fabric Jews!” warns the front page of the local paper on July 2, 1941. On the same page, German troops are heading for Leningrad. What proportion of the fabric Jews are also actual Jews remains unclear. The body of the article mentions an “itinerant salesman of foreign origin,” whose crime, it’s said, is that he sells some suit fabric worth 75–90 kronor for 170 kronor. It’s far from clear whether or not a crime, in the legal sense of the word, has been committed at all, but that’s not the point. The point is to warn readers, who belong to a nation of people “quite reserved and untalkative in their everyday dealings,” not to let strangers into their homes and get carried away by a volubility that “exceeds all bounds.” The same article notes that a “suit Jew” recently operating in the area “plied his customers generously with spirits he brought with him” and then “brazenly” took advantage of the liquid refreshment’s effects. The increase in reports of dead Jews out in the world is matched by a decrease in the number of reports of Jews lurking about the countryside, though this does not prevent the local paper, as late as December 6, 1944, from putting on its front page the story of the “clever clothes Jew” who made raincoats from sheeting.