Goran Rosenberg - A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz

During this speech the SS men stood with heads lowered. Kapo Meyer (that was the name of the German Jew) told us all to stand up and sing “Hatikvah”[the anthem of the Zionist movement]. Just imagine, three weeks before the end of the war, 800 Jews on German soil singing “Hatikvah” and SS men presenting arms (that’s what it looked like in our car). People were moved to tears.

I must hurry up with my story, I’m afraid I’m already boring you.

Allow me here, before you resume boring the woman who will become my mother, to insert one detail about the food parcels. Though it’s true they’re labeled RED CROSS, my guess is that the labels do not say AMERICAN RED CROSS but INTERNATIONAL RED CROSS, as anything else would hardly be possible; this is Nazi Germany, after all, still at total war with America, and it’s hard enough to understand how even this much is possible. Again, a story apart. Not that it matters, not now and not then, but just so your account jibes with my documents. You’re quite right about the Americans’ being behind the food parcels, but they’re operating primarily through a body called the War Refugee Board, set up by President Roosevelt on January 22, 1944, and tasked with taking immediate steps “to forestall the plan of the Nazis to exterminate all the Jews and other persecuted minorities in Europe.”

One such step is to finance the 40,000 parcels of kosher food that in February 1945 are warehoused at the port of Gothenburg and which, through the mediation of Gilel Storch and others, are handed over to the International Red Cross to be transported by rail, primarily to the Theresienstadt, Bergen-Belsen, and Ravensbrück concentration camps, and expressly for distribution to Jewish inmates. Some 7,500 of the parcels from Gothenburg reach Ravensbrück sometime in April. I assume that toward the end of your journey, one or two of these parcels save your life. Each parcel contains twenty Camel cigarettes, vitamin tablets, a bar of soap, half a kilo of dried milk, chocolate, biscuits, half a kilo of margarine, a can of corned beef (marked kosher), a can of cheese, and a can of tuna fish.

The food parcels not only save lives, they also kill. Starving bodies cannot suffer the shock of solid food. Hunger must be controlled to be vanquished. Not everyone is capable of such control, and a can of corned beef, however kosher it may be, is no child’s plaything. “There are evidently different methods for killing people; by gas chamber or by Red Cross parcels,” notes Dr. Georges Salan, counting 58 Jewish prisoners dying from the food parcels in Ravensbrück.

The train carrying the singing Kapo and the SS men presenting arms never completes the announced journey to Sweden, but you don’t explain why. This is where you hurry up with your story a bit so as not to bore the woman who is to be my mother. Dr. Liedke’s investigations reveal that the trainload of Polish Jews from Łódź sets off from Ravensbrück in the direction of Hamburg on April 24 but comes under attack from Allied bombers and is forced to turn back. The German railroad lines are common bombing targets in the last weeks of the war. I find it hard to fathom how you can gloss over something like that, but I’m starting to realize that on your road from Auschwitz, the cancellation of a train ride to freedom is just another wrong turn in the growing chaos of war, where no one knows what’s real or unreal anymore: food parcels, death transports, liberation, annihilation, the Red Cross, the SS, truth, lies. I imagine the only things that really exist for you on that train are the food parcels in your hands, but I’m not sure everyone’s convinced that even those are real. Nor am I at all sure whether you and the others on the train realize what’s happening, or why the train is turning back, or even that it’s doing so. Trains have a tendency to shunt to and fro, to move from one track to another, without necessarily changing their destination. Maybe your two stays in Ravensbrück blur into one, with the food parcels being the all-suppressing link between the two. Maybe all days, dates, and events are blurred together. The last white buses leave Ravensbrück on April 25 under the command of the Swedish lieutenant Åke Svenson. That same day, a “Swedish” train leaves Ravensbrück for Hamburg with 4,000 women loaded on fifty freight cars, but the train disappears in the fog of war and is found four days later outside Lübeck, where its engine has broken down. When the trucks are unbolted, four women are found dead while others are in a very bad state and have to be taken to a hospital, but this “ghost train” is nonetheless able to continue its journey to the Danish border with 3,989 surviving Ravensbrück women. The train carrying the singing Kapo and the arms-presenting SS men apparently left a couple of days earlier, yet it does not, as far as I’ve been able to establish, feature in the narrative of those who were saved from Ravensbrück. The ghost train of Lübeck is there, but not the train with the singing Kapo. If you were on the way to Sweden, as you were expressly told, why is there no record of it other than your story and Dr. Liedke’s story and, I assume, the stories of all the others who share the experience, on a train from Ravensbrück, of a Jewish Kapo intoning the new Jewish national anthem in front of SS men presenting arms?

Maybe the Kapo and the SS men got their trains muddled up.

Maybe you and the others weren’t on your way to Sweden.

Maybe there was never any intention of rescuing you at all.

Be that as it may, there is certainly no intention of rescuing you when you leave Ravensbrück a second time.

“Instead of Sweden, we were sent to Wöbbelin,” continues the letter you fear might bore the woman who is to be my mother.

I like your concise, low-key style. You really are doing your best not to bore your reader.

The story of Wöbbelin can hardly bore anyone.

The rail route from Ravensbrück to Wöbbelin runs due west, first through an area of lakes with long stretches of deciduous woodland and narrow forest roads, then through increasingly open agricultural countryside with small villages and towns along the roads, which are still narrow but now lined with poplars. When traveling by car, however, one can go west from Ravensbrück only by first going north for about ten kilometers and then taking the exit for Wesenberg and Mirow, and it’s not a straight route, particularly if you want to avoid the Berlin-to-Hamburg superhighway, which I do. Between Ravensbrück and Wöbbelin there are plenty of minor roads to go astray on, roads where in moments of inattention one runs the risk of being caught on camera.

It’s actually the road to Ludwigslust I’m taking, since Wöbbelin is too small to appear on my map. Wöbbelin is five kilometers north of Ludwigslust, so if I find the one, I ought to find the other. Ludwigslust has been called a gem of a town, as its name perhaps hints. At the end of the eighteenth century, the Mecklenburgian Grand Duke Christian Ludwig had a palace built here to satisfy his lust for hunting. Around the same time, he had a church built at an appropriate distance from the palace, perhaps to set limits to his lusts.

Ludwigslust is indeed a gem. Both the palace and the church are still standing, and the area between them has long been an open common, lined with old linden trees and well-preserved half-timbered houses. The only thing disturbing the idyll, on closer inspection, are the two hundred flat gravestones in four straight rows, fifty stones per row, lying along the walkway between the linden trees, two rows on each side. Half the stones are engraved with a cross and half with a Star of David. That’s all. No names, no dates, no explanation. The stones are pale gray granite, and for particular reasons especially thick (eight centimeters) and extremely heavy (fifty-five kilos), and sunk deep into the ground, and provided with a graffiti-proof glaze. In short, they would be awkward to remove, and difficult to vandalize. For a gem of a town to have its most central place covered by gravestones is, after all, rather unexpected — and not entirely uncontroversial, either.