Early Holocaust Memory in Sweden: Archives, Testimonies and Reflections [1st ed.] 9783030555313, 9783030555320

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THE HOLOCAUST AND ITS CONTEXTS

Early Holocaust Memory in Sweden Archives, Testimonies and Reflections Edited by Johannes Heuman Pontus Rudberg

The Holocaust and its Contexts Series Editors Ben Barkow The Wiener Library London, UK Suzanne Bardgett Imperial War Museum London, UK

More than sixty years on, the Holocaust remains a subject of intense debate with ever-widening ramifications. This series aims to demonstrate the continuing relevance of the Holocaust and related issues in contemporary society, politics and culture; studying the Holocaust and its history broadens our understanding not only of the events themselves but also of their present-day significance. The series acknowledges and responds to the continuing gaps in our knowledge about the events that constituted the Holocaust, the various forms in which the Holocaust has been remembered, interpreted and discussed, and the increasing importance of the Holocaust today to many individuals and communities. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14433

Johannes Heuman  •  Pontus Rudberg Editors

Early Holocaust Memory in Sweden Archives, Testimonies and Reflections

Editors Johannes Heuman Jönköping University Jönköping, Sweden

Pontus Rudberg Uppsala University Uppsala, Sweden

The Holocaust and its Contexts ISBN 978-3-030-55531-3    ISBN 978-3-030-55532-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55532-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Matteo Omied / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

The work with this volume began in the summer of 2017 when we approached a number of scholars who we knew were working on, or had previously touched upon, the issue of early Holocaust testimonies and memorialisation in Sweden and invited them each respectively to write a chapter for a book. To our great joy, nearly all of them accepted. We owe our gratitude first and foremost to them. We first agreed to invite all contributing scholars to an initial workshop, and then once again to a conference. The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond) generously provided the funds we needed to invite all of the researchers to Uppsala to the two-day conference in May 2018. Each paper at the conference was commented on by Professor Hasia R. Diner, who has been an important source of inspiration to us and many other scholars working on the subject of Holocaust memory. She also agreed to write the final chapter of our book. Thank you, Hasia! We also owe our thanks to the Director, Dr Tomislav Dulić, and to the staff of the Hugo Valentin Centre, who helped us organise the conference and welcome our guests in Uppsala. We are in debt to our language reversioners Victoria Martinez and Craig Kelly, who both did a fantastic job, not only on correcting the language of the non-native English speakers, but also on improving and bringing the chapters together. We want to thank The Royal Patriotic Society (Kungl. Patriotiska Sällskapet) and The Gunvor and Josef Anér Foundation (Gunvor och Josef Anérs stiftelse) for their generous contribution in funding this work. We would also like to give a heartfelt thanks v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

to the following individuals for their comments on the manuscript or support in other ways: Dr Lars M. Andersson, Dr Simon Perego, Professor Helmut Müssener, Philip Schwartz, Dr Carl Henrik Carlsson, Katinka Bergvall, Annika Holmér, and Robert Miljan. Finally, and most importantly with respect to this book, we would like to thank the editor Emily Russell, the professional staff at Palgrave Macmillan, and the peer reviewers. During the completion of the manuscript, we received the sad news from Berlin that our former teacher and colleague Dr Paul A. Levine had passed away. Levine was one of the pioneers in the field of Holocaust history in Sweden and a great inspiration to both of us. This book would not have been written had it not been for the work of Levine and the other scholars in the field of Swedish Holocaust studies who paved the road for study and research in the field.

Contents

1 Holocaust Memory in Sweden: A Re-evaluation  1 Johannes Heuman and Pontus Rudberg 2 In Search of Documentation: Nella Rost and the Jewish Historical Commission in Stockholm 33 Johannes Heuman 3 Witnessing the Holocaust: Jewish Experiences and the Collection of the Polish Source Institute in Lund 67 Izabela A. Dahl 4 Holocaust Testimonies in Jewish Compensation Claims in the United Restitution Organisation’s Archive in Stockholm 93 Pontus Rudberg 5 ‘The Greatest Pogrom in World History’: Hugo Valentin and the Holocaust119 Olof Bortz 6 Tracing the Holocaust in Early Writings in Post-War Sweden139 Karin Kvist Geverts

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Contents

7 ‘A Hellish Nightmare’: The Swedish Press and the Construction of Early Holocaust Narratives, 1945–1950163 Antero Holmila 8 Jews, Gender, and the Scandinavian Subject: Understanding the Context and Content of the Film Vittnesbördet [The Testimony]189 Kristin Wagrell 9 Dire Strait? When the Holocaust Came to Sweden—A Regional Perspective 1943–1945221 Ulf Zander 10 The Holocaust and the Jewish Survivors in the SwedishJewish Press, 1945–1955249 Malin Thor Tureby 11 Recognition, Justice, and Memory: Swedish-­Jewish Reactions to the Holocaust and the Major Trials287 Julia Sahlström 12 Early Memorialisation of the Holocaust: American and Scandinavian Perspectives315 Hasia R. Diner Index323

Notes on Contributors

Olof  Bortz  is a Swedish historian, conducting postdoctoral research at the Department of History at Uppsala University in Sweden and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. His PhD thesis analysed the work of Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg. His postdoctoral project deals with scholarly interpretations of Nazism between 1933 and 1939. Izabela A. Dahl  is Associate Professor of History at Örebro University in Sweden. Her research interests include history of antisemitism, Jewish history and European memory culture. Dahl has published extensively about history of Jewish migration and integration, exile and refuge in Sweden. Hasia R. Diner  is the Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History and the director of the Goldstein Goren Center for American Jewish History at New York University in the United States. She is the author of We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust (2010) and Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migration to the New World and the Peddlers Who Led the Way (2015). Johannes Heuman  is Senior Lecturer in History at Jönköping University in Sweden. Heuman specialises in modern French history, including social movements and memory. He is the author of the book The Holocaust and French Historical Culture, 1945–1965 (2015).

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Antero  Holmila  is Associate Professor of History at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. His first monograph, Reporting Holocaust in the British, Swedish and Finnish Press 1945–1950 (2011), challenged the idea that there was no discussion about the Holocaust immediately after the war. Holmila’s other books have examined the Winter War from the perspective of the world’s press and the transition from war to peace in Finland. Karin Kvist Geverts  is a historian and researcher at the National Library of Sweden. She has written on Swedish refugee policy and Jewish refugees during the Holocaust, antisemitism in Sweden, Holocaust education and memory culture. Kvist Geverts was a secretary of the government inquiry A Museum About the Holocaust and the editor of the volume Holocaust Remembrance and Representation: Documentation from a Research Conference (2020). Pontus  Rudberg is a historian and researcher at the Hugo Valentin Centre at Uppsala University and the Jewish Museum of Stockholm. He has previously authored the book The Swedish Jews and the Holocaust (2017). Rudberg is researching the rehabilitation and integration of Holocaust survivors in Swedish post-war society. Julia  Sahlström  is a doctoral student at the Department of History at Stockholm University in Sweden. Her doctoral thesis is about Swedish-­ Jewish Holocaust memory and conceptions of justice. Sahlström has previously written a report on antisemitic hate crime in Sweden for the National Council for Crime Prevention (BRÅ). Malin  Thor  Tureby is Associate Professor of History at Malmö University in Sweden. She is an expert in oral history and has done research within the fields of cultural heritage studies, migration studies, Holocaust studies and Jewish history. Thor Tureby’s publications include works on the Hechaluz movement, Jewish relief and refugee aid, and on life stories and oral history collections with migrants, the Jewish minority and Holocaust survivors in Sweden. She worked as an appointed expert to the committee of the Swedish government inquiry A Museum About the Holocaust (2019–2020). Kristin  Wagrell is a cultural studies scholar at Linköping University, Sweden, who recently defended her PhD thesis ‘Chorus of the Saved’: Constructing the Holocaust Survivor in Swedish Public Discourse, 1943–1966

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(2020). Wagrell is researching questions relating to the history of survivor activism and the archival practices of cultural heritage ­institutions. She is also the executive editor of the interdisciplinary journal Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research. Ulf Zander  is Professor of History at Lund University in Sweden. He has written extensively about Holocaust memory and is the co-editor of the volumes Echoes of the Holocaust (2003), Holocaust Heritage (2004), The Holocaust—Post-War Battlefields (2006) and Perspectives on the Entangled History of Communism and Nazism: A Comnaz Analysis (2015).

