A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz (34 page)

On Thursday May 23, 1957, the king of Sweden and the queen of the Netherlands visit Södertälje. It’s a glorious late spring day, and just in the driveway down to the truck factory’s main offices the local paper counts thousands of children, all waving flags presented to them by Scania-Vabis as the king and queen drive past in a black Daimler and get out onto a red carpet to sit on a royal blue platform, and the reception committee bows and curtseys, and the entire program runs “immaculately.”

You stay at home that day.

I also stay at home that day.

Are we both ill?

I can’t reconcile the voice in the night with your lighthearted playfulness. You’re generally cheerful and jolly, pulling faces to make me laugh, yodeling with your hands cupped around your mouth, tapping out rhythms on your teeth with a pencil, giving silly names to things that have no name.
Kigelmigel
is your name for a fruit salad of oranges, apples, and bananas, topped with whipped cream.
Kigelmigel
sounds the way it tastes: soft, smooth, and sweet. Your invented names are all soft and rounded, with an
-l
or a
-le
at the end. Maybe it’s the affectionate Yiddish diminutives stepping in to soften the harsh language of Strindberg. I can hear them in the voice calling in the night, too.
Mamale. Tattale
.

Nor can I reconcile your restless activities and irrepressible ambitions with your frailty and fatigue, and with the recurring visits to the doctor. As I attempt, much later, to piece together all the activities you set in motion and all the projects you’re planning, they can’t all be fitted into the calendar; they trip over each other, overlap, squeeze each other out, as if not even the smallest chink of idle time is allowed to open up. Yet by 1947 you’re already consulting Dr. Paul Lindner at 26 Jungfrugatan in
Stockholm about your headaches, anxiety, insomnia, and paranoid thoughts. From then on you go to see Dr. Lindner twice a year for a checkup and prescriptions for vitamins and sleeping pills. In 1950 your anxiety worsens for a time, and Dr. Lindner prescribes a powerful tranquilizer, Oxicon. The anxiety deepens into “particularly severe depression” over the course of 1959, and in a report dated March 3, 1960, Dr. Lindner proposes referring you for special psychiatric care.

Ambition and anxiety competing fiercely with each other, year after year, and I don’t see it. You don’t let me see it. You don’t let anyone see it.

You’re always so cheerful, Karin writes.

It’s only much later that I see the shadows dogging your every step, threatening to plunge you into darkness if you drop the pace even slightly.

It’s only much later that I’m able to reconcile the voice in the night with the voice that so lightheartedly and playfully gives softly resonant names to components of my world.

Time to say something about the term “survivor” as applied to people in your situation, the term that slowly crystalizes out as all others are tested and found inadequate, making the central element of your situation the fact that you’re still alive. People survive things all the time, of course, war, persecution, accidents, epidemics, without necessarily being termed survivors except with specific reference to the event they’ve survived, and mainly as a mere statement of fact. People who survive go on living, they don’t go on surviving. Surviving is normally not a continuous state but a momentary one. I think the term “survivor” initially has the same significance—a statement of fact—
for people in your situation too. You’ve survived against all odds and must now go on living in one of the categories available to you: refugees, transit migrants,
repatriandi
, displaced persons, Polish Jews, stateless individuals. Initially it’s also clear to the world what exactly it is that you’ve survived and how implausible it is that you’re still alive. At least there’s no shortage of evidence. Or of pictures, for those who can bear to look at them. The words are still unfamiliar and unreal, and are sometimes prey to the confusion of languages—gas chambers, death factories, extermination policy, final solution, annihilation—but those of you who have survived have no reason to doubt that the world knows what you’ve survived, and that the world is shaken to its very foundations by the knowledge, and that the world afterward is no longer the same as the world before. It’s impossible to think anything else. It’s impossible to think you’ve all survived in order for the world to forget what it’s just been through and to go on as if nothing has happened. There must be some point to the fact that you’ve survived, since the main point of the event you’ve survived was that none of you were supposed to survive, that you were all supposed to be annihilated without a trace, without leaving even a splinter of bone behind, still less a name on a death list or a death certificate. So initially you all survive with the assurance that you are the traces that weren’t supposed to exist, and that this is your survival’s particular point. It may seem superfluous to attribute a particular point to your survival, as there is generally more point in being alive than in being dead, but how else to justify the fact that you’re alive whereas so many others are not? You all know, if anybody does, that your survival is a result of the most unlikely of circumstances and the most arbitrary of chances, and that by every realistic calculation of probability you should be as utterly annihilated as all
those whose faces and voices continue to follow and haunt all of you. You may actually feel that you need to atone for being alive when they aren’t, particularly as I suspect that none of you can free yourselves from the thought that some of them deserved to survive more than you did. It’s a crazy thought, of course, since death and survival in Auschwitz depended not on merit but on the annihilation capacity of the gas chambers and crematoriums; however, I can appreciate that survival in such circumstances might seem unfair, or at any rate undeserved. Why me and not the others? Naturally it’s also an unbearable thought, which has to be pushed aside sooner or later if surviving is to turn into living. So I think it’s initially pushed aside by the assurance that you haven’t survived for yourselves only but for the others, too; that you’re the traces that must not be eradicated, and that you therefore owe a particular duty to the life you’ve been granted, against all the odds and beyond any notion of fairness, and that through this life you must justify the fact that you’re alive while the others are dead.

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.