Read A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz Online
Authors: Goran Rosenberg
And as if to share her solitude in some way, you tell her about the time when you, too, were sitting alone with your thoughts, which happened to be the time of your trip to Gränna.
It was in my early days at Öreryd, when I still had no idea of your existence. We shipwrecked people certainly don’t lack reasons to lose our spirits. If the weather was nice we tried to forget by swimming and rowing at a nearby lake, or by walking in the forest and picking mushrooms. It was much worse when the weather turned bad, it was enough to drive you mad, and there were lots of rainy days like that. I had to get away for a few days, at any cost. I had no money for travel, nobody to visit, and nowhere to go. I cut down on cigarettes (in the camp we were given 5 kronor “pocket money” that was supposed to cover cigarettes and other small expenses) and I saved up a few kronor. Then I got on a bus without any real plan and went to the nearest town, Jönköping (known for its picturesque setting and its match factories). I wasn’t really supposed to travel because I still had no passport, but I didn’t care. The town is on a huge lake, with lovely hills all around. I was so dazed by it all that I forgot who I am and how I ended up here. After I’d wandered around for a couple of hours I felt so uneasy, so foreign (I couldn’t
talk to people, I only knew a few words of Swedish) that I was on the verge of going back to Öreryd that same evening. But I put the thought out of my mind when I met two Hungarian Jewish women. They told me that in Gränna, about 60 km away, there was a Polish camp, and that I could get there by car, or by boat across the lake. So I went there, thinking I might meet someone who knew something about your fate.
When I got to Gränna it turned out there wasn’t a camp there after all, instead there were women billeted at hotels and boardinghouses (Gränna is a well-known spa and tourist resort)—Polish women, at that. I didn’t even have time to look around me and see which way to go before I suddenly hear someone calling: “Dawid! Dawid! My God, who is it that I see! Dawid’s alive!” And there in front of me is Estusia (red-haired Estusia, from the post office). Her first words were: “Where’s Hala, have you had any news of her?”
What happened next is hard to describe. Girls came streaming in from all directions and looked at me like a creature from another planet. All around me I can hear voices: “Has this guy been in a concentration camp? God, how is that possible, he looks like a normal human being,
ein emes jiddisch jingl
.”
I was rooted to the spot and didn’t know what to do with myself or what it was all supposed to mean. But suddenly it dawned on me that these women had come to Sweden before the end of the war (through the Red Cross), and therefore hadn’t witnessed the liberation. Which served to explain why my appearance came as such a pleasant surprise to them. A few hours before they left for Sweden they’d been lined up for roll call at Ravensbrück, opposite the men (I happened to have been one of those men, or should I say walking corpses). They kept me talking until late into the night, wanting to hear every last detail of the liberation.
The next day I went back to Öreryd. Before I left I had to make a solemn promise that I would come back for Rosh Hashana [Jewish New Year] and that I would bring a few more men with me, because they were planning a traditional New Year celebration, and without men it sort of wouldn’t work because they wanted to have the prayers, too [for a Jewish act of worship you have to have a
minyan
, that is, a gathering of ten Jewish men].
I kept my word and took a whole gang with me to the celebration. Since then, men keep going there from Öreryd and vice versa. That way, by simply asking around, many people have found out what happened to their relatives and friends. We took our turn and organized dances and invited the girls from Gränna to them. In short, we started having a bit of a social life again. And thanks to my first escapade in Gränna, there are now six couples. They’re scattered all over Sweden. Only one of the couples lives here in Alingsås.
At about this point, the mood of the letter darkens. It’s palpable. The words lose their bounce. Shadows fall between the lines. The reunion which only a moment ago seemed to be a matter of course is now vanishing beyond the horizon. From Poland, only those cleared for continued travel across the Atlantic are now allowed to enter, you write. Obtaining admission to Sweden from the DP camp at Bergen-Belsen has also become “very difficult.” “As regards the possibility of my arranging the formalities, it’s nonexistent for the time being.”
And Haluś hasn’t even made her way to Bergen-Belsen yet. She’s still in Łódź.
Tomorrow you’ll give it another go and try to find out exactly how things stand in Bergen-Belsen, and try to talk to people who have just arrived from there and who are still in quarantine in Helsingborg.
