The tone is generally one of forced optimism: things will fall into place, you’ll see; new options have opened up and so-and-so has just arrived from Bergen-Belsen without any family ties here at all; tomorrow I’m going to talk to so-and-so who is right up to date on the best way to go about it; everything’s ready for when you get here, you know, with a job and a place to live all organized; and there’s so much I haven’t had a chance to tell you, and so much you haven’t had a chance to tell me; and I can’t see the point of having both survived hell if we’re not allowed to share paradise.
There are times when you can’t convince even yourself, and sometimes I get the feeling you aren’t even sure whether the woman who is to be my mother actually wants to join you in Sweden or whether she’d prefer that you join her in Poland, which tends to make you desperate as well as decisive. In a disconsolate moment you write that it might be best for you to go to her in Łódź after all, that your longing for her is unbearable, that you can’t stand the idea of being apart from her much longer. In your decisive moments, and they are many, you put a great deal of effort into convincing her that she has to leave Poland, that Poland is no place for people like her and you, and that it’s definitely not mere selfish convenience that’s deterring you from leaving paradise at once and coming to her side:
You mustn’t think that the decisive factor for my not coming to Poland is the drop in living standards that would lead to. The way things look now, there’s no way back for a Jew. I’ve talked to people who have just come to Sweden from Poland illegally, via Gdynia. They were two Christian Poles who had already been in Sweden, then returned to Poland but have now come back here. When I told them I was weighing up the idea of going to Poland they looked at me as if I was mad.…
I don’t want to build a new life on the ruins of our homes, and what’s more, at a time when everything around is malign or even hostile toward us. And this, even despite the fact that in Łódź I might be able to arrange things better for myself, live better, i.e. get a job in my own profession. But it can’t be helped, I would rather be an unskilled worker here than have to listen to comments like “So where are all these Jews coming from now, I was sure we’d got rid of them?”…
I’ll say it again: it’s in “our” own best interests for you to come to me, even though it isn’t easy to put into practice. How can I even think of coming back, when we keep hearing about murders of Jews? Right now they’re talking on Radio Warsaw about the murder of 5 Jews in Krakow. So why should I drop everything and go to where I’m hated and despised?
In your letters, you try hard to present life in Alingsås as fully normal, yes, even as bright and promising. After only a few months, you’re able to report that Natek has landed a new job at the textile factory, in the stockroom of the dyeing section, with the prospect of promotion since textile dyeing is his speciality — which goes to show that even foreigners have the chance of “a first-rate job.” You write of the Jewish-Polish colony and its gatherings, of your trips to visit new friends in the land of the vast forests, of the new language, which you learn not so much from your two lessons a week as from talking to Swedes, “and I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you: including Swedish women.”
You begin one letter by telling about the two letters that were waiting for you both when you got back from work, one from Haluś to yourself, dated February 5, 1946, and one for Natek. The letter for you has taken seven weeks to get there, and I can well imagine the dark misunderstandings that can arise from such postal service. The letter to Natek brings the answer to his question about Andzia:
When he’d finished reading the letter, he wasn’t able to utter a word. He just sat there staring listlessly at the same spot. I went out of the room because I could feel something was happening inside him and he needed to be alone. Up to that point he hadn’t let any bad thoughts get near him. In fact just the opposite, he’d tried hard to behave in an easygoing, lighthearted way and had even allowed himself brief flirtations now and then. But I knew very well that it was all self-deception, and in fact he told me himself that if he didn’t keep up the show he’d soon be in bad shape. With Andzia he could have been happy, because there was no other woman he could ever truly be in love with. He still thinks it’s thanks to her that the sun is peeping out from the clouds.
You can’t imagine the effect the letter had on him.
Then a detailed account of a burlesque linguistic misunderstanding is suddenly allowed to take up most of the rest of the letter:
Coffee is the Swedish national drink, and they take cakes and biscuits with it. When Swedes offer you coffee, you can’t say no, or they’re mortally offended. So we come in, take a seat, and our hostess kindly invites us to help ourselves. As we begin drinking and eating, the hostess turns to us and says: varso gut dupa, but since we weren’t familiar with Swedish customs, we didn’t know what she meant, and she repeated it several times, varso gut dupa, varso gut dupa. There were three of us, Natek, me and another fellow. We all burst out laughing and couldn’t stop, and our hosts laughed with us. They wondered what we were laughing about and our hostess said we had to explain what was so funny, and was even ready to defend herself. There was nothing for it, we had to tell her that the word d— [an explicit four-letter word] is not a very nice one in Polish. Once she had heard it, there was no stopping her, she was splitting her sides with laughter. It turned that what she’d said was varsågod och doppa, which means “Do feel free to dunk.” Swedes have the habit of dunking their biscuits in their coffee, in fact it’s such standard practice that it has its own special name. Since then, Swedes have been avoiding the word, but only in Polish company of course.
Here you seem a bit shocked as you realize how your pen has run away with you—“Haluś, what am I doing, what good is this nonsense to you?”
At this point you’re interrupted in your letter-writing by a visit to your room. A workmate and his girlfriend have come to tell you they’re getting engaged, which prompts you to offer them, “elegantly,” some fruit and wine—“Haluś, can you imagine me as a host?” But once the guests have left you start feeling sad and eventually have to throw out your brother, who’s been sad all evening and should rather go and see a movie to banish the darkness inside, and as so often, the letter ends in shadows. “Haluś, what’s to become of us?”
The biscuit-dunking story is a glade of brightness in a forest of shadows.
Life in Alingsås is a life of waiting for answers that tarry, in the meandering stream of people who come and go on their way to somewhere else, in the restless motion between the shadows of memory and the glades of forgetfulness. Pension Friden is located at Torggatan 8, which is about as much in the center as you can get in little Alingsås, but for the people who come and go across its creaking floor, it’s a place on the outskirts, or rather a no-man’s-land between a world that is no longer and a world that is still unreal.
A waiting place, in fact.
A waiting place for a connection not yet established.
Hardly a life you would call normal, if by normal you mean a life with a past and a future.
It’s hardly normal to wait for a connection that may not exist.
At any rate, there’s no given term for people in your category. The official documents are stamped RED CROSS REFUGEES, but refugees you are not.
If only you had been. If only you had fled while there was time.
But you didn’t flee, you were transported, which is something else, particularly if the purpose of the transport is annihilation.