A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz (2 page)

I know nothing further about the three men waiting on the platform beyond the fact that they, like most of the others on this journey, will soon be moving on. What I do know is that the following day, the man who will be my father writes a letter to the woman who will be my mother and who’s been his wife for six months, informing her that the town, which is called Södertälje, seems bigger than the one he just left, which is called Alingsås. He notes that like all towns in this new country it seems sparsely populated, that it’s a long walk from one part of the town to another, and that there are large areas of newly built houses and blocks of flats, laid out with generous amounts of light, air, and greenery extending around a small but not particularly dense town center. There also seem to be big trees everywhere, whole forests of them, in fact, growing almost up to the doorsteps, and more importantly there’s a large pharmaceutical factory, where there are plenty of jobs for young women who can pack medicinal drugs deftly in cartons and bottles, and the defter they are, the more they can earn. “I didn’t get home all that late last night, eleven at the latest,” he assures her, “because I wanted to unpack my cases and inspect my room, but my roommate was already in bed asleep and so I had to wait.” The following day is Sunday, when everyone’s off and a breakfast of coffee, bread, and cheese is served in the lodging-house dining room—you aren’t allowed even to heat water for tea in your rooms—and so that
morning his roommate, a “young and quiet snail,” has had time to tell him that work at the big truck factory starts at seven and ends at four, with a half-hour lunch break at 12:30. You can come to work in your ordinary clothes and change there, because you can take a shower and wash up properly after your shift. They have modern toilets as well, but if you need to go during working hours you have to ask permission, and the doors don’t shut properly, let alone lock, so nobody can loiter in there for a rest or a nap. But he doesn’t really consider any of this important enough to write about. The letter is short, the tone rather dutiful, and the handwriting too rushed, because he wants to get the letter posted right away. The only thing that matters, he writes, is for me to find a place where we can live, or at least a room we can have to ourselves, where we can heat water and make a home, so that you can get on the train and come here.

He’s worried about her too, you can tell; even a bit too much, you might think. Be careful on your bike and when you go swimming, he writes, as if she were a child. They’ve been continuously together for almost a year now, following nearly two years of being continuously separated, if you can say such a thing. Yes, “separated” may not be the right expression when the place where you’re forced to separate is the selection ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. And “worried about each other” may not adequately express their state of mind, when everything a human being could possibly fear might happen to him or her has already happened to them both, as has everything that no one was able to imagine could happen and yet happened all the same, everything except for that one final thing that could still happen but absolutely must not, and for which the word “worry” no longer seems satisfactory. Not when a weight of worry big enough to poison a world has been concentrated into a single black drop
of corrosive anxiety that’s forever poised above what is at present the weakest point in this still improbable, and therefore not yet quite real, connection between two young people who last parted on the selection ramp in Auschwitz-Birkenau. No, wrong. Who last parted on a railroad platform in Alingsås.

But it’s no longer easy to distinguish one parting from another. No, she mustn’t have a fatal accident on her bike or drown in a lake or trip on the stairs or suffer any eventuality, conceivable or inconceivable, that might sever the last, fragile thread connecting them to what could, after all, turn out to be a new life. “There’s absolutely no need to worry about me at all,” he adds cockily. “And tomorrow morning I’ll apply for the truck factory job M. thinks I’m bound to get with all my first-rate ‘qualifications,’ and this very day I’ll ask the poor landlady who lost her husband if a room will become available anytime soon, and as I say I’m terribly worried about you, and you’re never out of my thoughts for a second, and maybe it really would have been best if you had traveled here with me, because then we wouldn’t have had to worry so much and no doubt everything would have worked out all right, even so. Everything’s sure to work out before long, and soon you’ll be here with me.”

As the sender’s address he gives R 639 B, Södertälje. What kind of address is that? No street, no name, just a code. The address of yet another barrack in yet another camp? Can a letter of reply really be delivered to an address like that? How long can such an address be allowed to keep them apart?

Two days later, he starts work at the truck factory. His job is to weld fuel pipes on truck chassis. He has no problem getting hired. “Conscientious and hardworking,” says the typewritten notepaper from the personnel manager at the textile factory, Alingsås Bomullsväfveri, and that’s presumably all the
personnel manager at Scania-Vabis needs to know, though he’s also informed that the man in front of him has some experience in truck building. “Worked as a welder of truck axles at Firma Büssingwerke in Braunschweig/Vechelde from September 1944 to March 1945” is duly noted on the new-employee form under the heading “Qualifications and Experience.” Not that this makes any difference, as previously noted. Europe is currently demanding more trucks than Scania-Vabis can produce, and Scania-Vabis is seeking more workers than it can currently lay hands on. Many of Europe’s truck factories are still in ruins, incapable of making the trucks needed to rebuild them, not to mention everything else in Europe that needs trucks for rebuilding, a situation that presently gives Scania-Vabis in Södertälje a competitive advantage over, say, Büssingwerke in Braunschweig, which has not been able to turn any truck axles at all in the past two years.

Two weeks later, a new possibility becomes available at R 639 B in Södertälje, and the worry that can’t be dispelled in any other way is dispelled when the woman who is to be my mother takes the train to join the man who is to be my father, to share with him a rented room that has no kitchen. In those early, steadily darker autumn mornings, they surreptitiously heat their water on an upturned iron before he goes off to the truck factory and she to the pharmaceutical factory, and after a while to the family-owned clothing factory where she sews coat linings at piecework rates to musical accompaniment. “The girls don’t like marches, but apart from that we play everything from classical music to popular hits,” the manager tells the local paper. She’s young and deft, with a year’s experience of sewing work at Sveriges Förenade Linnefabrikers AB in Alingsås. On a good eight-hour working day she can get up to seventy-five öre
an hour, which along with the meager but slightly higher wage from the truck factory soon puts them on a sounder footing. By the first of October 1947 they’re able to move into a sublet, one-room apartment with a kitchenette and a proper address: 22 Villagatan. One year later at that address, in a house I have no memory of, the young man becomes my father and the young woman my mother.