Today, you’re too tired to write anything more.
“I’m in a terrible state of mind,” ends the letter about the merry trip to Gränna.
From time to time, the weekly physician’s reports from Öreryd record the medical consequences of terrible states of mind. In the early hours of June 21, 1946, dentist Abraham Goldman takes his own life by cutting his wrists and sticking a knife with a four-centimeter blade straight into his heart. Nine months earlier, in the report of September 27, 1945, it’s noted that the said Abraham Goldman hadn’t been able to produce certification of his dental qualifications, but that he’d been vouched for by two “Poles” in the camp and an application therefore had been sent off to the Royal Board of Medicine asking permission for Goldman to practice as a dentist in Öreryd.
To judge by subsequent reports, permission has been granted and the temporarily precarious state of the “dentist question” clarified.
What doesn’t get clarified, at least not permanently, is Abraham Goldman’s state of mind.
“In his last weeks he was melancholic and preoccupied with suicidal thoughts,” writes the Öreryd camp physician in his report of June 28, 1946.
By this time, you and Natek are long gone from Öreryd, and long gone from Furudal too. You leave the Swedish archipelago of aliens’ camps for good in early February 1946. About Furudal, you write that the area is beautiful, and that it’s covered with a thick layer of snow, and that camp life is monotonous,
although “those who enjoy winter sports have no trouble passing the time.”
You yourself learn to ski in Furudal.
No one forces you to leave Furudal. You’ve simply “had enough of camp life and want to work.”
You also want to stay in Sweden, at least for now. On September 1, 1945, while still at Öreryd, you both apply for Swedish aliens’ passports. You emphasize in the strongest terms that you don’t want to return to Poland, that you don’t want to be categorized as
repatriandi
, that you want nothing more to do with Poland. Your brother is even more adamant on this point and encloses a separate sheet with a handwritten declaration in Polish, and alongside it the translation, typed in Swedish: “My entire family, which lived in Łódź before the war, has been murdered by Hitler’s brutes. If I were to return to Łódź now, my whole life would be a string of tragic memories.”
Under the handwritten signature of Naftali Rosenberg, someone (the translator?) has typed the word “Jew” in brackets, perhaps to explain or clarify, but the answer is slow in coming, and on December 10, 1945, the two of you write another letter to the State Aliens Commission, this time without any typewriting go-between, and this time in German.
BITTE
, in capitals at the top.
BITTE
. We are two brothers, both qualified textile engineers, who would be able to get jobs at a textile factory in Marieholm if only we had our passports. Favorable treatment of our request,
die günstige Erledigung unserer Bitte
, would make it possible for us to start living a normal life. We want to stress that we have no intention of returning to Poland as our whole family in Poland has fallen victim to the Hitler regime,
ist dem Hitlerregime zum Opfer gefallen
.
You write politely, rounding off with thanks in anticipation and yours faithfully, but no aliens’ passports are forthcoming as far as I can tell, which however doesn’t prevent you from checking out of the aliens’ camp in Tappudden-Furudal on February 2, 1946, and checking into Friden Pension in Alingsås, where two days later you embark on an apparently normal life as textile workers at Alingsås Bomullsväfveri. It’s a hard job, working under a lot of time pressure at clattering mechanical looms on large factory floors, and since you’ve both presented yourselves as qualified textile engineers (which is truer of your brother than of you), it’s maybe not quite what you’d hoped for. On the other hand, you’re eager to convince the woman who is to be my mother that your entry level in the Swedish labor market is a purely temporary one and only to be expected, and that Sweden is paradise, all the same. In your first letter from Alingsås to Łódź, on March 7, 1946, you write:
The Swedes unfortunately take priority for the better positions, which is quite understandable, though in Sweden nobody is ashamed of their job and nobody is choosy. The Swedes are a hardworking people and work is considered a blessing. No wonder, as an average worker lives better than a small businessman in prewar Poland. In some industries a worker earns (almost) as much as an engineer. I can earn as much as about 75 kronor a week. You can live all right on that, dress decently, afford proper accommodation, etc. Natek works at the same factory. For now we’re living at a pension, i.e. we get food and lodging. We’d rather have an apartment of our own but accommodation is difficult here. Even so, I think it will happen soon. The pension is fairly expensive, and what’s more we don’t like the food (Swedish food isn’t particularly tasty). Once we’re set up on our own we’ll be able to make our own breakfast
and supper and eat lunch at a restaurant. Can you imagine, Swedes sprinkle sugar on their herring, and drown their meat in cream. They add sugar to almost everything. We work in two shifts. One week from 5 in the morning to 1.30 in the afternoon, the next week from 1.30 until 10 at night.
