I don’t know what Mr. Hagelin means by making trouble. I only know that in a police report submitted to the Ministry of Justice in Stockholm on March 12, 1954, in connection with your application for Swedish citizenship, personnel manager Stina Fors at Alingsås Bomullsväfveri AB has something to say about making trouble.
Yes, I know, that’s much later, and again I’m anticipating events, but this concerns your time in Alingsås — though goodness knows how Miss Fors after so many years can remember this specific thing about you. Anyway, here the word “trouble” appears in connection with your name, which is the reason I mention it, because it might tell you something about what at this time was meant by trouble in reference to people like you.
So that there may be no misunderstanding, let me point out that Miss Fors is the only person in the police report from Alingsås to associate you with trouble, in fact the only one to have anything remotely unfavorable to say about you and the woman who is to be my mother and who is applying for Swedish citizenship together with you. The owner of the Pension Friden, Evald Stenberg, remembers “Mr. and Mrs. Rozenberg” as “very reliable, steady and decent, and he can therefore recommend them for Swedish citizenship.” The waitress at Pension Friden, Margareta Åberg, remembers you both as “decent and steady” and recommends the same. Only Miss Stina Fors remembers differently:
Dawid Rozenberg was employed as a weaver at the factory in the period 4/2 1946 — 2/8 1947 and from 19 October 1946 until the time he left, he rented lodgings in the factory-owned property at 29 Lendahlsgatan, where he lived with Hala Staw, who was at that time working at the linen factory.
He did his job satisfactorily and the factory did not have any particular complaints about him, but as a tenant he caused the company some difficulty in that he — or possibly Staw — often made trouble with the other tenants.
Miss Fors is of the view that if Mr. and Mrs. Rozenberg are still behaving as they did during their time in Alingsås, it is questionable whether they should be granted Swedish citizenship.
Thus has the woman who is to be my mother, Hala Staw, or Haluś as you usually address her in your letters, or sometimes Halinka, almost imperceptibly joined the guests at the Pension Friden in Alingsås and taken a job as a seamstress at the linen factory, Sveriges Förenade Linnefabriker, and on October 19, 1946, moved with you into a temporary, factory-owned accommodation for foreign textile workers at 29 Lendahlsgatan, where you and she are now referred to as “Mr. and Mrs. Rozenberg,” so perhaps it would be appropriate to explain how this has come about.
The last letter from Alingsås in my hands is dated August 9, 1946, and opens on a despondent note despite the fact that Haluś has finally found her way from Łódź in Poland to Bergen-Belsen in Germany, and the horizon ought reasonably to look brighter:
I find it hard to begin writing this letter to you as I had so much wanted to have concrete news for you, but everything here has reached deadlock for now. I made a big mistake in my application to the W.J.C. [World Jewish Congress] by referring to you as my fiancée.
If you had signed yourself Staw-Rozenberg in your first letter, I would have known how to go about it. As I wrote to you in my earlier letters, do not think of my exertions, stay watchful and on your guard where you are.
August 22, 1946, brings an icy response from the State Aliens Commission in Stockholm to your application for an entry visa for the woman you unwisely refer to as your fiancée (you already know that’s not enough, as only married couples get permission).
On that very same day, a woman going by the name of Hella Cwaighaft arrives in Helsingborg from Bergen-Belsen and is put into three weeks’ quarantine at Landskrona Citadel. Description: height five feet two inches, hair black, eyes brown, face shape oval, nose straight, age twenty. When registering, she gives her proper name, Hala Staw, and applies for a residence permit and a foreigner’s passport. The reason given for the former is that she wants to join her fiancé in Sweden. The reason given for the latter is that she no longer wishes to be a Polish citizen.
On September 12, 1946, Hala Staw moves in with David Rosenberg at Pension Friden in Alingsås. On September 19, 1946, she’s hired as a seamstress at Sveriges Förenade Linnefabriker at a wage of fifty kronor a week. On February 23, 1947, she marries the man who is to be my father at the synagogue in Gothenburg.
The next letter I hold in my hand is dated August 2, 1947, and opens “My dearest Halinka, I got to Södertälje at seven in the evening.”
So perhaps it’s appropriate to say something about how this has happened, which is to say something about yet another improbable road from Auschwitz. I don’t intend to say very much; like you I don’t want to bore my readers, and even miracles can get tedious, but something must perhaps be said, nevertheless.
After the selection for the gas chambers on the ramp in Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1945, there are four members of the Staw family left, four sisters to be precise, among whom Hala is the youngest and Bluma the eldest. Between them come Bronka and Sima. There are photos preserved of sister Sima in the Łódź ghetto, tiny miniature prints, one centimeter by two, taken to be hidden in the growing archive of documents, jottings, statistics, and photographs that the Jewish ghetto administration is building up in a special room with a special entrance in the house at 4 Kościelny Square, and which after the liquidation of the ghetto is saved for posterity by a man named Nachman Zonabend, who belongs to a small group of a few hundred Jews left behind to clear up the human and inhuman remains of the liquidated ghetto’s residents. It’s a repulsive job among dead bodies and excrement, and requires special rations of spirits for non-Jews, and special Jews for the most repulsive tasks, but the work allows Nachman Zonabend to survive in the ruins of the ghetto until liberation in January 1945, and the miniature pictures of Sima survive with him. In the summer of 1945, Nachman Zonabend is brought to Sweden by the Red Cross along with two of his brothers, one of whom much later becomes a neighbor of ours on the first floor of a modern block of apartments in a suburb of Stockholm. Through Nachman Zonabend, the pictures of Sima come into the hands of the woman who is to be my mother and are stashed in the back of the frame that holds the only existing photo of my paternal grandfather, Gershon.
The reason the ghetto archive keeps pictures of Sima is that she works in the ghetto administration’s orphanage, which is one of the many ghetto activities of which a photographic record is kept for posterity. The photos of her look as if they are all taken on the same day: in all of them she is wearing a dark, short-sleeved, jacketlike blouse over a pale top, and her dark blond hair is combed lightly back into a loose bun at the nape of her neck.
Only the situations and poses change.
Sima assisting at the examination of a naked boy on a chair, in front of a woman in white, the boy looking into the camera.
Sima with a young girl getting treatment in a dentist’s chair, flanked by two women in white, the girl’s face in profile, gently held still by two hands.