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1

Nella Rost speaks in the Jewish Community of Stockholm, 1950. (Yngve Karlsson/Stockholm Stadsmuseum) 42 Figs. 8.1 Fig. 8.1 (left) shows Scandinavian men recuperating at a and 8.2 convalescent facility in southern Sweden while Fig. 8.2 (right) shows the doctor removing a bandage from a naked woman’s back in one of the sanitising tents erected in the vicinity of Malmö harbour. (Stills from the film Vittnesbördet)209

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CHAPTER 1

Holocaust Memory in Sweden: A Re-evaluation Johannes Heuman and Pontus Rudberg

It may be surprising that it was a Swedish prime minister who, at the turn of the millennium, initiated the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance that was designed to spread knowledge, research, and awareness of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Sweden remained neutral during the Second World War and the country was never invaded and was therefore spared from Nazi atrocities. The establishment of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, as well as the so-called Stockholm Declaration, is nevertheless considered to be the culmination of Holocaust remembrance at an international level with representatives from forty-six countries gathering in the Swedish capital to agree upon the implementation of policies and programmes in support of Holocaust education, remembrance, and research.1 Needless to say, Sweden’s role in this process

J. Heuman (*) Jönköping University, Jönköping, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] P. Rudberg Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Heuman, P. Rudberg (eds.), Early Holocaust Memory in Sweden, The Holocaust and its Contexts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55532-0_1

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is instructive for the prominent position of Holocaust memory in Europe after the end of the Cold War, but certainly also a continuation of Sweden’s humanitarian aspirations on the international scene.2 Considering Sweden’s ambition to be a leading example regarding the communication of knowledge of this genocide, it is relevant to examine how survivors, activists, and intellectuals addressed the trauma during the early post-war period—before Holocaust had its name and long before its memorialisation became a major concern for political leaders. They worked under different conditions, in some cases without financial stability, with no academic structures for Holocaust studies, and certainly without the interest in minority concerns that is common today. Still, the post-war undertaking to preserve the painful experiences of the Holocaust was rather extensive—not just in the context of Sweden but also internationally—and this gave birth to new historical frames of reference in a nation that was little concerned with Jewish history. These efforts have unfortunately not been analysed sufficiently and researchers have only sparingly exploited the collections of the first testimonies. This book is about the memory of the Holocaust in Sweden and concentrates on early initiatives to document and spread information about the genocide from the late 1940s until the early 1960s. From an international perspective, the Swedish case shows both specific and general patterns regarding this memory. First, the early activism in its various forms embodied an urgent moral need to testify and remind about the atrocities committed against the Jews. This need to recognise and communicate what had happened was particularly strong among survivors across Europe, including those who came to Sweden during and after the war. Claims of justice and recognition were important, as was the desire to commemorate the victims in various ways and prepare for history writing.3 The international Jewish context was particularly important since the Jewish population in Sweden increased during and after the Holocaust. The memory in Sweden was to a large extent sustained by non-Swedish survivors, and not by returnees as in other occupied countries. The early discussion of the Holocaust should therefore also be situated in the vital reconstruction of Jewish life in Western Europe after the Holocaust,4 and it developed partly independently of Sweden’s national recovery after the Second World War. Second, post-war Sweden stands out in Europe because its neutrality during the war led to a less turbulent post-war period, without any significant political debates about the war years. The new post-war political landscape was not shaped by experiences of resistance as elsewhere in Europe.

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Rather, Swedish post-war national identity was based on ideas centred on its progressive modernity where the benefits of its policy of neutrality played a significant role.5 At the same time, difficult questions about Sweden’s concessions towards Nazi Germany were, in the words of historian Alf W. Johansson, ‘swept under the carpet by the triumph of small state realism’.6 This issue, together with the restrictive immigration policy before and during the Second World War, is today central in debates about Sweden and the Holocaust. The positive view on the policy of neutrality aligned well with contemporary developments around the Swedish welfare state and what has become known internationally as the Swedish People’s Home. This project demonstrated that the Social Democratic Party’s politics could encompass all of society, not just the working class. The aspiration of a classless society meanwhile involved linking the continuing process of homogenisation of Swedishness in the form of habits, routines, and preferences to progressive social-democratic ideas, which stands in contrast to multicultural Swedish society of today and its more visible representation of minorities.7 From this perspective, there initially appears to be a contradiction between the various initiatives to document and spread knowledge of Holocaust in Sweden on the one hand, and the political context of the Swedish People’s Home and its strong emphasis on the benefits of Swedish neutrality on the other. The purpose of this volume is indeed to understand how and in what ways the memory of the Holocaust began to take shape in the developing Swedish welfare state and to what extent the first representations eventually challenged or integrated dominant views about the moral benefits of Swedish neutrality during the Second World War. The book will also provide more general insights into how alternative approaches to the past, focusing on the Jewish experience, were created in the post-war era by examining the ways testimonies were collected, the intended purpose of the collections, and how Holocaust experiences were represented. A close study of the early Holocaust collections and representations will show the challenges and opportunities that were faced in the creation of an alternative minority-narrative of the past within the framework of a nation and, in this case, the developing Swedish welfare state.

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Holocaust Memory in Sweden from an International Perspective There has been a tremendous amount of international research on Holocaust memory and its impact on culture and politics from the end of the Second World War to date. The first major works on this issue in the 1990s and over the following decade established a general pattern of downplaying the specifically Jewish dimension of this trauma during the first two or three decades after the war.8 There was no lack of information about what happened to the six million Jews, according to this perspective. Yet despite all the evidence, the Holocaust—understood as a self-­ enclosed entity—did not enter into the general consciousness. Most people were first, and only temporarily, shaken out of their indifference to the suffering of the Jews by the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, according to this view. While the Holocaust in Central and Eastern Communist Europe was both marginalised and externalised, partly due to strong currents of antisemitism, the liberal attachment to progress in the West also created an unfavourable climate for any thorough discussion of the Jewish genocide. In an oft-quoted epilogue, commenting upon the absence of Jews from post-war national myth-making, British historian Tony Judt remarked: ‘The first post-war Europe was built upon deliberate mismemory—upon forgetting as a way of life.’9 It is not difficult to find support for this view in Swedish post-war intellectual discussion, where, due to Sweden’s neutrality, the memory of the Second World War was weaker than in other Nordic countries. Stig Dagerman, one of the most prominent Swedish post-war authors, for instance, visited the ruins of the Third Reich in Germany in 1946. He wrote newspaper articles that were gathered in the book German Autumn the following year. The book received significant attention in Sweden. Dagerman was an anti-fascist activist, and his book dealt with the question of German guilt in the context of poverty, disillusionment, and major streams of refugees. But, for today’s readers, it is striking that Dagerman, in his powerful and rich account of the burdens on Germany, did not address what has become today the most important moral issue: the murder of six million Jews. The Jewish dimension of this European trauma, or the role of antisemitism, which today appears to be the deepest wound of the last century, is only indirectly present in his dealings with the process of de-Nazification.10 It is rather unlikely today to think of a European left-­ wing intellectual addressing questions of German guilt in relation to the

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Second World War without concentrating on, or even discussing, the Holocaust. In general, however, research on the post-war period has emphasised how antisemitism and what we today call the Holocaust was not the focus when Swedish post-war intellectuals discussed Nazism and distanced themselves from German culture in general after the Second World War.11 It is also well known that for a long time Swedish academics did not regard the Holocaust as part of Swedish or even general history. Even in the 1960s and 1970s, when Sweden’s experiences of the Second World War were studied in a large-scale project that produced around twenty doctoral theses, no single study dealt with Sweden and the Holocaust.12 The reconstruction of attitudes towards the past is a difficult and delicate task, however. When these attitudes are summarised and explained as part of a ‘national narrative’ or ‘collective memory’, variations and differences within a society tend to disappear. This is particularly true for the Jewish efforts to understand and commemorate this catastrophe that for a long time were ignored or undervalued. Recent research has therefore reconsidered the early post-war era by emphasising the importance of initiatives within the Jewish post-war communities to confront the Holocaust in various ways, and by challenging the common belief that the public discussion on this genocide started from nearly nothing in the 1960s or even later. A central book in this regard is Hasia R. Diner’s We Remember with Reverence and Love. American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962, which contributed to a new focus within the research on Holocaust memory. Diner explored how American Jews during the two post-war decades made the Holocaust part of their communal life by addressing the catastrophe in various ways within different institutions, including religious ceremonies, commemorations, seminars, philanthropic works, the Jewish press, and many kinds of educational activities. At this time, the many activities related to the Holocaust took place on a more spontaneous grassroots level, which was later disregarded and consigned to oblivion by a new generation of young Jews that criticised the community leadership for devoting too little attention to the Holocaust. The book shows that the American Jews were far away from being silent during the first decades after the war, as had been presumed by both historians and activists within the communities, but that these first encounters with the past simply did not reach a wider non-Jewish audience due to the context of the Cold War.13

