A Brief Stop on the Road to Auschwitz

Goran Rosenberg’s parents survived the Nazi’s Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps and made a new life in Sweden but, as he told Tony Clayton-Lea, they never fully escaped it— neither should we.

Göran Rosenberg

Granta Books, €20.99

THE YEAR is 1947, and the month is August, but there is little sunshine in the life of young Jewish man David Rosenberg. He disembarks, alone, from a train at the small Swedish town of Sodertalje, but the journey there is riddled with experiences that are simply beyond belief. Rosenberg is, no more and no less, blinking in the light of freedom; he started this particular part of his journey in the Polish city of Lodz, and from there he went to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and other aptly-termed death camps in Germany.

Yet life in Sweden, after World War II, might just be the new beginning that David and his beloved wife, Halinka, need to repair themselves and each other from the unutterable damage forced upon them during the war. The time is right, it seems, for fresh dreams. Within a short period of time, a son, Goran, is born, a child of immigrants who will become one of Sweden’s most successful and distinguished journalists.

The same Goran will one day write a devastating, emotive book about trying to understand what it was his father went through, not necessarily in those horrific dark days of the Holocaust, but after it— when life could have been, should have been, so much easier, so much brighter.

A Brief Stop On The Road From Auschwitz is not only a brilliantly researched and measured exploration of the past, but also a tender examination of a child’s relationship with his father. Speaking in impeccable English on the phone from his hotel room in Paris, Goran Rosenberg agrees that the book is, effectively, about a child trying to reconnect with his father.

“There’s a veil of ignorance that the child — even as an adult— will never be able to look through,” he admits. “What I had to do for the book was to resort to some deep digging into what really happened. But that is not a task in itself, or the goal of the book. The purpose of the book is to get to know the father. Everything coming from my search has that purpose. The book is not about Auschwitz or the Holocaust, but him.”

According to Rosenberg, the book was lurking in the wings, shouting to be written, for most of his adult life. He began his career as a journalist in the 1970s, and for a while, he says, he “had other things on my mind.” Come the 80s, he realised the book was something he needed to return to, particularly in the early 80s when the Holocaust issue came back into the collective mind of the West.

“I wrote extensively about this at the newspaper I worked for,” he recalls, “and so already I had ventured back into the general history of that time, and indeed my father, without knowing any of the particulars. But then I needed, for many reasons, to get him back into my life for a while.”

Early research proved fruitless. “It didn’t take me anywhere, and I wasn’t sure that I could write the book. In fact, I knew nothing — I had no documentation, I couldn’t substantiate much of anything, and even when I occasionally asked my mother about events she didn’t add very much to it. As to why she felt she couldn’t is, of course, an interesting story in itself— I suppose it dragged up so many memories.”

In the midst of such frustration, Goran’s mother handed him a surprise package. “One day, suddenly, she gave me a plastic bag full of letters that she had somehow kept away from me. This released the work into the open, and from that point on, I heard my father’s voice.”

While the letters were crucial in the development of the book, ‘hearing’ his father’s voice in, and through them, was something else altogether. The letters, he explains, were written in Polish, and so had to be translated.

Rosenberg’s voice falters as he talks.“It was very, very moving,” he says quietly. “In fact, to be honest, it was a shock. The first letter is the one he writes to my mother from the camp in Sweden, when he gets the news that she’s alive. It’s a very moving letter, and it’s hard to read it even now.”

Throughout the book the reader is copper fastened to their chair by a series of facts

>>>> and figures as well as the composure by which Rosenberg delivers such head-shaking statistics. One of the most incredulous, however, is noted from the early 50s, a period when the Allies (who, says Rosenberg, “at that time had stewardship of Germany”) applied pressure on the German government to recompense survivors of the camps.

“It was, in the beginning, a reluctant thing,” he begins. “It certainly wasn’t with open hands that they agreed. The law then was very restrictive about who was allowed to have that compensation. Eventually, most survivors received reparation in one way or another, but it took some time.”

Duly summoned, Rosenberg’s father was examined by a German doctor, but was deemed psychologically well enough not to pass the ‘means’ test. There was, explains Rosenberg with some restraint, very little understanding of the psychology of the survivors, or indeed the surviving of such an ordeal.

“There was either a reluctance to understand or an absolute inability to understand. People could look healthy and fine, as my father did, but other people couldn’t see that the man was ill. He was, and so many others were, and that’s a fact. They were all damaged, for life, for what they had been through. And the way he was treated in this particular process was, of course, absolutely devastating to him, psychologically, because for a person like him surviving the Holocaust was surviving complete dehumanisation. These people were humiliated down to the bone, literally.”

For all the horrific yet understated details, Rosenberg is at pains to point out that by writing the book he didn’t have any higher intentions or a message to deliver to the reader. By a kind of osmosis, however, what the book most certainly achieves is the evocation of the deeply human character of his father and his fate.

“Ultimately, it’s about a man who becomes very close to the reader. In a way, they get to know him through me, and the fate that is his touches the sense of humanity, or the sense of what it is to be a human being. I also think it shocks the reader— the letters I get, tell me that it’s an emotional shock to read the book.

“If I dare say, the book raises the issue of the Holocaust to a more immediate, emotional human level. And that is perhaps what I think we need if we still feel that the Holocaust, in particular, is worth remembering. I still think it is; it’s difficult because it’s an historical event that will pass with each successive generation. But it’s also something that should be a living memory, an emotional memory, and a memory that somehow, when we are confronted with it, touches our souls and our true selves.”

Of course, his deeply personal yet unsentimental book also highlights what, under certain circumstances, human beings can do to each other. “What happened during the Holocaust was done in the midst of our own civilisation by people very much like you and me. The book evokes in the reader the sense, and indeed the certain knowledge, that history still has some bearing on their lives.”

Rosenberg pauses for breath. More interviews await him. . He prepares to walk out into the crisp, thin air. “If this is the effect of reading the book, then that is the effect I wanted.”