A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz by Goran Rosenberg

Author:Goran Rosenberg [Rosenberg, Göran]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59051-608-9
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC (Publisher Services)
Published: 2015-02-24T05:00:00+00:00

The people with the Polish names get to Öreryd by train and bus in July and August 1945, after the Norwegian police reserves, just a day or so following the German surrender, have marched off “with flags flying and music playing” toward the railroad station in Hestra. Unlike the Norwegians, who are viewed by the locals as brothers or cousins of a sort, the people with the Polish names are viewed as foreigners first and foremost. Contacts between the villagers and the camp residents cool and drop off. The language barrier doesn’t help, and neither does the anxiety about—one might even say fear of—what the foreigners may bring with them. Pretty much everyone knows a bit about where they come from and what they’ve been through, and that presumably they’re all scarred in some way. Rumors of scuffles, fits of madness, and cases of suicide filter out into the little community around the white wooden church, and in any case the word is that the foreigners’ stay at the camp will be only a short one, because these are transit migrants or repatriandi who will soon be moving on to somewhere else.

So why make the effort?

Even those who make the effort don’t always have an easy time of it. On August 2, 1945, the Christian daily Svenska Morgonbladet publishes an article signed B.J. and titled “Our Guests from German Torture Camps”:

Brought together in camps of varying sizes surrounded by tall, barbed-wire fences, with only forestry workers’ primitive barracks or similar to live in, they are isolated from the outside world for week after week, month after month.… When the author of this piece tried to telephone one such camp in the Stockholm area … the female operator replied that the telephone number of the aliens’ camp “was unlisted.”…

These guests in our country, invited by the Red Cross, should have the right not to be seen as mere numbers in an impersonal mass of “Lagerschwestern” [camp sisters]. It is the isolation from “ordinary people” that really gets on their nerves.

Only the kindest of people should be allowed to have anything to do with these—often Jewish—victims of Nazism. One can hardly call the head of one such camp kind who when asked by a visiting member of the women’s corps if she could go and say hello to her friends, replied: “There is too much mollycoddling of these unpleasant refugees.” When she told him that she had got to know “these refugees” as charming and grateful, and that moreover one had to bear in mind that most of them had seen their parents and siblings consigned to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, he interrupted her curtly: “That has nothing to do with it.”…

We must remember that these are living people whom we have committed ourselves to rescuing, not a mere collection of numbers from miscellaneous clusters of German barracks.

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