Silent Refuge

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Silent Refuge Page 7

by Margrit Rosenberg Stenge


  It did not take us long to settle in Malmö. We rented a nice, modern one-bedroom apartment in a quiet neighbourhood and bought some second-hand furniture. I was given the small bedroom; my parents slept on a hide-a-bed in the living room. Life assumed some normalcy. My father went to work in the mornings, my mother did the grocery shopping in stores that were new and strange to her and took care of the apartment, and I went to school.

  Since I had missed about five months of schooling again and my education in Rogne had left much to be desired, I was quite nervous about starting at yet another school. The Norwegian and Swedish spoken languages (as well as the Danish language) are very similar. The written languages, however, are another matter entirely. Going from Norwegian as it was spoken and written in Oslo to the New Norwegian in Rogne and now to Swedish was not easy. The school in Malmö, to which I was admitted without losing a year, was a vocational high school, where I studied not only the usual subjects but also typing and shorthand. I enjoyed the typing and shorthand lessons. These lessons gave me practical skills to fall back on if needed in the future. One of my teachers, a woman in her fifties, took pity on me and volunteered to tutor me in Swedish. I was soon able to express myself well in Swedish. It did not take long before I caught up with my contemporaries, with even my written Swedish becoming acceptable.

  Despite the fact that my father’s health was manageable again, I always feared that something would happen to him. The wound on his back opened up again soon after the surgery in Alingsås, and my mother continued to tend to it. She wanted to teach me to cleanse and bandage the wound, but I was too squeamish. Although things were finally going quite well for us, I was always nervous and apprehensive. I suppose the past had caught up with me.

  The Jewish community in Malmö was small. Rabbi Berlinger was in charge of the synagogue and the Sunday morning cheder. My Jewish education had been put on hold in April 1940, and it was important to my father that I resume where I had left off. So instead of enjoying some free time on Sundays, I went to cheder. I immediately loved the Jewish environment and felt completely at ease with the other children there. I became friendly with the rabbi’s three children: a daughter, Yetta, who was a year older than I, a son exactly my age and a younger daughter. Yetta became my special friend. Often on Shabbat, after attending synagogue, I was invited to the Berlinger home for lunch. Orthodox Judaism held a certain attraction for me, but I never became observant.

  Malmö is a port city and has wonderful beaches. The sand is almost white, and the beach is kept spotlessly clean. It was there that I finally learned to swim properly. A long wooden pier led from the beach to two large sea-water swimming pools, which were separated by a wall but not covered. One pool was for men and the other for women, and everyone swam in the nude. Although I was rather shy, I loved the sensation of swimming without a bathing suit and gladly paid the few öre (Swedish pennies) for admission.

  It takes about two hours by boat to reach Copenhagen from Malmö, and on a clear day one can see the skyline of Copenhagen from the beaches in Malmö. Knowing that the Germans were in such close proximity always gave me an eerie and unsettled feeling.

  A new wave of refugees began to arrive in Malmö, Danish Jews from Copenhagen and its surrounding areas. Most of them had made their escape in Danish fishing boats. The fishermen stowed their Jewish passengers in the holds of their boats and left Denmark under the cover of darkness. Many people were saved in this manner. My parents became friendly with several couples, friendships that in many instances lasted all their lives. Stories were told of the heroism of the Danish people during the German occupation and how the king protected his Jewish citizens. Only a small number of Danish Jews were deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp, of whom very few perished due to the influence and interference of Danish officials.

  Returning from the synagogue on a Friday evening, my father brought home a guest. Jack Ganz was a Norwegian Jew, a bachelor in his early forties, a small man with a pronounced nose on his narrow face and an easy, friendly smile. Both my parents enjoyed his company, and he became a steady fixture in our home. He was a helpful and generous person who remained in our lives for years to come.