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Diner’s book had a significant impact not only on the United States, but also on the growing body of research devoted to the memory of the Holocaust. New studies focusing on various Jewish survivors’ initiatives in Europe, Israel, and North and South Americas have shown how individuals and groups had already paved the way for Holocaust studies, museums, and archives in the immediate post-war period.14 The reconsideration of the first post-war decades has contributed to a more complex picture of how the memory of the Holocaust developed and, above all, has demonstrated the importance of the role Jewish survivors and communities played in advancing knowledge. Other researchers on Holocaust memory have extended Diner’s argument to the non-Jewish world. For instance, the French philosopher François Azouvi in his Le Mythe du grand silence suggested that the Holocaust was in fact very much present in the early decades of post-war French intellectual and cultural life.15 There is no doubt that Azouvi has contributed important nuances and refuted the caricature of French intellectuals and the society in general as completely incapable of understanding the Jewish dimension of the catastrophe. When the argument of a ‘myth of silence’ is pushed too far, however, and applied to post-war societies as a whole, it risks underestimating prevailing post-war antisemitism; the general reluctance or at least disinterest regarding Jewish matters; the difficulties for early Holocaust research centres, archives, and educational initiatives to reach a wider audience; and perhaps most notably, the ideological changes in post-war Europe. The latter point is particularly important for understanding the increasing significance of the Holocaust during the post-war period and the centrality of this event at the end of the twentieth century for Western-European identity with new memorials, Holocaust institutions, public commemorations, and heated debates. Even Azouvi has pointed out in a later edition of his book that he did not take sufficient account of the change that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, in terms of a more intense attention paid to the Holocaust, when he attacked the ‘myth of silence’ in post-war France.16 The discussion on this issue is likely to continue and impact on our view on the conditions of the survivors, Jewish communities, and the relationships of post-war societies to the past. We nevertheless argue that for the first decades after the war, the idea of silence is misleading since it indicates an absence and thus disregards individuals and groups that were concerned about the genocide and its significance for Jewish history.17 This is particularly true for Jews in Sweden, who were—even during the war—well-informed about the

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magnitude of the catastrophe.18 Svante Hansson, a political scientist and one of the leading experts in the field of Jewish history in Sweden, has outlined some of the extensive Jewish social work conducted on behalf of the survivors coming to Sweden by Jewish congregations and several smaller associations, as well as the Swedish branches of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in Sweden and the World Jewish Congress (WJC).19 This work was accompanied by commemorative activities, initiatives to document the catastrophe for various purposes, and discussions on the Holocaust as shown in the present book. Five years before Dagerman’s book, in the autumn of 1942, the Swedish-Jewish historian Hugo Valentin published a widely read article on the ongoing extermination (‘utrotningskrig’) of the Jews in Europe, and he further developed his analysis during the post-war period.20 Already by December that same year, the first ceremony to commemorate the victims of the Jewish catastrophe was held in the Synagogue of Stockholm.21 The Jewish communities in Sweden developed new forms of memorialisation after the war, including commemorations for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Swedish-Jewish press were also closely covering the anti-Jewish developments in Germany from the 1930s, and in the immediate post-war period the two main journals Judisk Krönika and Judisk Tidskrift became arenas for discussing different aspects of the genocide in relation to Jewish identity,22 but the memory of the recent atrocities was also present in other post-war Jewish publications in Sweden, like Vår Röst, Yedioth (or Yedies), Congress Nyheter, Judiska hem, Unser Blatt, and Församlingsblad för Mosaiska församlingen i Stockholm. Jewish life also changed in Sweden at the end of the war and in its immediate aftermath. Many of the new Jewish arrivals in Sweden had first-­ hand experiences of the Nazi’s anti-Jewish policies. It was only natural that small Holocaust memorials were erected in Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö in the immediate post-war period, despite the fact that Swedish Jews had been spared. The memorial in Malmö, erected at the Jewish cemetery in 1949, contains ashes from Auschwitz.23 Other Jewish—as well as non-Jewish—initiatives were dedicated to collecting testimonies, which would serve both legal and historiographical purposes. This context is particularly important since these early initiatives prepared the groundwork for the later intense discussions on the Holocaust; it refutes the idea of a general silence in regard to the genocide, and shows instead the importance of going beyond this discussion in order to understand the conditions of the early work as well as its content.

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There is also evidence in our book that Jewish experiences impacted mainstream Swedish society in the late 1940s and entered the non-­ academic historiography to a larger extent than has been previously recognised. In media accounts of the liberations of camps and the Nuremberg trials, Jews were often mentioned with compassion as a group that had especially suffered. This was not the case in all Western democracies and formerly occupied countries where Jewish victims tended to be assimilated with other groups in press accounts.24 One reason, stressed in this volume, has to do with Sweden’s more active position in relation to the Jews during the second half of the war. This meant that the Jewish trauma could be linked to positive Swedish rescue actions instead of being associated with the disturbing politics of collaboration, as in the occupied countries. Important rescue actions included the successful rescue of the Danish Jews in October 1943, Raoul Wallenberg’s mission in Budapest, and the so-called White Buses operation that brought survivors from concentration camps to Sweden.25 Unlike much of the discussion regarding Sweden and the Holocaust today, the experiences of Jews tended to confirm a Swedish self-image of humanity and solidarity, and further justify its politics of neutrality. Aspects of the Holocaust were therefore often linked to the rescue efforts in the final stages of the war and used to strengthen a positive national self-image and support various kinds of progressive politics, rather than becoming a sensitive issue on the politics of collaboration relating to arrests and the deportations of Jews—as was true of Norway, for example.26 Moreover, if Sweden was mentioned at all in the early international Holocaust literature, it was foremost associated with the rescue of Danish Jews,27 suggesting that the painful memories of survivors in Sweden were less controversial than in several European nations following the war. With few exceptions, it was only from the late 1980s and the 1990s that this ultimately changed in a significant way with a shift in Nordic historiography on the Second World War, where Sweden’s refugee policies and concessions towards Nazi Germany were reconsidered and connected to the Holocaust. This was not least a result of the fact that an American historian, Steven Koblik, brought Sweden’s responses to the Holocaust into the evaluation of its relations to Germany and Nazism, while the public debate was more influenced by the journalist and author Maria-Pia Böethius’ book in 1991 on Sweden and the Second World War.28 The new turn in historiography has since then inspired a growing pluralism of scholarly interpretations of Sweden during the Holocaust.29

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Another contributing factor that certainly influenced Holocaust memory may have been that Sweden did not have returning prisoners of war or camp inmates that took an active part in the Resistance—groups that were celebrated as heroes and often gave voice to the camp experience rather than the Jewish survivors. Some intellectuals outside the Jewish community furthermore recognised early that the rise of Nazism was not only a human catastrophe, but also a specific Jewish trauma. This was true of the political scientist, writer, and newspaper editor Herbert Tingsten. He had a critical attitude towards the policy of neutrality and in the 1950s became increasingly interested in the situation of the Jews and the state of Israel. Tingsten’s interpretation and understanding of Nazi-Germany was fed by theories of totalitarianism that tended to obscure the specifics of the genocide of the Jews in the first post-war decades. He nevertheless identified antisemitism as a distinct feature of Nazism in comparison to Communism, stressed the guilt of the Western world to the Jews, and feared a new destruction of the Jewish people during the Suez crisis in 1956. Tingsten’s interest in these matters also inspired a younger generation of liberals that later defended Israel and stressed the importance of the memory of the Holocaust.30 He is furthermore not the only non-Jewish intellectual who addressed the genocide in the immediate post-war period.31

Theoretical Significance and Methodological Approach This book brings together scholars working on various aspects of Holocaust memory or Jewish history from a variety of theoretical and methodological backgrounds. While the field of memory studies has been characterised by a proliferation of various concepts and approaches—often with a similar focus—this volume uses the term memory in its basic sense as an umbrella concept for social processes which relate past and present in different sociocultural contexts.32 Instead of any psychological connotation of the concept, our approach emphasises the social aspects of memory: attitudes towards the past were established in communication and interplay between various individuals and groups. The historian Alon Confino has from a similar perspective described how memory can be understood as ‘a symbolic representation of tradition and of the past embedded in the context of social action’.33 One starting point for our project has also been to emphasise the social context of the circulation of representations of the

