You who have survived Auschwitz are all damaged, whether it shows or not, and whether you care to admit it or not. Some of you deal with the damage better than others and are able to build a new world on the ruins of the old one and see all kinds of horizons opening up, and after a time no one can see or even suspect where you come from and what you’re carrying with you — but no one is safe from the shadows.
For many, the shadows come later in life than they do for you. Sometimes right at the end, as momentum is inexorably lost and it gets harder not to stop and look back.
I try to understand why your shadows come so early, but I don’t find very much to understand.
You just happen to get off at the wrong station on your road from Auschwitz.
Yes, I think, in the end, that the Place has a part to play in this.
It’s too small a place for someone like you, with too few people who appreciate where you come from and what you carry with you, with a factory too large and too dominant to free oneself from, with too few exits to a future other than the one already mapped out, and with a horizon that never really wants to open up.
The place where I make the world into my own is also the place where the world turns its back on you. And the place where you finally turn your back on the world.
It never becomes a home to you. Not the way it does to me.
Homelessness is an underrated hell for people like you, I think. Homelessness and the confusion of languages. The one has something to do with the other. To be at home is to be understood without having to say all that much.
I don’t think any place can replace the place where we put our first words to the world, and share it with other people, and make it our own. I know there are those who think such a place can be re-created anywhere, at any time, but I don’t believe that. I believe the place that has shaped us will keep shaping us even after we’ve left it and made our home elsewhere. Or rather, we can only make our home elsewhere if some kind of link lives on with the place, the people, and the language that shaped us.
But for people like you, there’s no such link. The place that shaped you is no longer there, nor the people, nor the language, nor even the memory. Between you and the world that you once made your own towers a wall of pain that memory cannot penetrate.
So you must make a home in a place where you aren’t understood, no matter what you say, and where you’re deprived of every link with the place where you first put words to the world and didn’t have to say all that much to be understood, which is my definition of being at home, and just about Améry’s definition too. “Home [die Heimat] is the land of one’s childhood and youth,” writes Améry. “Whoever has lost it becomes a loser himself, even if he has learned not to stumble about in the foreign country as if he were drunk, but rather to tread the ground with some fearlessness [einiger Furchtlosigkeit].”
Améry makes much of his homelessness, of the fact that not only has he seen his home desecrated and liquidated by the Germans, but the Germans have forever turned that home into a hostile, alien place and by so doing transformed the whole world into a place of loneliness and lost bearings. Perhaps Améry’s homelessness is made worse by the fact that his language is also that of the perpetrators, but I don’t think there’s too much difference between you and him. The confusion of languages doesn’t reside in the language.
“How much Heimat does a person need?” asks Améry.
“The less of it he can carry with him, all the more,” he replies.
A home can certainly, to some extent, be replaced by other things — memories, objects, smells, tastes, dreams, hopes, promises — but it presupposes that somewhere, sometime, there was a place that was a home.
If no such place has existed, or if the links to it have forever been ripped up and broken and you haven’t been able to carry with you anything at all, I imagine that in the end homelessness can become unbearable.
Sundby hospital, like Ulvsunda nursing home, lies by a lake. It’s not literally an old castle like Ulvsunda, but there’s undeniably something of a castle about it. For a time it was more or less taken for granted in the land of vast forests and innumerable lakes that castlelike buildings would be erected or acquired to house the slow-witted or deranged or mentally ill, or whatever name was chosen for those people who were to be kept apart, possibly for good, from society as a whole. Sundby hospital, opened in 1922, nestles like most mental hospitals of the time in a large area of parkland with peaceful strolling paths lined with shady maples and linden trees. The therapeutic conviction of the era is that external peace fosters internal harmony, and that proximity to open water can be particularly soothing. At any rate, one doesn’t have to walk very far from the main building at Sundby hospital, along one of the paths through the park, to reach the shore of Lake Mälaren and there look out over the soothing water and see on the other side of a narrow sound the idyllic cathedral town of Strängnäs, bowing down to the soaring spire at its heart.
For many years the hospital and the town were linked only by a ferry, and the risk of any lost soul straying among the normal citizens of the town by mistake was therefore minimal. Besides, the lost souls were rarely left unsupervised. That the ambitions of mental care were high, one might even say impressive, is clear from the account of the ceremonial opening of the Strängnäs asylum, as it was originally called. The account is published in the magazine Humanitet (Humanity), the house journal of the Swedish Association of Asylum Staff, and from reading it you realize that the opening of an asylum is a big event at the time, and that the hopes invested in its future are of almost epic proportions:
The local press describes the institution as a beautiful monument to some of the brightest and most hopeful sides of our culture. This is evident not only in the building itself, but also in any comparison of past methods of treatment in this area and those used today, clearly highlighting the humane spirit in modern care of the mentally ill. It is in phenomena of this kind that man must firmly invest his hopes, even while so much else in our age makes him doubt how far progress, so often invoked, has actually improved the lot of humanity.
This is yet another postwar period, it strikes me, and the memories of unimaginable destruction are still fresh, and its human aftereffects still profound, and the bishop of Strängnäs, Uddo Lechard Ullman, finds reason to say something in his inaugural speech about the impact of the age on the human mind. As I understand it, he wonders whether it is in fact the age that is mad. He doesn’t say so directly, and my understanding is based on a magazine account only, but according to an article in the February 1922 issue of Humanitet, Bishop Ullman is saying
that in the present age it may seem as if the whole human race were an immense hospital, in which all the hellish powers of destruction have conspired to imbue our race with misery. One glaringly conspicuous manifestation of the world’s current state of distress is the kind of suffering for which this magnificent nursing institution … is intended to be a place of refuge, or if possible salvation, or at least relief.
On April 26, 1960, you are taken by ambulance from Mörby general hospital to Sundby mental hospital, to be afforded salvation, or at least relief.