Read A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz Online
Authors: Goran Rosenberg
The people with the Polish names get to Öreryd by train and bus in July and August 1945, after the Norwegian police reserves, just a day or so following the German surrender, have marched off “with flags flying and music playing” toward the railroad
station in Hestra. Unlike the Norwegians, who are viewed by the locals as brothers or cousins of a sort, the people with the Polish names are viewed as foreigners first and foremost. Contacts between the villagers and the camp residents cool and drop off. The language barrier doesn’t help, and neither does the anxiety about—one might even say fear of—what the foreigners may bring with them. Pretty much everyone knows a bit about where they come from and what they’ve been through, and that presumably they’re all scarred in some way. Rumors of scuffles, fits of madness, and cases of suicide filter out into the little community around the white wooden church, and in any case the word is that the foreigners’ stay at the camp will be only a short one, because these are transit migrants or
repatriandi
who will soon be moving on to somewhere else.
So why make the effort?
Even those who make the effort don’t always have an easy time of it. On August 2, 1945, the Christian daily
Svenska Morgonbladet
publishes an article signed B.J. and titled “Our Guests from German Torture Camps”:
Brought together in camps of varying sizes surrounded by tall, barbed-wire fences, with only forestry workers’ primitive barracks or similar to live in, they are isolated from the outside world for week after week, month after month.… When the author of this piece tried to telephone one such camp in the Stockholm area … the female operator replied that the telephone number of the aliens’ camp “was unlisted.”…
These guests in our country, invited by the Red Cross, should have the right not to be seen as mere numbers in an impersonal mass of “
Lagerschwestern
” [camp sisters]. It is the isolation from “ordinary people” that really gets on their nerves.
Only the kindest of people should be allowed to have anything to do with these—often Jewish—victims of Nazism. One can hardly call the head of one such camp kind who when asked by a visiting member of the women’s corps if she could go and say hello to her friends, replied: “There is too much mollycoddling of these unpleasant refugees.” When she told him that she had got to know “these refugees” as charming and grateful, and that moreover one had to bear in mind that most of them had seen their parents and siblings consigned to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, he interrupted her curtly: “That has nothing to do with it.”…
We must remember that these are living people whom we have committed ourselves to rescuing, not a mere collection of numbers from miscellaneous clusters of German barracks.
On August 17, 1945,
Svenska Dagbladet
reports that forty “inmates” at Öreryd (“Polish camp in Småland”) panicked and set out on a march to Stockholm to protest against the camp conditions, and that the police stopped them at Mossebo, about five kilometers north of Öreryd, and that they were presently under arrest in Jönköping, awaiting further proceedings. “The forty who did not want to stay apparently fell prey to some kind of concentration camp psychosis. They are all very young, in the age range 16–20. They claim, among other things, that they did not receive sufficient allocations of food or tobacco in the camp.”
On August 29, 1945, the head of an unnamed aliens’ camp writes in the daily
Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfarts-Tidning
(
GHT
) that the only “more general dissatisfaction” he has noted relates to food:
As a rule, this is because they are unused to Swedish food—they find black pudding and fish balls particularly hard to come to terms
with, and most of them find it impossible to appreciate the Swedish habit of putting sugar in all kinds of dishes.
A more intractable problem is how to teach the refugees not to waste food; some kind of hoarding instinct seems to force them to store up supplies, which then go dry or moldy and eventually end up in the pig bucket.
The refugees’ unstable emotional state provides fertile soil for what might be termed camp psychoses, which take various forms. Sometimes it is individuals suddenly feeling themselves unjustly treated or persecuted by other camp residents, sometimes a general sense of alarm spreads rapidly, with anxieties about the future, the fate of relations.…
For the most part, however, the Swedish press doesn’t write very much about the aliens’ camps and the people who populate them. In community after community, Auschwitz temporarily moves in behind the local co-op store but leaves little trace in public life. Only rarely do journalists take the opportunity to visit the camps and interview the people who inhabit them and provide an account of their experiences and thereby also try to understand why some of them sometimes behave as they do. It’s as if a curtain of silence has descended between the world the visitors bring with them and the world that surrounds them. Or a curtain of anxiety, perhaps, that the two worlds will prove incompatible, or at least will not readily tolerate meeting each other. I note this anxiety also in Alva Myrdal’s otherwise enlightened view of the camps: anxiety that the darkness inside the residents will infect the enlightened society around them. “The victims of brutality themselves become brutalized,” she writes.
