A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz (38 page)

No, the children are told nothing. The children are wrapped up in their own affairs. The memory fragments are few, far between, and firmly trampled into the darkness and silence. Your mute back one cold winter’s day on the way to Havsbadet. The gray herringbone coat flapping around your legs and hanging heavily on your shoulders. You want to go on your own but I’ve asked to come too. Why are we going to Havsbadet in winter? An early morning at the start of summer in Auntie Ilonka and Uncle
Birger’s summer cottage by a seawater inlet south of Södertälje. The day before, we rowed out together, you and I, and jigged for herring in the sound. We jigged bucket after bucket of herring, and you promise we’ll row out and jig for more the next day, but the following morning you get up very early and row out on your own and come home with a zander, which you put in a bucket outside the door. The zander, unable to stretch out straight, is curled into a circle as it moves gently in the bucket. An hour or two later, it’s floating belly up. We go back to the rowanberry avenue that same afternoon. At the annual music school concert, I play the second part in Vivaldi’s Concerto in A Minor for Two Violins and Piano.

You’re there, aren’t you?

Jean Améry doesn’t want to pathologize the Auschwitz survivors’ irreconcilability, or their mistrust, or their restlessness, or their fear of losing a foothold. Jean Améry thinks it’s the world, which moves forward without looking back, that ought to be pathologized, not the survivors.

Easy to say for those who have the ability to write a world of their own.

Harder for those who find that the world is against them.

Not that easy for Améry either, when I think about it, since he sees all too well how lonely he is, with his irreconcilability and his bitterness and his inability to move on as if nothing has happened, and at the end of the day he draws the logical conclusions from his predicament and kills himself. Before that he writes a book about suicide, or as he prefers to call it, voluntary
death,
Freitod
, in which he maintains that a life of humiliation and helplessness might be worth bringing to an end, that suicide might be an act of dignity and not an act of resignation.

He doesn’t say that in so many words, but that’s what he means.

Parts of the text make for uncomfortable reading, as Améry is so clearly obsessed with his subject, attempting rather desperately in places to make poetry and philosophy out of it, but I read the book to try to understand why so many survivors kill themselves. The suicide rate of survivors is three times that of people in general. It’s as if a latent virus has fastened onto people like you and suddenly, without warning, manifests itself in a resolute wish to take one’s own life. Améry doesn’t deal with the issue of survival, not even his own, in this context, but it’s impossible not to read this book, too, in the light of his inability or disinclination to be reconciled to the world after Auschwitz. What Améry refuses to admit is that this inability or disinclination, like the accompanying feelings of humiliation and helplessness, can also develop into pathological states, and that this in many cases may lead to suicide. I can feel respect for Améry’s refusal to let himself be diagnosed as diseased because of Auschwitz, and for his attempt to give suicide some moral dignity, but that doesn’t prevent him from appearing, in my eyes, as diseased and damaged as all of you are.

You who have survived Auschwitz are all damaged, whether it shows or not, and whether you care to admit it or not. Some of you deal with the damage better than others and are able to build a new world on the ruins of the old one and see all kinds of horizons opening up, and after a time no one can see or even suspect where you come from and what you’re carrying with you—but no one is safe from the shadows.

For many, the shadows come later in life than they do for you. Sometimes right at the end, as momentum is inexorably lost and it gets harder not to stop and look back.

I try to understand why your shadows come so early, but I don’t find very much to understand.

You just happen to get off at the wrong station on your road from Auschwitz.

Yes, I think, in the end, that the Place has a part to play in this.

It’s too small a place for someone like you, with too few people who appreciate where you come from and what you carry with you, with a factory too large and too dominant to free oneself from, with too few exits to a future other than the one already mapped out, and with a horizon that never really wants to open up.

The place where I make the world into my own is also the place where the world turns its back on you. And the place where you finally turn your back on the world.

It never becomes a home to you. Not the way it does to me.

Homelessness is an underrated hell for people like you, I think. Homelessness and the confusion of languages. The one has something to do with the other. To be at home is to be understood without having to say all that much.

I don’t think any place can replace the place where we put our first words to the world, and share it with other people, and make it our own. I know there are those who think such a place can be re-created anywhere, at any time, but I don’t believe that. I believe the place that has shaped us will keep shaping us even after we’ve left it and made our home elsewhere. Or rather, we can only make our home elsewhere if some kind of link lives on with the place, the people, and the language that shaped us.

But for people like you, there’s no such link. The place that shaped you is no longer there, nor the people, nor the language, nor even the memory. Between you and the world that you once made your own towers a wall of pain that memory cannot penetrate.

