Goran Rosenberg - A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz

The little place is called Furudal and is situated in the vast forest belt between Rättvik in Dalarna and Bollnäs in Hälsingland; as I say, it’s not a place you might accidentally pass through on the way to somewhere else, but a place you come to only if you know in advance that this is exactly where you’re going, which few people have a reason to know. Before May 1974 I had never heard of Furudal, but I did know in advance that it was where I was going, first by train to Rättvik, then by bus through Ovanmyra, Boda, and Gulleråsen to Furudal, and Furudals Bruk, the estate of a former ironworks a bit farther to the north. In the old manor of the estate, at the edge of a dark forest by a black pond, I was to spend two weeks taking a crash course in French, with the blessings and support of my then employer. It was all beautifully planned, and the conditions for intense language learning were probably the best, but Furudal became important in my life for mainly nonlinguistic reasons (French still eludes me). Quite simply, I fell in love with the place, which largely had to do with the fact that I fell in love with a woman in this place, meaning that in this very place my life took a turn. Such places tend to linger on in life even after one’s links to them are broken and life has taken a few more turns. In this case, my link to the place wasn’t broken. For many years I returned to Furudal, motivated by a number of apparently unconnected reasons, though the underlying and unifying reason must have been an invisible attraction to the memories the place evoked.

So you must understand my astonishment, I might even say shock, when, a lifetime later, I’m confided with a yellowing bundle of handwritten letters dating from the winter and spring of 1946. I say confided because they’re mostly love letters. They’re the letters you write to the woman who is to be my mother after you’ve found out she’s alive and you can no longer imagine life without her. These are joyful letters and desperate letters and letters of life and death, and the letter on top has the dateline Tappudden-Furudal, which I don’t have to know Polish to understand. “Tappudden-Furudal 15/1 46,” it says in the top right-hand corner. Your handwriting is small but clear, every letter distinct and separate, almost like printing, and I read the heading over and over again, wondering for a moment if there might be more than one Furudal in Sweden, but I already know that Tappudden is a point on Lake Ore and that your Furudal must also be my Furudal and that this is precisely where you are when on January 15, 1946, you receive a postcard, sent to you by the World Jewish Congress, which passes on greetings from a certain Hala Staw, to whom you can write via Komitet Żyd at 32 Sródm. in Łódź or via A. Borensztajn in Hohne Belsen, b. Celle, Camp 3, R.B. 1/16. There’s no explanation of who this A. Borensztajn might be and the dual addresses are a little confusing and perhaps not entirely reassuring, as neither provides an unambiguous street with an unambiguous number where you could immediately go and knock on the door and take your beloved Haluś in your arms and never let her go again; but there’s no doubt that in this particular place amid the vast forests between Rättvik and Bollnäs, your young life takes yet another turn. The letter you write in duplicate that very day and send off to both addresses registers for all time the overwhelming effect of a postcard in Furudal:

Haluś, can you imagine what happened to me!?

I was so overcome I couldn’t get a word out. I ran home to the barracks and read the card again, and then again, and again, and again … until the words finally dislodged themselves from my breast:

Hala’s alive! Hala’s alive! Hala’s alive!

You’ve been in the aliens’ camp at Tappudden-Furudal for just over two weeks when it happens.

Yes, that’s what the official papers call it, the aliens’ camp.

One of the papers notes that you’re part of the contingent of Polish Jews transferred on December 12, 1945, from the aliens’ camp at Öreryd to the camp at Furudal. There are seventeen of you, and the head of the Öreryd camp asserts that you have all been provided with a set of winter clothes and pocket money until December 31, 1945. To ensure that there’s no duplication of provisions or payments, I assume.

A copy of the contingent list is to be duly signed by the head of the camp in Furudal and sent back to the head of the camp in Öreryd. So no one in the contingent disappears, I assume.

You’re duly arranged in alphabetical order, from Apelbaum Juda to Zylberszac Mozes, and somewhere in between is Rozenberg Dawid and Rozenberg Naftali, Rozenberg with a z, Dawid with a w. You’re not intended to stay in Sweden, so there’s no reason to start spelling your name any other way. “Transit migrants” is the term that’s been coined for people like you, which means you have the government’s permission to recuperate here for a while before continuing your journey to somewhere else.

In the months following the end of the war, nearly thirty thousand survivors from German concentration camps are permitted to recuperate in Sweden. Some never do recuperate. Some soon continue their journeys to somewhere else. Some soon go back to where they came from, giving rise to yet another term applied by officialdom to those who have come to recuperate, repatriandi , which means people who can be expected to have a home or at least a homeland to return to. Of the thirty thousand transit migrants or repatriandi , however, ten thousand are Jews, which soon turns out to mean that most of them have nowhere to return to, and of course nowhere else to journey on to.

About the difference between Jews and repatriandi there’s initially some confusion, or even downright ignorance, among the Swedish authorities, and about the difference between Poles and Polish Jews as well. The authorities eventually learn to know better, which presumably is one of the reasons why in late December 1945 most of the Polish-Jewish men in the aliens’ camp at Öreryd are transferred to the aliens’ camp at Tappudden-Furudal, and most of the Polish-Jewish women to the aliens’ camp in Doverstorp.

In Öreryd, all “former concentration camp clients” (yes, that’s what they write) are categorized as Poles, whether they’re Jews or not. This isn’t a very good idea, for among some of the Poles there’s a tradition of anti-Semitism that hasn’t necessarily been softened by the fate of the Polish Jews. Among the former concentration camp clients there are also some who were perpetrators, and some who were both victims and perpetrators, and it happens that victims are directly confronted with their former tormenters, which isn’t good for camp discipline. Subsequently, the idea of putting the Jews and the Poles into separate camps comes up, and this rouses the indignation of a leading Swedish opinion maker, Alva Myrdal, who writes in the weekly magazine Vi (no. 35, 1945):

If the tendency to segregate were to triumph, we would have to acknowledge that this is the first introduction of the ghetto in Sweden — a terrible calamity and a horror that a democratic society cannot tolerate. We must not unleash such racial hatred and racial fear: we must do all we can to conquer them by education and information.

Which, as we have seen, does not prevent the aliens’ camp at Öreryd from being almost emptied of its Polish Jews in December 1945, so that a postcard sent there to Dawid Rozenberg must be forwarded to the aliens’ camp at Tappudden-Furudal.

You’re transferred to Öreryd on August 10, 1945, after three weeks of quarantine in the small university town of Lund. Öreryd is located amid the vast forests of Småland, between Jönköping and Gislaved, and it too is a place hard to find on the map if you don’t know where to look beforehand, which is presumably an important reason why a camp for Norwegian refugees is opened here on March 16, 1941. At any rate, such a camp is not exactly something that Sweden would want to advertise to Germany, which at that point looks likely to win the war and therefore should not be needlessly provoked. Further camps for Norwegian refugees are consequently set up in equally undistinguished and hard-to-find places with names like Holmudden, Bäggböle, Voxna, Skålmyra, Bäckehagen, Älgberget, Stråtenbo, Gottröra, Mälsåker, Mossebo, and Tappudden-Furudal.