Goran Rosenberg - A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz

At any rate, that’s how it looks on paper.

On paper, it’s a very attractive world, and it will take a lot to make you turn your back on it.

Six weeks later, you turn your back on it. The photos of your trip reveal nothing of what makes you do that. You have a very nice reflex camera that makes a resolute click as it takes sharp pictures of trimly dressed people in bright sunshine. There you are on the promenade in Tel Aviv with a warm breeze ruffling your hair, and Bluma has her hands on Jacob and Isaac, who are standing there in white shoes, white shirts, and white shorts with white suspenders, while in the background men in white shirts and women in flowery dresses stroll along; it must be a Saturday afternoon. There you are on the slopes of Mount Carmel with Bluma and Moniek Wyszogrodzki, who has opened a cake shop and cafe in Haifa and has just been handed spare parts for a bread-making machine out of one of the suitcases you’ve brought along, and you’re all looking out over Haifa Bay, where the cargo ships lie at anchor in the humid summer haze.

What the pictures fail to reveal is the economic crisis. You come to Israel at a time when everybody asks if you’re out of your mind, thinking of leaving Paradise for Hell. Yes, this is how they describe the situation in the country. I don’t find any letters from your trip to Israel, but the question is clearly stored among the fragments of my memory: are you out of your mind? The country is on the brink of ruin and all consumer goods are strictly rationed: meat, bread, vegetables, clothes, shoes. In the shops, the rations run out and leave people still standing in line, the factories have been brought to a standstill by a lack of raw materials and electric power, the newspapers have halved in size because of the paper shortage. It’s not even certain that you’ll be allowed to emigrate here. The Israeli government is toying with the idea of rationing Jewish immigration, too, so that there can be sufficient food and necessities to go around for those who are here already. The idea is that only Jews in acute physical danger will be allowed in. The idea never has to be put to the test, because there are so few Jews knocking on the door in these days of distress. The years of mass immigration from Europe are over, and the years of mass immigration from North Africa are yet to come, and for a few lean years in between, people shake their heads despairingly over anyone crazy enough to want to leave Sweden for Israel.

In the summer of 1953 the Israeli economy is turning around, but you probably don’t notice it, and people probably don’t dare to believe it, and besides, there’s an ominous clamor about the main reason for the upturn: the Reparations Agreement with West Germany. On July 30,1953, in the middle of your trip to Israel, the first delivery of German iron under the Reparations Agreement is loaded onto the freighter Haifa in the port of Bremen. Some people use the term “damages,” but the German word is, Wiedergutmachung , “reparations.” The Hebrew word is simply shilumim , “payments.” The summer you turn your back on Israel, West Germany starts to compensate for the annihilation of your world by means of cash payments and deliveries of iron and steel for the construction of the state of Israel, thus allowing the economy to turn around. In the 1950s, reparations from West Germany cover 29 percent of the deficit in the Israeli balance of payments. Soon the Israeli economy is growing by 8–9 percent, and within ten years the per capita income rises by 74 percent. If your trip had been a year or two later, no one would have shaken their heads despairingly at you. Two years later, your brother Natek is divorced and moves from Borås to Tel Aviv, while we move from one side of the rowanberry avenue to the other. That’s all.

No, not really all, there’s the citizenship too, and the house in Vibergen, and the second child.

After your journey to Israel, only one future seems to be left, the one already mapped out.

You travel to Israel on a Swedish alien’s passport valid for one year. In your passport application of September 17, 1952, your description is certified by Acting Deputy Sergeant Sture Blomgren: height five feet three inches, hair brown, eyes dark brown, face shape oval, nose straight. “To the approval of the alien’s application, I have no objections,” reads the annotation by Ola Olsson at the office of the public prosecutor in Södertälje.

The alien’s passport is a sort of recognition, after all. You’re still an alien, but now you’re a Swedish alien. Sweden keeps a careful watch over its aliens. In the passport application, a thorough account of your background and conduct, the confusion of languages, the onerous kind, is still apparent. The report from the local police in Södertälje notes that up to August 1944, the applicant

held assorted positions in Lodz, the most recent of which was as a postman in the Ghetto where he lived with other Jewish families. In August 1944 he was deported and taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he stayed for about a month. He was then transferred to a similar camp in Braunschweig, where he was made to stay until 3/21/1945, during which time he worked for the Germans in a truck factory.

As regards your fellow applicant, my mother, the report notes that after war broke out she “was employed in a clothing factory, where she worked in the office for about a year and then became a seamstress in the factory,” after which she was deported to a concentration camp in Germany.

That’s all.

How much of this is a product of what you actually say, and how much is a product of what Acting Deputy Sergeant Sture Blomgren is able to understand from what you say?

But maybe this is about as much as either of you wishes to say. Maybe your only wish is to qualify for Swedish alien status, and therefore you emphasize what you believe will be seen as qualifying, such as your conscientiousness and your willingness to work.

The two of you have no trouble qualifying for Swedish alien status, and a scant two years later for Swedish citizenship too, although the eye of the needle appears narrower here. At any event, the pile of documents in the archives of the State Aliens Commission is bigger, mainly thanks to the interviews with all the people who have observed you on your road through Sweden, and who are now sought out by the police to pronounce on your suitability for Swedish citizenship. Among them is, as I’ve previously mentioned, personnel officer Stina Fors at Alingsås Bomullsväfveri, who considers you unsuitable on the grounds of something she remembers having observed seven years earlier. As said, she’s the only one to take that view. Caretaker Rolf Larsson at 22 Villagatan in Södertälje certifies that the applicants “were reliable people.” Caretaker G. Carlsson at 42A Hertig Carls väg in Södertälje certifies that the applicants “fulfilled their obligations as tenants and there is nothing to complain of as regards their conduct.” Engineer Rune Fridholm at Scania-Vabis AB considers “the applicant to be professional in his work and generally liked at his place of employment.” As for you, you state that you have permanently settled in Sweden, which you view as your second native country. I think you mean to say that you now have a second native country replacing the first, which no longer exists. This you solemnly declare on October 12, 1953.

On the subject of your fellow applicant Hala Rozenberg, engineer G. Bogler at Tornvalls Konfektion AB states that she is a capable seamstress and that there are no complaints about her conduct. In a handwritten note on the application is added: “By phone Mrs. R. has specifically requested that her surname be spelt with an s (not z ).”