  One day a letter arrived in the mail, addressed to me. To my amazement, it was from Sigmund Meiranovsky. He was in a German prisoner-of-war camp and had obtained his brother John’s address in Sweden through the efforts of the Red Cross. John, in turn, had sent Sigmund our address. Now my personal “war effort” began. Many letters between Sigmund and me crossed the ocean, and when we met at the end of the war, he told me that the arrival of a letter from me always made that day a brighter one.

  In the spring of 1944, I went to visit John and Beks in Norrköping, Sweden. Beks was pregnant and quite unwell, but we still made the most of the few days we had together. That same spring, I also visited Tante Ruth and Onkel Hermann in Stockholm. Onkel Hermann became my guide. We visited museums and beautiful parks and dined in fancy restaurants, all of which were a novelty for me. Onkel Hermann made a deep impression on me with his knowledge of art and his interest in everything around him. Although older than my father, he appeared much more youthful, and other than my father, he became the most important person in my life for some time to come.

  When school was over in the spring of 1944, I decided to make use of my new skills — typing and stenography — and began looking for work. I was certainly not a fast typist and my shorthand left a lot to be desired, so I was overjoyed when I was offered a job in a small office. It turned out that all I had to do was answer an occasional phone call. I was left alone in the little narrow office from the time I arrived in the morning until 4:00 p.m. A typewriter was my only company. Two weeks later, I had to admit to myself that this job was not for me, and I left.

  An ad in the newspaper attracted my attention. A small company was looking for an office assistant, and I could not believe my luck when I was hired. The office consisted of only two people, the owner of the company and his secretary. In my opinion, the young secretary was the smartest and most efficient woman I had ever met, and I was completely in awe of her.

  Things went really well at the office for a while, until one day I committed a blunder I have never forgotten. I was handed a stack of letters to mail, one of which was a registered letter that had to be taken to the post office. Instead, I mailed all the letters in a mailbox. When I realized what I had done, all I could do was stare at the mailbox, hoping against hope that it would regurgitate the registered letter. I ran back to the office and confessed to my boss what had happened, expecting to be fired on the spot. But he calmly went to the post office, and the letter was retrieved. I became, if possible, even more eager to please, and at the end of the summer I regretfully left the job and the two people who had shown me such kindness and consideration to return to school.

  The construction of a beautiful theatre complex had recently been completed in Malmö. I saw my very first play on an outing with my class and loved it. To my great surprise, Yetta’s brother asked me one day if I wanted to go with him to a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. My first date! It was also my last with him.

  At the end of 1944, it became obvious that the Germans were losing the war, and by the spring of 1945, it was only a question of time before Hitler would have to capitulate. The Allied forces were beginning to land in Germany, and rumours of concentration camps and atrocities abounded. But nothing could have prepared us for what we were about to witness.

  In April 1945, my class was told by the teacher who had tutored me in Swedish that all the students at the school would be relocated for the remainder of the school year and would be going to school in shifts. Our school would be used to house concentration-camp prisoners who would be liberated shortly through the efforts of Sweden’s Count Folke Bernadotte. At the same time, the teacher expressed regret that the graduating class would be unnecessarily inconvenienced by this move and said that she found the w
hole thing grossly unfair. I was shocked. This woman, who I had thought was so kind, had no compassion at all for the unfortunate people who were about to come to Sweden. In anticipation of their arrival, many schools in Malmö were converted into temporary hospitals while the Malmö museum, a reconstructed fort located in a lovely park and surrounded by a moat, was prepared to house the relatively healthy survivors.

  And then they started to arrive. The museum was soon filled to capacity with Jewish people of many origins. Few were from Germany. For my parents, it became a daily ritual to go to the museum to make inquiries about our family, but no one had any information. One day, they spoke to a young boy from Cologne. Although conversation across the moat was difficult, my parents learned that he was sixteen years old and the sole survivor of his family, except for an older brother who was in the United States. My father suggested to me that since the boy and I were the same age, it might benefit the boy to have a friend visit him. From then on until the end of the boy’s quarantine, I went to see him every day. Even though we had to shout across the moat, we managed to become good friends, and when he was able to leave the museum, he came to our apartment several times before leaving for the United States to join his brother.

