I know nothing further about the three men waiting on the platform beyond the fact that they, like most of the others on this journey, will soon be moving on. What I do know is that the following day, the man who will be my father writes a letter to the woman who will be my mother and who’s been his wife for six months, informing her that the town, which is called Södertälje, seems bigger than the one he just left, which is called Alingsås. He notes that like all towns in this new country it seems sparsely populated, that it’s a long walk from one part of the town to another, and that there are large areas of newly built houses and blocks of flats, laid out with generous amounts of light, air, and greenery extending around a small but not particularly dense town center. There also seem to be big trees everywhere, whole forests of them, in fact, growing almost up to the doorsteps, and more importantly there’s a large pharmaceutical factory, where there are plenty of jobs for young women who can pack medicinal drugs deftly in cartons and bottles, and the defter they are, the more they can earn. “I didn’t get home all that late last night, eleven at the latest,” he assures her, “because I wanted to unpack my cases and inspect my room, but my roommate was already in bed asleep and so I had to wait.” The following day is Sunday, when everyone’s off and a breakfast of coffee, bread, and cheese is served in the lodging-house dining room — you aren’t allowed even to heat water for tea in your rooms — and so that morning his roommate, a “young and quiet snail,” has had time to tell him that work at the big truck factory starts at seven and ends at four, with a half-hour lunch break at 12:30. You can come to work in your ordinary clothes and change there, because you can take a shower and wash up properly after your shift. They have modern toilets as well, but if you need to go during working hours you have to ask permission, and the doors don’t shut properly, let alone lock, so nobody can loiter in there for a rest or a nap. But he doesn’t really consider any of this important enough to write about. The letter is short, the tone rather dutiful, and the handwriting too rushed, because he wants to get the letter posted right away. The only thing that matters, he writes, is for me to find a place where we can live, or at least a room we can have to ourselves, where we can heat water and make a home, so that you can get on the train and come here.
He’s worried about her too, you can tell; even a bit too much, you might think. Be careful on your bike and when you go swimming, he writes, as if she were a child. They’ve been continuously together for almost a year now, following nearly two years of being continuously separated, if you can say such a thing. Yes, “separated” may not be the right expression when the place where you’re forced to separate is the selection ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. And “worried about each other” may not adequately express their state of mind, when everything a human being could possibly fear might happen to him or her has already happened to them both, as has everything that no one was able to imagine could happen and yet happened all the same, everything except for that one final thing that could still happen but absolutely must not, and for which the word “worry” no longer seems satisfactory. Not when a weight of worry big enough to poison a world has been concentrated into a single black drop of corrosive anxiety that’s forever poised above what is at present the weakest point in this still improbable, and therefore not yet quite real, connection between two young people who last parted on the selection ramp in Auschwitz-Birkenau. No, wrong. Who last parted on a railroad platform in Alingsås.
But it’s no longer easy to distinguish one parting from another. No, she mustn’t have a fatal accident on her bike or drown in a lake or trip on the stairs or suffer any eventuality, conceivable or inconceivable, that might sever the last, fragile thread connecting them to what could, after all, turn out to be a new life. “There’s absolutely no need to worry about me at all,” he adds cockily. “And tomorrow morning I’ll apply for the truck factory job M. thinks I’m bound to get with all my first-rate ‘qualifications,’ and this very day I’ll ask the poor landlady who lost her husband if a room will become available anytime soon, and as I say I’m terribly worried about you, and you’re never out of my thoughts for a second, and maybe it really would have been best if you had traveled here with me, because then we wouldn’t have had to worry so much and no doubt everything would have worked out all right, even so. Everything’s sure to work out before long, and soon you’ll be here with me.”
As the sender’s address he gives R 639 B, Södertälje. What kind of address is that? No street, no name, just a code. The address of yet another barrack in yet another camp? Can a letter of reply really be delivered to an address like that? How long can such an address be allowed to keep them apart?