Goran Rosenberg - A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz

The factory is completed by the spring of 1952, and the drainage runs as intended.

Havsbadet is the light in the world I’m making into my own. Quite literally so, in fact, since it’s toward Havsbadet that the forest thins out, and the sky gleams through the pines, and the white sand reaches out to the sunlit water. Havsbadet’s always bathed in light, or perhaps it’s just that the memory fragments shine more brightly here. Normally, we walk to Havsbadet, or go by bike, but it’s the walks I remember, because what I remember is the warmth of your hand around mine, and the silhouette of your back against the sun when you hurry on, or is it me lagging behind to inspect the cowslips, the lilies of the valley, or the bilberries along the forest path and then having to catch up with the back ahead of me and slotting my hand into the warmth. The road we walk on is warm. The fragrance of the forest is warm. Havsbadet is warm.

The canal’s cold but Havsbadet’s warm.

When we go by bike, Mom’s always with us, with the child seat on her bike, which has a spoke guard. Gun, a girl living next door, got her foot stuck in the spokes, or so they say. Whether that’s true or not, she has a built-up shoe and walks with a limp. Maybe they just want me to be wary of the spokes. Maybe Gun has had polio, too.

When we walk we’re always on our own, you and me, that’s how I remember it, the road warm and the air heavy with the scent of resin, and from the sea a whiff of tarred wood as the sand gleams through the last pines.

The jetty at Havsbadet is as wide as a footpath with railings on both sides and runs out to a wooden castle with two side sections and a tower. From the top of the tower, flags flutter in the wind and brave bodies fly through the air. Reflections from the mirrored surface of the water play restlessly on the wooden planks of the yellow-painted side sections, and behind them naked people are sunbathing around an enclosed pool area. I’m allowed into the naked men’s pool, but not into the naked women’s. They say you can catch a glimpse of the naked women through the cracks in the plank, but that’s only something I hear, not something I remember doing. They also say you can swim under the jetties and see naked women that way. I don’t remember who tells me this. We never go to the nude bathing pools. Nor do we rent one of the changing huts on the beach. We always sit on a blanket on the sand, and all around us, on a succession of other blankets, sit new friends in a new world, talking and laughing, burrowing their feet into the sand, and touching each other with their hands, and everything looks so bright.

Södertälje bathing beach is a tourist attraction. There’s a wooden pavilion with a dance floor, and a restaurant, and a terrace overlooking the sea, and beneath the pines on the edge of the forest there are tennis courts and miniature golf courses, and along the beach toward the small cape at Näset there are boardinghouses and summer villas with rooms to rent, and every summer weekend caravans of bicycles and cars wind their way along the paved road through the rowanberry avenue, and people come by train from Stockholm and get off at Södertälje Södra and walk the last bit with their blankets and baskets. Is there a bus, perhaps? I don’t remember a bus. Before the war, during the summer season, there was apparently a temporary railroad stop as well, situated where the embankment came closest to the beach, but this is something no one any longer remembers.

On July 25, 1949, the local paper reports, “beach crammed with 1,840 paying visitors and 1,200 children.” Where do we pay? I can’t remember any kind of entrance to Havsbadet, still less a fence. Do we pay to sit on the sand? “Many of the visitors were from Stockholm and clearly there were also a good number of foreigners on the beach, to judge by the confusion of languages, though many of these were perhaps part of the more settled colony of foreigners living among us since the stream of wartime refugees.”

The source for the article is Kalle Åbom, the bathing beach superintendent. Did Kalle Åbom walk past our blanket? What does he mean by a confusion of languages? Everybody talks to each other all the time, of course, and the language they usually speak is Swedish. Maybe they don’t speak as fluently as Kalle Åbom, but it’s Swedish all the same. Janek from Poland speaks Swedish to Ulla from Finland, Birger from Sundsvall speaks Swedish to Ilonka from Sapanta in Romania via Bergen-Belsen, Moses from Poland speaks Swedish to Kato from Hungary, Karin and Ingvar speak Swedish. You and Mom speak Swedish to me and Yiddish and Polish to each other. The only language I remember myself speaking is Swedish, though I later learn that I speak Polish, too. There are many languages in my world, and their sounds fill it as naturally as the shrieks of the gulls over the flag-topped tower in the glittering water and the faint rasp of naked flesh on warm sand.

One night at the end of May 1954, Havsbadet burns down. I can’t imagine the world without Havsbadet, but the building’s yellow wings with the separate pools for men and women burn down, and the jetty and its railings burn down, and the scent of tar is overpowered by the smell of burned wood, and nothing remains but the tower, standing alone in the water like a sooty chimney.

The beach and the sand remain too, for now.

What remains for the longest is the light.

On September 25, 1953, assistant vicar Yngve Junel at the parish civil registration office in Södertälje attests “that former Polish citizen Dawid Rosenberg can speak, write and read the Swedish language to a proficient level.” I can attest in addition that you’re doing all you can to teach your four-year-old son this language, using homemade wooden alphabet blocks laid out on the floor of our living room. I’d assert that you make an excellent job of it, too, or at any rate, that your son is an early and omnivorous reader. He reads the names on the shop signs along the main road, he reads the destination boards hanging from the canopies of the station platforms, he reads the small print on the boxes of washing powder, he reads everything that crosses his path, and you make energetic efforts to ensure that what crosses his path is worth reading, though you don’t always succeed. He also reads when you would rather he didn’t, with a flashlight under the bed covers, or in the fading evening light that comes through the crack at the side of the blind.

What must be attested to, above all, is that you have ambitions, not only for your son but for yourself too. You journey on to the town with the big truck factory because you’re convinced you have a brighter future as a truck builder than as a weaver. At any event, the wage is higher and rises faster. Between 1950 and 1953, it rises from 5,740 kronor to 11,600 kronor per annum. Trucks are in hot demand. South America needs trucks, too. The truck factory’s main problem is finding accommodation for all the workers it must recruit to build the ever-increasing number of trucks required to build the world anew. It’s a great time for truck builders, and especially for a truck builder who only recently was building trucks in a German slave labor camp, and who instead of sharing a room in a Swedish bachelors’ barrack with a “young and quiet snail” is now sharing a modern one-room apartment with the woman who is the mother of the child who is to become me. At the truck factory, they need not only fitters but also designers and engineers, and you have no intention of remaining a pipe fitter all your life. I don’t know what a pipe fitter does, or rather what sort of pipes you fit, where they’re located on the truck, or how they work, but I know you’re a champion at bending and welding pipes.