A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz (12 page)

The furious pace is set by the wartime market. In Södertälje, the wartime market is booming. From 1941 onward, all curves are rising. The boom starts before the war and accelerates from that point on. The war’s good for Södertälje, which is growing after twenty years of stagnation. The war’s good for the production of trucks, armored vehicles, and penicillin. The war’s good for a town and a land of undamaged factories. The war’s good for the small pharmaceutical company, which during these years quadruples its turnover and triples its staff and becomes a major industry. The war’s good for the big truck factory, which during these years grows into a global business and needs to recruit people from far and wide.

It all comes as a surprise to Södertälje, which has not prepared itself for the role of rapidly expanding immigrant town or planned any housing for the new workers who stream in by the thousand. “Housing emergency” becomes a charged phrase in Södertälje during these years, and ending the housing emergency is seen as the final step in building the new and better society whose establishment will be completed as soon as the war is over.

Any way you look at it, the war’s good for the building contractors; they go full throttle during these years and can only regret that the war prevents them from procuring the manpower and materials to go faster and build more. For the time being, the big truck company has to advertise in the local paper for rooms and apartments for its employees. “Rent guaranteed,” it says. For the time being, the big truck company will also have to build bachelor barracks on its own property, basic accommodations for single male workers that cause a certain level of concern in the community, since the term “bachelor barracks” has a bad ring to it. Many marriages are postponed because of the housing emergency,
says the local paper. Many fear that the housing emergency could lead to social unrest.

What’s feared most, however, is the peace crisis—yes, that’s what it’s called—by which is meant a major slump as soon as the guns fall silent, or even a deep depression like the one after the previous war, when Södertälje’s economy ground to a halt.

The war has been good for Södertälje and many people are anxious about what will happen when peace breaks out and the world is lying in ruins.

Be that as it may, there it is, the newly created cityscape below the railroad station on the other side of the new railroad bridge across the widened canal, waiting to come in your way.

You all are very lonely, I imagine. As lonely as the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto when they hear the music and laughter from the carousel in Krasiński Park. As lonely as the last people in a world that no longer exists, and which the people in the world that now exists have already forgotten.

Even before the fire is out, they’ve already forgotten the flames.

You’re very lonely at the station in Radogoszcz.

It’s full of people, of course: all of you who are to depart and who are now being squeezed together into the little assembly area in front of the cattle cars, and all the policemen and soldiers and dogs surrounding you, and the many inhabitants of the Germanized town of Litzmannstadt, who on this day, as on all days, are passing by in their separate world on the other side, and who cannot avoid seeing you as you mount the narrow wooden ramps and cram yourselves into the dark cars with the air vents covered by barbed wire and vanish from sight behind heavy doors that are slammed shut and bolted from the outside. Maybe they say something to each other about how much cleaner the town will be now that the ghetto has been liquidated and all traces of the Jews are gone.

The train, its cattle cars bursting with living people—the whites of their eyes are occasionally seen glittering through the sealed air vents—travels on ordinary railroad tracks through ordinary towns inhabited by ordinary people who occasionally look up from their ordinary activities to see what it is that’s passing by.

In a cattle car rolling through the German camp archipelago, the narrator in Jorge Semprún’s novel
The Long Voyage
has been able to get a standing place by the air vent and looks out over a world that is no longer his. On one occasion the train stops at Trier, a traditional German town in the beautiful Moselle Valley, which the narrator recalls from his childhood. At the station in Trier, he sees people gradually realize that this isn’t a train like any other. They’re talking agitatedly among themselves and pointing to the air vents in the freight cars, and a little boy who
hears what they’re saying shakes his head angrily and rushes off to get a big stone, which he hurls at the air vent with all his might, coming close to smashing the face of the man standing next to the narrator behind the barbed wire.

It’s a long journey. People die on their feet.

Even young men die on their feet.

The young man standing next to the narrator dies on his feet, too.

I try to imagine the loneliness in the cars.

The loneliness of the moment when the door of the car is bolted behind you and the world as you’d recently understood it definitively leaves you.

Eighteen months later, in a letter to the young woman who is to be my mother, you write of “the nightmarish night in the railroad car on the way to hell.”

That’s all you write about the start of your journey.

A lifetime later. At the opening of an art exhibit in Linköping, I meet Sara. Sara’s a small woman with a shy smile and restlessly glittering eyes who comes up to my friend Peter, the artist, and asks if he can give her a lift to the funeral of her friend Ester the next day. The Jewish cemetery in Norrköping is over two hundred years old but still has some space left, Peter explains to me. It’s a very nice cemetery, he adds, and free of charge, if you want to lie there.

No, Norrköping is not my place on earth, and hopefully not beneath it either, but tomorrow it will become Ester’s place, and perhaps eventually Sara’s, just as it has already become the place for many others who chose to make this their last stop on the road from Auschwitz.

I ask Sara Fransson, born Sara Leczycka in Poland on February 4, 1927, where she once came from, and she replies Łódź.

And then from Auschwitz, of course, she adds.

And then? I ask.

What do you mean, “then”? she seems to wonder. I survived Auschwitz, what else is there to say?

Yes, but by what road did you come from Auschwitz? I insist.

