A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz

"My list is very Jewish-Holocaust heavy, but I wasn’t trying to be representative. These are books that have stayed with me. I reviewed this book for the Times Higher Education Supplement . It left me in tears. It’s not strictly German history, in the sense that it’s about a Polish Jewish couple who survive Auschwitz and then, at the end of the war, relocate to Sweden. But it’s very relevant because they are victims of the Nazi persecution and it’s indicative of how so many Jewish refugees had to reinvent themselves at the end of the war, and the challenge of living with the shadow of the Holocaust. Goran Rosenberg is the son of this couple. He talks about how his youth is overshadowed by the Holocaust. His parents are desperate to blend into Sweden society. They give him a Swedish name. At the same time though, they talk to him in their mother tongue—which he pretends he doesn’t hear because he doesn’t like the fact this makes him different from the other children at school. “His father was not deemed damaged enough by his experience at Auschwitz” His father takes a job in a truck factory. He isn’t welcome at all—the Swedes don’t really want the refugees there. This poor man, as one of the survivors of the Holocaust, has this huge pressure to make the most of his life—he’s a lucky one who has survived—while all the time facing these road blocks trying to make the most of their new life. For his father, the breaking point is in 1952. The West German government says that there will be compensation to victims of the Holocaust—and his father makes a claim as part of the process. The doctor who he sees is duty-bound to try and minimize the number of compensation claims. So, his father is not deemed damaged enough by his experience at Auschwitz. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back and the poor man has a breakdown and ultimately commits suicide. These are all pretty miserable stories, really, but absolutely fascinating in terms of the long-term consequences of the Nazi persecution. They humanise the experience very effectively. Yes, that’s a theme in the books that I’ve chosen. It’s extremely accessible and readable so that you almost don’t know that you’re reading non-fiction. It’s something that his parents never talked about. People who have been through such horrendous experiences often don’t talk about it with their nearest and dearest. His father died and then, years later, he’s trying to piece together his parents’ life in Poland before the war. What happened when they were taken into slave labour? He knows part of the story from when he was growing up. He has letters and correspondence and all sorts that he’s consulting to piece together the jigsaw of this life that has not been talked about."