We move to the house I actually remember a year or two later. The documents say one thing and the aging memory another, but it doesn’t matter; this is where it all begins, in the building below the railroad station where the young man who will be my father alighted from the train on an early August evening in 1947, and which you can see right beneath the window on the left-hand side of the coach if you arrive by train from the north, across the Bridge.

This is it; this is the Place. This is where my world assumes its first colors, lights, smells, sounds, voices, gestures, names, and words. I’m not sure how far back a human being can remember; some people say they have memories going back to their second year, but my first memories are of snow and cold and therefore probably date from somewhat later, since I was born in October. But one thing I’m certain of is that even before the point where my memories of that first world of mine begin, it had already set its stamp on so much that even things I can no longer remember aren’t forgotten either. This is the Place that will continue to form me even when I’m convinced that I’ve formed myself.

That’s the difference between them and me. They have encountered the world for the first time in an entirely different place, and carry with them an entirely different world,
and for them so much has already started and already ended, and it’s still unclear whether anything can start afresh here, since a great deal of what they can’t remember, or don’t want to remember, they cannot forget. For them, the colors and the shifting light and the smells and sounds and voices of this place will often remind them of something else, though they might not always know what it is. For them to be able somehow to make this place their own, they’ll have to get to know it well enough, and let it stamp them deeply enough, so that sometimes it will be this place they’re reminded of when they hear a freight train rattle past at night, or inhale the smell of fried herring in the stairwell, or walk under tall pines, or catch a whiff of tar and sea, or see rowanberries glowing in the fall, or look at their children.

What quickly binds them to the Place is the Child, who happens to be me. I don’t want to exaggerate my own importance in this context, and I could be wrong, but on a purely practical level, a child makes it harder to move on. Moving on with only a hat on your head and a suitcase in your hand is one thing. Moving on with a newborn child is another proposition entirely. For the sake of the Child, a brief stop must be extended indefinitely, and big plans associated with their journey onward must be reduced to little plans associated with the place where they happen to be, a happenstance that the Place confirms with a miracle.

“Housing Shortage” is one of the first expressions the language of the Place forces upon them. Housing Shortage and Housing Emergency. The local newspaper,
Stockholms Läns & Södertälje Tidning
, popularly known as the
Länstidningen
(the
County News), publishes reports about a family living in a tent on the beach. About five hundred applicants for sixty flats. About the truck factory’s barracks for its single male workers. “Catastrophic Housing Shortage in Vivid Focus,” shouts the front page on July 19, 1948.

Not that they need to read the local paper to know. Anyone in the Place can tell you that an apartment of your own is a miracle.

And yet it happens. An almost new apartment with a small, all-purpose living room and a little kitchen, a bathroom with a WC and hot running water, a wood-fired laundry in the basement of the neighboring house and a rubbish chute in the stairwell, a letterbox and a nameplate on the front door. In the small living room, a sofa that turns into a bed, a height-adjustable round table made of varnished wood, walnut-brown with an extension leaf, and four matching chairs with upholstered fabric seats. A child’s bed in a sleeping alcove. In one corner, on a little table covered with a white, lace-edged cloth, a Philips radio set. Somewhere there’s also a linen cupboard, with drawers for sheets, towels, and children’s clothes. In the kitchen, a couch in pale wood, a refrigerator and a sink unit, a wall cupboard with sliding Masonite doors painted pale gray, a crockery set with a blue pattern, six of everything. On the wall above the radio, an oil painting of a vase with red and yellow flowers. In the basement, two secondhand bikes, one with a child’s seat, hung on hooks from the ceiling. I’m also looking for a stroller, but I’m not sure where to place it. All I know is that there must have been a place for it somewhere, just as there will eventually have to be a place for a wooden toy train and a shelf of children’s books borrowed from the town library and a box with a basic Meccano set sorted in compartments and a few of those expensive, cast-metal
model cars, a Volvo PV444 definitely among them. In an apartment with just one room, it’s easy to see what a lot of space a single child takes up.

In this flat, the Child takes up more space than the naked eye can see. Around the Child, an expanding web of ambitions and plans. The little cardboard box of alphabet blocks, made and decorated by hand, is not just a Toy but also a Project, and the perpetually changing letter combinations that the Child and the young man who is now his father lay out on the living room floor on those long Sunday afternoons form not only the words of a new language but also the building blocks of a new world.
The Child shall make the Place his own so that a new world will become possible for them as well
is the Project that rapidly fills the small apartment with its invisible inventories of dreams and expectations. After all, what the two new arrivals need is not a roof over their heads but firm ground beneath their feet, and if the child can take root somewhere, perhaps they too, in time, will find a foothold.

The Child, then, is me. And the Place I will make theirs by making it mine has its geographic center in a yellow three-story apartment block with two entrances and eighteen rental units just below Platform 1 of the railroad station, where the big passenger trains make a brief stop on their way south, even the expresses, even the night trains, even the trains to Copenhagen and Hamburg. From the kitchen and living room windows in the small first-floor apartment in the block nearest the forest, you can see people moving about in the railroad cars. And people being moved along by the railroad cars. And with every train, behind the reflections in the railroad car windows, a new world, mutely oblivious of its brief stop in the world that is to be mine.