RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-a-brief-stop-on-the-road-from-auschwitz-by-goran-rosenberg-1425513511

Taken for slave labor from the lines that led to the ovens at Auschwitz, he travels through the infernal archipelago of the work camps.

Over the course of two years in the early 1940s, my grandparents (a former city magistrate and a nurse) were forced into three progressively smaller apartments in Munich and then herded into wooden shacks strewn with straw in the city’s northern reaches—from which, on the eve of Passover 1942, they were marched to the local freight station, jammed into cattle cars and dispatched to Piaski. This Polish town was a holding pen for the gas chambers of Belzec and Sobibór; it is where my grandparents vanish from official vigilance with a note in the record that says “Tod unbekannt”—death unknown.

I have often wondered what they thought and experienced as the Nazi regime stripped them of every bit of their existence for the sole reason of their Jewishness. Göran Rosenberg, a Swedish journalist, had a similar curiosity, though in a far more intimate way, as it was his parents who endured the horrors of the Holocaust. His father, David, was born in Lodz in Poland and made the rare journey not just to Auschwitz but from it in the final, desperate year of World War II.

It is this last experience that is at the heart of “A Brief Stop on the Road From Auschwitz,” the result of years of painstaking digging. It is an affecting book, a son’s letter to his father asking for knowledge—lyrically rendered by a translator with an eerily appropriate name, Sarah Death. Mr. Rosenberg sifted through his parents’ correspondence, the reminiscences of survivors, court transcripts, newspaper accounts, concentration camp records, dog-eared photographs, police blotters and train manifests to piece together the path his father traveled from Auschwitz in August 1944, when he was among the young men commandeered as workers by German industrialists from the lines that led to the ovens. He would experience the archipelago of infernal work camps (taken, successively, to Braunschweig, Ravensbrück and Wöbbelin) that dotted the countryside between Berlin and Hamburg.

Mr. Rosenberg drives along snow-swept byways, gradually uncovering markers that tell the tale: A solitary arch in Vechelde is the sole remnant of a truck-axle factory where 200 Jews were used as slave labor; a simple stone in Uchtspringe marks the spot where 66 unknown camp evacuees were taken off a train and buried on April 8, 1945—dead of disease, malnutrition, exposure. “Anyone who knows at which points along your road from Auschwitz there ought to be a memorial plaque,” Mr. Rosenberg writes, “will most likely find one, and perhaps even a small monument if you search for it, and occasionally even a memorial museum. You have to hand it to the Germans, even in commemorating repulsive acts they’re conscientious.” Frequently these memorials are covered with a glaze to prevent desecration. A map, one of the book’s many small black-and-white illustrations, shows the haphazard route that his father traced as the Germans tried to stay a step ahead of the advancing Allies while continuing to produce equipment and munitions for the last gasps of their war effort.

His father is in Ravensbrück when food parcels from the Red Cross arrive—authorized by Himmler himself, who,
Mr. Rosenberg notes, “is playing a double game of life and death,” hoping to save his own life after the German surrender. Mr. Rosenberg’s father is one of 800 Jews who are told they are being sent to Sweden, but their train ends up in Wöbbelin, a camp built just 10 weeks earlier as a place to kill off inmates from evacuated camps through disease and starvation. A week later, they are again rushed onto open freight cars, to be sent to another killing field. But the next morning, May 2, 1945, Hitler is dead, and American paratroopers liberate the camp.

The Swedish government offers to give temporary refuge to “some ten thousand children and invalids” from the refugee camps of Europe. Thus it is that Mr. Rosenberg’s father finds himself on a train to Södertälje, a small town about 20 miles from Stockholm. It is there that his past never leaves him. The author himself is born in 1948, just 42 months after Hitler’s corpse smoldered outside the Reichstag. His parents, teenage sweethearts who survived four years in the Lodz ghetto before being separated on the selection ramp at Auschwitz, were reunited. They try to adapt to a strange country, a foreign tongue, an unfamiliar diet and a small town unused to foreigners.

Unlike other refugees who quickly leave for Israel, the Rosenbergs stay in Sweden. The author’s father, trained in his native Poland as a textile engineer, finds work welding fuel pipes in a local truck factory, and his wife does piecework sewing coat linings. The author, as he grows, does what comes naturally to the children of immigrants; he distances himself from his parents’ foreign habits and tries to blend in with the ways of his local friends. He finds that his open-eyed, child-like view of life is a world removed from that of his parents—particularly his father.

As the 1950s progress, Mr. Rosenberg’s parents are awarded Swedish citizenship, buy their first car (a Volkswagen) but remain strangers in a foreign land. His father is at the receiving end of anti-Semitic taunts at work and quits. He tries to make a living selling costume jewelry but cannot escape the darkness. His efforts to claim reparations from the West German government are stonewalled by a psychiatrist who decides that he was not sufficiently victimized to receive any of the promised payout. This only accelerates his despair. His rest is ripped apart by the “nightmares wallpapering the small apartment,” and he slips into a perpetual state of despondency. He is admitted to a hospital and given electroshock therapy but, eventually, after one failed attempt, succeeds in drowning himself in a lake—15 years after he boarded the train that led him away from the concentration camps that his mind never left.

It is impossible to read this enormously touching work without contemplating the present day. As refugees shuffle out of Syria, are washed ashore on the beaches of Lampedusa, huddle in shacks in Calais, flee violence in Honduras, hide under truck axles at Albanian border crossings and suffer in so many other countries—only one thing is certain. The echoes, nightmares, repercussions and consequences of their horrors will also live on.

Mr. Moritz is chairman of Sequoia Capital.