Goran Rosenberg - A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz

You’re no rebel either, far from it, but when the horizon of the truck factory refuses to open and the mapped-out future threatens to suffocate you, untrodden forest starts to attract you, too. “I’ve made a huge mistake in staying at the factory for so many years, I would have been better off doing a variety of jobs,” you write to Natek on October 11, 1957, my ninth birthday. The factory has started to measure the time each stage of your job takes, using a method called MTM, demanding that you do the same amount of work in a shorter time, and you’re beginning to suffer from persistent headaches that you suspect have something to do with your “unhappiness” at the factory.

You write the word in Swedish, vantrivsel , in a letter otherwise in Polish. Natek has made the leap from Borås to Tel Aviv, and you’re ready to make the leap from the truck factory to almost anywhere else. The more the horizon closes in, the more important the leap becomes, and the longer the leap is postponed, the more the horizon closes in. You tell Natek that you recently replied to an advertisement “for a job as a service engineer for the Toledo automatic car,” and the company called you back and everything looked very promising — until you told them you were thirty-five.

I know nothing about the Toledo automatic car ( automat-vagnen ). You’re writing in Polish, so the problem could have something to do with the translation, or with your Polish, which quite often has some Swedish mixed in, making it hard to understand what you mean, particularly when the Swedish and Polish words are similar. You may possibly mean a service engineer for the Toledo automatic scales ( våg rather than vagn ), but I’m not familiar with those either. What I do know is that you speak the language of Strindberg with the accent of Mickiewicz, and what I suspect, much later, is that the obstacle to your becoming a service technician for Toledo wagons or scales is not your age but the confusion of languages.

In a letter to Natek on February 17, 1959:

PS. If you have any good contacts with firms in the textile trade who are interested in exporting to Sweden (Scandinavia) and have still not been introduced into these countries, do try to get hold of some samples. It could be ladies’ blouses, thin cotton and wool sweaters, but only the latest fashion, original designs, and the right sort of price.

Time and again you raise your head to see if the horizon is opening, but instead you see time running out and the Project stalling.

Let me say something about the big horizon as I see it, much later. There’s something about the light. It’s too bright. It eats away the shadows and burns off the gray shades. The world becomes too light and too dark. The brightest of horizons shines over the darkest of experiences and the most menacing of times.

“The residents of Södertälje can protect themselves against a dreaded nuclear death by throwing themselves to the ground and ensuring that no part of the body is left uncovered,” pronounces Captain Curt Holmfrid at a public meeting of the Södertälje Civil Defense Association on April 29, 1957.

“The atom bomb can shorten wars and reduce casualties,” asserts Colonel Erik Graab at the meeting of the Rotary Club on August 20, 1957.

“More than half of New York’s eight million inhabitants are estimated to have died in a mock attack in which five hydrogen bombs were dropped,” reports the local paper on July 21, 1956.

“The USA has hydrogen bombs that can displace the earth’s axis by sixteen degrees,” says the local paper on October 27, 1956.

“The mystery of life will soon be solved and religion abolished,” pronounces the director of studies at the Workers’ Education Association, Torvald Karlbom, in the assembly hall of my local school on August 18, 1956.

“Ours is an age characterized by lack of moral and spiritual direction,” warns study ombudsman Thorsten Eliasson of the Workers’ Education Association in the music room of my local school on August 21, 1957.

Light in the assembly hall, darkness in the music room.

Light on the big horizon, darkness on the small.

Darkness descends only gradually, almost imperceptibly, over Havsbadet. On July 11, 1956, the local paper reports a water temperature of 19 degrees C (66 degrees F) and two thousand bathers. On July 18, 1956, the Chemical Analysis Agency reports 7,000 E. coli bacteria per liter of seawater. On August 6, 1956, the local paper reports sunshine and a party spirit at a packed bathing beach for the 38th swimming gala, “the loveliest element unquestionably the formation floating, which a bouquet of pretty girls had mastered to perfection.”

The darkness is falling and nobody notices.

Nobody wants to notice.

Havsbadet is too indispensable to be unfit for use.

The unfitness follows from the toilets. Year after year, human waste is flushed from toilets straight out into the bays of Igelstaviken and Hallfjärden and can sometimes be seen washing up on rocks and beaches in semisolid form. Over the course of twenty years, the number of toilets in Södertälje increases twentyfold. Toilets — called water closets or WCs — are to be found in all the apartments in the blocks along the rowanberry avenue. It’s only the tenements in Baltic that still have dry privies in the yard, or dry closets as the local paper calls them. The dry privies are rows of dark stalls, separated by thin walls of rough planking. I can hang on for days to avoid going to the dry privies. I’m scared to death of something crawling up out of the dark holes or of falling into them. The WC is a blessing for humankind in general, and for me in particular.

The price of having a WC, however, is Havsbadet, even if nobody wants to accept the fact and the payment keeps being postponed. Summer after summer, the question is raised of whether Havsbadet should be closed or cordoned off so people who should know better will keep away, but summer after summer, thousands of people who don’t know better burrow their feet into the white sand of Havsbadet and take a dip in the tainted waters and reluctantly use the new beach showers to rinse off the E. coli bacteria afterward. The showers are installed after the fire and are intended to replace dips in the sea, but dips in the sea are not easily replaced. Particularly not as long as the Chemical Analysis Agency is vacillating about the water quality and the Public Health Board is vacillating about the closure and there are experts claiming they can purify the water at Havsbadet within two weeks. A Dr. Pettersson from Stockholm is given the opportunity to test his method, which employs compressed air to force the water from the bottom up to the surface and a propeller to push it toward the shore, which presupposes that the water at the lower level is cleaner than the water at the surface, a fact that even the local newspaper calls into question. “There’s doubtless a large volume of polluted water even at the deeper level, extending a good way out to sea.”

In the record-breaking hot summer of 1959, health inspector Torsten Lysell issues a warning in the local paper, saying that the water quality is steadily deteriorating and when last measured was found to contain 90,000 E. coli bacteria per liter, which is potentially life-threatening. He’s also worried by the fact that the public seems entirely unconcerned. A few weeks later, he proposes that Havsbadet be closed down, because people are tearing down the notices prohibiting its use and continuing to bathe there.

I don’t remember when we swap Havsbadet for the lake of Malmsjön. The transition is gradual and almost imperceptible. The summer I’m learning to swim, we go by car to Malmsjön. I associate the swap more with the car than with the water. Malmsjön has no sandy beach, and no restaurant with evening dances and no horizon to hold your gaze, but there are no swimming lessons at Havsbadet anymore.