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past and interaction within and between various groups. Indeed, memory is only a shared experience insofar as it is shaped within various social frameworks, which Maurice Halbwachs already emphasised in his pioneering studies on the subject.34 This book also demonstrates that the memory of the Holocaust cannot be understood as a singular entity within Sweden, but rather exists in relation to various social communities with different attitudes towards the past. This was even more the case during the early post-war period, when the overall framework of interpretation was more fluid and in the making. The early reactions to the Holocaust were dependent upon both the Swedish post-war context and various international trends in the Jewish world. While historians such as Klas-Göran Karlsson have rightly situated the importance of Holocaust memory within a process of Europeanisation at the end of the Cold War, reflecting on its different roles within the cultural integration in Europe and national historical cultures,35 contributions in this volume emphasise how efforts to memorialise this catastrophe among Jews were early on influenced by transnational Jewish debates and commemorations. The Holocaust obviously pushed Jewish community leaders to interact and develop new networks both inside and outside Europe. Jews in Sweden were in fact represented on a ten-day historical European conference on Holocaust in Paris at the end of 1947,36 which marked the first serious attempt to initiate a Europeanisation of the Holocaust within the Jewish Diaspora.37 Most of the first Holocaust representations in Sweden, as mentioned above, did not, however, challenge national narratives about the success of Sweden’s neutrality, but rather simply added a Jewish experience of the recent past. In other cases, Jewish experiences were closely associated with other victim groups and tended to be diluted, while proposing a more universalist vision of Nazi atrocities and its victims. The dichotomy between a ‘particular interpretation’—understood as the emphasis of the Jewish nature of the genocide—and a ‘universal interpretation’ is central to how Holocaust memory has developed.38 The concept of universalisation can have various meanings in the context of Holocaust memory, but it is generally associated with the strategy of reaching a larger audience and emphasising the human significance of Nazi atrocities. This was the case, for example, with the Austrian sociologist Eugen Kogon and his influential book Der SS-Staat (1946), which had a general focus on Nazi persecution based on Kogon’s own experiences in Buchenwald where both Jewish and non-Jewish victims represented the universal evilness of Nazism.39

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This was even more prevalent in the French Marxist writer David Rousset’s L’univers concentrationnaire (1946). As the title of Rousset’s book suggests, he proposed a unitary vision of Nazi atrocities based on his experiences of Buchenwald and other camps, without marking the key differences between extermination and concentration camps.40 Such narratives only indirectly deal with contemporary understanding of the Holocaust. For the survivors of the Holocaust, lessons of democracy, freedom, and tolerance were not necessarily needed to create links to the past: universalisation was principally a way to incorporate non-Jewish groups, while discussions among Jews in Sweden tended to connect more with the impact of the trauma on Jewish history and identity. The tension between a more universal approach to Nazi atrocities and initiatives that points out and develops the singularity of the Jewish experiences is an overall conflict of interpretation during the first two decades after the war. This volume furthermore stresses the importance of justice in the formation of memory, which relates the findings in Sweden to that of other contexts. The relationship between justice and Holocaust memory is not necessarily directly related to trials, since there were no major official prosecutions in Sweden related to this genocide, besides a few informative tribunals involving Jews in Sweden (so-called honour courts, see Chap. 2). The relationship between justice and memory is foremost related to various forms of restorative justice, including the rehabilitation of victims and the quest for recognition. As Michael Rothberg points out in his book about ‘multidirectional memory’, no other single historical event encapsulates the struggles of recognition in relation to memory in such a condensed and global form as the Holocaust.41 Our book suggests that this was also the case during the early post-war period, irrespective of the fact that no major trials took place in Sweden. The quest for recognition played an important role among Jews in Sweden as elsewhere. While emphasising the social aspects of Holocaust memory, it is also important to explore how various aspects of the past have been rejected and selected.42 A fundamental manifestation of this process is the making of archives, which is an important focus in three of the contributions in this volume. It has become something of a cliché to associate archives with political domination and the power to control the past, taking a lead from Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.43 In relation to the Holocaust, however, the contributions in this volume emphasise that archives were also created for purposes linked to the social needs of survivors, such as tracing lost individuals, preparing civil processes of compensation, and as

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an act of resistance against the ambition to wipe out Jewish civilisation. Needless to say, the archives are also associated with different forms of memory politics, such as whether the initiatives came from Swedish refugee activists,44 Polish non-Jewish exile groups, or from Jews in Sweden. The archives studied in this book are small and vulnerable but have proven to be important places where memory is negotiated by various types of activists. Overall, contributions in this volume challenge the tendency within the field of memory studies to focus only on ‘discursive aspects’ of historical representations and isolate them from their origins and social contexts. Our aim has been to pay more attention to individuals or groups behind historical activities related to the Holocaust and, where possible, trace interests and intentions behind various activities. We have therefore favoured contributions based on archival research in addition to media representations and historiography. In general, archival research has been underestimated within memory studies resulting from a strong focus on contemporary culture and politics or on the history of ideas. This book includes actors and groups that have never before been the subject of scholarly study and we hope that these contributions will inspire further investigations into Swedish-Jewish history during the post-war period and will also be useful for comparative works in other contexts. In fact, this anthology shows that there are considerable archives and sources related to Swedish-Jewish post-war history, both within and beyond Sweden, that have not yet been used in research and can be of significant value for academics interested in Holocaust memory across Europe.

Sweden, the Holocaust, and the Surviving Remnant To understand post-war initiatives aimed at documenting and distributing knowledge of the Holocaust, it is important to remember the particular historical context for Jews in Sweden both before, during, and after the Holocaust. Post-war discussions were often built on existing information and knowledge about the genocide which had been reported in the Swedish-Jewish press. This was a result of Sweden’s geographic position, but also its position beyond the centre of events. Furthermore, Swedish Jews played an active role in international Jewish networks of organisations, and throughout the Nazi era introduced information and discussion about Nazi Germany and its various anti-Jewish policies and actions. The present section will also give an overview of where research on Sweden

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and the Holocaust sits today, two decades after ‘the small state paradigm’ lost much of its significance for research and national identity alike. In 1933, there were around 7000 Swedish Jews, of which some 4000 lived in Stockholm. There was a widespread belief in Sweden that the Jews constituted a problem for society, and anti-Jewish rhetoric, discrimination, and direct threats impacted Swedish Jews in their private and professional lives.45 At the same time, however, there was also a strong opposition towards Nazism and antisemitism in Sweden. This was especially true among intellectuals, the labour-movement, liberals, and the far left. Even a conservative, like the Conservative Party-leader Gösta Bagge, labelled antisemitism ‘a misfortune’ and ‘spiritual plague’ that ‘every sound country had to defend itself against’.46 Swedish immigration policy was still restrictive against foreign Jews and was motivated by a mix of general xenophobia, antisemitism, ideas about a pure Nordic race, and fear of foreign competition in the labour market. It was also compounded by the popular notion that there was an impending wave of mass immigration that would threaten order and security. The immigration authorities restricted the issuing of permits and visas to foreign Jews. Their guidelines stated that only Jews who had relatives or other close connections in Sweden could be considered for residence permits: these were needed for any stay more than three months. After negotiations between Swedish-­ Jewish representatives and government officials, two small transmigration quotas—one quota for pupils in a Jewish boarding school and one for youth pioneers in an agricultural re-training programme run by the Zionist Hechaluz movement—were created as a concession to the Jewish community. According to an estimate made by the Jewish Community of Stockholm, the total number of refugees (both Jewish and political) in Sweden by November 1938 was between 2700 and 3200.47 In 1938, anti-Jewish measures were still publicly acceptable in Germany. The developments in Germany impacted Swedish Jews who had close connections with German-Jewish communities and organisations as a result of previous immigration. A few days after the Pogroms of November 1938, Marcus Ehrenpreis, Chief Rabbi of Stockholm, spoke in the Stockholm and Norrköping synagogues. In the speech, he said that the date of the Pogroms would be a day of mourning in the same way as 9th Av, the date of the destruction of the Temple of Salomon in Jerusalem. Ehrenpreis explained that the Pogroms had made it clear for those who had not wanted to see, that the Germans were waging a war of destruction against the Jews. Although the inflow increased somewhat after the

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Pogroms of November, when two new transmigration quotas were introduced—one for 500 children who came without their parents through the Kindertransport movement and one quota for adults and families—few Jewish refugees made it to Sweden after the war broke out. The refugee aid was, thus, largely limited to a transmigration programme that would allow a small number of Jews to get out of Central Europe and stay in Sweden for a period of time before they could travel on to third countries, in particular to Palestine or the United States. Most of these refugees were from Germany and Austria, but there was also a small number of Jews from Poland and Czechoslovakia. The total number of refugees grew to around 4000 in January 1939 and reached 4800 in July of the same year. When the war broke out in September, the Swedish authorities were reluctant to issue new entry permits and visas. On 30 November 1939, the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union broke out, and on 9 April 1940, Denmark and Norway were invaded by Germany. With Sweden practically isolated and routes for further emigration closed, transmigration through Sweden was no longer an option for Jewish refugees. The number of Jewish refugees in Sweden steadily declined to around 4200 in January 1940, when it stabilised, as the influx of refugees nearly ceased entirely.48 Information about the genocide was received all over Europe in 1942, although the full details were unknown. However, for a long time, the news was not accepted, and the full implications were not understood.49 In Sweden, news of the atrocities that were carried out by the Germans against Jews in Poland, including the death marches from two Polish towns to the Soviet border, were published in Swedish-Jewish periodicals in late 1939. Refugees who had seen the terror with their own eyes continued to arrive, as did written reports and testimonies. During the Holocaust, the Swedish-Jewish press also reported on the information it had received about the ongoing mass murder. By this time, German Jews who had personal experience of the Nazi persecution, assaults, and violence, and whose relatives in many cases were still stuck in Germany and the occupied countries, had been arriving in Sweden for nearly a decade. For every two Swedish Jews there was approximately one Jewish refugee in Sweden. There are also thousands of personal letters from European Jews in the archive of the Jewish Community of Stockholm, many with photographs, requesting assistance.50 But Swedish Jews were not the only people well-apprised of the situation. The Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs received reports that Jews from Germany and the Netherlands,

