A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz (20 page)

This camp is not to be confused with the concentration camp next door, which has been burned to stop the spread of epidemics. The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp is liberated by the British on April 15, 1945, and while the world for a short time is receptive to the unbearable, it’s the unbearable images from the liberation of Bergen-Belsen that the world is seeing.

As the years go by, the displaced persons camp, as it is called, becomes unbearable in another way, because for many of those displaced here, there seems to be no way out. Their old world no
longer exists, and the new world is none too eager to let itself be theirs. By the end of 1946 there are still 250,000 Jewish survivors in European camps for displaced persons waiting for somewhere to go. The Bergen-Belsen camp remains in operation until 1950.

On the map of the displaced, the road to Sweden hardly figures at all. Nearly all of them pin their hopes on the road to America or Palestine. That’s also true for most of those who in June and July 1945 are allowed to take the road to Sweden, at the request of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. UNRRA is up and running as early as November 1943, but for as long as the war lasts, neutral Sweden will have nothing to do with it. After the war, the situation appears in a new light, and on June 1, 1945, the Swedish government decides to give temporary refuge to “some ten thousand children and invalids” from the refugee camps of Europe. “The Swedish government feels unable to turn down a request of this nature,” explains Gustav Möller, minister for social affairs, to the Lower House of the Swedish Parliament on May 25, 1945. He emphasizes that the refuge is of limited duration, a matter of months, until the health of the sick has improved enough for them to move on elsewhere.

It’s plain that he’s addressing a public opinion not altogether congenial to his project.

On what grounds you’re selected for one of the transports to Sweden remains unclear. You’ve been ill, of course (typhus), and when you’re liberated you weigh eighty pounds, and you have nowhere to go, but the same is true for many others. Perhaps the mysterious promise made at Ravensbrück plays some part; somehow, Sweden’s already on your map, and perhaps as a consequence, you’re on Sweden’s. The Jewish men from the Łódź ghetto who survive the selection on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the slave labor at the Büssing factories in Braunschweig,
and the meandering death transport from Watenstedt to Ravensbrück, and the black hole of Wöbbelin, are virtually all transported to Sweden through the good offices of the Red Cross in the summer of 1945.

David Rosenberg. Entered July 18, 1945. Passport control, Malmö.

There are still some places to rescue from oblivion. One of them, strangely enough, was mine before I discovered it had once been yours. It’s actually more than strange that the place has been both yours and mine, a most improbable coincidence, in fact, bordering on the impossible. After all, it’s a place that can hardly be detected on the map, even with a magnifying glass. In any event, it’s a very small place on the edge of a very big forest that stretches for miles in this sparsely populated country, where elk are more common than people and the narrow forest roads are seldom frequented by anyone except the few who for some inscrutable reason live and work here. But it’s a place of great beauty, especially in summer, when the black water behind the hydroelectric dam on the River Ore glitters invitingly against the clear blue sky above the pine trees, and the air fills with the scent of needles and resin, and sunlit fields and pastures peep through the trees, and the small village on the shore of Lake Ore nestles in the gossamer green of unfurling leaves on dazzling white trunks of birch.

The little place is called Furudal and is situated in the vast forest belt between Rättvik in Dalarna and Bollnäs in Hälsingland; as I say, it’s not a place you might accidentally pass through on the way to somewhere else, but a place you come to only if you know in advance that this is exactly where you’re going, which few people have a reason to know. Before May 1974 I had never heard of Furudal, but I did know in advance that it was where I was going, first by train to Rättvik, then by bus through Ovanmyra, Boda, and Gulleråsen to Furudal, and Furudals Bruk,
the estate of a former ironworks a bit farther to the north. In the old manor of the estate, at the edge of a dark forest by a black pond, I was to spend two weeks taking a crash course in French, with the blessings and support of my then employer. It was all beautifully planned, and the conditions for intense language learning were probably the best, but Furudal became important in my life for mainly nonlinguistic reasons (French still eludes me). Quite simply, I fell in love with the place, which largely had to do with the fact that I fell in love with a woman in this place, meaning that in this very place my life took a turn. Such places tend to linger on in life even after one’s links to them are broken and life has taken a few more turns. In this case, my link to the place wasn’t broken. For many years I returned to Furudal, motivated by a number of apparently unconnected reasons, though the underlying and unifying reason must have been an invisible attraction to the memories the place evoked.

So you must understand my astonishment, I might even say shock, when, a lifetime later, I’m confided with a yellowing bundle of handwritten letters dating from the winter and spring of 1946. I say confided because they’re mostly love letters. They’re the letters you write to the woman who is to be my mother after you’ve found out she’s alive and you can no longer imagine life without her. These are joyful letters and desperate letters and letters of life and death, and the letter on top has the dateline Tappudden-Furudal, which I don’t have to know Polish to understand. “Tappudden-Furudal 15/1 46,” it says in the top right-hand corner. Your handwriting is small but clear, every letter distinct and separate, almost like printing, and I read the heading over and over again, wondering for a moment if there might be more than one Furudal in Sweden, but I already know that Tappudden
is a point on Lake Ore and that your Furudal must also be my Furudal and that this is precisely where you are when on January 15, 1946, you receive a postcard, sent to you by the World Jewish Congress, which passes on greetings from a certain Hala Staw, to whom you can write via Komitet Żyd at 32 Sródm. in Łódź or via A. Borensztajn in Hohne Belsen, b. Celle, Camp 3, R.B. 1/16. There’s no explanation of who this A. Borensztajn might be and the dual addresses are a little confusing and perhaps not entirely reassuring, as neither provides an unambiguous street with an unambiguous number where you could immediately go and knock on the door and take your beloved Haluś in your arms and never let her go again; but there’s no doubt that in this particular place amid the vast forests between Rättvik and Bollnäs, your young life takes yet another turn. The letter you write in duplicate that very day and send off to both addresses registers for all time the overwhelming effect of a postcard in Furudal:

You’ve been in the aliens’ camp at Tappudden-Furudal for just over two weeks when it happens.