  Although Sweden had remained neutral during World War ii, many Swedes had secretly sided with the Germans. Not so secret were the transports of German weapons and troops that were allowed to go through Sweden. Although the Jewish population in Sweden was negligible, many of the Swedes were antisemites, something I experienced first-hand in a very unpleasant encounter. I was visiting my friend and shouting across the moat in German as usual when a man passed by and yelled at me that I was nothing but a whore. I was in shock and too young to have the presence of mind to react. Now I had one more thing to worry about. Would the man be there the next day? He never came back.

  The schools, too, began to fill up. In the schoolyards where kids had been playing until recently, pitiful victims of Hitler’s concentration camps walked aimlessly about. The bony hands reaching for the bread and chocolate that people brought them, the emaciated faces staring through the fences and begging for food, the fights among the survivors that sometimes erupted over a piece of bread — it all made me almost physically ill. Yet I returned to these schoolyards every spare minute I had with more bread and chocolate, which turned out to do more harm than good. Soon it became strictly forbidden to bring food from the outside since many of the former prisoners had gotten seriously ill from the unaccustomed caloric intake. They had been starving too long and their digestive systems could handle only small portions of food at one time, with portions now measured by the doctors in charge. I cannot describe the deep sorrow and despair I felt that spring of 1945 and even now, a lifetime later, I can still feel the pain of the sixteen-year-old I was then.

  When the survivors were healthy enough, they were released from the various quarantined facilities in Malmö. The majority of them headed for the larger cities in Sweden, such as Stockholm and Gothenburg, in search of work. Eventually, many immigrated to Canada and the United States. I think about how no matter how their lives turned out, the memories of the horrors of the camps would always be with them.

  The Germans finally capitulated on May 7, 1945. My parents went out that night to spend the evening with friends, but I was in no mood to celebrate. The events of the past weeks had depressed me so much that all I wanted was to crawl into bed. Since we were living on the ground floor, I had always rolled down my blind before getting undressed. That evening I did not. A face appearing in my window almost paralyzed me. I screamed. He ran away, but he had seen me partially undressed and I felt completely violated. I never told my parents.

  The end of World War ii signalled the end of our life in Malmö, as well as a new beginning. We had come to Sweden as refugees and could, therefore, only stay as long as there was a need for it. Both Norway and Denmark had been liberated, and all of us who had settled in Sweden during the war had to return to our respective countries.

  The good news was that Nordiske in Oslo was anxiously waiting for my father to resume his position as director of its paint division, but the bad news was that the company had been able to find only a small studio apartment for us. That was the best accommodation the company could find under the circumstances. Since we had been living in Malmö for more than two years, my mother, in particular, became busy winding up our affairs. She arranged for our furniture that was to be shipped to Oslo to be placed in storage and packed up our personal belongings. Finally, in the fall of 1945, we said goodbye to all our friends in Sweden and went by train to Oslo, the city we had left so long ago.

  * * *

  2Amek tells his story of surviving through ghettos and concentration camps in his memoir, Six Lost Years, published by the Azrieli Foundation in 2017. Amek passed away in 2017.

  Back in Norway

  The Germans had left every city and country that they occupied in shambles, Norway among them. It was a shock to come from the peaceful, prosperous small city of Malmö to Oslo, where there was a shortage of everything from food to housing and clothing. Sugar, flour, meat and chocolates were still rationed. The city of Oslo looked drab and neglected, and the shortage of adequate housing was critical.

  We moved into our studio apartment, which was not large enough for two people, let alone for three. The living room served as both our bedroom and dining room. My mother could barely turn around in the tiny kitchenette, and before long the three of us thoroughly detested our surroundings. Even my father’s health was affected, but it would be a year and a half until we were able to move.

