Yes, you do look very calm in the picture, your hands firmly gripping the pipe for bending, and your eyes fixed on the vise it’s clamped in.
Another photo: the Rosenberg family at the round table in the living room. On the table, a white lace cloth and the Vibergen prospectus. Your right hand’s holding up the prospectus, and your left is on my shoulder. I’m wearing a checked shirt and leather suspenders and looking down at the prospectus. Lilian’s eight months old, sitting on Mom’s knee and looking up into the camera. “Within the next year, the Rosenbergs hope to be living under their own roof,” runs the caption. The piece that accompanies the pictures is headlined “HOME AT LAST,” and it relates
the story of David Rosenberg from Poland …, who shared his destiny as a refugee with millions of others in wartime and postwar Europe, a story that starts in the Polish city of Lodz one October afternoon in 1939 and leads, via starvation, assault, privation, general misery, and horror, to the spring of 1955, when it ends at Scania-Vabis in Södertälje.
Well, that’s undeniably the way it may look; as if Södertälje were the last stop on your journey, and as if your future beneath the factory-subsidized roof were all mapped out already. It is, after all, an extremely favorable offer, practically a gift, from the truck factory, since it’s not only interest-free but also written off at an annual rate of 10 percent, which means that after ten years you owe nothing without having repaid anything. Assuming, of course, that you stay on at the factory for another ten years. If you want to leave before that, you’ll have to pay back the outstanding amount of the loan. If you want to leave after five years, you’ll have to pay back half. You say nothing in the magazine piece about your ambitions to be something other than a pipe fitter. Getting the loan requires no ambition. Getting the loan requires that you continue to be an able and industrious assembler at Scania-Vabis in Södertälje for another ten years. The house in Vibergen is, in short, the happy ending to the story of David Rosenberg from Poland and his family. Home at last.
“Our old home no longer exists, we have no relatives. In reality we have already died once, it is just that we were granted a rebirth. And here in Sweden we have tried to start all over again. It has gone quite well, the years have slipped by, and we no longer have those nightmares,” says David Rosenberg. “I have a job I like, and good friends. And now I am going to try building my own house.”
It seems to me that the writer of the article in Kilometern does what he can to overcome the confusion of languages, the onerous kind. He writes of “the chimneys of the extermination camps,” of your brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers going up in smoke before your eyes in Auschwitz, of the dead and frozen bodies in the open freight cars on the railroad track en route to Ravensbrück, of the nineteen-year-old American soldier who on seeing you and Natek in Wöbbelin “bursts into floods of tears.”
Yet nowhere does he say that you’re Jews. The word “Jews” doesn’t occur in the text, nor the word “ghetto.” Is it because you don’t mention them? Is it because the writer doesn’t want to complicate the story?
A few weeks later, you receive a letter from the writer:
Mr. Rosenberg!
I don’t know if you’re a reader of Dagens Nyheter, the newspaper where I’m on the permanent staff, but if you happen not to be, I’d like to tell you that starting on Thursday, Dagens Nyheter is going to publish a series of articles in which we recapitulate what happened and what came to light during these days, ten years ago.
Please don’t think I’m writing in order to recruit a new subscriber. I just think that these articles will be of great interest to you. And you will presumably be pleased that this newspaper is thinking along exactly the same lines as you — the concentration camps absolutely must not be forgotten.
Please give my regards to your sweet wife and your lovely children!
I see this letter as a sign that after ten years, the two of you give the impression of being at home. At any rate, you give the impression of being potential subscribers to Dagens Nyheter. A subscription to Dagens Nyheter is scarcely an issue one would raise with people who give the impression that they’re on their way somewhere else. Among the memory fragments from the two-room apartment on the other side of the rowanberry avenue, there’s definitely the glint of a morning paper. I’d like to say it’s Dagens Nyheter, but it might just as well have been the local paper. The brightest glint comes from the glossy weekly Folket i Bild, which means “The People in Pictures.” Folket i Bild has large pictures on its covers. On one cover there’s a naked woman cooking food in a kitchen. On the inside there’s an illustrated story about nudists, which is a word I learn from Folket i Bild.
No newspapers ever get delivered to Vibergen. The following year, the address is gone from the telephone directory. The following year, we’re not under our own roof in Vibergen but in the small two-room apartment on the other side of the rowanberry avenue. Nothing comes of Vibergen but a painstakingly cleared forest slope. This has something to do with the loan and the factory. With the fact that the conditions of the loan have tightened and the costs have risen, so that the ties to the factory have stiffened. With the fact that the factory doesn’t want you as anything other than an able and industrious pipe fitter. You don’t want to tie yourself to the factory for another ten years on those terms. The snow has long since melted and the air has become warm and humid and the mosquitoes are dancing in the evening sunshine above the whitewood stakes marking our plot at Vibergen when you close the prospectus for the last time and decline the loan and the house and the future mapped out by the factory.
I like to think the car has something to do with it. At any rate, the car comes into the picture the same summer as Vibergen disappears from it. It’s a hot summer, as I said, and the wind is blowing through the open side windows, and the freedom of the road tickles the nostrils, but a new Volkswagen, the 1955 model, costs 6,375 kronor (almost half your annual salary), “including delivery to Hälsingborg,” and even if you can purchase it with a staff discount from the truck factory and perhaps a small personal loan as well, it’s still hard to understand why you say no to the house but yes to the car — unless the car is part of a plan for another future than the one already mapped out.
Be that as it may, this is the point at which you invent and construct a luggage rack for VW Beetles. It’s made of “top-quality tubular steel” painted a matte silver shade “to go with any automobile color” and simply slots into two holders screwed to the back bumper mounts. Thus fixed, a bit outside the rear hatch and just above the license plate, this platform can accommodate two stacked suitcases or a bicycle or everything one needs for a picnic. It’s an ingenious construction that admittedly has the slight disadvantage of needing to be removed if one has to check the oil or change the fan belt or do anything else that requires opening the rear hatch, but on the other hand the rack can be neatly folded and stowed away in that little space under the front hood and above the gas tank that’s not much use for anything else. You name your invention the Piccolo, weld together a couple of prototypes all by yourself, and market it with a spartan leaflet, slipped under the windshield wipers of every VW in sight. On a few Sundays I come along to help out and keep you company, and I don’t know too much what it’s all about, but a Beetle I can recognize, and the windshield wipers I can reach, and I manage to place a few leaflets. “Volkswagen owners! Novelty!” it says at the top of the leaflet, and below are two pictures of our black and still shiny VW with the Piccolo mounted on the back and the Piccolo folded in the front, and a presentation text written by yourself, concluding with “Yours faithfully” and a signature. It’s a well-written and informative text, telling the reader that “Piccolo doesn’t come into direct contact with the bodywork, obscure the license plate or brake light, or obstruct the air-cooling system.” At the bottom of the leaflet there’s an order form that can be cut off along the black line and sent directly to D. Rosenberg, 42A Hertig Carls väg, Södertälje, to place an order for a Piccolo “at 55 kronor plus shipping, with full right of return within eight days.”