A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz (24 page)

Thus ended the journey onward for 650 individuals, some of whom might well have had their pictures taken on sunny jetties and rocky shores in the land of the vast forests, momentarily thinking they were in paradise, but to whom the idea of staying on had remained alien, perhaps even frightening. None of them could possibly have been unaware of the risks of such a voyage. The illegal conveyance of Jewish survivors to Palestine on defective, undersized, and overloaded ships was a high-risk enterprise that could end well or in disaster, or in a British internment camp on Cyprus, or sometimes in a British internment camp in Germany.

Yes, this must not be forgotten, the British had the gall to do even that. In the summer of 1947, four thousand Jewish survivors of the much mythologized
Exodus
were taken to a camp in Poppendorf, just outside Lübeck, after having come within sight of the coast of Palestine. Nobody could be unaware of the fact that this was how the journey onward could end. The picture of Jewish survivors being taken back to a camp in Germany was published the world over, even on the front page of
Stockholms Läns och Södertälje Tidning
on September 13, 1947.

Maybe someone shows you the picture—someone who already knows who you are and where you’ve come from.

But there I go, anticipating your life.

It’s so easy to do, and so unnecessary.

Time enough for that.

The place is still Alingsås, the time is the summer of 1946, and you’re still waiting for an answer that’s tarrying, and in the land of the vast forests there’s a debate going on about what to do with people like you. It can no longer be assumed that people like you can move on. That much has become obvious.

But it can’t be assumed that you can stay, either. In the land of the vast forests, the inhabitants aren’t used to the idea of thousands of people with wildly foreign languages and cultures suddenly taking up residence behind the Co-op at the forest edge. Only recently, even a dozen was unthinkable; jobs would be stolen, cultures destroyed, and the pure Swedish breed contaminated. Such views have not vanished completely, even if a deepening blush of shame now attends them. It may seem astonishing that such views persist at all, given that the land of the vast forests is crying out for people to man its unscathed cotton mills and truck factories. But xenophobia is old and ingrained, while the hunger for labor is new. On September 15, 1945, an editorial in the
Dagens Nyheter
sounds a note of warning about letting “the Polish-Jewish refugees” stay on:

Does it surprise you that such things are written? Or does it merely confirm what you already know or suspect about the land of the vast forests? I’m trying to understand why, over time, so many of you want to leave again, not because you’re forced to but because you want to, in fact long to, and reading lines like these helps me understand a little better.

Strangely enough, there’s some uncertainty about how many of you ultimately stay on. The Swedish historian Svante Hansson, who in 2004 published the most thorough investigation of the matter so far, concludes that it must be investigated still further, since you’re such a difficult group to keep track of. From his own findings, he estimates that in 1951 at least five thousand Jewish survivors still remain in Sweden, although the true total is probably considerably higher because no one knows exactly how many of the survivors marry Swedish citizens and thereby disappear early on from the register of stateless persons. He notes that Jewish survivors continue to leave Sweden for many years. By 1955, only 3,600 of the 1945 survivors are estimated to remain. Between 1945 and 1955, a total of 8,782 persons continue their journey with support from the Jewish community in Sweden. In 1946, there are few countries to which they can go, Palestine and the United States being all but closed to Jewish
immigration, South America far away and complicated, Australia far away and expensive, Europe as closed as before the war.

In the beginning nearly all of you want to move on, but as answers fail to arrive and onward journeys have to be postponed, the land of the vast forests and labor-hungry factories takes hold of you, one by one. A temporary stay has to be extended for an indefinite period, and in an indefinite period there are many decisions that must be made and many things that must happen without anyone’s really having made a decision about them.

In the end, a decision must be made as to whether Sweden is to be the last stop on the road from Auschwitz and the place to start life anew.

In the early years, it’s the labor hunger that decides where a new life can make its beginnings. These are the years when Sweden is transformed from a country convinced it can’t tolerate too many “aliens” to a country crying out for them. By 1948, a hundred thousand “aliens” have been granted Swedish residence permits, of whom “almost all are fully employed in the labor market.” This last part is carefully recorded on July 31, 1948, on the front page of my newspaper of record throughout this narrative,
Stockholms Läns och Södertälje Tidning
, and immediately clarified with “no one granted a residence permit here has the right just to drift aimlessly.” The director of the State Aliens Commission, Nils Hagelin, is also keen to clarify: “Work is the best medicine for those who come from war-torn countries and find it hard to cope with orderly conditions.… That is how they will most rapidly become part of society, and there are very few who abuse our hospitality by making trouble.”

I don’t know what Mr. Hagelin means by making trouble. I only know that in a police report submitted to the Ministry of Justice in Stockholm on March 12, 1954, in connection with your
application for Swedish citizenship, personnel manager Stina Fors at Alingsås Bomullsväfveri AB has something to say about making trouble.

