Goran Rosenberg: A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz

As the sender’s address he gives R 639 B, Södertälje. What kind of address is that? No street, no name, just a code. The address of yet another barrack in yet another camp? Can a letter of reply really be delivered to an address like that? How long can such an address be allowed to keep them apart?

Two days later, he starts work at the truck factory. His job is to weld fuel pipes on truck chassis. He has no problem getting hired. “Conscientious and hardworking,” says the typewritten notepaper from the personnel manager at the textile factory, Alingsås Bomullsväfveri, and that’s presumably all the personnel manager at Scania-Vabis needs to know, though he’s also informed that the man in front of him has some experience in truck building. “Worked as a welder of truck axles at Firma Büssingwerke in Braunschweig/Vechelde from September 1944 to March 1945” is duly noted on the new-employee form under the heading “Qualifications and Experience.” Not that this makes any difference, as previously noted. Europe is currently demanding more trucks than Scania-Vabis can produce, and Scania-Vabis is seeking more workers than it can currently lay hands on. Many of Europe’s truck factories are still in ruins, incapable of making the trucks needed to rebuild them, not to mention everything else in Europe that needs trucks for rebuilding, a situation that presently gives Scania-Vabis in Södertälje a competitive advantage over, say, Büssingwerke in Braunschweig, which has not been able to turn any truck axles at all in the past two years.

Two weeks later, a new possibility becomes available at R 639 B in Södertälje, and the worry that can’t be dispelled in any other way is dispelled when the woman who is to be my mother takes the train to join the man who is to be my father, to share with him a rented room that has no kitchen. In those early, steadily darker autumn mornings, they surreptitiously heat their water on an upturned iron before he goes off to the truck factory and she to the pharmaceutical factory, and after a while to the family-owned clothing factory where she sews coat linings at piecework rates to musical accompaniment. “The girls don’t like marches, but apart from that we play everything from classical music to popular hits,” the manager tells the local paper. She’s young and deft, with a year’s experience of sewing work at Sveriges Förenade Linnefabrikers AB in Alingsås. On a good eight-hour working day she can get up to seventy-five öre an hour, which along with the meager but slightly higher wage from the truck factory soon puts them on a sounder footing. By the first of October 1947 they’re able to move into a sublet, one-room apartment with a kitchenette and a proper address: 22 Villagatan. One year later at that address, in a house I have no memory of, the young man becomes my father and the young woman my mother.

We move to the house I actually remember a year or two later. The documents say one thing and the aging memory another, but it doesn’t matter; this is where it all begins, in the building below the railroad station where the young man who will be my father alighted from the train on an early August evening in 1947, and which you can see right beneath the window on the left-hand side of the coach if you arrive by train from the north, across the Bridge.

This is it; this is the Place. This is where my world assumes its first colors, lights, smells, sounds, voices, gestures, names, and words. I’m not sure how far back a human being can remember; some people say they have memories going back to their second year, but my first memories are of snow and cold and therefore probably date from somewhat later, since I was born in October. But one thing I’m certain of is that even before the point where my memories of that first world of mine begin, it had already set its stamp on so much that even things I can no longer remember aren’t forgotten either. This is the Place that will continue to form me even when I’m convinced that I’ve formed myself.

That’s the difference between them and me. They have encountered the world for the first time in an entirely different place, and carry with them an entirely different world, and for them so much has already started and already ended, and it’s still unclear whether anything can start afresh here, since a great deal of what they can’t remember, or don’t want to remember, they cannot forget. For them, the colors and the shifting light and the smells and sounds and voices of this place will often remind them of something else, though they might not always know what it is. For them to be able somehow to make this place their own, they’ll have to get to know it well enough, and let it stamp them deeply enough, so that sometimes it will be this place they’re reminded of when they hear a freight train rattle past at night, or inhale the smell of fried herring in the stairwell, or walk under tall pines, or catch a whiff of tar and sea, or see rowanberries glowing in the fall, or look at their children.

What quickly binds them to the Place is the Child, who happens to be me. I don’t want to exaggerate my own importance in this context, and I could be wrong, but on a purely practical level, a child makes it harder to move on. Moving on with only a hat on your head and a suitcase in your hand is one thing. Moving on with a newborn child is another proposition entirely. For the sake of the Child, a brief stop must be extended indefinitely, and big plans associated with their journey onward must be reduced to little plans associated with the place where they happen to be, a happenstance that the Place confirms with a miracle.

“Housing Shortage” is one of the first expressions the language of the Place forces upon them. Housing Shortage and Housing Emergency. The local newspaper, Stockholms Läns & Södertälje Tidning , popularly known as the Länstidningen (the County News), publishes reports about a family living in a tent on the beach. About five hundred applicants for sixty flats. About the truck factory’s barracks for its single male workers. “Catastrophic Housing Shortage in Vivid Focus,” shouts the front page on July 19, 1948.

Not that they need to read the local paper to know. Anyone in the Place can tell you that an apartment of your own is a miracle.

And yet it happens. An almost new apartment with a small, all-purpose living room and a little kitchen, a bathroom with a WC and hot running water, a wood-fired laundry in the basement of the neighboring house and a rubbish chute in the stairwell, a letterbox and a nameplate on the front door. In the small living room, a sofa that turns into a bed, a height-adjustable round table made of varnished wood, walnut-brown with an extension leaf, and four matching chairs with upholstered fabric seats. A child’s bed in a sleeping alcove. In one corner, on a little table covered with a white, lace-edged cloth, a Philips radio set. Somewhere there’s also a linen cupboard, with drawers for sheets, towels, and children’s clothes. In the kitchen, a couch in pale wood, a refrigerator and a sink unit, a wall cupboard with sliding Masonite doors painted pale gray, a crockery set with a blue pattern, six of everything. On the wall above the radio, an oil painting of a vase with red and yellow flowers. In the basement, two secondhand bikes, one with a child’s seat, hung on hooks from the ceiling. I’m also looking for a stroller, but I’m not sure where to place it. All I know is that there must have been a place for it somewhere, just as there will eventually have to be a place for a wooden toy train and a shelf of children’s books borrowed from the town library and a box with a basic Meccano set sorted in compartments and a few of those expensive, cast-metal model cars, a Volvo PV444 definitely among them. In an apartment with just one room, it’s easy to see what a lot of space a single child takes up.