Goran Rosenberg - A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz

In your letters, you try hard to present life in Alingsås as fully normal, yes, even as bright and promising. After only a few months, you’re able to report that Natek has landed a new job at the textile factory, in the stockroom of the dyeing section, with the prospect of promotion since textile dyeing is his speciality — which goes to show that even foreigners have the chance of “a first-rate job.” You write of the Jewish-Polish colony and its gatherings, of your trips to visit new friends in the land of the vast forests, of the new language, which you learn not so much from your two lessons a week as from talking to Swedes, “and I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you: including Swedish women.”

You begin one letter by telling about the two letters that were waiting for you both when you got back from work, one from Haluś to yourself, dated February 5, 1946, and one for Natek. The letter for you has taken seven weeks to get there, and I can well imagine the dark misunderstandings that can arise from such postal service. The letter to Natek brings the answer to his question about Andzia:

When he’d finished reading the letter, he wasn’t able to utter a word. He just sat there staring listlessly at the same spot. I went out of the room because I could feel something was happening inside him and he needed to be alone. Up to that point he hadn’t let any bad thoughts get near him. In fact just the opposite, he’d tried hard to behave in an easygoing, lighthearted way and had even allowed himself brief flirtations now and then. But I knew very well that it was all self-deception, and in fact he told me himself that if he didn’t keep up the show he’d soon be in bad shape. With Andzia he could have been happy, because there was no other woman he could ever truly be in love with. He still thinks it’s thanks to her that the sun is peeping out from the clouds.

You can’t imagine the effect the letter had on him.

Then a detailed account of a burlesque linguistic misunderstanding is suddenly allowed to take up most of the rest of the letter:

Coffee is the Swedish national drink, and they take cakes and biscuits with it. When Swedes offer you coffee, you can’t say no, or they’re mortally offended. So we come in, take a seat, and our hostess kindly invites us to help ourselves. As we begin drinking and eating, the hostess turns to us and says: varso gut dupa , but since we weren’t familiar with Swedish customs, we didn’t know what she meant, and she repeated it several times, varso gut dupa, varso gut dupa . There were three of us, Natek, me and another fellow. We all burst out laughing and couldn’t stop, and our hosts laughed with us. They wondered what we were laughing about and our hostess said we had to explain what was so funny, and was even ready to defend herself. There was nothing for it, we had to tell her that the word d— [an explicit four-letter word] is not a very nice one in Polish. Once she had heard it, there was no stopping her, she was splitting her sides with laughter. It turned that what she’d said was vars å god och doppa , which means “Do feel free to dunk.” Swedes have the habit of dunking their biscuits in their coffee, in fact it’s such standard practice that it has its own special name. Since then, Swedes have been avoiding the word, but only in Polish company of course.

Here you seem a bit shocked as you realize how your pen has run away with you—“Haluś, what am I doing, what good is this nonsense to you?”

At this point you’re interrupted in your letter-writing by a visit to your room. A workmate and his girlfriend have come to tell you they’re getting engaged, which prompts you to offer them, “elegantly,” some fruit and wine—“Haluś, can you imagine me as a host?” But once the guests have left you start feeling sad and eventually have to throw out your brother, who’s been sad all evening and should rather go and see a movie to banish the darkness inside, and as so often, the letter ends in shadows. “Haluś, what’s to become of us?”

The biscuit-dunking story is a glade of brightness in a forest of shadows.

Life in Alingsås is a life of waiting for answers that tarry, in the meandering stream of people who come and go on their way to somewhere else, in the restless motion between the shadows of memory and the glades of forgetfulness. Pension Friden is located at Torggatan 8, which is about as much in the center as you can get in little Alingsås, but for the people who come and go across its creaking floor, it’s a place on the outskirts, or rather a no-man’s-land between a world that is no longer and a world that is still unreal.

A waiting place, in fact.

A waiting place for a connection not yet established.

Hardly a life you would call normal, if by normal you mean a life with a past and a future.

It’s hardly normal to wait for a connection that may not exist.

At any rate, there’s no given term for people in your category. The official documents are stamped RED CROSS REFUGEES, but refugees you are not.

If only you had been. If only you had fled while there was time.

But you didn’t flee, you were transported, which is something else, particularly if the purpose of the transport is annihilation.

You aren’t immigrants, either, not in your own eyes, nor in the eyes of Sweden. You haven’t come here of your own free will or under your own steam, but again by being transported, from one camp to another, from a camp in hell to a camp in the land of the vast forests, which out of a combination of magnanimity and guilt has offered you a temporary stop while you’re waiting to journey on to somewhere else, and which therefore designates you as transit migrants or repatriandi .

For people who haven’t fled, and haven’t migrated, and have nowhere to be transited or repatriated to, and who are still waiting for answers that tarry, and who until further notice live a life without a past and without a future, there’s no ready-made term and no ready-made policy, either, which is hardly surprising. Whoever could have imagined that in the course of a few short summer months, Sweden would take in over ten thousand individuals for whom no ready-made category exists in the Swedish language?

As time goes by, the term “survivors” starts to be used, initially as a statement of fact, survivors as distinct from the perished, but gradually as a category in its own right, a term for people whose main attribute is that they’re alive when in all probability they should be dead. Those to whom this term primarily applies are people who declare themselves to be Jews and who prove to fit particularly badly into the official categories of transit migrants and repatriandi . Already on July 3, 1945, an editorial in Sweden’s main daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter , notes that the minister of justice has received a request “for the benefit of a large group of stateless individuals” to

set aside the rule requiring a minimum of ten years’ residence to qualify for Swedish citizenship.… Among the UNRRA refugees that the Red Cross has been bringing here for some time, there are a number of people with highly uncertain futures — for example Polish Jews with no links to home — fearful that they will be sent from one anti-Semitic environment to another.

Jewish concentration camp survivors become, in short, a human category all their own. Shipwrecked, you call them in one of your letters. Floating wreckage, I read somewhere else. Some of the shipwrecked still fear that in all probability they should be dead and therefore declare themselves as something other than Jews, which makes it somewhat difficult to keep a tally.

Some of them see forebodings everywhere.

Förbjudet att luta sig ut , says a small metal plate screwed to the window frame in every Swedish train compartment, forbidding passengers to lean out.