A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz (23 page)
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Authors: Goran Rosenberg
You begin one letter by telling about the two letters that were waiting for you both when you got back from work, one from Haluś to yourself, dated February 5, 1946, and one for Natek. The letter for you has taken seven weeks to get there, and I can well imagine the dark misunderstandings that can arise from such postal service. The letter to Natek brings the answer to his question about Andzia:
When he’d finished reading the letter, he wasn’t able to utter a word. He just sat there staring listlessly at the same spot. I went out of the room because I could feel something was happening inside him and he needed to be alone. Up to that point he hadn’t let any bad thoughts get near him. In fact just the opposite, he’d tried hard to behave in an easygoing, lighthearted way and had even allowed himself brief flirtations now and then. But I knew very well that it was all self-deception, and in fact he told me himself that if he didn’t keep up the show he’d soon be in bad shape. With Andzia he could have been happy, because there was no other woman he could ever truly be in love with. He still thinks it’s thanks to her that the sun is peeping out from the clouds.
You can’t imagine the effect the letter had on him.
Then a detailed account of a burlesque linguistic misunderstanding is suddenly allowed to take up most of the rest of the letter:
Coffee is the Swedish national drink, and they take cakes and biscuits with it. When Swedes offer you coffee, you can’t say no, or they’re mortally offended. So we come in, take a seat, and our hostess kindly invites us to help ourselves. As we begin drinking and eating, the hostess turns to us and says:
varso gut dupa
, but since we weren’t familiar with Swedish customs, we didn’t know what she meant, and she repeated it several times,
varso gut dupa, varso gut dupa
. There were three of us, Natek, me and another fellow. We all burst out laughing and couldn’t stop, and our hosts laughed with us. They wondered what we were laughing about and our hostess said we had to explain what was so funny, and was even ready to defend herself. There was nothing for it, we had to tell her that the word
d—
[an explicit four-letter word] is not a very nice one in
Polish. Once she had heard it, there was no stopping her, she was splitting her sides with laughter. It turned that what she’d said was
vars
å
god och doppa
, which means “Do feel free to dunk.” Swedes have the habit of dunking their biscuits in their coffee, in fact it’s such standard practice that it has its own special name. Since then, Swedes have been avoiding the word, but only in Polish company of course.
Here you seem a bit shocked as you realize how your pen has run away with you—“Haluś, what am I doing, what good is this nonsense to you?”
At this point you’re interrupted in your letter-writing by a visit to your room. A workmate and his girlfriend have come to tell you they’re getting engaged, which prompts you to offer them, “elegantly,” some fruit and wine—“Haluś, can you imagine me as a host?” But once the guests have left you start feeling sad and eventually have to throw out your brother, who’s been sad all evening and should rather go and see a movie to banish the darkness inside, and as so often, the letter ends in shadows. “Haluś, what’s to become of us?”
The biscuit-dunking story is a glade of brightness in a forest of shadows.
Life in Alingsås is a life of waiting for answers that tarry, in the meandering stream of people who come and go on their way to somewhere else, in the restless motion between the shadows of memory and the glades of forgetfulness. Pension Friden is located at Torggatan 8, which is about as much in the center as you can get in little Alingsås, but for the people who come and go across its creaking floor, it’s a place on the outskirts, or rather
a no-man’s-land between a world that is no longer and a world that is still unreal.
A waiting place, in fact.
A waiting place for a connection not yet established.
Hardly a life you would call normal, if by normal you mean a life with a past and a future.
It’s hardly normal to wait for a connection that may not exist.
At any rate, there’s no given term for people in your category. The official documents are stamped
RED CROSS REFUGEES
, but refugees you are not.
If only you had been. If only you had fled while there was time.
But you didn’t flee, you were transported, which is something else, particularly if the purpose of the transport is annihilation.
