Goran Rosenberg - A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz

How long will anyone remember the victims of Wöbbelin? The memorial stone is new, as is the signpost pointing through the trees to the mass graves. There’s another stone, visibly older and more like an ordinary gravestone, standing discreetly a little farther in among the pines, the words engraved in it already rendered illegible by dirt, moss, and neglect. Again, the new memorial plaque seems to be covered in some kind of graffiti-proof substance, the snow slips off so easily.

In Wöbbelin, if one can talk of being in a place one’s immediately out of, the memory of the dead in the camp is shared with the memory of the nineteenth-century German poet Theodor Körner, in a building erected in 1938 to honor this cultural icon of the Third Reich. Theodor Körner wrote romantic poetry in which he glorified and heroized war, and he died in a manner befitting his writings, in a skirmish between Prussian militia and a French baggage train near Wöbbelin (to be more precise, at a place by the name of Rosenberg) on August 23, 1813. In the nineteenth century his grave monument, a lyre crossed by a sword, became a place of pilgrimage for German nationalists, and during the Nazi era an official cult site, where German recruits were gathered to swear their oath to the Führer. This ceremony — the Waffenübernahme an der Körnerstätte— took place for the last time in mid-March 1945.

This is not to say that every poet revered by the Nazis deserved such a fate, it’s only that Goebbels ended his infamous speech at the Berlin Sports Palace on February 18, 1943, Wollt Ihr den totalen Krieg? (Do you want total war?), with a verse by Körner: Nun, Volk, steh auf, und Sturm, brich los! — “Now, people, rise up, and storm, break loose!” It was also indisputably the Nazis who built the red-brick building in Wöbbelin with the words Unserm Theodor Körner (To our Theodor Körner) in wrought-iron letters on its front wall. In one part of the building, a permanent exhibition commemorating the German nationalist writer of heroic poems; in the other part, since 1965, a permanent exhibition commemorating the victims of the German nationalist insanity his poems to some degree inspired. The latter is a powerful display with all the photographs and documents one could possibly ask for, such as to leave no visitor in any doubt of what confronted the liberators of Wöbbelin and to ensure that the memory of the atrocities will remain more than graffiti-proof. Yet in the house the Nazis built, no spatial distinction is drawn between the memory of a poet who died in 1813 and an atrocity that occurred in 1945 (both are allocated the same amount of space), which makes me fear for the memory of the latter.

On the front wall it still says only Unserm Theodor Körner .

In the long run, who wants to remember Wöbbelin?

A stone’s throw from the pine woods that cover the mass graves, the double-track railroad from Ludwigslust to Schwerin runs past on newly laid concrete sleepers. The siding that led to the camp has been demolished, as has the old railroad line; only a walled-up, red-brick station building is left standing desolately by the embankment. No trains stop at Wöbbelin anymore.

However, as late as November 26, 1946, a reminder is sent from the Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft Altona-Kaltenkirchen-Neumünster to Herrn Oberfinanzpräsidenten Hamburg concerning a bill of 1,728 German Reichsmarks for the conveyance of 2 officers, 84 men, and 576 prisoners from Bahnhof Kaltenkirchen to Lager Wöbbelin Bahnhof Ludwigslust, on April 16, 1945. “This bill,” the railroad company emphasizes, “has been neither wholly nor partially withdrawn or annulled.”

I turn the car around and take the plane back to Sweden.

Sweden is where you’re heading, after all.

Exactly why you’re going to Sweden isn’t clear. It’s true that you once thought you were on the way to Sweden, on the train from Ravensbrück with the singing Kapo and the SS men presenting arms and the food parcels of corned beef and Camel cigarettes, but there’s no indication that the road from Wöbbelin leads to Sweden. The road from Wöbbelin leads to an American field hospital in Ludwigslust, and to a convalescent home in Schwerin, and to the Bergen-Belsen camp for human wrecks from the German camp archipelago.

This camp is not to be confused with the concentration camp next door, which has been burned to stop the spread of epidemics. The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp is liberated by the British on April 15, 1945, and while the world for a short time is receptive to the unbearable, it’s the unbearable images from the liberation of Bergen-Belsen that the world is seeing.

As the years go by, the displaced persons camp, as it is called, becomes unbearable in another way, because for many of those displaced here, there seems to be no way out. Their old world no longer exists, and the new world is none too eager to let itself be theirs. By the end of 1946 there are still 250,000 Jewish survivors in European camps for displaced persons waiting for somewhere to go. The Bergen-Belsen camp remains in operation until 1950.

On the map of the displaced, the road to Sweden hardly figures at all. Nearly all of them pin their hopes on the road to America or Palestine. That’s also true for most of those who in June and July 1945 are allowed to take the road to Sweden, at the request of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. UNRRA is up and running as early as November 1943, but for as long as the war lasts, neutral Sweden will have nothing to do with it. After the war, the situation appears in a new light, and on June 1, 1945, the Swedish government decides to give temporary refuge to “some ten thousand children and invalids” from the refugee camps of Europe. “The Swedish government feels unable to turn down a request of this nature,” explains Gustav Möller, minister for social affairs, to the Lower House of the Swedish Parliament on May 25, 1945. He emphasizes that the refuge is of limited duration, a matter of months, until the health of the sick has improved enough for them to move on elsewhere.

It’s plain that he’s addressing a public opinion not altogether congenial to his project.

On what grounds you’re selected for one of the transports to Sweden remains unclear. You’ve been ill, of course (typhus), and when you’re liberated you weigh eighty pounds, and you have nowhere to go, but the same is true for many others. Perhaps the mysterious promise made at Ravensbrück plays some part; somehow, Sweden’s already on your map, and perhaps as a consequence, you’re on Sweden’s. The Jewish men from the Łódź ghetto who survive the selection on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the slave labor at the Büssing factories in Braunschweig,and the meandering death transport from Watenstedt to Ravensbrück, and the black hole of Wöbbelin, are virtually all transported to Sweden through the good offices of the Red Cross in the summer of 1945.

David Rosenberg. Entered July 18, 1945. Passport control, Malmö.

There are still some places to rescue from oblivion. One of them, strangely enough, was mine before I discovered it had once been yours. It’s actually more than strange that the place has been both yours and mine, a most improbable coincidence, in fact, bordering on the impossible. After all, it’s a place that can hardly be detected on the map, even with a magnifying glass. In any event, it’s a very small place on the edge of a very big forest that stretches for miles in this sparsely populated country, where elk are more common than people and the narrow forest roads are seldom frequented by anyone except the few who for some inscrutable reason live and work here. But it’s a place of great beauty, especially in summer, when the black water behind the hydroelectric dam on the River Ore glitters invitingly against the clear blue sky above the pine trees, and the air fills with the scent of needles and resin, and sunlit fields and pastures peep through the trees, and the small village on the shore of Lake Ore nestles in the gossamer green of unfurling leaves on dazzling white trunks of birch.