I have chosen not to burden my text with footnotes, but will list below some of the sources that have been with me throughout my writing.
For the sections dealing with Södertälje and its history, and the view of the world from there, I had access (via the Royal Library of Sweden) to an invaluable time machine: the daily editions of Stockholms Läns & Södertälje Tidning from 1938 to 1960. The Södertälje Municipal Archive helped with all kinds of local authority plans and decisions. Södertälje historian Göran Gelotte shared with me his memory fragments, pictures, and knowledge. Without Karin Sterner’s stories and letters, many fragments would have remained buried in darkness.
For the sections on the Łódź ghetto, I relied on the detailed and comprehensive documentation that miraculously survived the ghetto’s liquidation, primarily the “official” ghetto chronicle referred to in the book and published in an edited version (Lucjan Dobroszycki) in English in 1984, under the title The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto 1941–44. Some of the German documents from the ghetto, among them the one concerning the extra spirit rations needed for the “dejudification of the Warthegau,” I have taken from a yellowing Polish collection, Dokumenty i Materiały, Tom III, Getto Łódzkie, ed. A. Eisenbach (1946). The notebooks of Josef Zelkowicz are published in English under the title In Those Terrible Days: Notes from the Lodz Ghetto (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2002). Another indispensable document from the Łódź ghetto is the diary kept by David Sierakowiak, published in English under the title The Diary of David Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Łódź Ghetto, ed. Alan Adelson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
The lines of Czesław Miłosz in the introduction to the chapter “The Carousel” are from his poem “Campo dei Fiori,” published in English in his Collected Poems, trans. Louis Iribarne and David Brooks (New York: Eco Press, 1973).
For documents and facts about the deportations from the Łódź ghetto to Auschwitz and from Auschwitz to the German slave camp archipelago, I have made extensive use of Andrej Strzelecki’s The Deportation of Jews from the Łódź Ghetto to KL Auschwitz and Their Extermination (Oświęcim, Poland: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2006). Dr. Karl Liedke’s study of the route taken by some thousand Polish Jews from Auschwitz to the Büssing slave camps in Braunschweig is published in Yad Vashem Studies 30 (Jerusalem, 2002), under the title Destruction Through Work: Łódź Jews in the Büssing Truck Factory in Braunschweig, 1944–45. Karl Liedke also ensured that a copy of the handwritten SS list from Ravensbrück found its way into my hands. In addition, Dr. Liedke was my tireless guide through the camp archipelago in the surroundings of Braunschweig. Information about the conditions in the SS camps at Firma Büssing in Braunschweig is largely taken from the vivid eyewitness account of the doctor and fellow inmate Geoges Salan in his book Prisons de France et bagnes allemandes (Nîmes, France: Imprimerie L’Ouvrière, 1946), one of those many contemporary testimonies that were printed only once and then vanished into oblivion.
The sparse documents from the aliens’ camps at Tappudden-Furudal and Öreryd are kept at the National Archives in Stockholm, as are the personal case files opened on aliens resident in Sweden, which also include the police investigations undertaken in connection with applications for aliens’ passports and citizenship.
For newspaper comment of the period on the reception of Jewish survivors in the Swedish camp archipelago, I primarily have to thank the cuttings archive at the Sigtuna Foundation, which also gave me a writer’s grant allowing me an untroubled month’s stay in a restful setting. For further material on Sweden’s encounter with the survivors, I have consulted the consecutive volumes of Judisk Krönika (The Jewish Chronicle) and Judisk Tidskrift (The Jewish Journal), beautifully bound and put at my disposal by Peter Freudenthal.
The following are a few more works that in various ways have played a part in the preparation of this book.
Améry, Jean. At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities. Translated by Sidney and Stella P. Rosenfeld. New York: Schocken, 1986.
Benjamin, Walter. Berlin Childhood around 1900. Translated by Howard Eiland. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. First English edition 1950.
——. “A Berlin Chronicle.” In Reflections, translated by Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken, 1986. (For the image of the fragments in the darkness.)
Berggren, Lena. Nationell upplysning. Drag i den svenska anti-semitismens idéhistoria [National enlightenment: Traits in the history of Swedish anti-Semitism]. Carlsson Bokförlag, 1999. This work set me on the trail of Elof Eriksson, the newspaper editor who wanted to free the world, and Södertälje, from the Jews.
Bergmann, Martin S., and Milton E. Jucovy, eds. Generations of the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. On the Janus-faced nature of German reparations.
Borkin, Joseph. The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben. New York: Free Press, 1978. A groundbreaking early study of how the ramifications of the Nazi slave system extended deep into German industry.
Browning, Christopher R. Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Charny, Israel W., ed. Holding on to Humanity: The Message of Holocaust Survivors. From the Shamai Davidson Papers. New York: New York University Press, 1995. All I needed to know (and more) about the psychology and pathology of survival.
Diner, Dan. Beyond the Conceivable: Studies on Germany, Nazism and the Holocaust. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. A collection of essays about the inconceivable nature of the experience I have nonetheless tried to put into words.
Einhorn, Lena. Handelsresande i liv [Traveling salesman in life]. Stockholm: Prisma, 1999. A painstaking study of the surreal game of life and death played out in the negotiations about, among other things, the food parcels to Ravensbrück.
Friedländer, Saul. Memory, History and Extermination of the Jews of Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
——. Nazi Germany and the Jews. 2 vols. New York: Harper-Collins, 1998 and 2008.
Gavin, James M. On to Berlin: Battles of an Airborne Commander 1943–1946. New York: Viking, 1978. For its account of the liberation of Wöbbelin.