So you must make a home in a place where you aren’t understood, no matter what you say, and where you’re deprived of every link with the place where you first put words to the world and didn’t have to say all that much to be understood, which is my definition of being at home, and just about Améry’s definition too. “Home [
die Heimat
] is the land of one’s childhood and youth,” writes Améry. “Whoever has lost it becomes a loser himself, even if he has learned not to stumble about in the foreign country as if he were drunk, but rather to tread the ground with some fearlessness [
einiger Furchtlosigkeit
].”

Améry makes much of his homelessness, of the fact that not only has he seen his home desecrated and liquidated by the Germans, but the Germans have forever turned that home into a hostile, alien place and by so doing transformed the whole world into a place of loneliness and lost bearings. Perhaps Améry’s homelessness is made worse by the fact that his language is also that of the perpetrators, but I don’t think there’s too much difference between you and him. The confusion of languages doesn’t reside in the language.

“How much
Heimat
does a person need?” asks Améry.

“The less of it he can carry with him, all the more,” he replies.

A home can certainly, to some extent, be replaced by other things—memories, objects, smells, tastes, dreams, hopes, promises—but it presupposes that somewhere, sometime, there was a place that was a home.

If no such place has existed, or if the links to it have forever been ripped up and broken and you haven’t been able to carry with you anything at all, I imagine that in the end homelessness can become unbearable.

Sundby hospital, like Ulvsunda nursing home, lies by a lake. It’s not literally an old castle like Ulvsunda, but there’s undeniably something of a castle about it. For a time it was more or less taken for granted in the land of vast forests and innumerable lakes that castlelike buildings would be erected or acquired to house the slow-witted or deranged or mentally ill, or whatever name was chosen for those people who were to be kept apart, possibly for good, from society as a whole. Sundby hospital, opened in 1922, nestles like most mental hospitals of the time in a large area of parkland with peaceful strolling paths lined with shady maples and linden trees. The therapeutic conviction of the era is that external peace fosters internal harmony, and that proximity to open water can be particularly soothing. At any rate, one doesn’t have to walk very far from the main building at Sundby hospital, along one of the paths through the park, to reach the shore of Lake Mälaren and there look out over the soothing water and see on the other side of a narrow sound the idyllic cathedral town of Strängnäs, bowing down to the soaring spire at its heart.

For many years the hospital and the town were linked only by a ferry, and the risk of any lost soul straying among the normal citizens of the town by mistake was therefore minimal. Besides, the lost souls were rarely left unsupervised. That the ambitions
of mental care were high, one might even say impressive, is clear from the account of the ceremonial opening of the Strängnäs asylum, as it was originally called. The account is published in the magazine
Humanitet
(Humanity), the house journal of the Swedish Association of Asylum Staff, and from reading it you realize that the opening of an asylum is a big event at the time, and that the hopes invested in its future are of almost epic proportions:

This is yet another postwar period, it strikes me, and the memories of unimaginable destruction are still fresh, and its human aftereffects still profound, and the bishop of Strängnäs, Uddo Lechard Ullman, finds reason to say something in his inaugural speech about the impact of the age on the human mind. As I understand it, he wonders whether it is in fact the age that is mad. He doesn’t say so directly, and my understanding is based on a magazine account only, but according to an article in the February 1922 issue of
Humanitet
, Bishop Ullman is saying

On April 26, 1960, you are taken by ambulance from Mörby general hospital to Sundby mental hospital, to be afforded salvation, or at least relief.

Your case notes for that day: “On waking exhibited motor disturbance and extreme anxiety, intermittently wandering in corridor. In conversation exhibits signs of classic depression. Feels generally useless, as if does not deserve to live. Persistence of serious suicidal thoughts.”

No more confusion of languages. For conditions like yours, modern mental health care has a growing arsenal of highly specific and unambiguous words at its disposal. Lergigan, for example, and Heminevrin, Truxal, Diminal Duplex, and Catran, and electric shock treatment.

The first electric shock is administered on May 4.

After the second electric shock, on May 6: “Appears calmer but will not admit he feels better.”

After the fourth electric shock, on May 13: “Thinks he is in a lighter mood and that the treatment is having the desired effect.”

After the fifth and final electric shock on May 17, a session with the chief physician at Sundby, Dr. Segnestam: “The patient lucid and controlled, happy and content, feels he is completely recovered.… What he wants is to be allowed home for May 28, as his son who is a scout [?] will be playing the violin, which the patient would like to see and hear.”

You express your gratitude to the Swedish healthcare system. “Happy and grateful.”