Yes, that’s what the official papers call it, the aliens’ camp.

One of the papers notes that you’re part of the contingent of Polish Jews transferred on December 12, 1945, from the aliens’ camp at Öreryd to the camp at Furudal. There are seventeen of you, and the head of the Öreryd camp asserts that you have all been provided with a set of winter clothes and pocket money
until December 31, 1945. To ensure that there’s no duplication of provisions or payments, I assume.

A copy of the contingent list is to be duly signed by the head of the camp in Furudal and sent back to the head of the camp in Öreryd. So no one in the contingent disappears, I assume.

You’re duly arranged in alphabetical order, from Apelbaum Juda to Zylberszac Mozes, and somewhere in between is Rozenberg Dawid and Rozenberg Naftali, Rozenberg with a z, Dawid with a w. You’re not intended to stay in Sweden, so there’s no reason to start spelling your name any other way. “Transit migrants” is the term that’s been coined for people like you, which means you have the government’s permission to recuperate here for a while before continuing your journey to somewhere else.

In the months following the end of the war, nearly thirty thousand survivors from German concentration camps are permitted to recuperate in Sweden. Some never do recuperate. Some soon continue their journeys to somewhere else. Some soon go back to where they came from, giving rise to yet another term applied by officialdom to those who have come to recuperate,
repatriandi
, which means people who can be expected to have a home or at least a homeland to return to. Of the thirty thousand transit migrants or
repatriandi
, however, ten thousand are Jews, which soon turns out to mean that most of them have nowhere to return to, and of course nowhere else to journey on to.

About the difference between Jews and
repatriandi
there’s initially some confusion, or even downright ignorance, among the Swedish authorities, and about the difference between Poles and Polish Jews as well. The authorities eventually learn to know better, which presumably is one of the reasons why in late December 1945 most of the Polish-Jewish men in the aliens’
camp at Öreryd are transferred to the aliens’ camp at Tappudden-Furudal, and most of the Polish-Jewish women to the aliens’ camp in Doverstorp.

In Öreryd, all “former concentration camp clients” (yes, that’s what they write) are categorized as Poles, whether they’re Jews or not. This isn’t a very good idea, for among some of the Poles there’s a tradition of anti-Semitism that hasn’t necessarily been softened by the fate of the Polish Jews. Among the former concentration camp clients there are also some who were perpetrators, and some who were both victims and perpetrators, and it happens that victims are directly confronted with their former tormenters, which isn’t good for camp discipline. Subsequently, the idea of putting the Jews and the Poles into separate camps comes up, and this rouses the indignation of a leading Swedish opinion maker, Alva Myrdal, who writes in the weekly magazine
Vi
(no. 35, 1945):

Which, as we have seen, does not prevent the aliens’ camp at Öreryd from being almost emptied of its Polish Jews in December 1945, so that a postcard sent there to Dawid Rozenberg must be forwarded to the aliens’ camp at Tappudden-Furudal.

You’re transferred to Öreryd on August 10, 1945, after three weeks of quarantine in the small university town of Lund.
Öreryd is located amid the vast forests of Småland, between Jönköping and Gislaved, and it too is a place hard to find on the map if you don’t know where to look beforehand, which is presumably an important reason why a camp for Norwegian refugees is opened here on March 16, 1941. At any rate, such a camp is not exactly something that Sweden would want to advertise to Germany, which at that point looks likely to win the war and therefore should not be needlessly provoked. Further camps for Norwegian refugees are consequently set up in equally undistinguished and hard-to-find places with names like Holmudden, Bäggböle, Voxna, Skålmyra, Bäckehagen, Älgberget, Stråtenbo, Gottröra, Mälsåker, Mossebo, and Tappudden-Furudal.

Yes, as you can see, Tappudden-Furudal is also initially a camp for Norwegian refugees and part of a growing Norwegian-Swedish camp archipelago. As the winds of war change direction in 1943 and 1944, the camps are turned into bases for the training of Norwegian “police reserves.” The training is organized by the Norwegian exile government in London and carried out with the consent of the Swedish government, with the aim of creating military and police units that in the case of a German surrender shall be capable “of restoring Norwegian law and justice as soon as possible.”

The story of the Norwegian training camps on Swedish soil is a reasonably heroic one that many people will have good reason to remember, and memorials, to the extent that they’re erected on former camp sites, are dedicated to the Norwegians. Since 1994, the old ironworks in Furudal is home to a Norwegian veterans’ museum, and in Öreryd in the summer of 2008 a musical theater performance was put on to commemorate the years when the Norwegians came to town, and Elsa’s cafe was the center of world politics, and Sweden made some contribution to
the right cause, after all. On a rough-hewn stone on the site of the former camp, a plaque reads “Öreryd refugee camp 1940–46,” and another conveys the gratitude of the Norwegians “for the good reception and kindness shown to us in the war years.”

Far fewer people remember the Poles. Actually, no one really remembers the Poles, still less the Polish Jews, who in fact do not officially exist, since they go by the name of Poles or Polish
repatriandi
. When the well-known Swedish journalist and writer Jan Olof Olsson (Jolo) happens to be passing through Öreryd in April 1972, he visits the churchyard by the white wooden church, where among the stones for departed shopkeepers, manufacturers, farmers, and stay-at-home daughters he finds two iron crosses engraved with clearly foreign names. “No dates; nothing more,” he notes. “Just these strange names in the Öreryd graveyard. The names are Polish. How did these two get here?”