Goran Rosenberg - A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz

You yourself learn to ski in Furudal.

No one forces you to leave Furudal. You’ve simply “had enough of camp life and want to work.”

You also want to stay in Sweden, at least for now. On September 1, 1945, while still at Öreryd, you both apply for Swedish aliens’ passports. You emphasize in the strongest terms that you don’t want to return to Poland, that you don’t want to be categorized as repatriandi , that you want nothing more to do with Poland. Your brother is even more adamant on this point and encloses a separate sheet with a handwritten declaration in Polish, and alongside it the translation, typed in Swedish: “My entire family, which lived in Łódź before the war, has been murdered by Hitler’s brutes. If I were to return to Łódź now, my whole life would be a string of tragic memories.”

Under the handwritten signature of Naftali Rosenberg, someone (the translator?) has typed the word “Jew” in brackets, perhaps to explain or clarify, but the answer is slow in coming, and on December 10, 1945, the two of you write another letter to the State Aliens Commission, this time without any typewriting go-between, and this time in German.

BITTE , in capitals at the top.

BITTE . We are two brothers, both qualified textile engineers, who would be able to get jobs at a textile factory in Marieholm if only we had our passports. Favorable treatment of our request, die günstige Erledigung unserer Bitte , would make it possible for us to start living a normal life. We want to stress that we have no intention of returning to Poland as our whole family in Poland has fallen victim to the Hitler regime, ist dem Hitlerregime zum Opfer gefallen .

You write politely, rounding off with thanks in anticipation and yours faithfully, but no aliens’ passports are forthcoming as far as I can tell, which however doesn’t prevent you from checking out of the aliens’ camp in Tappudden-Furudal on February 2, 1946, and checking into Friden Pension in Alingsås, where two days later you embark on an apparently normal life as textile workers at Alingsås Bomullsväfveri. It’s a hard job, working under a lot of time pressure at clattering mechanical looms on large factory floors, and since you’ve both presented yourselves as qualified textile engineers (which is truer of your brother than of you), it’s maybe not quite what you’d hoped for. On the other hand, you’re eager to convince the woman who is to be my mother that your entry level in the Swedish labor market is a purely temporary one and only to be expected, and that Sweden is paradise, all the same. In your first letter from Alingsås to Łódź, on March 7, 1946, you write:

The Swedes unfortunately take priority for the better positions, which is quite understandable, though in Sweden nobody is ashamed of their job and nobody is choosy. The Swedes are a hardworking people and work is considered a blessing. No wonder, as an average worker lives better than a small businessman in prewar Poland. In some industries a worker earns (almost) as much as an engineer. I can earn as much as about 75 kronor a week. You can live all right on that, dress decently, afford proper accommodation, etc. Natek works at the same factory. For now we’re living at a pension, i.e. we get food and lodging. We’d rather have an apartment of our own but accommodation is difficult here. Even so, I think it will happen soon. The pension is fairly expensive, and what’s more we don’t like the food (Swedish food isn’t particularly tasty). Once we’re set up on our own we’ll be able to make our own breakfast and supper and eat lunch at a restaurant. Can you imagine, Swedes sprinkle sugar on their herring, and drown their meat in cream. They add sugar to almost everything. We work in two shifts. One week from 5 in the morning to 1.30 in the afternoon, the next week from 1.30 until 10 at night.

You ask what my plans are. I want the same as you, Haluś, which is to hold you in my arms as soon as possible.

I would like to fly away to you at this very minute — there actually are flights from Stockholm to Warsaw — but you know very well what the obstacles are.

The only thing we can do is to get you to Sweden, and it would happen all the sooner if only you could get to Bergen-Belsen.

That’s how most of the letters from Pension Friden in Alingsås to Hala Staw in Łódź end. With “if only.”

If only you could get to Bergen-Belsen.

If only you could claim to be someone’s wife or child. Claiming to be someone’s sister or brother isn’t enough, as you know.

If only from the start, I had declared you my wife.

If only from the start, you had declared me your husband.

If only you could get in touch with so-and-so who knows so-and-so who knows the best way to get from Łódź to Bergen-Belsen and from Bergen-Belsen to Sweden.

If only I could get a Swedish family to guarantee the ten thousand kronor required for an entry visa from Poland.

If only I could join the crew of a Swedish ship in Gothenburg and smuggle you aboard in some Polish port, Gdynia maybe — there’s a lot of smuggling going on there, you know.

The tone is generally one of forced optimism: things will fall into place, you’ll see; new options have opened up and so-and-so has just arrived from Bergen-Belsen without any family ties here at all; tomorrow I’m going to talk to so-and-so who is right up to date on the best way to go about it; everything’s ready for when you get here, you know, with a job and a place to live all organized; and there’s so much I haven’t had a chance to tell you, and so much you haven’t had a chance to tell me; and I can’t see the point of having both survived hell if we’re not allowed to share paradise.

There are times when you can’t convince even yourself, and sometimes I get the feeling you aren’t even sure whether the woman who is to be my mother actually wants to join you in Sweden or whether she’d prefer that you join her in Poland, which tends to make you desperate as well as decisive. In a disconsolate moment you write that it might be best for you to go to her in Łódź after all, that your longing for her is unbearable, that you can’t stand the idea of being apart from her much longer. In your decisive moments, and they are many, you put a great deal of effort into convincing her that she has to leave Poland, that Poland is no place for people like her and you, and that it’s definitely not mere selfish convenience that’s deterring you from leaving paradise at once and coming to her side:

You mustn’t think that the decisive factor for my not coming to Poland is the drop in living standards that would lead to. The way things look now, there’s no way back for a Jew. I’ve talked to people who have just come to Sweden from Poland illegally, via Gdynia. They were two Christian Poles who had already been in Sweden, then returned to Poland but have now come back here. When I told them I was weighing up the idea of going to Poland they looked at me as if I was mad.…

I don’t want to build a new life on the ruins of our homes, and what’s more, at a time when everything around is malign or even hostile toward us. And this, even despite the fact that in Łódź I might be able to arrange things better for myself, live better, i.e. get a job in my own profession. But it can’t be helped, I would rather be an unskilled worker here than have to listen to comments like “So where are all these Jews coming from now, I was sure we’d got rid of them?”…

I’ll say it again: it’s in “our” own best interests for you to come to me, even though it isn’t easy to put into practice. How can I even think of coming back, when we keep hearing about murders of Jews? Right now they’re talking on Radio Warsaw about the murder of 5 Jews in Krakow. So why should I drop everything and go to where I’m hated and despised?