  Life had to go on. My father went to work every day at Nordiske, my mother struggled to keep our little place clean and tidy, which was no small feat, and I went to school. This time, though, I did lose a year and was now in Grade 10 instead of Grade 11, which meant that I had three more years of high school to complete. Once again, I had to switch languages. Apart from the language that was spoken and written in the cities, the high school curriculum included two other Norwegian dialects, one that was spoken and written in the countryside, Nynorsk, or New Norwegian, which I remembered fairly well from Rogne, and another called Gammelnorsk, or Old Norwegian, which was completely unfamiliar to me. Math and Gammelnorsk were my nemeses. Another problem was studying in our little apartment, but I somehow muddled through that year.

  Beks, John and their little daughter, Renée, as well as Beks’s sister Hanna and her eleven-year-old son, Robert, had in the meantime also returned from Sweden. Hanna’s husband had perished in Auschwitz. Fortunately, both families were able to return to the apartments they had lived in prior to their escape. John inherited the store his brother Jack had left behind when he and his family were deported to Auschwitz, where they perished. Beks, John and Hanna took over the store, a men’s haberdashery, which they called Corner, since it was located on a busy corner in the centre of the city. The three of them worked there tirelessly from morning till night, completely devoted to its success. John was the buyer and looked after the business end, Beks was the salesperson and Hanna did alterations in the downstairs area. A shortage of goods was their main problem, and building up a stock was almost impossible. As quickly as shirts, socks, pants or jackets were delivered, they were snapped up by the customers.

  For years to come, Corner would be a landmark in the city, where sailors bought their uniforms and men of all ages knew they would be well served. When Beks retired at the age of seventy, her nephew Robert assumed the responsibilities of running the store, and when he died prematurely in his fifties, his wife took over. The store eventually went downhill, together with the area in which it was located, and it was sold many years later.

  Both Beks and John realized how stressful my family’s living conditions were, and their home was always open to us. Although Beks was tired from standing on her feet all day in Corner, she served us the most delicious open-faced sandwiches and home-baked co
okies, which were a treat during the prevailing food shortage. My father fell in love with little Renée, who was a beautiful child with straight dark hair and huge brown eyes, though she was also quite spoiled. But she was only a baby then, a year and a half old, and she was the apple of John’s eye and could do no wrong.

  Beks was a slender, attractive woman and just as competent in her home as she was in the store. The apartment was spotlessly clean. When visitors came, no effort was spared and everyone was always welcomed with a smile. John was a handsome man but quite complex. Although much younger than my parents, who had after all been John’s parents’ friends, John and Beks became our best and closest friends, a friendship that survived time and distance and lasted till the end of their lives.

  Sigmund, too, returned to Oslo in the fall of 1945. He had not yet been discharged as an airman, and in his light-blue uniform of the Royal Air Force, he looked absolutely dashing. My heart skipped a beat whenever I saw him, and soon I was head over heels in love with him. All the young Jewish girls competed for his affection, and each time I saw him pay special attention to one of his admirers, I suffered painful pangs of jealousy. Sigmund told me in later years that he was aware of my feelings and did his best to squelch them. To him, I was still his little sister. It took me quite a while to get over this infatuation. Several months later, Sigmund left for the United States where he has lived ever since. He never married.

  The Norwegian Jewish community had suffered severe losses during the war. Of the approximately 760 Norwegians who had been deported to Auschwitz, only around twenty-eight survived and returned home. One of these survivors was twenty-four-year-old Kai Feinberg, who also became very popular with the single Jewish girls in Oslo. Although nervous and high-strung, he was a charming, good-looking young man. In time, he would be the leader of the Jewish community in Oslo, a position he held for many years. A book about his imprisonment in Auschwitz was written with his help and published after his death. In 2000, I translated his book, Prisoner No. 79108 Returns, from Norwegian to English.

 

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