A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz (36 page)

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

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.”

“In this respect, the illness is to be regarded as a pension neurosis.”

Die Krankheit ist in dieser Hinsicht als Renten-Neurose aufzufassen
.

As I understand it, Dr. Lindenbaum writes that you’re ill because you want reparations, not because you’ve survived Auschwitz. In other words, if it weren’t for your craving for reparations, you’d be entirely well. The reduction in your working capacity as a result of Auschwitz is thus, in his judgment, 0 percent after January 1, 1948. How Dr. Lindenbaum arrives at this date isn’t clear. Nor how he can determine that your working capacity is reduced by 100 percent in 1945, by 60 percent in 1946, and by 30 percent in 1947.

Your post-Auschwitz reduction in working capacity from 1948 onward is assessed at 0 percent.

On the basis of Dr. Lindenbaum’s report, your claim for reparations for lasting damage resulting from your persecution by National Socialism is rejected.

I’m not a small child any longer. In the summer of 1957, I’m sent to a summer camp for Jewish children on the island of Väddö, north of Stockholm, and I grow accustomed to being away from home. And to the fact that you, too, are away from home. After the unsold Piccolo, and the unbuilt house in Vibergen, and the ungranted German reparations, and the completion of your military service, you tend to come home late in the evening and sometimes not at all. One evening when you’re at home, we go out to watch for
Sputnik
but fail to find it.
Sputnik
is supposed to look like a star moving quickly across the sky, and you’ve checked precisely when and where to watch, but no matter how intensely we watch, we can’t see it. While we’re watching, you explain to me how it’s possible for
Sputnik
to leave the earth without falling back down again. It has to do with the speed of the launch.
Sputnik
has to reach a launch velocity of 11 kilometers per second, otherwise it will fall back down again.

The VW Beetle’s speedometer goes up to 120 kilometers per hour, but the indicator never gets that far around the dial.

When I finally do see
Sputnik
moving up there, I’m not with you. I think I’m with Bertil, and there’s snow on the ground, and we’ve gone out specifically to see it.

With you, I watch the 1954 solar eclipse through a developed but unexposed strip of film—but that’s an entirely different memory fragment.

In 1957,
Sputnik
breaks free of the earth’s gravitational pull, and you make repeated attempts to break free of the factory’s. Or at least that’s how, much later, I’m inclined to interpret the late evenings, and the appointment in the building with the elevator, and the names in the night, and the handwritten draft of a business contract that I find among your papers. Under its terms you are to work full time as a traveling salesman for a company that imports a Japanese camera called Taron and are prohibited under penalty of a 50,000-kronor fine from revealing company secrets to outsiders. Japanese cameras are cheap and have a poor reputation, and the draft contract has been annulled. You can’t sell your own, hand-welded Piccolo for fifty-five kronor including postage and the right of return, so how can you sell cheap Japanese cameras with dubious reputations?

Are there other annulled contracts? Other buildings with elevators in Stockholm?

What I realize, much later, is that time after time you make a run-up toward the horizon, and time after time you fall back to earth again.

Maybe I ought to realize it even now, or at least to be concerned—I’m no longer a small child, after all—but this is when horizon after horizon is opening up to me with no effort at all and my world is inexorably breaking loose from yours, and it’s only with difficulty that I can recall the sensation of that day when you get home earlier than usual and we go down to the port to see if there are any Polish or Russian ships in, so you can find someone to chat with and maybe buy a surreptitious bottle of vodka from, but you don’t chat with anyone, not even me. We walk in silence along the quay and do not stop by the Polish ship unloading its cargo of coal, or it might be coke, nor do we stop by the gantry crane as it screeches past us along the rails on its broad, rickety legs, its soot-blackened grab bucket dangling in the air above our heads, first gaping wide like a crocodile’s jaws, then firmly clamped around its prey. I try to say something, perhaps I’m scared, but I have a powerful sense of your being somewhere else. I can feel it through your hand as it holds mine, and the sensation penetrates my body and hides there, waiting to be summoned again by a closely written aerogram in Polish, by a letter in Swedish with bold, leftward-slanting capitals, by a medical report in German, by an annulled draft contract, or simply by the lively imagination of someone determined at any cost to unearth a memory fragment or two and piece together a narrative.

It’s so much easier to recall the sensation, or in fact more than that, of Ester’s damp hand in mine at the Last Night Party down by the steamer landing stage, and of Inger’s hot cheek against mine during the last dance in the dining hall, and of Anita’s tongue touching mine when we’re playing Postman’s Knock in
the hideaways of the coastal defense bunkers on Secret Mountain. Inger is a year or two older, and one evening she lets me put my hand on her breast. Well, not directly on her breast, but on the jumper with the stiff, pointy brassiere beneath it. It must be one of the last summers at the camp, and the bright evenings are fraught with throbbing expectations, furtive looks, and the bulging rumps of the draft horses in the pasture below the cowshed, and my body speaks a language I don’t understand, one that draws me inexorably toward yet another world to discover and make into my own.

Anita must be the last summer, when I stop and think about it.

Otherwise, I don’t have to stop and think very much to remember the last summer.

Much later, I read in a Swedish medical journal (
Läkartidningen
, no. 40, 2005) “that there is not a single scientific study to support the hypothesis of so-called pension neuroses.” On the contrary, studies show that “symptoms persist even after the pension has been settled.”

Your symptoms persist. That, at any rate, is the opinion of doctor after doctor even after the pension has been “settled” and you should therefore, according to Dr. Lindenbaum’s diagnosis, be restored to health and fit for work again. Instead there are signs of deterioration as the reparations you’ve been denied eat their way into your life and poison it. You may not have suffered from “pension neurosis” before Dr. Lindenbaum, but you certainly do afterward. After Dr. Lindenbaum, the question of
reparations grows into something much bigger than a pension question, ultimately becoming a matter of life and death. I know that sounds dramatic, and I don’t mean it literally, but it’s indisputable that Dr. Lindenbaum’s verdict launches a heavy German torpedo right into the fragile foundations of your survival. Now you have to live not only with Auschwitz and the liquidation of your world, but also with Dr. Lindenbaum’s verdict.

Es steht ausser Zweifel, dass Pat. seine Beschwerden übertreibt
.

So you apply again, in the hope of erasing Dr. Lindenbaum’s verdict from your life. This time you know that Auschwitz and Wöbbelin are not enough. This time you know that a German
Vertrauensarzt
is an enemy who must be defeated by all the means at your disposal. So you arm yourself with new testimonies, new documents, and new medical certificates, and the stamp duties mount up at the office of the notary public. You’re even prepared to counter numbers with numbers. In a sworn statement on February 9, 1957, you affirm that your father had a cotton mill at 78 Sienkiewski Street with warehouse space in the building at 36 Piłsudskiego, where you all lived “in a large, attractive apartment.” You also affirm that you were in your third year at a textile college in Łódź and were preparing for further study to become a textile engineer when your world was destroyed, and you now want the financial means to complete your training and escape the assembly-line work at the factory that you find mentally and physically draining.

And you have no more illusions. There’s a calculating, almost cynical tone to the letter you write on February 8, 1958, to Natek in Israel, explaining what it takes to outwit the enemy: