Much later I realize that some of his energy and will also benefits you. Besides holding my head steady during circumcision, he also has a hand in the housing miracle, the little one-room apartment with the window facing the railroad tracks in the house across from the bakery.
It doesn’t surprise me that the Wyszogrodzki family’s departure from Södertälje prompts an article in the local paper. It’s December 17, 1949, and the article makes the front page, and it’s the result of Moniek Wyszogrodzki energetically and on his own initiative striding into the newspaper office and requesting to express, through the paper, “his gratitude to Södertälje for the hospitality he and members of his family have enjoyed.” In particular he wants to thank his friends in the Amateur Cycling Club. The article reveals that the Wyszogrodzki family has already departed by train for Malmö, from where they will fly to Marseille and continue to Haifa by boat, and that they have left Södertälje together with “the tailor Adam Glusman [sic] and his wife Polla.” It’s obvious from the article that the writer has difficulties in fully comprehending Moniek Wyszogrodzki’s story about his road to Södertälje, and I don’t think it’s due to a confusion of languages. I rather think it’s a certain rigidity inherent in the journalistic language of the day that manifests itself here. In any event, it’s a contemporary historical document, and I’ll let it speak for itself:
We both came from Germany in 1945 after having spent a rather long time in concentration camps. We didn’t arrive here together, but by sheer chance happened across each other in Karlstad in December 1945. We hadn’t seen each other for five years. It goes without saying that we were happy to see each other.
Sadly, my wife had contracted TB in the difficult years in Germany and had to spend two and a half years in various sanatoriums. Fortunately enough, she has made a complete recovery.
This is the only article I can find in the local paper about the temporary community of survivors in Södertälje, apart from the one about the confusion of languages on the sands of Havsbadet. Within a few years, virtually the whole community has moved on. The majority are women from Bergen-Belsen or Ravensbrück, who have come to Södertälje to make clothes at the Tornvall garment factory, where the yearly staff turnover is 100 percent. Many of them live at Pension Fridhem, which is a large, privately owned, red-painted wooden house at a walking distance from the factory. There are pensions where people stay to rest, and there are pensions, such as Friden in Alingsås and Fridhem in Södertälje, where people stay to work.
One of the residents at Pension Fridhem is Auntie Ilonka, who comes from Bergen-Belsen via the aliens’ camp at Kummelnäs, outside Stockholm, where on September 20, 1945, she’s declared fit and “ready to be sent to work.” A year later she marries Uncle Birger from Sundsvall and changes her surname from Hellman to Sundberg and moves from Pension Fridhem to a cold-water apartment with a dry privy in the yard, not far from the big pharmaceutical factory, and some years after that to a fully modern flat in the newly built, eight-story apartment house at the other end of the rowanberry avenue. Uncle Birger works at the truck factory and earns money on the side as an insurance salesman, and Auntie Ilonka soon stops sewing for Tornvall’s and opens a tobacconist’s shop in a red-brick apartment building, and as far as I can tell they’re an ill-matched and happy couple. Their marriage is childless, but in their home I’m their child. It’s a fragile home, full of glittering china and glass figurines, crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, embroidered lace cloths on the tables, and sets of hardback novels in matching bindings on the bookshelves. The tables are laid with thin, gold-edged china cups and saucers with elegant floral patterns, lemonade glasses with drinking straws, and serving plates in nickel silver filled with homemade cakes, buns, and Swiss rolls. Auntie Ilonka’s deep love of children often expresses itself in highly calorific forms. Their home is also one of the first to boast a radio gramophone of dark mahogany, and at the earliest possible instant, a piece of furniture combining the radio gramophone with a television. When the television broadcasts live matches from the Stockholm World Cup in 1958, we put the radio commentary on. No one can stand the silence on TV. There has to be that constant radio blare, otherwise nothing can really be happening, can it? Auntie Ilonka has glittering black eyes and a gold tooth that glints when she laughs, and her Swedish sings with a different lilt from yours. There’s a Polish lilt and a Hungarian lilt, and I grow up to the sound of them both. Uncle Birger speaks a northern Swedish dialect, and the dishes served in their kitchen are somehow northern as well, often lingonberries. If Auntie Ilonka has brought any dishes from her home in the previous world, I don’t remember them. What I remember is meatballs with cream sauce and lingonberries. And the cakes. And Uncle Birger’s northern lilt as he says my name. There’s no need for you to say good-bye to Auntie Ilonka, or to Auntie Ethel who marries Uncle Sven, Birger’s brother, or to Uncle Miklós and Auntie Elisabeth, who live across the railroad bridge and are staying on here for roughly the same reasons as you are.
And that’s about the size it remains, the refugee colony of Jewish survivors in Södertälje; most people move on. From America come shiny photographs of flourishing babies in bulbous baby carriages, from Israel thin blue aerograms with tightly written sentences on every folded flap of the single sheet. When I tear off the stamps, they leave holes in the sentences.
On second thought, Södertälje isn’t the most obvious place to start life anew. At least not for those who want that life to have anything Jewish about it. The prerequisites for Jewish life don’t exist in Södertälje. Jewish life demands a basic, minimum number of Jews, and in Södertälje that number is never to be reached. During the brief period when it might have been reached, the Jews in Södertälje have other things to think about than Jewish life, assuming they want to think about Jewish life at all. I sense that being Jewish is not something to make a big show of. Not in a place like this. When I tell the two of you that Mr. Winqvist always calls out “Herein!” in German when anybody knocks at the classroom door, you worry that I’ll think I know a bit of German and try it out on Mr. Winqvist, when what I possibly might know is a few words of Yiddish. I never let Mr. Winqvist find out that I know a few words of Yiddish. The Jewish elements of our life are toned down. On Friday evenings, Mom blesses the Sabbath candles with a gentle movement of her hand, and on the big Jewish holidays we go to Stockholm. At school I’m excused from Scripture lessons, but when I resist having to be the only exception in the school, there’s little opposition. On summer vacations I’m sent to a camp for Jewish children in the archipelago north of Stockholm that no doubt fulfills its educational purposes, but it’s far from clear what role Jewish life plays in the Project.
I don’t think it’s missing Jewish life that for so long makes you consider moving on. I think it’s the horizons of the Place that refuse to open up to you, in spite of the miracle apartment, and the truck factory, and the mapped-out future, and the daycare center, and Havsbadet, and the Child who’s supposed to make his world yours.
And in spite of Karin and Ingvar.
Ingvar’s the team leader in the pipe gang at the truck factory and a few years older than you; I’m not sure by what words and gestures you soon become friends, but very early on, hanging in the one-room apartment below the railroad station, there’s an oil painting by Ingvar — a vase of flowers. Karin and Ingvar are there before the Child. It’s Karin and Ingvar who suggest giving the Child a name that doesn’t stand out. Karin and Ingvar are there at the Child’s circumcision. “All those people who would soon spread around the world,” Karin writes, much later. “Nobody could speak Swedish. All the men wore hats.”