Goran Rosenberg - A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz

So on this day, in the lingering brightness of early evening, he finds himself lugging two battered and rather heavy suitcases in the company of three not very close friends. After all, he means to take up residence here for an unspecified length of time, and even the possessions of a newly begun life soon start to weigh a good deal. Naturally he’s wearing one of the suits, perhaps the elegant, pale-gray check, and a white shirt and matching tie, and a hat even though it’s still summer. It’s been the hottest summer for a hundred years and the evening is warm, and it would have been nicer to walk bareheaded, but there hadn’t been any room in his luggage for the hat anyway, and taking the train to an unfamiliar place in a new country is something he wouldn’t dream of doing in his shirtsleeves. The four men have set off from the station on foot, taking turns carrying the cases, and A., who has been here the longest, says they’ll have to take the bus from the next stop because there’s still quite a way to go and otherwise they won’t have enough time to find a place to eat, and besides it’s Saturday evening and there’s a good movie showing in town and they might just catch it if they hurry. So they hurry for all they’re worth, and the man who just got off the train scarcely has time to settle into his lodgings in the recently built detached house or to introduce himself to his landlady, whose husband has recently died, and so instead of turning the place into a home for herself she’s obliged to rent out rooms to single men working at the factory, but she’s nonetheless friendly and welcoming. Then they briskly move on to celebrate the fact that they’re all, at least for now, in the same place and in one another’s company. The movie, for which they arrive just in time, is being shown at the Castor cinema, located in the middle of the town, by the idyllic harbor where the little lift-net boats are moored for their Saturday rest and the townsfolk are taking their evening stroll along the quaysides. The film is set on a slave ship whose captain intends to get married and become respectable and wants to give up slave trading. He orders his first mate to change both the cargo and the crew, but when he goes on board with his young bride for what’s meant to be their honeymoon, he discovers that both the cargo and the crew are still the same. It’s a thrilling story with a script by William Faulkner, starring Mickey Rooney and Wallace Beery, and although it’s set in the nineteenth century, I imagine they’re able to identify with it a little, having all just experienced the way apparently ordinary ships, or in their case apparently ordinary trains, can prove to be something else entirely. And none of them is yet quite sure what kind of ship or train it is that they’ve just boarded, or rather, what kind of place it is where they’ve just disembarked. Perhaps they all go back to one of the rented rooms afterward, have a glass or two of lukewarm vodka, envelop the place in a haze of cigarette smoke, tell each other stories, and play cards, forgetting for a moment that they’re in a place they don’t know, a place that doesn’t know them; they’re still young, and it’s Saturday evening and the night is as silver as the full moon and they want to make as much as they possibly can of this brief stop on the long journey that has accidentally and probably only for a short time brought them all together precisely here.

I know nothing further about the three men waiting on the platform beyond the fact that they, like most of the others on this journey, will soon be moving on. What I do know is that the following day, the man who will be my father writes a letter to the woman who will be my mother and who’s been his wife for six months, informing her that the town, which is called Södertälje, seems bigger than the one he just left, which is called Alingsås. He notes that like all towns in this new country it seems sparsely populated, that it’s a long walk from one part of the town to another, and that there are large areas of newly built houses and blocks of flats, laid out with generous amounts of light, air, and greenery extending around a small but not particularly dense town center. There also seem to be big trees everywhere, whole forests of them, in fact, growing almost up to the doorsteps, and more importantly there’s a large pharmaceutical factory, where there are plenty of jobs for young women who can pack medicinal drugs deftly in cartons and bottles, and the defter they are, the more they can earn. “I didn’t get home all that late last night, eleven at the latest,” he assures her, “because I wanted to unpack my cases and inspect my room, but my roommate was already in bed asleep and so I had to wait.” The following day is Sunday, when everyone’s off and a breakfast of coffee, bread, and cheese is served in the lodging-house dining room — you aren’t allowed even to heat water for tea in your rooms — and so that morning his roommate, a “young and quiet snail,” has had time to tell him that work at the big truck factory starts at seven and ends at four, with a half-hour lunch break at 12:30. You can come to work in your ordinary clothes and change there, because you can take a shower and wash up properly after your shift. They have modern toilets as well, but if you need to go during working hours you have to ask permission, and the doors don’t shut properly, let alone lock, so nobody can loiter in there for a rest or a nap. But he doesn’t really consider any of this important enough to write about. The letter is short, the tone rather dutiful, and the handwriting too rushed, because he wants to get the letter posted right away. The only thing that matters, he writes, is for me to find a place where we can live, or at least a room we can have to ourselves, where we can heat water and make a home, so that you can get on the train and come here.

He’s worried about her too, you can tell; even a bit too much, you might think. Be careful on your bike and when you go swimming, he writes, as if she were a child. They’ve been continuously together for almost a year now, following nearly two years of being continuously separated, if you can say such a thing. Yes, “separated” may not be the right expression when the place where you’re forced to separate is the selection ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. And “worried about each other” may not adequately express their state of mind, when everything a human being could possibly fear might happen to him or her has already happened to them both, as has everything that no one was able to imagine could happen and yet happened all the same, everything except for that one final thing that could still happen but absolutely must not, and for which the word “worry” no longer seems satisfactory. Not when a weight of worry big enough to poison a world has been concentrated into a single black drop of corrosive anxiety that’s forever poised above what is at present the weakest point in this still improbable, and therefore not yet quite real, connection between two young people who last parted on the selection ramp in Auschwitz-Birkenau. No, wrong. Who last parted on a railroad platform in Alingsås.

But it’s no longer easy to distinguish one parting from another. No, she mustn’t have a fatal accident on her bike or drown in a lake or trip on the stairs or suffer any eventuality, conceivable or inconceivable, that might sever the last, fragile thread connecting them to what could, after all, turn out to be a new life. “There’s absolutely no need to worry about me at all,” he adds cockily. “And tomorrow morning I’ll apply for the truck factory job M. thinks I’m bound to get with all my first-rate ‘qualifications,’ and this very day I’ll ask the poor landlady who lost her husband if a room will become available anytime soon, and as I say I’m terribly worried about you, and you’re never out of my thoughts for a second, and maybe it really would have been best if you had traveled here with me, because then we wouldn’t have had to worry so much and no doubt everything would have worked out all right, even so. Everything’s sure to work out before long, and soon you’ll be here with me.”