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including women and children, had been deported to Poland throughout the autumn of 1941. There was frequent contact between the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Swedish-Jewish representatives.51 In the Swedish-Jewish periodical Judisk Krönika, the Pogroms, deportations, and incarceration in ghettos were reported in detail and could be followed month by month, and as early as December 1941, an account of a mass killing of Jews by the Nazis was published. In September 1942, the first part of a series of articles under the above-mentioned title ‘The War of Extermination against the Jews’ (‘Utrotningskriget mot judarna’) appeared, which reported that, according to sources in London, 700,000 Jews had been massacred in Poland, and listed a number of reported mass killings of tens of thousands of Jews in the Baltic countries and Eastern Europe. The report also included detailed descriptions of some of the massacres. The killings were seen as part of a policy of extermination of the Jews in Germany and the countries under the Nazi sphere of influence. In October, a version of the article was also published in Gothenburg’s anti-­ Nazi daily Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning. Accounts of the use of gas to kill Jews that referred to Chelmno were published by the periodical in October 1942. In November and December, there were several accounts of systematic killing, including the burying alive of Jewish children in Ukraine. Auschwitz was mentioned as the site of a concentration camp in April 1942 and an extermination site in November 1943. In Judisk Tidskrift, Ehrenpreis reported what was known of the mass murders. Many of the reports were not only unusually early, but also detailed. As previous researchers have pointed out, anyone who read the Jewish press during these years would have been well-informed about the ongoing genocide.52 Although Swedish-Jewish leaders and refugee aid-workers most likely read and discussed these reports, the ultimate aim of the deportations was still unknown in early 1942. The Swedish-Jewish relief committees were trying to trace deported Jews to send them food, clothes, and medicine, and they were also disseminating information to, and seeking information from, Jewish organisations in other countries. In the late summer of 1942, the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs received information from several sources of the mass murder of Jews. According to the Holocaust historian Paul A. Levine, there is little doubt that ministry officials had a ‘clear general picture’ of the German policy of extermination, having been informed of killings of Jews in Belgrade, deportations from France, killings of Jews in the Baltic region, and even accounts of gassings.53

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It has been argued that the anti-Jewish atrocities were perceived in Sweden as something that happened in Germany and did not concern Swedes. In general, people tend to establish a personal relationship to what is going on first when the terror strikes someone they know or with whom they identify. Arthur Koestler illustrated this in an article entitled ‘The Nightmare That is a Reality’ in New York Times Magazine in 1944: ‘A dog run over by a car upsets our emotional balance and digestion; three million Jews killed in Poland cause[s] but a moderate uneasiness. Statistics don’t bleed; it is the detail which counts. We are unable to embrace the total process with our awareness; we can only focus on little lumps of reality.’54 It is fair to say that although all the details and exact figures of Jewish casualties were not always accounted for, the Swedish-Jewish press did provide a surprisingly accurate picture of the nature of the German terror against the Jews. Just as in the earlier period, Swedish Jews were as well-­ informed as anyone could possibly be outside of Germany.55 During the autumn of 1942, it also became legitimate in Sweden to report openly and in detail about the terror and genocide in the mainstream press, but the real breakthrough for broader and more extensive accounts came shortly after the deportations of the Norwegian Jews. In the spring of 1943, the Swedish press associated the fate of Norwegian Jews with the ongoing genocide. Around 1100 of the Jews in Norway fled to Sweden, while 772 were deported, of which only 34 survived.56 In the late summer of 1943, the threat of deportation of the Jews in Denmark became imminent and apparent to both Swedish government officials and Jews in Sweden. Some 7220 Jews and 680 non-Jewish family members managed to escape from Denmark over the Sound to Sweden. Levine explains that the shift in Swedish policy was at least partly due to Scandinavian Jews being viewed as fellow Scandinavians and therefore met with sympathy in Sweden.57 Nevertheless, by the end of 1943, even the conservative journal Svensk Tidskrift published a four-page article under the same title as Valentin’s original ‘The War of Extermination against the Jews’. In it, the article explained that it was the deportation of Norwegian Jews that prompted an ‘almost unanimous’ reaction among Swedes and called the terror against the Jews in the heart of Europe a threat to both civilisation and humanity.58 The Swedish King’s intervention to stop deportations of Jews from Hungary on 30 June 1944, and Raoul Wallenberg and the Swedish legations’ efforts to save Jewish lives, came to represent the new and more active role of the Swedish government. Meanwhile, a small group of

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foreign Jews in Sweden who were tied to the World Jewish Congress, including Fritz Hollander, Norbert Masur, and Gilel Storch, managed to get in contact with Count Folke Bernadotte and Himmler’s physician and agent in Stockholm, Felix Kersten. This contact enabled negotiations with Himmler for the release of Jewish prisoners and their transport to Sweden with the Red Cross White Buses mission. The Swedish Red Cross mission in the spring of 1945 and the negotiations that led up to it have been described in detail in previous research. There has been heated debate around the fact that the Swedish Red Cross also agreed to help Germany transport around 2000 prisoners from the concentration camp Neuengamme—the location of the prisoners that were to be evacuated to Sweden—to other camps. Most of the prisoners died during or shortly after the transport.59 At the very end of the war and shortly thereafter, a large number of refugees came to Sweden, in particular through two operations—the Swedish Red Cross expedition and the so-called United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) action that took place in July and August 1945. The two operations more than doubled the Jewish population in Sweden. In total, between 11,500 and 12,000 individuals registered as liberated Jews came to Sweden in 1945 and 1946. Of these, around 3700 non-Scandinavian Jews arrived in Sweden with the White Buses mission in the spring and summer of 1945, and 900 Jewish survivors came later in 1945, while around 6900 came with the UNRRA transports in 1945 and 1946. Their arrival was recognised in the Swedish daily and weekly press and on national radio broadcasts. For instance, radio journalist Manne Berggren followed a group of around 200 survivors on the ship m/s Rönnskär from Lübeck to Malmö in May. Obviously shaken by the terrible condition of the refugees, he reported what he saw and interviewed some of the survivors. Another reporter, Sven Jerring, met the survivors on one of the ships on the docks of Malmö and interviewed them from the first refugee centre where they were assembled. Another 1200 Jews arrived in 1947, but by that year many had re-emigrated and the number of refugees and survivors that had stayed in Sweden was more or less the same as the number of Swedish Jews, around 7000.60 The liberated prisoners, who were evacuated to Sweden through the Red Cross expedition from the vicinities of Lübeck and Ravensbrück, largely came from countries in Eastern Europe. The UNRRA expedition primarily concerned itself with diseased concentration camp prisoners from Bergen-Belsen, but also a few individuals from the surroundings of

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that camp. Among these, the majority were from Eastern Europe. Humanitarian concerns aside, Swedish officials saw that this aid could give Sweden much-needed goodwill in the eyes of the Western Allies and strengthen its position economically as well as in terms of diplomacy and security.61 In cases where the health of the individuals allowed for it, refugees were initially placed in refugee camps, while many others were placed in hospitals, emergency hospitals, sanatoria, and convalescent homes. Initially, they were labelled repatriandi and were expected to return to their home countries as soon as the post-war turbulence had settled. However, during the summer of 1945, Jewish repatriandi began to fear that they would soon be forced to return: creating a stir above all among Polish Jews. Representatives of the Jewish Community in Stockholm made calls to the National Foreigners Commission (30/8), the Minister of Justice (1/9), and the Minister for Foreign Affairs (6/9), to petition for the repatriandi to be allowed to stay. The permissions were finally granted by the government in early October 1945.62 Following the two operations in 1945, there was the arrival of around 200 Jewish survivors whose nearest families were in Sweden. During the years 1946–1948, two additional categories of Jews arrived, the so-called ‘transmigrants’ and ‘skilled workers’, whose presence would cater to the needs of Swedish industry. These transmigrants and skilled workers mostly came from Poland and from German refugee camps. The 1946 Pogrom of Kielce in Poland resulted in individuals who came from threatened areas being considered most in need of entry permits. According to a report by a German-Jewish legal expert who escaped to Sweden in the 1930s, Dr Wilhelm Michaeli, the number of transmigrants and skilled workers would hardly have exceeded 2500. Michaeli stated that what drove these people to Sweden was not so much a wish to permanently settle, but more a feeling of insecurity and fear prompted by the situation in the countries of Eastern Europe, not least after the Kielce Pogrom. There were also political concerns among many refugees as news and first-hand accounts of the situation in the Eastern bloc reached Sweden. Between the years 1947 and 1950, a small number of Jews who had immigrated illegally came to Sweden from the countries in the Soviet Zone. Finally, three small groups of tuberculosis-infected refugees from camps in Central Europe were transferred to Sweden, where they received medical care.63 In Sweden, like elsewhere in so-called bystander nations, claims have been made that the Jewish leadership were passive or overly cautious due

