A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz Read Online Free PDF Page B

threshold, the thin ice crunching beneath their feet, the lethal cold burning against their skin.
    Only much later can sensations turn into stories. Only much later can mute expanses of wordlessness be strewn with scattered fragments of language. Only much later do I slither behind Tommy down the steep slope to the canal bank by the railroad bridge and slide out onto the creaking ice and see dark cracks of water open beneath our feet and feel my feet slipping and the water getting into my boots and the cold and stiff trousers chafing against my body on the heavy way home and the sensations of dread and thrashing.
    Only much later can I become the child who tells a tale. Only much later can I dig in the mute expanses for fragments, sieve them out of the layered deposits of time, and put them together into a story. It’s not the child who’s remembering. It’s me, trying much later to recall the child’s sensations.
    “Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater,” writes Walter Benjamin in an essay about the Berlin of his childhood.
    It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the “matter itself” is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous investigation what constitutes the real treasurehidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand—like precious fragments or torsos in a collector’s gallery—in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding.
    The image: a shiny yellow disk of metal, sharp and uneven around the edges, a bit like thinly rolled-out gingerbread dough, and the size of a five-öre coin. It’s burning hot in my hand.
    The later understanding: we’re romping noisily along the sleepers of the railroad track that runs along the path to my first school and leads to the factory where they make milk separators. It also leads to the factory where they prefabricate building blocks of aerated concrete and to the black mountains of coal and coke beneath the tall cranes on the docks and to the gigantic grain silo whose purpose we don’t yet understand. But the separator factory is what we’re running toward, because our school is just beside it, and because the separator factory’s renowned canteen (“Every housewife’s dream: appliances, appliances, and more appliances of every conceivable kind”) is where we walk to in a column every day and consume the free school meal to which we have just become entitled but about which we’ve already taken the liberty of developing cautious opinions.
    But no, it must have been on our way home from school. On our way to school in the mornings, when we were always late and racing against the clock, the idea wouldn’t have occurred to anybody. So it’s in the afternoon, and we’re running along the sleepers leading away from the factory, and it must be from behind, from the factory, that the train is coming. Well, no, not a train really, just a shunting locomotive, and it’s making quite a racket because it’s a diesel. No danger, we can all see and hear it coming, and it’s coming only very slowly. But some danger still, because now somebody’s got the idea that we’re in a competitionto see who’s last off the track. It’s not Tommy this time, he’s too old to be in my class. So who is it? The picture won’t come into focus.
    The engine’s getting closer, nobody budges, I get an idea.
    Am I the one who puts the two-öre coin on the rail? Is it really my idea?
    We hide in the waste-filled and weed-covered ditch and watch the engine grow against the sky. The ground trembles. The rails screech. The coin vibrates.
    I imagine myself in the place of the two-öre piece.
    A shiny disk of