Yes, I know, that’s much later, and again I’m anticipating events, but this concerns your time in Alingsås—though goodness knows how Miss Fors after so many years can remember this specific thing about you. Anyway, here the word “trouble” appears in connection with your name, which is the reason I mention it, because it might tell you something about what at this time was meant by trouble in reference to people like you.

So that there may be no misunderstanding, let me point out that Miss Fors is the only person in the police report from Alingsås to associate you with trouble, in fact the only one to have anything remotely unfavorable to say about you and the woman who is to be my mother and who is applying for Swedish citizenship together with you. The owner of the Pension Friden, Evald Stenberg, remembers “Mr. and Mrs. Rozenberg” as “very reliable, steady and decent, and he can therefore recommend them for Swedish citizenship.” The waitress at Pension Friden, Margareta Åberg, remembers you both as “decent and steady” and recommends the same. Only Miss Stina Fors remembers differently:

Thus has the woman who is to be my mother, Hala Staw, or Haluś as you usually address her in your letters, or sometimes Halinka, almost imperceptibly joined the guests at the Pension Friden in Alingsås and taken a job as a seamstress at the linen factory, Sveriges Förenade Linnefabriker, and on October 19, 1946, moved with you into a temporary, factory-owned accommodation for foreign textile workers at 29 Lendahlsgatan, where you and she are now referred to as “Mr. and Mrs. Rozenberg,” so perhaps it would be appropriate to explain how this has come about.

The last letter from Alingsås in my hands is dated August 9, 1946, and opens on a despondent note despite the fact that Haluś has finally found her way from Łódź in Poland to Bergen-Belsen in Germany, and the horizon ought reasonably to look brighter:

August 22, 1946, brings an icy response from the State Aliens Commission in Stockholm to your application for an entry
visa for the woman you unwisely refer to as your fiancée (you already know that’s not enough, as only married couples get permission).

On that very same day, a woman going by the name of Hella Cwaighaft arrives in Helsingborg from Bergen-Belsen and is put into three weeks’ quarantine at Landskrona Citadel. Description: height five feet two inches, hair black, eyes brown, face shape oval, nose straight, age twenty. When registering, she gives her proper name, Hala Staw, and applies for a residence permit and a foreigner’s passport. The reason given for the former is that she wants to join her fiancé in Sweden. The reason given for the latter is that she no longer wishes to be a Polish citizen.

On September 12, 1946, Hala Staw moves in with David Rosenberg at Pension Friden in Alingsås. On September 19, 1946, she’s hired as a seamstress at Sveriges Förenade Linnefabriker at a wage of fifty kronor a week. On February 23, 1947, she marries the man who is to be my father at the synagogue in Gothenburg.

The next letter I hold in my hand is dated August 2, 1947, and opens “My dearest Halinka, I got to Södertälje at seven in the evening.”

So perhaps it’s appropriate to say something about how this has happened, which is to say something about yet another improbable road from Auschwitz. I don’t intend to say very much; like you I don’t want to bore my readers, and even miracles can get tedious, but something must perhaps be said, nevertheless.

After the selection for the gas chambers on the ramp in Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1945, there are four members of the Staw family left, four sisters to be precise, among whom
Hala is the youngest and Bluma the eldest. Between them come Bronka and Sima. There are photos preserved of sister Sima in the Łódź ghetto, tiny miniature prints, one centimeter by two, taken to be hidden in the growing archive of documents, jottings, statistics, and photographs that the Jewish ghetto administration is building up in a special room with a special entrance in the house at 4 Kościelny Square, and which after the liquidation of the ghetto is saved for posterity by a man named Nachman Zonabend, who belongs to a small group of a few hundred Jews left behind to clear up the human and inhuman remains of the liquidated ghetto’s residents. It’s a repulsive job among dead bodies and excrement, and requires special rations of spirits for non-Jews, and special Jews for the most repulsive tasks, but the work allows Nachman Zonabend to survive in the ruins of the ghetto until liberation in January 1945, and the miniature pictures of Sima survive with him. In the summer of 1945, Nachman Zonabend is brought to Sweden by the Red Cross along with two of his brothers, one of whom much later becomes a neighbor of ours on the first floor of a modern block of apartments in a suburb of Stockholm. Through Nachman Zonabend, the pictures of Sima come into the hands of the woman who is to be my mother and are stashed in the back of the frame that holds the only existing photo of my paternal grandfather, Gershon.

The reason the ghetto archive keeps pictures of Sima is that she works in the ghetto administration’s orphanage, which is one of the many ghetto activities of which a photographic record is kept for posterity. The photos of her look as if they are all taken on the same day: in all of them she is wearing a dark, short-sleeved, jacketlike blouse over a pale top, and her dark blond hair is combed lightly back into a loose bun at the nape of her neck.