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to fear of antisemitism. However, the limited scope of Swedish-Jewish aid was not due to a lack of effort or will, but rather attributable to the rigidity of the refugee policy in Sweden, which did not acknowledge persecuted Jews as ‘political refugees’.64 The Swedish-Jewish leaders closely cooperated with other Jewish and non-Jewish organisations on the national, transnational, and international levels. The aid to the ‘Redeemed of 1945’ in Sweden was carried out by a mix of state and private organisations that had built up experience of refugee aid during the war years and in the 1930s, often with activists who had come as refugees themselves. In addition to the official non-political Jewish Communities that were similar to the German Einheitsgemeinde, where all Jews irrespective of religious or political identification were members, there were also a number of organisations connected to the Zionist Organisation and the Jewish Agency for Palestine, as well as committees based on national origin. These organisations carried out their own fundraising campaigns, gave support to refugees in Sweden, and sent material relief to their brethren in ghettos and camps in Nazi Germany. A Swedish Section of the World Jewish Congress was created in 1944, although it already had individual representatives in Stockholm. The Jewish Communities in Stockholm and Gothenburg, however, chose not to join the WJC, as this would automatically affiliate all its members, including those who were opposed to the political agenda of the congress. In 1946 and 1947, when the aid work for Jewish survivors was at its most intense in Sweden, the Jewish Community of Stockholm alone had some sixty refugee aid-workers and around ten counsellors employed, along with many volunteers. Malmö had three counsellors, and counsellors were also employed in smaller towns where there was a considerable population of European Jews. Thirteen special Jewish boarding schools were created with more than 700 pupils. The adult Jews who arrived and survived (many of them were too weak or sick to recover), passed from the refugee camps to hospitals or sanatoria, after which they were supported in building a new life in Sweden or emigrating further.65 Before the war had ended, conflicts arose between Jews in Sweden about the response to the plight of their co-religionists, and about how the refugee aid and relief work should be carried out and by whom. The Swedish Section of the WJC hired its own social workers who travelled the country to the different refugee centres, hospitals, and homes where the survivors were located. This was viewed as unwelcome competition by the official Jewish communities. To make matters worse, the JDC in New

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York, that funded a large part of the Jewish communities’ relief, refused to work with the WJC in Sweden. Unfortunately, these political disputes, and personal feuds, have left a deep rift in the community’s collective memory of the period, and have influenced the way in which the Jewish response to Nazi atrocities and post-war relief efforts have been perceived.66

Content of the Book Nearly all the Jewish refugees and survivors who came to Sweden before, during, or in the wake of the Holocaust—regardless of whether they stayed, returned home, or migrated further—have left traces behind in archives and private collections. On arrival, they were registered by the Swedish Government and a file was created by the National Foreigners Commission with documentation about their personal information, whereabouts, health, and so on. The refugee camps, hospitals, and sanatoria also kept records of the survivors, as did many of the relief committees that came into contact with them. The Jewish Community of Stockholm’s relief committee moreover kept files with documents concerning all the Jewish refugees and survivors about whom it had received information, and together with the World Jewish Congress it organised a tracing service so that people could find out the fate of family members and in some cases help them to re-unite. The first three chapters in this volume deal with these documentation activities, focusing on three important projects to record the past during the period immediately after the war, both inside and outside the Jewish communities. The origins and purposes of these collections, as well as their content and further post-war fate, are an important aspect of memory politics in post-war Sweden. This is considering the fundamental role of archives in the preservation and formation of knowledge. One of those initiatives was a small Jewish historical commission in Stockholm, established under Nella Rost within the framework of the World Jewish Congress activities in Sweden. Rost was a journalist, teacher, and Jewish activist from Krakow, and before she arrived in Stockholm in 1946, she was involved in the Central Jewish Historical Commission’s branch in Krakow. Johannes Heuman’s chapter investigates the activities of Nella Rost and the Jewish Historical Commission in Stockholm, exploring its undertakings in Sweden in the immediate post-war period. Like most of the Jewish historical commissions and documentation centres in Europe, the one in Stockholm was only active a few years before Rost left

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for Uruguay. Heuman’s chapter shows the challenges and difficulties of establishing a Jewish Holocaust archive and underlines the importance of an international Jewish context—including the presence of a new Yiddish culture among refugees in post-war Sweden—for post-war memory. The dissolution of the archive is explained by external factors such as immigration from Sweden, lack of funds, and limited academic interest. Heuman furthermore argues that research within the field of memory studies should also pay attention to unsuccessful initiatives to record and commemorate the past. Nella Rost furthermore cooperated with the more well-known Polish Source Institute (Polski Instytut Źródłowy) in Lund in southern Sweden, which collected over 500 testimonies from Polish survivors in Sweden in the immediate post-war period. Izabela A. Dahl shows in her chapter that the Polish national experience was the focal point of this collection. However, the institute also created a small Jewish section for interviews with Polish-Jewish survivors in Sweden. The study analyses the work of the archive’s funder Zygmunt Łakociński with the overall aim to understand what role the Holocaust played in the documentation project. Although the Holocaust played a secondary role in this documentation project, the presence of these experiences was still markedly different to how the memory of this genocide was marginalised in communist Poland after the war. The Jewish testimonies describe life in Poland before and after the war, as well as the Jewish survivors’ arrival and experiences of Sweden. The recording of testimonies can also have a more specific purpose, linked to special needs among survivors. As mentioned, a recurring theme in this anthology is the strong link between memory and justice, which was also reflected in the category of testimonies that were not created in order to serve as sources for historical inquiry. Pontus Rudberg’s chapter deals with a collection of testimonies emanating from legal processes and shows how several bureaus were created under the auspices of the Jewish Community in Stockholm to provide legal aid to Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors making claims on Germany, Poland, and other countries between 1947 and 1950. From 1953, yet another bureau, The URO Bureau, was created as a national branch of the international United Restitution Organisation (URO) to assist individuals who wanted to file claims for restitution in lines with the German compensation laws of 1952. The files and documents of these bureaus are preserved in the community’s archive and include both the applicants’ personal testimonies and the

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final accounts that were part of the applications, drafted in the more objective and detached style that is typical of legal testimonies. Rudberg shows how claims for justice have influenced the narratives in these testimonies, both of what information they give about the Holocaust and different strategies of survival in different places and contexts, as well as the survivors’ everyday lives in the post-war period. There have been few studies using the first collection of testimonies and many of the witness accounts remain unexplored. This does not, however, mean that no historian dealt with the Holocaust in one way or another. The historian Hugo Valentin occupies a singular place within the history of early Swedish Holocaust memory. He was also a journalist, Zionist, and refugee activist involved in spreading knowledge about the Jewish catastrophe, helping its victims, and countering its repercussions in the post-­ war world. Through his efforts, Swedes became aware of the ongoing genocide, and during the first post-war decades he introduced international research and discussions on the topic. In his chapter, Olof Bortz takes a closer look at Valentin’s role as a purveyor of Holocaust memory from the war years until his death in 1963. The chapter draws mostly on the articles written by Valentin and published in both Jewish and non-­ Jewish journals and newspapers, but also on private correspondence and other forms of archival material. Bortz shows how Valentin’s approach to the genocide was caught up in the political struggles of his time. Ultimately, Valentin was less interested in commemorating the Holocaust as a symbol of modern Jewish martyrdom than in conveying what he saw as a political lesson associated with threats of antisemitism and assimilation. Valentin was, however, not the only historian or author in Sweden to deal with the Holocaust in the immediate post-war years. Karin Kvist Geverts’ chapter is a systematic review of early writings of the Holocaust published in Sweden in the 1940s and the 1950s. Kvist Geverts shows that, if non-academic writing is included, there were actually many books published that addressed this event. Her chapter shows that many Swedish books about the Second World War during the first post-war decade integrate various experiences of Jews and recognise the Jews as the major category of civilian victims of Nazi atrocities. However, Jewish victimhood tended to be represented in a particularly Swedish national narrative that focused on the country’s rescue operations and to a large extent concentrated on victims from the Scandinavian countries. Sweden was not portrayed as a bystander to the genocide but in a more self-glorifying light as the rescuer of Jews. Since no Jews were deported from Sweden, the

