Goran Rosenberg: A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz

So why do we celebrate your birthday on May 14? In a letter I write you on May 14, 1960, I’ve drawn a special garland around the date. “Since today is your birthday, we would like to send you our warmest congratulations,” I write in capital letters slanting boldly to the left. I’m evidently writing on behalf of the whole family. “We miss you very much. It’s so empty without you, in fact it feels worse than when you were off traveling.”

Presumably, then, May 14 is your actual birthday, but April 14 is the date reproduced on all your Swedish documents and is thus the one that runs the least risk of being contradicted by other sources. Do I detect a slight hesitation as you, under oath, forswear your actual birthday? May 14 doesn’t seem to be correct, you write.

Es scheint nicht richtig zu sein .

That doesn’t sound entirely convincing.

The reparations impose themselves on you as early as the autumn of 1953, demanding that you prove what it is that you have survived and what the consequences thereof are. On November 24, 1953, Josef Leib Goldstein and Feliks Zeligman affirm in a sworn declaration, an Eidesstattliche Erklärung , that they were in your company when you survived Łódź, Auschwitz, Vechelde bei Braunschweig, and Wöbbelin. On April 13, 1954, E. Öberg at the State Aliens Commission issues, for a stamp duty fee of 4 kronor, a certificate, Bescheinigung , to confirm that you came to Sweden from Germany on July 18, 1945, through the agency of the UN and the Red Cross and that you have been in possession of a Swedish alien’s passport since September 24, 1952.

Your first sworn affirmation, the Eidesstattliche Versicherung , is dated November 13, 1954, with the signature certified by notary public Gunnar Nordin in Södertälje, and bears the 2-kronor stamp fee as well as another official stamp for 1 krona. I can find only one inaccuracy in the sworn account of your road to and from Auschwitz. You write that you’re liberated from Vebelin on May 2, 1945. It ought to say “Wöbbelin.” It’s a brief, terse document. A single typewritten page. Clearly a case of better too little than too much. Under oath, you tell the Germans very little. Very little in which to find any inaccuracies. Nothing about damage or suffering or reduced capacity for work. Nothing at all, in fact.

Perhaps you thought Auschwitz, Wöbbelin, and the liquidation of your world would be enough?

Toward the end, an intimation that life has not turned out as you imagined. “When war broke out I was a student at a textile college. I have not been able to resume this activity in Sweden. I have slowly worked my way up to the job of pipe fitter.” But you write in German, of course: Als der Krieg ausbrach, war ich Student in einer Textilschule. Diese Tätigkeit habe ich in Schweden nicht fortsetzen können. Jetzt habe ich mich langsam zum Monteur heraufgearbeitet .

Evidently supplementary information has been requested by the German authorities, such as an authorized German translation of your marriage certificate, but above all yet another sworn affirmation in which you put words to the physical injuries and suffering inflicted on you by the German state, and for which you are now claiming reparation. That’s what matters, after all, nothing else. I understand very well why as long as possible you postpone putting words to your injuries and suffering, but reparation demands words for everything, even for things for which there are no words, or at any rate, no words that can break through the confusion of languages.

So on August 27, 1956, you put German words to your injuries and suffering.

Kurze Schilderung des Verfolgstatbestandes unter Darlegung der gelten gemachten Körperschäden .

I can find no adequate words in my own language for such a sentence.

Your affidavit is short, at any event, a bare page in length. In the ghetto you were forced to work far beyond what you had the strength for, you write. In the ghetto you were severely assaulted by an SS man, you write. In Vechelde bei Braunschweig you were forced to work very hard and were very hungry and weak, you write. When you were unable to get up one morning, you were called a malingerer, beaten repeatedly about the head, and dragged to work by force, you write. As for Auschwitz, you write only that you were delivered there and sent on from there. And of Wöbbelin (Vebelin again, but nobody corrects you, the camp’s on its way to being erased from the annals), nothing more than that you were sick when you were liberated.

Near the end, nevertheless, an attempt to demonstrate lasting damage inflicted by the German persecution: “Since my arrival in Sweden I’ve been receiving medical treatment. I still suffer from headaches, insomnia, and such bad nerves that I often find it difficult to go to work. My capacity for work is reduced because I am often weak and tired, weil ich oft schwach und müde bin .”

Your words seem equally weak and tired to me. Not much to go hunting for inaccuracies in. Not much else, either. What is there to say? You’re alive, while all the rest are dead. From the outside you look healthy, in good shape even, with no physical damage as far as the eye can discern, so what is there to say that doesn’t risk being branded inaccurate and internally contradictory and making you appear like a liar and a fraud?

I think you yourself realize how little you’re actually saying, or perhaps someone else points it out to you, so you bring with you to the examination by Dr. Lindenbaum a certified report by Dr. J. Lando in Stockholm, who confirms that you’ve been consulting him for several years about severe headaches and serious depressions, attributable to your experiences in the concentration camps. “I have signed the patient off sick for considerable periods and judge his capacity to work to be reduced by at least 50 percent,” attests Dr. Lando.

So a figure is finally put on the damage and suffering inflicted on you.

Dr. Lindenbaum takes little notice. Or rather, the impression you make on Dr. Lindenbaum is one of health. He attributes the headaches to the concussion you sustained at the factory, and he attributes the insomnia and restlessness to nothing at all. At any rate, there are no “physical defects” to be seen that would reduce the patient’s functional capability.

“Without a doubt, the patient is exaggerating his difficulties [ Es steht ausser Zweifel, dass Pat. seine Beschwerden übertreibt ],” writes Dr. Lindenbaum.

“He also gives the impression of doing all he can to prevent any investigation into his past [ dass er alles versucht Nachforschungen in seinen Antezedentia zu verhüten ].”

Dr. Lindenbaum doesn’t trouble himself to substantiate this impression. Nor indeed his overall impression ( Gesamteindruck ), which is that

the patient, unlike most of his comrades in misfortune, seems to have survived his internment in the concentration camps without suffering any persistent consequences harmful to health [ Pat. scheint im Gegensatz zu den weitaus meisten seiner Leidensgenossen die Internierung im KZ ohne nachhaltige Folgen für seine Gesundheit überstanden zu haben ]. The symptoms of psychoneurosis [ Psycho-Neurose ] that the patient alleges he has can no longer necessarily be linked to possible harm inflicted in the concentration camps [ steht heute nicht mehr einwandfrei in irgendwie ursächlichen Zusammenhang mit einem Schaden, in KZ erworben ].

Dr. Lindenbaum doesn’t write explicitly that you’re a malingerer, nor that you’re a liar and a fraud. He writes that your illness has been triggered by your desire for reparations. There’s a special name for this illness in Dr. Lindenbaum’s German vocabulary, Renten-Neurose , which in English might be called “pension neurosis” or “pension hysteria.”