Goran Rosenberg - A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz

On August 28, Chaim Rumkowski boards the train at Radogoszcz without the slightest euphemism to support him.

On August 29, the last train departs from Łódź.

In the language that delivers human beings, the ghetto is thereby liquidated .

All that is left to clear away are the traces of those who have been dispatched for delivery .

The piles of abandoned bundles, the stench of starvation and death, the ruins of hope and of the will to live.

So I piece fragments together. If you’re registered as delivered to Auschwitz on August 26, you must have boarded the train at Radogoszcz on August 25 at the latest, possibly a day or two earlier. It’s only just over two hundred kilometers to Auschwitz, but in the Europe of human transports the railroad tracks are overused and the trains overloaded. Sometimes the trains grind to a halt for hours or even days. Some passengers survive the journey, others do not. Some remain human beings, others do not. So much has already been said about those days and nights in the cattle cars to Auschwitz. And so little. The Germans have no intention of letting anyone survive to say anything, and those who survive don’t know what to say to be believed.

You’ve said nothing, and I have nothing to add.

The only thing I can say with some degree of certainty, thanks to the SS list at Ravensbrück, is that you board a train at Radogoszcz that delivers you to Auschwitz on August 26, 1944. But I don’t know if you’re registered as delivered the same day you get off the train onto the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau or not until a few days later. After all, the vast majority of those who get off the train from the Łódź ghetto are never registered because they’re immediately sorted to one side (the left) to be murdered in the gas chambers and incinerated in the crematoriums, all traces of them expunged. The few who are not to be murdered just yet but are to be used as slave labor first have to be sorted again, assigned numbers, and registered as delivered. This must surely take time, possibly several days. If that’s the case, then another fragment can be slotted in, a registration card from a later stop on the journey, which says that you’re in the ghetto in Łódź until August 20, 1944, and in KL Auschwitz from August 21, 1944. That means you’re in KL Auschwitz for a number of days without being delivered. Assuming it’s necessary to make all the fragments fit together.

But that isn’t necessary at all. In this context it makes absolutely no difference on precisely which day you reach Auschwitz. Your journey has no timetable and no direction. You have no exact dates behind you and no exact dates ahead of you. On your journey, exact dates have no function.

It’s me they have a function for. I’m the one who needs them. I’m the one who needs every fragment that can possibly be procured, so I don’t lose sight of you. A fragment that can’t be erased, edited, denied, explained away, destroyed. A date. A list. A registration card. A photograph. The exact names and numbers of the days when your world is liquidated.

Because that’s what’s happening. These are the days when your world is liquidated. When the places and people in whose care you made the world your own are wiped from the face of the earth, blotted out of history, and expunged from memory. The last days in the ghetto are the last days when it’s still possible to experience your world by smelling its scents, hearing its voices, touching it, missing it, fantasizing about it. The ghetto’s a doomed world, a world of gradual degradation and destruction, a world of ever more unrealistic hopes, kept alive by increasingly implausible euphemisms, but it’s a world that still has a past and a future. Just beyond the deadly fences of the ghetto, basically within walking distance, are the house at 36 Piłsudskiego where you grew up, the school you went to, and the places where your cheeks flushed, your eyes glittered, and your dreams were woven. The town’s no longer called Łódź but Litzmannstadt, and the streets have been given German names instead of Polish ones; the houses and apartments where two hundred thousand Jews recently lived have now been taken over by Germans, and little by little all links to the past are being severed, and all links to humanity. So yes, your world is about to be wiped out, and day by day the ghetto is dying, but in apartment 6 at 18 Franciszkańska, near the corner of Brzezińska (which the Germans have renamed Sulzfelderstrasse), there are still some of the people who populated that world, and some of the objects that furnished it (nothing valuable, the Germans have stolen all that, piece by piece, but still), and maybe a boxful of the links that consolidated it, and no doubt somewhere the photographs that immortalized it. Still living there are your father Gershon, your mother Hadassah, and your youngest brother Salek, and a short distance away, at 78 Lutomierska (Hamburgerstrasse), in apartment 29, your big brother Natek and his young wife Andzia, and in number 26 at the same address Andzia’s father Majlech and mother Cywia. And somewhere out there, most recently heard of in Warsaw, your eldest brother Marek, who is also called Mayer. And with the Staw family in apartment number 3 at 18 Franciszkańska (Franzstrasse, the Germans have decreed), a very pretty girl two years younger than you called Halina or Hala, but more properly Chaja, and more affectionately Haluś or Halinka, and on whom you have a teenage crush, and who’s sharing the apartment’s single room with her father Jakob and her mother Rachel and her big sisters Bluma, Bronka, and Sima. In the kitchen there’s yet another family. In the kitchen of apartment 5, on the third floor, lives Hala’s eldest sister Dorka with her husband Jeremiah and their son Obadja, born on April 2, 1939, and still a baby when the ghetto is closed to the outside world on April 30, 1940.

Of course, your world can look like this only during the first days of the ghetto, when the two hundred thousand Jews of Łódź have just been forced behind the barbed wire, into das Wohngebiet der Juden in Litzmannstadt , and when nearly all of them are still alive and the transports haven’t started yet and the dawn streets aren’t lined with the previous night’s bodies, with people who starved to death or died of typhus or killed themselves, and when the whole thing still seems too unreal to be true. Yes, this is what your world looks like when its root fibers are still attached to living people and memories and it’s still possible to draw a family tree with an ever finer tracery of branches to ever more distant names, places, and stories, and no one yet knows that whole family trees can be chopped down and whole worlds liquidated.

On July 25, 1943, your father Gershon dies in apartment number 6. On July 26, 1943, Jeremiah, Obadja’s father, jumps from the window of apartment number 5 on the third floor and succeeds, not without difficulty, in killing himself. On November 10, 1943, your youngest brother Salek dies in apartment number 6.

I also have their birth dates. Gershon is fifty-six when he dies, Jeremiah forty-two, Salek nineteen. I also have the exact dates on which Rosenberg after Rosenberg is dispatched from the ghetto for onward transport. Rosenberg’s a common name in the ghetto, where it’s spelled with a z instead of an s .

“ Ausg . 10.3.42 Tr. 35” is written after the name of the porter Idel Rozenberg, who lives in apartment number 25 at 51 Sulzfelderstrasse (Brzezińska) and was born on 1.1.1897. Ausg . means ausgeliefert , dispatched for delivery, and Transport 35, like all the other transports of 1942, goes to the gas vans, the mobile gas chambers in Chełmno.