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traumatic experiences of the survivors in Sweden was not connected to any shameful politics of collaboration and was therefore a less controversial issue than in other European nations. History books about the Second World War did not, generally, have a direct impact on people’s thinking and, by extension, memories of the past. A more influential public arena in this regard was the Swedish press, where this volume also exposes differences between Sweden and other Western-European nations. Antero Holmila examines how the Swedish press responded to and framed the Holocaust immediately after the war. The liberation of the camps, the Nuremberg trials in 1945 and 1946, the ongoing problem of Jewish displaced persons in Europe, and, finally, the establishment of the state of Israel in spring 1948 were covered extensively in the Swedish press. Moreover, the fate of Jews under Nazi Germany formed an important element of such reporting. Holmila argues that the Swedish press regularly wrote about the Holocaust in the immediate post-­ war period. The reporting grappled with issues like the victims’ identities and their experiences, including gender, the acts, and motivations of perpetrators, and the European-wide geographical scope of the genocide. However, the tendency to universalise the experience in the camps to a human tragedy, without recognising different victim groups or differences between various camps, was also evident in Swedish post-war representations of the survivors. One of the most significant examples in this regard was the film Vittnesbördet [The Testimony]. The narrative followed a similar pattern to other films at this time with a didactic and propagandistic approach to Sweden’s policy of neutrality and the rescue activities. Working from a gender perspective, Kristin Wagrell argues that the camp survivors depicted in this important film embodied a normative view of the ‘exemplary victim’ that followed gendered stereotypes of how women, children, and men were assumed to act. Jewish survivors were indirectly exposed among non-Jewish survivors in the film, but at the same time were excluded from the narrative as they were never mentioned. The film was remade in 2011 with a new focus on Jewish victimhood. Wagrell argues, however, that both films demonstrate how conceptions of Swedish righteousness and benevolence at the end of the war continue to obscure the inherently complex experience of the victim-survivors who arrived in Sweden with the ‘White Buses’ mission. It is also important to consider local and regional perspectives regarding the various ways in which survivors were represented after the war. Ulf Zander, who has written extensively about various aspects of Holocaust

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memory, argues in his chapter that there in general have been relatively few attempts to supplement the many analyses of the nationalisation, Europeanisation, or globalisation of the Holocaust with local or regional perspectives when it comes to studying the reactions to the genocide of the European Jews or the attempts to get a grip with the catastrophe and its significant implications for post-war societies. Zander focuses on the arrival in the south of Sweden of Jewish refugees in October 1943 and during the spring of 1945 and shows how the Holocaust was discussed, analysed, and processed in local newspapers and by regional authorities in the Swedish-Danish borderlands. In this context, Ramlösa spa and hospital, where many refugees lived for a short period, became a significant symbol of humanity and peacefulness. Although Zander and even more Holmila show that Jewish experiences were to some degree acknowledged in the Swedish press in the immediate post-war period, especially when they could be linked to Swedish rescue activities and contribute to a positive national self-image, the debate on the Holocaust was, of course, more intense and had a more profound character within the Swedish-Jewish press. In her chapter, Malin Thor Tureby examines the Jewish public discourse of the Holocaust during the first decade after the war, with a particular focus on the survivors. While the Swedish-Jewish press became an important arena for discussing the Holocaust in various ways, Thor Tureby also identifies a silence regarding survivors in Sweden, especially women, as their voices and experiences were not commonly present in the two main Swedish-Jewish publications. The absence of Jewish survivors in the two main Swedish-Jewish journals continued until the mid-1950s, when perceptions of the survivors altered as a result of larger changes among Jews following the integration of refugees. The survivors were at that time no longer seen as temporary guests. For the Jewish community in Sweden, the post-Holocaust period was a time of reflection on identity and belonging in connection to the genocide and also the creation of Israel. An important aspect of the discussions on the recent traumatic past concerned questions of justice and a desire for retribution in the shadow of different kinds of legal processes. Julia Sahlström’s chapter investigates the memory of the Holocaust in the Swedish-Jewish community by focusing on the discussion concerning justice. The chapter concentrates on the period around the Nuremberg trials in the late 1940s and the Eichmann trial in the early 1960s. Sahlström traces how the legal processes influenced the discussion and at the same time inspired various demands for justice among Jews in Sweden.

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Sahlström finds that the Nuremberg trials did not influence the discussion among Jews in a significant way, as it did among non-Jews. The Eichmann trial, on the other hand, had a stronger impact and during the trial demands of justice were largely connected to questions of recognition and acknowledgement of the suffering of the victims. The volume ends with a conclusive reflection by Hasia R. Diner, who makes a comparative outlook on how American Jews’ memorialisation of the Holocaust in the post-war years was associated with their commitment to liberalism. They manifested this in their political behaviour but also in the ways they defined and presented their religion and civic activities. In a similar way, Swedish Jews, and even more non-Jews, expressed a rather positive commitment to Swedish society where the rescue missions became a bedrock of hope for a better future, juxtaposed against the horrors and tragedies of the Holocaust.

Notes 1. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 184–188. 2. On the Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson, the Middle East policy, and Holocaust memory, see Daniel Schatz, Leaders Matter. Foreign Policy Change in Sweden’s Middle East Policy 1999—200 (PhD Diss., Humboldt-­ Universität, 2017). 3. Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 4. David Weinberg, Recovering a Voice. West European Jewish Communities after the Holocaust (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2015). 5. Johan Östling, ‘The Rise and Fall of Small-State Realism. Sweden and the Second World War’, in Nordic Narratives of the Second World War. National Historiographies Revisited, eds. Henrik Stenius, Mirja Österberg, and Johan Östling (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2011), 127–130. 6. Alf W. Johansson, ‘Neutrality and Modernity. The Second World War and Sweden’s National Identity’, in War Experience, Self Image and National Identity. The Second World War as Myth and History, eds. Stig Ekman and Nils Edling (Stockholm: Gidlunds förlag, 1997), 176. See also Östling, ‘The Rise and Fall’, 128. 7. Orvar Löfgren, ‘Att nationalisera moderniteten’, in Nationella identiteter i Norden. Ett fullbordat projekt? Sjutton nordiska undersökningar, eds. Jan Olof Nilsson and Anders Linde-Laursen (Stockholm: Nordiska rådet 1991), 101–115; Andreas Johansson Heinö, Farväl till folkhemmet. Frihet,

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jämlikhet och sammanhållning i invandrarlandet Sverige (Falun: Timbro, 2016). 8. See for example, Annette Wieviorka, Déportation et genocide. Entre la mémoire et l’oubli (Paris: Plon, 1992); Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination. A Social and Cultural History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Steven E. Ashheim, Culture and Catastrophe. German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises (New York: New York University Press, 1996); David S. Wyman, ed., The World Reacts to the Holocaust (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life. The American Experience (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999); Pieter Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation. Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Klas-Göran Karlsson and Ulf Zander, eds., Echoes of the Holocaust. Historical Cultures in Contemporary Europe (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2003). 9. Tony Judt, Postwar. A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin, [2005] 2010), 829. 10. Stig Dagerman, German Autumn (London: Quartet Book, 1988). 11. Johan Östling, Sweden after Nazism. Politics and Culture in the Wake of the Second World War (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016). 12. See for example, Karin Kvist Geverts and Antero Holmila, ‘On Forgetting and Rediscovering the Holocaust in Scandinavia. Introduction to the Special Issue on the Histories and Memories of the Holocaust’, Scandinavian Journal of History 36, no. 5 (2011), 520–535. See also, Harald Runblom, ‘Sweden and the Holocaust from an International Perspective’, in Sweden’s Relations with Nazism, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. A Survey of Research, eds. Stig Ekman & Klas Åmark (Stockholm: Swedish Research Council, 2003), 197–249. 13. Hasia R. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love. American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York: NYU Press, 2009). 14. See, for example: Jockusch, Collect and Record!; Boaz Cohen, Israeli Holocaust Research. Birth and Evolution (New York: Routledge, 2012); David Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist, eds., After the Holocaust. Challenging the Myth of Silence (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012); Johannes Heuman, Holocaust and French Historical Culture, 1945–65 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Regina Fritz, Eva Kovács and Béla Rásky, eds., Als der Holocaust noch keinen Namen hatte (Vienna: New Academic Press, 2012); Judith Lindenberg, Premiers savoirs de la Shoah (Paris: CNRS, 2017); Simon Perego, ‘Introduction’, Archives Juives. Revue d’histoire des Juifs de France 51, no. 2 (2018): 4–17; Jan Schwarz, Survivors and exiles. Yiddish culture after the Holocaust (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press,

