Goran Rosenberg - A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz

The citizenship certificate is dated May 7, 1954.

From now on, Rosenberg with an s .

A few months later, the local paper reports from Israel that bakery worker Israel Sinai has hanged himself as a protest against the high taxes, and that tradesmen and shopkeepers in the country have gone out on a four-hour sympathy strike in his memory, but I don’t think you need to have your choice confirmed any longer. In the autumn of 1954, there’s another child in the one-room apartment below the railroad station, and on the round table in the living room lies the prospectus for Vibergen.

There’s an allotment somewhere too. Just a patch of soil, no hut or toolshed, long uncultivated and overgrown with weeds. We cycle to the allotment along the road to Havsbadet and past Näset to the edge of a forest, where the checkerboard of allotments stretches as far as the eye can see. There are lots of mosquitoes that summer and we have no hut or shed to escape to, only an oily repellent to make a mess with. I don’t see why we need the allotment. In the parts we’ve weeded and dug, we plant strawberry plants. No, we don’t plant the strawberries, you do. I do nothing. The mosquitoes don’t seem to trouble you in the slightest, but between me and the allotment they build a wall. I don’t think you’ve realized how much work there is with strawberry plants, how weeds love strawberry plants. And besides, they send out runners all over the place. I don’t remember the strawberries themselves, only the runners. The following summer we don’t have the allotment anymore. The following summer we have a stony plot of land in Vibergen instead, with spruce trees growing on it. In the telephone directory you already appear at the new address, David Rosenberg, 22 Vibergsvägen. It’s nothing but a plot of land that you must clear before a house, built at least partly by you, can go up there. There’s still snow on the ground when we drag the branches and twigs and uprooted stumps of felled spruce into a big pile, which will still be there when the mosquitoes come.

Vibergen is a special offer from the truck factory. Employees who want to build their own house in Vibergen are offered all sorts of assistance. They’re also offered an interest-free loan of three thousand kronor, with no amortization needed. A hundred people attend the first Vibergen information meeting, and thirty-six of those decide to accept the offer.

One of them is you.

It causes a bit of a stir that one of them is you.

In the house magazine of the truck factory, Kilometern (The Kilometer), there’s a photo of you. You’re standing at a workbench, bending pipes. “David Rosenberg is an able and industrious pipe fitter,” it says under the picture. “His calm eye as he goes about his work would certainly strike anyone who saw him a few years ago, when the horrors of war were still very much alive for him, and all dreams were nightmares. Now he’s thriving.”

Yes, you do look very calm in the picture, your hands firmly gripping the pipe for bending, and your eyes fixed on the vise it’s clamped in.

Another photo: the Rosenberg family at the round table in the living room. On the table, a white lace cloth and the Vibergen prospectus. Your right hand’s holding up the prospectus, and your left is on my shoulder. I’m wearing a checked shirt and leather suspenders and looking down at the prospectus. Lilian’s eight months old, sitting on Mom’s knee and looking up into the camera. “Within the next year, the Rosenbergs hope to be living under their own roof,” runs the caption. The piece that accompanies the pictures is headlined “HOME AT LAST,” and it relates

the story of David Rosenberg from Poland …, who shared his destiny as a refugee with millions of others in wartime and postwar Europe, a story that starts in the Polish city of Lodz one October afternoon in 1939 and leads, via starvation, assault, privation, general misery, and horror, to the spring of 1955, when it ends at Scania-Vabis in Södertälje.

Well, that’s undeniably the way it may look; as if Södertälje were the last stop on your journey, and as if your future beneath the factory-subsidized roof were all mapped out already. It is, after all, an extremely favorable offer, practically a gift, from the truck factory, since it’s not only interest-free but also written off at an annual rate of 10 percent, which means that after ten years you owe nothing without having repaid anything. Assuming, of course, that you stay on at the factory for another ten years. If you want to leave before that, you’ll have to pay back the outstanding amount of the loan. If you want to leave after five years, you’ll have to pay back half. You say nothing in the magazine piece about your ambitions to be something other than a pipe fitter. Getting the loan requires no ambition. Getting the loan requires that you continue to be an able and industrious assembler at Scania-Vabis in Södertälje for another ten years. The house in Vibergen is, in short, the happy ending to the story of David Rosenberg from Poland and his family. Home at last.

“Our old home no longer exists, we have no relatives. In reality we have already died once, it is just that we were granted a rebirth. And here in Sweden we have tried to start all over again. It has gone quite well, the years have slipped by, and we no longer have those nightmares,” says David Rosenberg. “I have a job I like, and good friends. And now I am going to try building my own house.”

It seems to me that the writer of the article in Kilometern does what he can to overcome the confusion of languages, the onerous kind. He writes of “the chimneys of the extermination camps,” of your brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers going up in smoke before your eyes in Auschwitz, of the dead and frozen bodies in the open freight cars on the railroad track en route to Ravensbrück, of the nineteen-year-old American soldier who on seeing you and Natek in Wöbbelin “bursts into floods of tears.”

Yet nowhere does he say that you’re Jews. The word “Jews” doesn’t occur in the text, nor the word “ghetto.” Is it because you don’t mention them? Is it because the writer doesn’t want to complicate the story?

A few weeks later, you receive a letter from the writer:

Mr. Rosenberg!

I don’t know if you’re a reader of Dagens Nyheter , the newspaper where I’m on the permanent staff, but if you happen not to be, I’d like to tell you that starting on Thursday, Dagens Nyheter is going to publish a series of articles in which we recapitulate what happened and what came to light during these days, ten years ago.

Please don’t think I’m writing in order to recruit a new subscriber. I just think that these articles will be of great interest to you. And you will presumably be pleased that this newspaper is thinking along exactly the same lines as you — the concentration camps absolutely must not be forgotten.

Please give my regards to your sweet wife and your lovely children!

I see this letter as a sign that after ten years, the two of you give the impression of being at home. At any rate, you give the impression of being potential subscribers to Dagens Nyheter . A subscription to Dagens Nyheter is scarcely an issue one would raise with people who give the impression that they’re on their way somewhere else. Among the memory fragments from the two-room apartment on the other side of the rowanberry avenue, there’s definitely the glint of a morning paper. I’d like to say it’s Dagens Nyheter , but it might just as well have been the local paper. The brightest glint comes from the glossy weekly Folket i Bild , which means “The People in Pictures.” Folket i Bild has large pictures on its covers. On one cover there’s a naked woman cooking food in a kitchen. On the inside there’s an illustrated story about nudists, which is a word I learn from Folket i Bild .