Rose October 07

Suddenly freedom, without being free

Peter Rose

Jacob G. Rosenberg
Sunrise West
Brandl & Schlesinger, $26.95 pb, 194 pp, 9781876040840

Gunter Grass, in his suave and controversial memoirs, Peeling the Onion (Harvill Secker, 2007, trans. Michael Henry Heim), rehearses many of the modern autobiographer’s qualms about the biddability of memory. Grass, with his long history of attacking other Germans’ wartime activities while concealing his own service in the Tenth SS Armoured Division, has every incentive to question the memoirist’s primary tool. ‘When pestered with questions,’ Grass writes, ‘memory is like an onion that wishes to be peeled so we can read what is laid bare letter by letter. It is seldom unambiguous and often in mirror-writing or otherwise disguised.’ Changing metaphors, Grass contends with memory’s caprices and slippages: ‘Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way.’

Memory certainly has its way in Jacob G. Rosenberg’s second volume of memoirs, Sunrise West, just as it did, with clarion resolve, in the first, the award-winning East of Time (2005). Here, ringingly if anachronistically – like something proffered by an earlier century, but with all the cogency and pertinence of art – there is no ‘crawling away’, no pussy-footing about the sorry past. Memory, in Rosenberg’s grip, is like a shield, bright, inviolable; the precious weapon that the young man guarded in the Nazi death camps; all he took with him when finally liberated in 1945 – the last vestige of a self that had been ruthlessly abused.

Readers of East of Time will not easily forget the last chapter, when the Germans, on 3 August 1944, finally ‘evacuated’ the Lodz ghetto in Poland where Rosenberg (aged twenty-two) and his family had somehow managed to live, and work, and read, and hope. Almost reluctantly, the author recalls ‘that sunny morning of shadows, violence, rapine and guile’. Caught in a human tide, he ended up on a train with his family, his father ‘enveloped in darkness, [standing] in a corner like his own tombstone’.

The new book opens with the same poetry that Rosenberg brought to East of Time: ‘To the south of my city of the waterless river, in the valley of open secrets, where the very winds dread their own lament, behind a thin forest of sad all-knowing trees, lay the kingdom of death.’ After the long sequestration in the ghetto, the ‘barbed-wire existence’, the lucky escapes and the nervous hope that the Allied forces might get there before the catastrophe: the upshot at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex was swift and pitiless. On this ‘day of barking dogs’, Mengele was there to greet them, ‘dressed in black and with gloves of white’. No sooner had they arrived than Rosenberg’s parents, his sisters and his two young nieces were murdered. (The mother of one of the little girls killed herself on an electric fence, ‘her mouth kissing death’.) Every day for the next nine months, this could have been Rosenberg’s fate. His survival seems incredible, given the insane violence and privations in the camps. Rosenberg witnessed countless murders and appalling acts of brutality. He forgets none of them – how could he? why should he? The furtive conversations and the crazy Nazi taunts are recalled with a kind of authority and immediacy that renders them unchallengeable.

Rosenberg, with his philosophical friend Raymond, was among the ‘lucky slaves’ sold or donated to a German road-making company. From Wolfsburg he was sent to another camp, Ebensee, whose commandant, a sometime bouncer in a nightclub, perfected new kinds of sadism, forcing the inmates to line up in front of the furnace where corpses were awaiting cremation, saying, ‘You’re in for a warm, radiant future’.

Fifty pages into the book, the Americans arrive. When the Polish Jews try to stand beneath their national flag, the other Polish inmates shun them, but the Jewish liberators from New York have other ideas. Rosenberg describes his emotions with typical clarity and with a realism that always keeps poignancy in check: ‘Out of camp into an open world, but with nowhere to go. Suddenly freedom, but without being free. So much to celebrate, but with whom?’

Nowhere led first to Italy, on a goods train. Along the way there were orchestras and speeches, but ‘things were in perfect disarray’. The Jewish brigade, attached to the British army, took over, and at last, after years of starvation, there was food and laughter and song. The refugees paused in the empty studios of Cinecittà, outside Rome, then fetched up in southern Italy, at Santa Maria di Bagno, where Rosenberg met his life partner, Esther, a survivor of the Jewish uprising in Warsaw and of Belsen and Dachau. Married weeks later, they snuck back to their communal room. ‘On the cracked windowpane hung a full moon, laughing yellow.’ Esther, like Jacob, was haunted by everything that had happened, including her father’s stark question to her after the Germans arrested her mother: ‘How come they took mother and you’re still here?’

In 1948, after trying to emigrate to America, the Rosenbergs prepared to sail for Australia. The cover photograph shows them in Marseilles, walking down a street just prior to their departure. Smiling at the camera, they look like any other young couple from the 1940s: well-groomed, arm in arm, full of purpose. Like another Pole, Rosenberg had always dreamed of the sea, but unlike Conrad he didn’t find his sea-legs and the long squeamish voyage was a trial.

In Melbourne the Rosenbergs found work in clothing factories. The summer heat was oppressive, but Jacob responded to the easy local humour (‘Ladies and gentlemen, another scorcher today. It will be 110 by noon, but I’ll give it to you for 99’). Before long he had acquired the language, made new friends, resumed his socialist work, begun writing again, and somehow come to terms with the horrors of his past, while fully aware that ‘once you’ve been tortured, you’re forever tortured’.

As with the first book, Sunrise West is episodic and divided into brief chapters, as if to make it bearable. The writing is lyrical, dry-humoured, almost playful at times. The new book seems freer than East of Time. Interspersed throughout are more ghost sequences; these would be nervous-making in anyone else’s hands. In one such dream, his mother tells him, ‘there is a strong rumour among the ashes that it wasn’t so bad’. The aphoristic quality that Peter Steele remarked in his review of East of Time is undimmed: ‘aphorism [as] a way of drilling deeper rather than a way of stepping back’ (ABR, September 2005).

At the end of Sunrise West, the Rosenbergs have a child. Esther quips, ‘And there are still some fools who say there is no such thing as a miracle.’ Long after midnight, the new father goes home to the shade of his murdered mother – an image of great power and sadness.

We are fortunate to have these two books, written so late in Jacob Rosenberg’s remarkable life. They seem as profound as anything in our autobiographical literature. In an age that buries books like landfill, it is reassuring to hear that Brandl & Schlesinger has just reprinted East of Time for the third time. Neither book should be out of print for long.

Peter Rose is Editor of ABR.