Why a Booktrail?
1947: An Auschwitz survivor moves to Sweden where he tries to learn to live again.
A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz
What you need to know before your trail
On the 2nd of August 1947 a young man gets off a train in a small Swedish town. He has survived the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz, and the harrowing slave camps and transports during the final months of Nazi Germany. Now he has to learn to live with his memories. Author Goran Rosenberg returns to his own childhood in order to tell his father’s story. It is also the story of the chasm that soon opens between the world of the child, suffused with the optimism, progress and collective oblivion of post-war Sweden, and the world of the father, haunted by the long shadows of the past.
Locations
Reset- Sweden - Södertälje
- A: Train station
- B: Town Hall
- C: Södertälje Centrum
- D: Torekällbergets museum
- E: Old Town Hall
- Poland - Auschwitz
- F: The concentration camp
Travel Guide
Södertälje
“A small Swedish town with a big lorry factory.”
From The European Literature Network:
Göran Rosenberg’s multi-layered masterpiece is a memorial to the father he loved, and lost. It is also an exploration of David’s experiences as a death-camp inmate, slave labourer, refugee and emigré; an examination of how society treats traumatised refugees; and a poignant memoir of Rosenberg’s childhood.
The narrative shifts back and forth in time, capturing the simultaneity of past and present. The opening scenes in post-war Sweden are followed by a flashback to the Łódź ghetto, where all pretence of normality ceases when the SS order families to yield up their young children. Meanwhile, Södertälje’s local newspaper juxtaposes a piece on the celebrations of the Catholic Saint Lucia with a report on the killing of Poland’s Jews. Like the Warsaw carousel that Czesław Miłosz immortalised, still turning while the ghetto empties, the everyday coexists with genocide.
Booktrail Boarding Pass: A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz
Destination : Södertälje Author/Guide: Goran Rosenberg Departure Time: 1947
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