When life is reduced to its bare minimum, primitive selfishness is the only natural response.… Women whose reason should tell them
that they will get enough food, and that there will be food for the next meal and for the next day too, cannot believe it because of their old terror. They save every crumb left over from the table. They pick dandelion shoots and other things to eat. They collect the pigs’ potato peelings. They rake up every dry little pea that has fallen on the ground. They even continue to steal from the camp stores.
The question is raised: what are we to do with such people? In two articles in
Expressen
(June 22 and 25, 1945), they’re described as animals. The writer maintains that “most of them survived thanks to those more or less animal qualities that Western society otherwise tries to keep in check: trickery, cunning, lying, obsequiousness, pilfering, and selfishness, combined with a certain brutal will to live.”
She’s consequently concerned about who would eventually want to employ them: “It won’t be easy for them to adapt, and it won’t be easy for their employers. The latter will presumably require more tireless understanding and generous humanity than the average employer can muster.”
The writer doesn’t specifically identify the Jews as the problem here (in fact, quite the opposite); most of the women in the camp she visits (Doverstorp), and on whose conduct she bases her conclusions, are non-Jewish Poles. The vast majority of people living in the archipelago of aliens’ camps in Sweden in the summer and autumn of 1945, it should be noted, are non-Jews.
Sometimes, however, the Jews are specifically identified as a problem, as in an article signed G.B.G. in
Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfarts-Tidning
on September 5, 1945:
Swedish employers are not, as many may imagine, particularly accommodating when it comes to taking on Jewish workers. The present writer has considerable experience of the difficulty of
finding decent work for such workers. Only textile workers seem to be accepted. With its low wages, the textile industry has taken on many refugees who have not been able to find any other work.… We know from experience that the Jews will not take on just any old work except in cases of extreme necessity. Business is in their blood, and of the other professions, that of tailor is the most attractive to them.…
If these young Jews are now to become Swedish citizens, it should be made clear to them that they must set their sights on careers other than business.…
Assuming these young Jews are now to be trained as, say, workers in manufacturing industries, carpenters, painters, etc., a new problem presents itself, namely how the Swedish trade union movement would react to the prospect of Jewish workmates.… One can occasionally sense a certain unwillingness, even among Swedish workers, to work with Jewish comrades.
I do wonder how many of all these problems with the Jews G.B.G. had already identified before having anything to do with actual Jews, if indeed he ever did. At any rate, none of these problems appears to stop the more or less Jewish Poles in Öreryd from soon being in great demand as forestry workers in the vast forests surrounding the camp, and as agricultural workers on the farms nearby, and as workers in the numerous manufacturing companies in the region. In a letter to the camp administrator at Öreryd dated November 9, 1945, the chairman of the local council in the small town of Norrahammar, some forty kilometers to the north toward Jönköping, pleads for permission for the refugee David Szpiegler to be granted an extended leave of absence from the camp, “so his job is not put in jeopardy,” since he has “shown himself both competent and hardworking, and
is liked by the management.” David Szpiegler has found his job at the Norrahammar works, which produces iron ranges, pots, and pans, through the mediation of Mr. Åke Roström, who also arranged board and lodging for him and is said to invite him to his home on a daily basis, “to keep him informed about work and other matters.”
“As I am also there on a daily basis and have learned much about the refugees’ sad situation, I hope that the best possible provisions can be made for him,” the chairman of the Norrahammar council ends his written plea to the camp administrator at Öreryd.
There’s a recurring tendency to stress the sadness of your existence and the occasionally strange way some of you behave. It’s much rarer to see anyone stress the fact that the sadness of your existence has very little to do with conditions in the camp, still less with conditions in Sweden. Rather, you keep pinching yourselves each morning when you find a Swedish breakfast laid out for you in the dining room, followed by a Swedish lunch and a Swedish dinner, and even if there’s too much sugar in the food and a few of you squirrel away a bit of it here and there, Sweden must still seem like paradise to most of you.
