Goran Rosenberg: A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz

At any rate that’s how I like to explain, much later, the restlessness and the ambitions, and perhaps also the lightheartedness and the playfulness. Like Lot’s wife, people in your situation can go on living only if they don’t turn around and look back, because like Lot’s wife, you risk being turned to stone by the sight. Nor, however, can you go on living if nobody sees and understands what it is you’ve survived and why it is you’re still alive, in spite of everything. I think the step from surviving to living demands this apparently paradoxical combination of individual repression and collective remembrance. You can look forward only if the world looks backward and remembers where you come from, and sees the paths you pursue, and understands why you’re still living.

It’s not that you’re crying out for the world’s attention and demanding its collective remembrance and recognition. On the contrary, your reticence about what you’ve been through is a matter of record. I think the world you survive into is populated by two categories of people, those who know and those who don’t. Faced with people who know, there’s not much that needs to be said, and faced with people who don’t know, it’s hard to say anything that doesn’t risk being perceived as unreal or exaggerated or pathetic. Before long you also discover that what you have to say risks being perceived as frightening and repugnant. In any case, the world soon stops listening, because it can’t bear looking back either. Within a few years the newsreels disappear from the cinemas, the testimonies from the newspapers, and the confusion of languages, the onerous kind, is spreading. The world looks forward without looking back, and you try to do the same, as best you can. I see the lightheartedness and playfulness as a response to the silence that spreads around and the loneliness that encircles you. Being alone with your thoughts, as you point out in your letter to Haluś, is terrible for people in your situation. I don’t know what you joke and laugh about in the shrinking circle of survivors who gather late in the evenings in the haze of cigarette smoke under the lamp above the round table in our living room, the languages merge and I’m too young for humor, still more so for black humor, but whatever it is I think it helps you keep your focus on the way forward, even when the world lapses into silence and the loneliness closes in.

The fact that the lightheartedness and playfulness are just a mask is quite easy to spot with the naked eye, particularly in the case of your brother Natek, who’s nearly always joking and fooling around, but with a kind of compulsive restlessness far more marked than yours. Natek’s in perpetual motion, flying up from seats and down into them, pacing floors, and riding his black Husqvarna motorbike (he lets me test-drive it with him, sitting on the gas tank) with a jerky impatience as if he were permanently on his way to somewhere else, and before long he really is on his way to somewhere else and you no longer have your brother on hand to help keep the silence and loneliness at bay. I imagine that Natek’s presence compensates for the mounting confusion of languages and that his departure from Sweden exacerbates it. The tightly written aerograms can hardly fill the vacuum left by perhaps the only person who, with an impatient glance, a restless gesture, or a timely joke, can confirm where you come from, and what it is that you’ve survived, and that it’s not you who are mad, but the world.

Did you know that long ago, survivors of war and disaster were sacrificed to the gods as scapegoats or were declared insane because no one wanted to hear what they had to say?

Not being able to take the step from surviving to living, always having to live with your survival as the central element of your existence, is a kind of insanity, I suppose, even if it’s not necessarily the survivors who are insane.

It seems to me that your situation deteriorates when you no longer have Natek at your side, and when someone in the changing room at the truck factory wonders what people like you are doing there, and when the world starts viewing people like you with distaste and would rather have you sacrificed to Oblivion and Progress. At any rate, the world seems increasingly disinclined to be shaken to its very foundations, which is what I think people like you ultimately ask of the world you’re to continue living in.

So you quicken your step to prevent the shadows from catching up with you, and you make sure your projects restlessly succeed one another so that not even the tiniest of voids can arise when one of them stalls. Only a few years have passed since you rejected the move to Israel in favor of the mapped-out future in Södertälje, but the mapped-out future appears more and more like a dead end, and the truck factory more and more like a prison.

The winter of 1956 is very cold, “the harshest of all our time in Sweden,” you write to Natek on February 17. We’ve just moved into the small two-room apartment on the other side of the rowanberry avenue, which has been substituted on short notice for the canceled house-building project in Vibergen, but we almost lose the apartment as well, as “there was a risk until the very last minute that someone else would get there first.” You describe it as “nice” but grumble that unlike the upper-floor apartments, it has no balcony, though goodness knows what you want with a balcony when the temperature outside the kitchen window drops to nearly twenty-five below, week after week, and you’re restlessly awaiting your call-up papers so you can get your military service out of the way before the end of the year, because you can’t röra på dig (“move on”) until then.

As usual, you sprinkle your Polish letters with Swedish words and phrases.

You must be able to move as soon as possible.

A survivor named Hans Mayer, confronted with the world where people like you are expected to forget and move on, changes his name to Jean Améry because he most definitely does not want to forget and move on. There are survivors who change their names in the hope of being able to move on, or to protect themselves against the next Hitler, or to hide from the subsequent world, but Hans Mayer changes his name because he doesn’t want to be reconciled with the world where his name so recently belonged, which is the world that has taken his name and his home from him forever and then has the gall to view people like him with distaste and move on as if nothing has happened. The world is shaken for a few years and then is shaken no more, but Jean Améry cannot and will not reconcile himself to such a world. Nor can the survivors in such a world stop being survivors, because they can’t stop reminding the world by their unforgivingness — yes, even bitterness — that nothing has been forgotten. In his book Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne (translated into English as At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities ), Améry describes traveling in southern Germany in 1958 and meeting a businessman who on realizing Améry has an “Israelite” background assures him that the German people do not bear the slightest grudge against the Jewish people and that the West German government has proved this by its magnanimous payments of damages, making Améry feel like Shylock, doggedly declining to forfeit his pound of flesh.

Refusing to be reconciled to a world that wants to forget and move on becomes, for Améry, a way of resuming moral control over his life: “In two decades of contemplating what happened to me, I believe to have recognized that a forgiving and forgetting induced by social pressure is immoral [daß ein durch sozialen Druck bewirktes Vergeben und Vergessen unmoralisch ist].”