As long as you’re all still at the station in Radogoszcz and haven’t yet been ordered onto the narrow wooden ramps leading to the dark openings of the covered cattle cars, I imagine that such a story is still possible.
I also know that once the cars have filled up and the doors are bolted and the train pulls out, no such story is possible anymore.
Perhaps it became impossible even earlier, perhaps as early as those incomprehensible days in September 1942 when the old and the sick and the small children were sacrificed to the Germans so that the ghetto could live on.
Perhaps the world that existed before such things happened was a world where such things couldn’t have happened — and therefore a world that could no longer exist.
So perhaps, there at the station in Radogoszcz, it’s already too late. The most important people in your world are still alive, still waiting with their bags and bundles for the journey to nowhere, but their stories may already have fallen silent for good.
This I don’t know, of course. I only imagine it to be so. I imagine that between the world as you understood it only yesterday and the world none of you can or wants to understand gapes a chasm that can no longer be bridged by memory.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there’s still a living family tree standing there among the bundles and bags, waiting for someone to investigate its foliage and root system. What were your grandparents’ names? What did they look like? What did they do? Where did they come from? Who were your aunts and uncles? Did they have pet names, like Primo Levi’s, who all have names starting with “Barba” and “Magna,” including some names that can be traced back to Napoleon, since there’s an Uncle Bonaparte on his mother’s side who’s called Barbapartín, and who like all the Barbas and Magnas in Primo Levi’s family chronicle has a character trait and a story attached to his name. Barbapartín leaves the family because he can’t stand his wife, so he has himself baptized and becomes a monk and goes off to China as a missionary. I read Primo Levi with envy and realize that for many reasons I will never be able to write a narrative like his.
I know your pet name, of course. You’re called Dadek. You and your three brothers all have pet names. Dadek’s a Polish pet name for David, Natek for Naftali, Marek for Mayer, and Salek for Israel. In Polish and Yiddish, and I assume in Italian too, diminutives are easy to form. They lie there on your tongue, waiting to pop out. As if it was in the nature of some languages to produce the soft diminutives that attach a note of solicitude and affection to the names of friends or relatives.
Dadek, Natek, Marek, Salek.
At the station in Radogoszcz, Dadek and Natek are still alive. And so is Hadassah. And so are Jankale and Rachela from apartment number 3. And so are Dorkale and Bronkale and Blumale and Simale and Haluś or Halinka. And so is Obadja, whose pet name I don’t know. And so are people in your world whose names, let alone pet names, will remain unknown to me.
But soon you have all climbed on board and the doors have closed and all thoughts of what stories might have been possible to tell, there and then, lose even their theoretical raison d’être. Once the train has left, I know for certain that this is where I must begin your journey.
I try to begin it earlier, but I fail.
Beyond the ghetto looms a wall I can’t get past. A wall of darkness and silence. Almost no fragments at all.
Not now and not later.
THE CAROUSEL
In the spring of 1943, Czesław Miłosz writes about the carousel in Krasiński Park in Warsaw. It’s a carousel that has been the subject of much writing and testimony. From the carousel in Krasiński Park in the spring of 1943, you can see and hear the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto. The carousel doesn’t stop while the ghetto is liquidated. Nor does the music. The Warsaw ghetto is liquidated to the music and laughter from a carousel in a park just outside its walls. This is on the days after Easter, and the last Jews in the ghetto have begun an uprising, and German soldiers are burning house after house, and the people whirling around on the carousel in Krasiński Park are enjoying the spring and the warmth as the last Jews of the ghetto are liquidated before their eyes.
At times wind from the burning
would drift dark kites along
and riders on the carousel
caught petals in midair.
That same hot wind
blew open the skirts of the girls
and the crowds were laughing
on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.
Nothing new there, of course, it’s well known that people are capable of living as if nothing’s going on even when the most atrocious things are happening around them. In all wars, even the cruelest, even right alongside the fields of battle and slaughter, people try to live as if nothing has happened: to enjoy a meal, a night’s sleep, a healthy stomach, a good laugh, a moment of forgetting. It’s not always possible, and not everyone can do it, but life doesn’t stop in the presence of death. Especially not there. In the presence of death, life itself can become the only thing of value. In the big diary of the Łódź ghetto, entries about death transports, fatal shootings, and suicides are interleaved with entries about grass growing, butterflies fluttering, and people streaming outdoors on a warm spring Sunday.
On Friday, April 23, 1943, a stork is sighted in the ghetto in Łódź, and in Warsaw the carousel in Krasiński Park whirls on.
While the Warsaw ghetto burns and the Łódź ghetto delivers up its children and the gas vans in Chełmno air out their compartments, feverish building activity is transforming the place where the man who gets on the train at Radogoszcz will eventually get off to start his life afresh. “Lofty pines, their crowns swept by the wind from the sea for many decades, are now succumbing to the woodcutter’s ax,” reports the local paper as a new part of town goes up in the Näset district below the red-brick station house at Södertälje Södra, where the big trains always make a brief stop on their way to and from the world.
The world’s in flames, and in the little town of Södertälje, in the little country of Sweden, they’re building houses and trucks as never before. Maybe not trucks so much as armored vehicles and tanks. Production of the SKP M-43 armored vehicle gets under way in late 1943, and production of the SAV M-43 assault artillery gun, consisting of a large gun mounted on a tank chassis, starts in March 1944. The chassis derives from a Czech tank that Scania-Vabis is building on license from Hitler’s Germany, since Hitler’s Germany has occupied Czechoslovakia, taken possession of the tank factory for its own use, and stopped the tank deliveries to Sweden.
What can one say? One man’s meat is another man’s poison?
No, that’s too harsh, though I know there are those who think like that. The world in flames is, after all, out of sight for the people who happen to live here. There’s no need for them to turn their heads away so as not to see. In their world, there are no houses burning in the next street, no neighbors being liquidated behind the carousel. They can imagine a summer following this one, and another beyond that, and feel the spring breezes from Havsbadet caress their cheeks, and hear the ax blows echoing through the pines, and be happy about all the houses that must be built to make homes for all the people coming to the little town to build all the armored vehicles that a world in flames demands. And eventually the trucks that will be in demand to help rebuild a world in ashes. In a place like this, the world can remain what it has always been and simultaneously become better than ever. The new houses rising in the cleared area below the railroad station all have laundries with washing machines and electric mangles, and the new apartments all have central heating and a bathroom and a kitchen or kitchenette, and between the kitchen and the hall a sliding, wood-veneer door, to save space. The installation of radiators and sinks in the Gondola quarter has unfortunately been delayed by a shortage of materials, by road haulage problems, and by military call-ups. A single day sees the call-up of twelve workers at the Edoff engineering firm, which is building houses both for the HSB housing cooperative and for itself, “and you can imagine how that might turn out.”