I know you had thought of yourself as being in paradise before, but this paradise here will still be standing in the morning. And the morning after that. Admittedly, it’s a paradise that seems at times unfamiliar and hard to understand, and the shadows that follow you all will follow you into this paradise as well, but nowhere in the letters you write to Haluś during this time do I find a word of criticism directed at conditions in the camp or in the country.
If it didn’t sound so trite, I’d say you’re grateful, deeply grateful, and for brief periods happy, too.
Happy and unhappy.
As in the letter your brother Natek sends from Öreryd on December 21, 1945, just before the Polish Jews are to be moved to Tappudden-Furudal. The all-eclipsing shadow in Natek’s life is the uncertainty about what has happened to his wife Andzia (Chana) since they were parted on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The letter is addressed to Sima Staw in Łódź.
There’s a rumor that Sima Staw has survived Auschwitz and gone back to Łódź and might be able to answer the question of whether Andzia is alive or dead. But the rumor’s false. The letter instead reaches the hands of Sima’s sister, the woman who is to be my mother, and it’s through her that I much later find it in my own hands.
In parts, it’s undeniably a desperate letter: “I implore you, tell me everything, no matter what it is. This uncertainty is draining me.” In parts, nevertheless, it’s a letter from paradise:
Sweden’s a country where there is no anti-Semitism. And as if that weren’t enough, there’s no “Jewish question” at all. The standard of living is very high. The ideal of class equality has, quite simply, been achieved. There is no unemployment and no one goes hungry. And anyone who wants to work can do so, and live well from it, and if I had my wife here, my happiness would be complete. Sima! For God’s sake, don’t let your answer tarry!
While so many answers still tarry, some of you cycle the eight kilometers to master bricklayer Manfredsson’s in Hestra to pick potatoes. This is on the morning of September 26, 1945, and the formal request for the delivery of four named individuals from Barrack F arrived two days ago from the aliens’ section of
the labor exchange in Öreryd. I suspect the aliens’ section is the only section there is at the labor exchange in Öreryd. The unspoken requirement for the job of potato picking is that you know how to ride a bike, which not all of you do. Nor, it transpires, do you all know how to pick potatoes. Each of you has been promised four kronor for the work, but the plants are not pulled up properly and lots of potatoes get left in the ground and the two-wheeled barrow on which you’ve loaded the potatoes tips over and has to be reloaded. What’s more, you eat like horses and the master bricklayer has to send his children out for more food.
I learn all this much later when the story is told to me by M.Z., who was the one who had to learn to cycle overnight, but who on the other hand knew more Swedish than the rest of you and had to do most of the talking as you sat around the table at Mr. Manfredsson’s house.
It’s a fond memory, I realize, that wobbly, late-summer bike ride through the countryside of Småland to your first job since the slave camps, even if I’m not quite convinced by all the details of these memories. Especially since so much else I ask about, things that seem more important, has been forgotten.
When I ask M.Z. about the potato picking, fifty-nine years have elapsed, and only fragments of this memory are left.
So I prefer to stick to the documents, as you know, and a written record of the potato picking in Hestra is to be found at the Swedish National Archives in Stockholm, Riksarkivet, as is your application to the State Aliens Commission on September 19, 1945, for permission to travel to the aliens’ camp in Gränna to visit your cousin Helena Wiśnicka.
I can’t deny that I’m surprised to find such an application, since I’ve never heard of such a cousin before. I’m not even sure such a cousin exists. Especially not after having read your letter
to Haluś of April 6, 1946, in which your trip to Gränna is revealed in another light. The letter’s written in an increasingly dejected mood; three months have passed since the postcard in Furudal and Haluś is still in Łódź, and you are still in Alingsås, and the formal barriers to your reunion seem to multiply by the day. You’ve been worrying about Haluś’s state of mind ever since she wrote in her last letter that she’d started avoiding people. You immediately interpret this to mean that she’s sitting alone with her thoughts: “You mustn’t do that Haluś! Sitting alone with your thoughts is terrible for people like us!”