A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz (40 page)

Beginning in January 1995, trains between Stockholm and the world do not make a brief stop at Södertälje Södra. They don’t even pass through Södertälje Södra, still less cross the bridge over the canal. The railroad now runs even farther from the center of Södertälje, along an even shorter route between Stockholm and the world, and Södertälje Södra is now called Södertälje Hamn (Harbor).

At Södertälje Hamn, the rowanberries still glow in the autumn.

In the summer of 2010, the old railroad bridge over Södertälje canal was pulled down. The new bridge can’t be crossed on foot.

“Much later” in this book is a recurring expression for the hopeless impotence felt by a writer who has made up his mind not to let the events of the future burden his story, still less the individuals in it. In reality, of course, this book could not have been written without knowing what can only be known much later. Or without the people who much later helped me excavate the fragments of memory. First and foremost my mother, Hala Rosenberg, whom I have plagued over the years with all manner of
questions, reasonable and unreasonable, and who has without reservation placed at my disposal the letters and documents she has preserved. Thanks also to my sister Lilian Rosenberg-Roth for help with crucial documentation, and to my cousins Assa and Anders Rosenberg, who have dug assiduously into their own memories. I have Lena Einhorn to thank for documentation on the food parcels sent to Ravensbrück, and I’m grateful to Anders Bodegård for the translation of letters and documents from Polish to Swedish. Without Dr. Karl Liedke, one important chapter in this book could never have been written.

I have chosen not to burden my text with footnotes, but will list below some of the sources that have been with me throughout my writing.

For the sections dealing with Södertälje and its history, and the view of the world from there, I had access (via the Royal Library of Sweden) to an invaluable time machine: the daily editions of
Stockholms Läns & Södertälje Tidning
from 1938 to 1960. The Södertälje Municipal Archive helped with all kinds of local authority plans and decisions. Södertälje historian Göran Gelotte shared with me his memory fragments, pictures, and knowledge. Without Karin Sterner’s stories and letters, many fragments would have remained buried in darkness.

For the sections on the Łódź ghetto, I relied on the detailed and comprehensive documentation that miraculously survived the ghetto’s liquidation, primarily the “official” ghetto chronicle referred to in the book and published in an edited version (Lucjan Dobroszycki) in English in 1984, under the title
The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto 1941–44
. Some of the German documents from the ghetto, among them the one concerning the extra spirit rations needed for the “dejudification of the Warthegau,” I have taken from a yellowing Polish collection,
Dokumenty i Materiały
,
Tom III, Getto Łódzkie
, ed. A. Eisenbach (1946). The notebooks of Josef Zelkowicz are published in English under the title
In Those Terrible Days: Notes from the Lodz Ghetto
(Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2002). Another indispensable document from the Łódź ghetto is the diary kept by David Sierakowiak, published in English under the title
The Diary of David Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Łódź Ghetto
, ed. Alan Adelson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

The lines of Czesław Miłosz in the introduction to the chapter “The Carousel” are from his poem “Campo dei Fiori,” published in English in his
Collected Poems
, trans. Louis Iribarne and David Brooks (New York: Eco Press, 1973).

For documents and facts about the deportations from the Łódź ghetto to Auschwitz and from Auschwitz to the German slave camp archipelago, I have made extensive use of Andrej Strzelecki’s
The Deportation of Jews from the Łódź Ghetto to KL Auschwitz and Their Extermination
(Oświęcim, Poland: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2006). Dr. Karl Liedke’s study of the route taken by some thousand Polish Jews from Auschwitz to the Büssing slave camps in Braunschweig is published in
Yad Vashem Studies
30 (Jerusalem, 2002), under the title
Destruction Through Work: Łódź Jews in the Büssing Truck Factory in Braunschweig, 1944–45
. Karl Liedke also ensured that a copy of the handwritten SS list from Ravensbrück found its way into my hands. In addition, Dr. Liedke was my tireless guide through the camp archipelago in the surroundings of Braunschweig. Information about the conditions in the SS camps at Firma Büssing in Braunschweig is largely taken from the vivid eyewitness account of the doctor and fellow inmate Geoges Salan in his book
Prisons de France et bagnes allemandes
(Nîmes, France: Imprimerie L’Ouvrière, 1946), one of those many contemporary
testimonies that were printed only once and then vanished into oblivion.

The sparse documents from the aliens’ camps at Tappudden-Furudal and Öreryd are kept at the National Archives in Stockholm, as are the personal case files opened on aliens resident in Sweden, which also include the police investigations undertaken in connection with applications for aliens’ passports and citizenship.

For newspaper comment of the period on the reception of Jewish survivors in the Swedish camp archipelago, I primarily have to thank the cuttings archive at the Sigtuna Foundation, which also gave me a writer’s grant allowing me an untroubled month’s stay in a restful setting. For further material on Sweden’s encounter with the survivors, I have consulted the consecutive volumes of
Judisk Krönika
(The Jewish Chronicle) and
Judisk Tidskrift
(The Jewish Journal), beautifully bound and put at my disposal by Peter Freudenthal.

The following are a few more works that in various ways have played a part in the preparation of this book.