You aren’t immigrants, either, not in your own eyes, nor in the eyes of Sweden. You haven’t come here of your own free will or under your own steam, but again by being transported, from one camp to another, from a camp in hell to a camp in the land of the vast forests, which out of a combination of magnanimity and guilt has offered you a temporary stop while you’re waiting to journey on to somewhere else, and which therefore designates you as transit migrants or
repatriandi
.
For people who haven’t fled, and haven’t migrated, and have nowhere to be transited or repatriated to, and who are still waiting for answers that tarry, and who until further notice live a life without a past and without a future, there’s no ready-made term and no ready-made policy, either, which is hardly surprising. Whoever could have imagined that in the course of a few short summer months, Sweden would take in over ten thousand individuals for whom no ready-made category exists in the Swedish language?
As time goes by, the term “survivors” starts to be used, initially as a statement of fact, survivors as distinct from the perished, but gradually as a category in its own right, a term for people whose main attribute is that they’re alive when in all probability they should be dead. Those to whom this term primarily applies are people who declare themselves to be Jews and who prove to fit particularly badly into the official categories of transit migrants and
repatriandi
. Already on July 3, 1945, an editorial in Sweden’s main daily newspaper,
Dagens Nyheter
, notes that the minister of justice has received a request “for the benefit of a large group of stateless individuals” to
set aside the rule requiring a minimum of ten years’ residence to qualify for Swedish citizenship.… Among the UNRRA refugees that the Red Cross has been bringing here for some time, there are a number of people with highly uncertain futures—for example Polish Jews with no links to home—fearful that they will be sent from one anti-Semitic environment to another.
Jewish concentration camp survivors become, in short, a human category all their own. Shipwrecked, you call them in one of your letters. Floating wreckage, I read somewhere else. Some of the shipwrecked still fear that in all probability they should be dead and therefore declare themselves as something other than Jews, which makes it somewhat difficult to keep a tally.
Some of them see forebodings everywhere.
Förbjudet att luta sig ut
, says a small metal plate screwed to the window frame in every Swedish train compartment, forbidding passengers to lean out.
Some of the survivors see only the letters spelling
jude
and draw their own conclusions.
Some of them keep on being afraid even after they understand.
I go through a plastic bag of small and somewhat dog-eared photos from your time in Alingsås. Many of them are group photos of young people cautiously pressing together, smiling into the camera, often with a glass in their hand, and a cigarette. Some are holding each other. Some are kissing. Some look a little distant. Most are under thirty, I would guess, though many look older. Most are dressed up, some are even elegant. You’re always elegantly dressed, I must say. Nice jackets, several of them, I note, a pale check in the summer pictures, usually with a wide bow tie, sometimes an ordinary tie; your shoes are polished, the cut of your trousers impeccable, your shirts well ironed. You care about your appearance, I can see that, and you’re eager for Haluś to like what she sees. Apart from anything else, you want her to see that you’re earning enough to dress “decently,” as you put it. “In the next day or two I’ll get a new photo taken and send it to you. I don’t look all that good in the last one. I’ve lost 6 kilos in Sweden, though I don’t really know why. We aren’t short of anything here, it’s like the good old days before the war.”
No, you aren’t short of anything, and you look very good despite those six kilos you’re worried about, not very tall, that’s true, but slim, with finely chiseled features. You’re rarely smiling in the pictures and your eyes often have a slightly absent look (posing is not your best sport), but no one seeing you at those parties and on those outings in and around Alingsås in the spring and summer of 1946 could possibly see anything other than a handsome young man with his life ahead of him. Especially not in the photos where you’re all posing on warm summer jetties and rocky shores and the sun is shining and the sea is
glittering and for one captured instant you all look as if you’ve known one another for a long time and have belonged here for a long time and are only doing what young people with their lives ahead of them do.
