Again and again Rose Lagercrantz talks about the big and small needs of the children with the loving voice of someone who knows and hopes. And again and again the history of her Jewish family pushes into the focus of memory. She has edited them in literary form, for adults and for young people. A booklet has now appeared that is aimed at children from the age of nine – with easy-to-read large letters – “Two of each”, translated by Angelika Kutsch, with colorful watercolored pictures by Rebecka Lagercrantz, the author’s daughter.
“When I write for children,” says Rose Lagercrantz, “there is only one goal for me: I have to come to a happy ending that is not a lie
The family of Rose Lagercrantz’s mother, Ella, lived in a town in Transylvania, Romania, when the Germans occupied the country. Ella’s mother, two aunts and their children were murdered in Auschwitz. Ella and her sister Rosalia survived. Rose’s later father saved the young Jewess Anna Karpe, who also died in Auschwitz. The writer reported on this in the poignant story “The Girl Who Didn’t Want to Kiss”.
But how do you bring the immensity of suffering into a story aimed at children? “When I write for children,” says Rose Lagercrantz, “there is only one goal for me: I have to come to a happy ending that isn’t a lie. It has to happen somehow.”
And it happens in this children’s book, in Rose Lagercrantz’s inimitable, gentle and understandable storytelling that does not spare the tragedy. Based on her own family history, she tells the story of a friendship between the nine-year-old first-person narrator Elias, known as Eli, in the early 1940s, and Luli, who was the same age. The boy lives with his mother and brother in that Transylvanian town after his father died. Luli’s mom is no longer alive either. Her father is exploring America in search of a new home. Meanwhile, the ever-hungry Luli lives with her sister at an aunt’s. So one could think that Rose Lagercrantz is telling about the everyday life of poor people in poor times, in which the children’s fantasies were nevertheless able to save themselves in modest refuges.
But then the unimaginable happens. First of all, Eli is lucky to survive a serious illness. A short time later, Luli and her sister follow their father to America. The war is approaching. The Germans occupy the area. Discrimination against the Jewish population is the order of the day. Then the deportations begin. Eli tells the story of how his mother was torn away from the children on the ramp of the Auschwitz death camp and they never see her again. The fact that his life and that of his brother hangs by a thread day after day through work, harassment and illness is not concealed in Eli’s story. But he also tells of wondrous and happy events after the liberation up to the present. Between the lines you seem to hear his question over and over again: “Why did I survive?” There is no answer to that. Only one perennial task that Rose Lagercrantz sets herself: preserve the humanity that was denied to the ancestors.
The recently deceased great Swedish children’s author Ulf Nilsson commented on his colleague’s book: “So heavy, so light, so big.” Nothing to add to that. (from 9 years and adults).
Rose Lagercrantz & Rebecka Lagercrantz (Ill.): Two of each. Translated from the Swedish by Angelika Kutsch. Moritz Verlag, Frankfurt 2021. 116 pages, 14 euros.