I seize every opportunity to ask about the road from Auschwitz, since every road from Auschwitz is an individual miracle unto itself, as distinct from the road
to
Auschwitz, which is a collective hell shared by each and every one. The road from Auschwitz follows the most shifting routes, veers off to the most unpredictable destinations, and comes through the most unexpected places. Those who are on the road from Auschwitz are
all exceptions, just as every road from Auschwitz is an exception. And since the few who reach the end of the road alive have rarely traveled the same road, it’s all too easy for the roads from Auschwitz to sink into oblivion.

Christianstadt, do you know anything about Christianstadt? asks Sara. Is there a place called Christianstadt? She was only seventeen on the road from Auschwitz and can’t remember for sure if that was the name of the place, or even if it exists, but if there is a place called Christianstadt, then it’s a place on her road from Auschwitz to Linköping.

No, I’ve never heard of Christianstadt, as I had once never heard of Vechelde or Watenstedt or Uchtspringe or Wöbbelin. And since I’ve set myself the task of digging those places out of oblivion, I also dig out Christianstadt, which proves to be a small town in eastern Germany that after the war becomes a small town in western Poland and changes its name to Krzystkowice and over time is reduced to a suburb of Nowogród Bobrzański. During the war there was a munitions factory in Christianstadt, owned by Deutsche Dynamit Aktiengesellshaft, DAG, previously Alfred Nobel & Co., which was the main reason the Germans set up a slave labor camp here in July 1944. The camp was sited at Schwedenwall, the Sweden wall, in the forests west of the town, and since the delicate and dangerous work of packing explosives into grenade casings was considered particularly suited to young women with deft fingers, the SS leadership in Auschwitz received a special order from the former Nobel & Co. in Christianstadt for female slave laborers. In late August or early September 1944, the order was dispatched by railroad freight cars, about ten carloads with altogether about five hundred women, recently delivered to Auschwitz from the ghetto in Łódź. The slave labor camp in Christianstadt was under the
administration of the concentration camp at Gross-Rosen (today Rogoźnica in southwestern Poland), and when Sara Fransson much later writes down her memories, Gross-Rosen is the name she remembers.

The summer and autumn of 1944 is the time of hastily established slave labor camps in rapidly disintegrating Nazi Germany. The flow of civilian forced labor from occupied Europe is drying up, and German industry turns its gaze on the concentration camps. This is the time when the roads from Auschwitz open up. The war industry needs slave laborers, and the German annihilation machine is asked to provide them. The request is a source of some conflict, since the German annihilation machine needs to kill people, while the German war machine needs to keep them more or less alive. The conflict remains unresolved to the last. People are annihilated and people are delivered.

It happens that German industrial managers turn up in person at the gas chambers and crematoriums in Auschwitz to make sure that Jews are being delivered rather than annihilated. Wherever German industries need slave labor, makeshift slave labor camps are set up, sometimes on the factory property, sometimes inside the factories themselves, sometimes in the middle of German cities and towns. Behind the retreating German front, a rapidly growing and increasingly incomprehensible archipelago of slave camps, through which the reluctantly opening roads from Auschwitz unfathomably fork and branch, unexpectedly changing direction and destination as German industries are bombed to pieces and the slave camps are of no use any longer, and the slave transports on their circuitous journeys are left with the primary task of removing all traces of themselves.

In front of me I have a list of names of places no one remembers anymore, or at least doesn’t remember them the way you must have remembered them when, much later, you try to forget them.

Much later, I follow in your tracks on your road from Auschwitz.

On road number 191, between Neu Kaliss and Heiddorf, in Landkreis Ludwigslust, in the German federal state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, just east of the former border between East and West Germany, I am photographed. The photograph is taken through the windshield of a rental car, an Opel Astra with the registration number EU AO 2199, and my gaze is set on the distant view, as is recommended when driving, and therefore I don’t see the camera that takes the photograph. Perhaps I should have seen it, or realized it might be there; my gaze, however, is focused not on speed cameras but on the well-kept villages that keep passing by in the snowy landscape, on their pretty, half-timbered houses, lining the road as I pass through, and on the sensibly dressed people making their way along the slushy pavements as if they all know exactly where they’re going.

I don’t know exactly where I’m going, because the road I’m trying to follow doesn’t always lead where I expect, and sometimes doesn’t seem to be where it ought to be. It’s true that the road is narrow and winding in places, and that I’m apparently driving at eighty-two kilometers an hour on a stretch where the limit is fifty, but there’s very little other traffic on the road and my thoughts are flying off in all directions, and one of the thoughts flying off is that not a single human being knows at this moment where I am and where I’m going.

Nobody except Frau Gorny at the traffic monitoring unit in Landkreis Ludwigslust in the German federal state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, it turns out. In a letter bristling with official crests, enclosing pictorial evidence, that finds its way with impressive speed to my home address in Stockholm, Frau Gorny brusquely informs me that on 4.3.2005 at 12:49 I infringed §55 of the law pertaining to violations of the public order,
Gesetzes über Ordnungswidrigkeiten
; I’m exhorted to admit my guilt by return of post and to pay what it costs (€225.60). It’s a formal, correct letter, addressing me as “Highly esteemed Herr Rosenberg,” and offers me the option of denying the charge within one week.