But soon faces will disappear, and farewells be said, and names be forgotten, and what seemed like a lasting fellowship will turn out to have been a haphazard and brief encounter between people who just a while ago had never met, and who just a while ago couldn’t imagine a place like this, and who for a single captured instant have only one another to share the world with. I see you holding one another, touching one another, looking at one another as if you’ll never have to part again. But I also see that you’re clinging to one another, bearing one another up, convincing one another that the waiting will be over soon, and the connection soon established, and the journey on to somewhere else soon resumed. Sweden may look like paradise and for a while feel like paradise to the young people in the yellowing pictures of parties and outings in and around Alingsås, but most of them are dreaming impatiently of the next leg of the
journey, including your brother, to judge by another yellowing document: “wishes to travel to Palestine” says the record of a police interrogation at Öreryd on August 22, 1945.
Perhaps you do too, before the dream of Haluś overtakes everything.
As late as September 1946, 45 percent of Jewish survivors in Sweden want to travel on to Palestine, 28 percent to the United States, 8 percent to other destinations. Only 16 percent want to be repatriated. Only 3 percent want to stay in Sweden.
Some 650 Jewish survivors, most of them young women, eventually tire of waiting for legal openings for the journey onward, and at the end of January 1947 they board a ship in the harbor of Trelleborg. The ship, the
Ulua
, is a Honduran-registered former American coast guard vessel weighing 880 metric tons. The passengers, who arrive on two specially chartered trains, are said to be between eighteen and thirty, mostly women. The voyage has been organized by the Jewish Refugee Welfare Association, whose representative in Trelleborg, Mr. Gunther Kohn, finds the
Ulua
in such a poor state that he wants a committee of passengers to approve conditions on board before departure. “A quick look at the ship’s facilities explains why Mr. Kohn is letting the passengers voice an opinion before they are crammed on board,” writes the local paper,
Trelleborgs Allehanda
. In any event, it’s “scarcely suitable for accommodating even 600 passengers for a number of days. The steerage has been fitted with a kind of cross between bunks and shelves, made of rough wood, on which the passengers are expected to sleep.”
The departure of the
Ulua
on January 24 makes the front page:
It was a singing ship that put out from the quayside in front of the Trelleborg harbormaster’s office at 3:30 in the afternoon—sailing toward an uncertain fate at the center of international politics. During the day, 661 Jewish emigrants had boarded the “ghost ship”
Ulua
and in the current cold weather had stayed below deck, but just as the vessel was putting out from the quay, the Jew passengers came swarming up from steerage like ants from an anthill, and it became clear just how overcrowded the ship was. As the
Ulua
swung its stern toward the hundreds of Trelleborg residents on the quay, the emigrants started singing a song of farewell, which could still be heard as the
Ulua
passed the outer section of the middle bridge.
The ship’s official destination is South America, but after a violent storm in the Bay of Biscay and emergency repairs in an Algerian port, the
Ulua
puts in at an unguarded beach outside Taranto in southern Italy and under cover of darkness takes seven hundred more Jewish survivors on board. With over 1,350 passengers crowded above and below deck, the ship approaches Palestine on February 27, 1947, level with Haifa. There she’s sighted by British reconnaissance aircraft, and two British minesweepers attempt to force her to stop. The
Ulua
responds by hoisting a “Jewish” flag and making for the coast at full speed. Along the sides of the ship, passengers push out wooden beams and sit in the lifeboats to obstruct boarding. Two British naval officers and ten seamen nonetheless succeed in boarding by the stern, but the swell in the wake of the ship sweeps their boat away, and when their tear gas runs out, they’re overpowered by the passengers and forced to jump overboard. At the next attempt, twenty-seven soldiers get themselves aboard and fire warning shots over the passengers’ heads while the
Ulua
steams
toward the coast at twelve knots, reaching land just south of Haifa with the British soldiers still literally clinging on and within sight of a British army base at the foot of Mount Carmel. Nine passengers manage to swim ashore and get away; the rest are taken to Haifa and then transferred to a British internment camp on Cyprus.