No, not really all, there’s the citizenship too, and the house in Vibergen, and the second child.
After your journey to Israel, only one future seems to be left, the one already mapped out.
You travel to Israel on a Swedish alien’s passport valid for one year. In your passport application of September 17, 1952, your description is certified by Acting Deputy Sergeant Sture Blomgren: height five feet three inches, hair brown, eyes dark brown, face shape oval, nose straight. “To the approval of the alien’s application, I have no objections,” reads the annotation by Ola Olsson at the office of the public prosecutor in Södertälje.
The alien’s passport is a sort of recognition, after all. You’re still an alien, but now you’re a Swedish alien. Sweden keeps a careful watch over its aliens. In the passport application, a thorough account of your background and conduct, the confusion of languages, the onerous kind, is still apparent. The report from the local police in Södertälje notes that up to August 1944, the applicant
held assorted positions in Lodz, the most recent of which was as a postman in the Ghetto where he lived with other Jewish families. In August 1944 he was deported and taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he stayed for about a month. He was then transferred to a similar camp in Braunschweig, where he was made to stay until 3/21/1945, during which time he worked for the Germans in a truck factory.
As regards your fellow applicant, my mother, the report notes that after war broke out she “was employed in a clothing factory, where she worked in the office for about a year and then became a seamstress in the factory,” after which she was deported to a concentration camp in Germany.
That’s all.
How much of this is a product of what you actually say, and how much is a product of what Acting Deputy Sergeant Sture Blomgren is able to understand from what you say?
But maybe this is about as much as either of you wishes to say. Maybe your only wish is to qualify for Swedish alien status, and therefore you emphasize what you believe will be seen as qualifying, such as your conscientiousness and your willingness to work.
The two of you have no trouble qualifying for Swedish alien status, and a scant two years later for Swedish citizenship too, although the eye of the needle appears narrower here. At any event, the pile of documents in the archives of the State Aliens Commission is bigger, mainly thanks to the interviews with all the people who have observed you on your road through Sweden, and who are now sought out by the police to pronounce on your suitability for Swedish citizenship. Among them is, as I’ve previously mentioned, personnel officer Stina Fors at Alingsås Bomullsväfveri, who considers you unsuitable on the grounds of something she remembers having observed seven years earlier. As said, she’s the only one to take that view. Caretaker Rolf Larsson at 22 Villagatan in Södertälje certifies that the applicants “were reliable people.” Caretaker G. Carlsson at 42A Hertig Carls väg in Södertälje certifies that the applicants “fulfilled their obligations as tenants and there is nothing to complain of as regards their conduct.” Engineer Rune Fridholm at Scania-Vabis AB considers “the applicant to be professional in his work and generally liked at his place of employment.” As for you, you state that you have permanently settled in Sweden, which you view as your second native country. I think you mean to say that you now have a second native country replacing the first, which no longer exists. This you solemnly declare on October 12, 1953.
On the subject of your fellow applicant Hala Rozenberg, engineer G. Bogler at Tornvalls Konfektion AB states that she is a capable seamstress and that there are no complaints about her conduct. In a handwritten note on the application is added: “By phone Mrs. R. has specifically requested that her surname be spelt with an s (not z).”
The citizenship certificate is dated May 7, 1954.
From now on, Rosenberg with an s.
A few months later, the local paper reports from Israel that bakery worker Israel Sinai has hanged himself as a protest against the high taxes, and that tradesmen and shopkeepers in the country have gone out on a four-hour sympathy strike in his memory, but I don’t think you need to have your choice confirmed any longer. In the autumn of 1954, there’s another child in the one-room apartment below the railroad station, and on the round table in the living room lies the prospectus for Vibergen.
There’s an allotment somewhere too. Just a patch of soil, no hut or toolshed, long uncultivated and overgrown with weeds. We cycle to the allotment along the road to Havsbadet and past Näset to the edge of a forest, where the checkerboard of allotments stretches as far as the eye can see. There are lots of mosquitoes that summer and we have no hut or shed to escape to, only an oily repellent to make a mess with. I don’t see why we need the allotment. In the parts we’ve weeded and dug, we plant strawberry plants. No, we don’t plant the strawberries, you do. I do nothing. The mosquitoes don’t seem to trouble you in the slightest, but between me and the allotment they build a wall. I don’t think you’ve realized how much work there is with strawberry plants, how weeds love strawberry plants. And besides, they send out runners all over the place. I don’t remember the strawberries themselves, only the runners. The following summer we don’t have the allotment anymore. The following summer we have a stony plot of land in Vibergen instead, with spruce trees growing on it. In the telephone directory you already appear at the new address, David Rosenberg, 22 Vibergsvägen. It’s nothing but a plot of land that you must clear before a house, built at least partly by you, can go up there. There’s still snow on the ground when we drag the branches and twigs and uprooted stumps of felled spruce into a big pile, which will still be there when the mosquitoes come.
Vibergen is a special offer from the truck factory. Employees who want to build their own house in Vibergen are offered all sorts of assistance. They’re also offered an interest-free loan of three thousand kronor, with no amortization needed. A hundred people attend the first Vibergen information meeting, and thirty-six of those decide to accept the offer.
One of them is you.
It causes a bit of a stir that one of them is you.
In the house magazine of the truck factory, Kilometern (The Kilometer), there’s a photo of you. You’re standing at a workbench, bending pipes. “David Rosenberg is an able and industrious pipe fitter,” it says under the picture. “His calm eye as he goes about his work would certainly strike anyone who saw him a few years ago, when the horrors of war were still very much alive for him, and all dreams were nightmares. Now he’s thriving.”