You ask what my plans are. I want the same as you, Haluś, which is to hold you in my arms as soon as possible.
I would like to fly away to you at this very minute—there actually are flights from Stockholm to Warsaw—but you know very well what the obstacles are.
The only thing we can do is to get you to Sweden, and it would happen all the sooner if only you could get to Bergen-Belsen.
That’s how most of the letters from Pension Friden in Alingsås to Hala Staw in Łódź end. With “if only.”
If only you could get to Bergen-Belsen.
If only you could claim to be someone’s wife or child. Claiming to be someone’s sister or brother isn’t enough, as you know.
If only from the start, I had declared you my wife.
If only from the start, you had declared me your husband.
If only you could get in touch with so-and-so who knows so-and-so who knows the best way to get from Łódź to Bergen-Belsen and from Bergen-Belsen to Sweden.
If only I could get a Swedish family to guarantee the ten thousand kronor required for an entry visa from Poland.
If only I could join the crew of a Swedish ship in Gothenburg and smuggle you aboard in some Polish port, Gdynia maybe—there’s a lot of smuggling going on there, you know.
The tone is generally one of forced optimism: things will fall into place, you’ll see; new options have opened up and so-and-so has just arrived from Bergen-Belsen without any family ties
here at all; tomorrow I’m going to talk to so-and-so who is right up to date on the best way to go about it; everything’s ready for when you get here, you know, with a job and a place to live all organized; and there’s so much I haven’t had a chance to tell you, and so much you haven’t had a chance to tell me; and I can’t see the point of having both survived hell if we’re not allowed to share paradise.
There are times when you can’t convince even yourself, and sometimes I get the feeling you aren’t even sure whether the woman who is to be my mother actually wants to join you in Sweden or whether she’d prefer that you join her in Poland, which tends to make you desperate as well as decisive. In a disconsolate moment you write that it might be best for you to go to her in Łódź after all, that your longing for her is unbearable, that you can’t stand the idea of being apart from her much longer. In your decisive moments, and they are many, you put a great deal of effort into convincing her that she has to leave Poland, that Poland is no place for people like her and you, and that it’s definitely not mere selfish convenience that’s deterring you from leaving paradise at once and coming to her side:
You mustn’t think that the decisive factor for my not coming to Poland is the drop in living standards that would lead to. The way things look now, there’s no way back for a Jew. I’ve talked to people who have just come to Sweden from Poland illegally, via Gdynia. They were two Christian Poles who had already been in Sweden, then returned to Poland but have now come back here. When I told them I was weighing up the idea of going to Poland they looked at me as if I was mad.…
I don’t want to build a new life on the ruins of our homes, and what’s more, at a time when everything around is malign or even
hostile toward us. And this, even despite the fact that in Łódź I might be able to arrange things better for myself, live better, i.e. get a job in my own profession. But it can’t be helped, I would rather be an unskilled worker here than have to listen to comments like “So where are all these Jews coming from now, I was sure we’d got rid of them?”…
I’ll say it again: it’s in “our” own best interests for you to come to me, even though it isn’t easy to put into practice. How can I even think of coming back, when we keep hearing about murders of Jews? Right now they’re talking on Radio Warsaw about the murder of 5 Jews in Krakow. So why should I drop everything and go to where I’m hated and despised?
In your letters, you try hard to present life in Alingsås as fully normal, yes, even as bright and promising. After only a few months, you’re able to report that Natek has landed a new job at the textile factory, in the stockroom of the dyeing section, with the prospect of promotion since textile dyeing is his speciality—which goes to show that even foreigners have the chance of “a first-rate job.” You write of the Jewish-Polish colony and its gatherings, of your trips to visit new friends in the land of the vast forests, of the new language, which you learn not so much from your two lessons a week as from talking to Swedes, “and I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you: including Swedish women.”