Goran Rosenberg - A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz

When I ask M.Z. about the potato picking, fifty-nine years have elapsed, and only fragments of this memory are left.

So I prefer to stick to the documents, as you know, and a written record of the potato picking in Hestra is to be found at the Swedish National Archives in Stockholm, Riksarkivet, as is your application to the State Aliens Commission on September 19, 1945, for permission to travel to the aliens’ camp in Gränna to visit your cousin Helena Wiśnicka.

I can’t deny that I’m surprised to find such an application, since I’ve never heard of such a cousin before. I’m not even sure such a cousin exists. Especially not after having read your letter to Haluś of April 6, 1946, in which your trip to Gränna is revealed in another light. The letter’s written in an increasingly dejected mood; three months have passed since the postcard in Furudal and Haluś is still in Łódź, and you are still in Alingsås, and the formal barriers to your reunion seem to multiply by the day. You’ve been worrying about Haluś’s state of mind ever since she wrote in her last letter that she’d started avoiding people. You immediately interpret this to mean that she’s sitting alone with her thoughts: “You mustn’t do that Haluś! Sitting alone with your thoughts is terrible for people like us!”

And as if to share her solitude in some way, you tell her about the time when you, too, were sitting alone with your thoughts, which happened to be the time of your trip to Gränna.

It was in my early days at Öreryd, when I still had no idea of your existence. We shipwrecked people certainly don’t lack reasons to lose our spirits. If the weather was nice we tried to forget by swimming and rowing at a nearby lake, or by walking in the forest and picking mushrooms. It was much worse when the weather turned bad, it was enough to drive you mad, and there were lots of rainy days like that. I had to get away for a few days, at any cost. I had no money for travel, nobody to visit, and nowhere to go. I cut down on cigarettes (in the camp we were given 5 kronor “pocket money” that was supposed to cover cigarettes and other small expenses) and I saved up a few kronor. Then I got on a bus without any real plan and went to the nearest town, Jönköping (known for its picturesque setting and its match factories). I wasn’t really supposed to travel because I still had no passport, but I didn’t care. The town is on a huge lake, with lovely hills all around. I was so dazed by it all that I forgot who I am and how I ended up here. After I’d wandered around for a couple of hours I felt so uneasy, so foreign (I couldn’t talk to people, I only knew a few words of Swedish) that I was on the verge of going back to Öreryd that same evening. But I put the thought out of my mind when I met two Hungarian Jewish women. They told me that in Gränna, about 60 km away, there was a Polish camp, and that I could get there by car, or by boat across the lake. So I went there, thinking I might meet someone who knew something about your fate.

When I got to Gränna it turned out there wasn’t a camp there after all, instead there were women billeted at hotels and boardinghouses (Gränna is a well-known spa and tourist resort) — Polish women, at that. I didn’t even have time to look around me and see which way to go before I suddenly hear someone calling: “Dawid! Dawid! My God, who is it that I see! Dawid’s alive!” And there in front of me is Estusia (red-haired Estusia, from the post office). Her first words were: “Where’s Hala, have you had any news of her?”

What happened next is hard to describe. Girls came streaming in from all directions and looked at me like a creature from another planet. All around me I can hear voices: “Has this guy been in a concentration camp? God, how is that possible, he looks like a normal human being, ein emes jiddisch jingl .”

I was rooted to the spot and didn’t know what to do with myself or what it was all supposed to mean. But suddenly it dawned on me that these women had come to Sweden before the end of the war (through the Red Cross), and therefore hadn’t witnessed the liberation. Which served to explain why my appearance came as such a pleasant surprise to them. A few hours before they left for Sweden they’d been lined up for roll call at Ravensbrück, opposite the men (I happened to have been one of those men, or should I say walking corpses). They kept me talking until late into the night, wanting to hear every last detail of the liberation.

The next day I went back to Öreryd. Before I left I had to make a solemn promise that I would come back for Rosh Hashana [Jewish New Year] and that I would bring a few more men with me, because they were planning a traditional New Year celebration, and without men it sort of wouldn’t work because they wanted to have the prayers, too [for a Jewish act of worship you have to have a minyan , that is, a gathering of ten Jewish men].

I kept my word and took a whole gang with me to the celebration. Since then, men keep going there from Öreryd and vice versa. That way, by simply asking around, many people have found out what happened to their relatives and friends. We took our turn and organized dances and invited the girls from Gränna to them. In short, we started having a bit of a social life again. And thanks to my first escapade in Gränna, there are now six couples. They’re scattered all over Sweden. Only one of the couples lives here in Alingsås.

At about this point, the mood of the letter darkens. It’s palpable. The words lose their bounce. Shadows fall between the lines. The reunion which only a moment ago seemed to be a matter of course is now vanishing beyond the horizon. From Poland, only those cleared for continued travel across the Atlantic are now allowed to enter, you write. Obtaining admission to Sweden from the DP camp at Bergen-Belsen has also become “very difficult.” “As regards the possibility of my arranging the formalities, it’s nonexistent for the time being.”

And Haluś hasn’t even made her way to Bergen-Belsen yet. She’s still in Łódź.

Tomorrow you’ll give it another go and try to find out exactly how things stand in Bergen-Belsen, and try to talk to people who have just arrived from there and who are still in quarantine in Helsingborg.

Today, you’re too tired to write anything more.

“I’m in a terrible state of mind,” ends the letter about the merry trip to Gränna.

From time to time, the weekly physician’s reports from Öreryd record the medical consequences of terrible states of mind. In the early hours of June 21, 1946, dentist Abraham Goldman takes his own life by cutting his wrists and sticking a knife with a four-centimeter blade straight into his heart. Nine months earlier, in the report of September 27, 1945, it’s noted that the said Abraham Goldman hadn’t been able to produce certification of his dental qualifications, but that he’d been vouched for by two “Poles” in the camp and an application therefore had been sent off to the Royal Board of Medicine asking permission for Goldman to practice as a dentist in Öreryd.

To judge by subsequent reports, permission has been granted and the temporarily precarious state of the “dentist question” clarified.

What doesn’t get clarified, at least not permanently, is Abraham Goldman’s state of mind.

“In his last weeks he was melancholic and preoccupied with suicidal thoughts,” writes the Öreryd camp physician in his report of June 28, 1946.

By this time, you and Natek are long gone from Öreryd, and long gone from Furudal too. You leave the Swedish archipelago of aliens’ camps for good in early February 1946. About Furudal, you write that the area is beautiful, and that it’s covered with a thick layer of snow, and that camp life is monotonous, although “those who enjoy winter sports have no trouble passing the time.”