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2015); Norman Erwin, Confronting Hitler’s Legacy. Canadian Jews and Early Holocaust Discourse, 1933–1956 (PhD Diss., University of Waterloo, 2014); Malena Chinski, Memorias olviadadas. Los judíos y la recordación de la Shoá en Buenos Aires, 1942–1956 (PhD Diss., Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, 2017). 15. François Azouvi, Le mythe du grand silence. Auschwitz, les Français, la mémoire (Paris: Fayard, 2012). 16. Simon Perego, ‘La mémoire avant la mémoire? Retour sur l’historiographie du souvenir de la Shoah dans la France de l’après-guerre’, 20&21. Revue d’histoire, no. 145 (January-March 2020): 77–90. 17. On the idea of a post-war silence in Sweden, see Ingrid Lomfors, ‘Inledning’, in Judiska minnen. Berättelser från Förintelsen, ed. Britta Johansson (Stockholm: Nordiska museet, 2000). This is also a common among survivors, see for example ‘Förintelsen Del 3/3. Att bryta tystnaden’ (Documentary), Swedish Radio (Jan. 24, 2019). We do not argue that such experiences among survivors are wrong but should be nuanced from the background of what was done among Jews regarding Holocaust memory. 18. Pontus Rudberg, The Swedish Jews and the Holocaust (Abingdon and New York: Routledge 2017). 19. Svante Hansson, Flykt och överlevnad. Flyktingverksamhet i Mosaiska församlingen i Stockholm 1933–1950 (Stockholm: Hillelförlaget, 2004), chapters 14–15. 20. ‘Utrotningskriget mot judarna’, Judisk Krönika 11, no. 7 (1942), 101–102. 21. Rudberg, The Swedish Jews, 202. 22. Malin Thor Tureby, ‘Swedish Jews and the Jewish survivors. The first public narratives about the Survivors in Swedish-Jewish Press’, Reaching a state of hope. Refugees, immigrants and the Swedish welfare state, 1930–2000, eds. Mikael Byström and Pär Frohnert (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2013). For an analysis on Judisk Krönika and Israel, see Karin Sjögren, Judar i det svenska folkhemmet. Minne och identitet i Judisk krönika 1948–1958 (Lund: Brutus Östlings förlag Symposion 2001). 23. Tanja Schult, ‘Gestaltningen och etablering av Förintelseminnet i Sverige’, Nordisk judaistik. Scandinavian Jewish Studies, 27, no. 2 (2016): 3–21; Tanja Schult, ‘Frühe Holocausterinnerung in Schweden. Denkmäler für Ermordete und Gerettete’, in eds. Regina Fritz, Eva Kovács and Béla Rásky, Als der Holocaust noch keinen Namen hatte, 263–284. 24. Antero Holmila, Reporting the Holocaust in the British, Swedish and Finnish Press, 1945–50 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Ulf Zander, ‘To Rescue or be Rescued. The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen and White Buses in British and Swedish Historical Culture’, in eds. Klas-Göran Karlsson and

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Ulf Zander, The Holocaust on Post-War Battlefields. Genocide as Historical Culture (Malmö: Sekel, 2006), 343–83; Malin Thor Tureby, ‘Svenska änglar och hyenor möter tacksamma flyktingar. Mottagningen av befriade koncentrationslägerfångar i skånsk press under året 1945’, Historisk tidskrift, 135, no. 2 (2015), 266–300. For visual representations of the Holocaust (and the Second World War), see Ulf Zander, ‘World War II at 24 Frames a Second. Scandinavian Examples’, in Historicizing the Uses of the Past. Scandinavian Perspectives on History Culture, Historical Consciousness and Didactics of History related to World War II, eds. Helle Bjerg, Claudia Lenz, and Erik Thorstensen (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011), 207–225; Max Liljefors, Bilder av Förintelsen. Mening, minne, kompromettering (Lund: Argos/Palmkrons Förlag, 2002). 25. On the shifting memory of these activities, see Ulf Zander, ‘Swedish Rescue Operations during the Second World War. Accomplishments and Aftermath’, in The Holocaust as Active Memory. The Past in the Present, eds. Marie Louise Seeberg, Irene Levin and Claudia Lenz (London and Burlington: Ashgate, 2013), 165–185; Ulf Zander, Förintelsens Röda nejlika. Raoul Wallenberg som historiekulturell symbol (Stockholm: Forum för levande historia, 2012); Tanja A Schult, Hero’s many faces. Raoul Wallenberg in contemporary monuments (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Kristian Gerner, ‘The Holocaust and Memory Culture. The Case of Sweden’, in Historicizing the Uses of the Past, eds. Bjerg, Lenz, & Thorstensen (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011), 91–106. 26. Synne Corell, ‘The Solidity of a National Narrative. The German Occupation in Norwegian History Culture’, in eds. Henrik Stenius, Mirja Österberg and Johan Östling, Nordic Narratives of the Second World War. National Historiographies Revisited (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2011), 101–125. 27. Gerald Reitlinger, The final solution. The attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945 (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1953), 349–351 and 332; Raul Hilberg, The destruction of the European Jews (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985), 556–568 and 850–851; Léon Poliakov, Bréviaire de la haine. Le IIIe Reich et les Juifs (Paris: Calomann-Lévy, 1951), 207; Leni Yahil, The rescue of Danish Jewry. Test of a democracy (Philadelphia, 1969), chapter 9. See also Hasia R. Diner’s chapter in this volume. 28. Maria-Pia Boëthius, Heder och samvete. Sverige och andra världskriget (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1991); Steven Koblik, The Stones Cry Out. Sweden’s Response to the Persecution of the Jews 1933–1945 (New York: Holocaust Library, 1988); Paul A.  Levine, From Indifference to Activism. Swedish Diplomacy and the Holocaust, 1938–1944 (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 1996).

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29. See for example, Lars M. Andersson and Mattias Tydén (eds.), Sverige och Nazityskland. Skuldfrågor och moraldebatt (Dialogos, Stockholm, 2007); Klas Åmark, Att bo granne med ondskan. Sveriges förhållande till nazismen, Nazityskland och Förintelsen (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 2011); Stig Ekman, Klas Åmark and John Toler (eds.), Sweden’s relations with Nazism, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. A survey of research (Stockholm: Swedish Research Council, 2003); John Gilmour, Sweden, the Swastika and Stalin. The Swedish experience in the Second World War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). See also Östling, ‘The Rise and Fall’, 141–142. 30. David Andersson, Med skuldkänslan som drivkraft. Om svenska Israelvänner och västfiender (Stockholm: Timbro 2017). 31. See Karin Kvist Geverts’ chapter in this volume. 32. Astrid Erll, Memory in culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 7. 33. Alon Confino, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance. Promises and Limits of Writing History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 32. 34. Halbwachs, Maurice, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (New York: Arno P., 1975[1952]). See also, Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 15. 35. See for example, Klas-Göran Karlsson, ‘The Uses of History and the Third Way of Europeanization’, in A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance, eds. Małgorzata Pakier and Bo Stråth (New York: Berghahn, 2010). 36. Les Juifs en Europe (1939–1945). Rapports présentés à la première conférence européenne des commissions historiques et des centres de documentations juifs (Paris: Éditions du Centre, 1949). 37. Heuman, Holocaust and French Historical Culture, chap. 4. 38. Levy and Sznaider, Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, 7. 39. Tom Lawson, Debates on the Holocaust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 21. 40. Samuel Moyn, A Holocaust Controversy. The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2005), 2; David Rousset, L’univers concentrationnaire (Paris: Éditions du Pavois, 1946). 41. Rothberg, Multidirectional memory, 6. 42. Confino, Germany as a culture of remembrance, 32. 43. Jacques Derrida, Archive fever. A Freudian impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Joan M.  Schwartz and Terry Cook, ‘Archives, Records, and Power. The Making of Modern Memory’, Archival Science 2, no. 1–2 (2002): 1–19.

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44. Einar Tegen and Gunhild Tegen, De dödsdömda vittna. Enquêtesvar och intervjuer (Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 1945). 45. Henrik Bachner, ‘Judefrågan’. Debatt om antisemitism i 1930-talets Sverige (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2009); Sven Nordlund, Affärer som vanligt. Ariseringen i Sverige 1933–1945 (Stockholm: Sekel, 2009); Rudberg, The Swedish Jews and the Holocaust; Berndt Hermele, När de kommer så skjuter jag oss. Om svenska judars liv i skuggan av Förintelsen (Stockholm: Lind & Co, 2018). 46. Rune Bokholm, Tisdagsklubben. Om glömda antinazistiska sanningssägare i svenskt -30 och -40-tal (Stockholm: Atlantis 2001); Hugo Valentin, Judarna i Sverige (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1964), 178–186. Bagge is quoted in Valentin, Judarna i Sverige, 178. 47. Hans Lindberg, Svensk flyktingpolitik under internationellt tryck 1936–1941 (Stockholm: Allmänna förlaget, 1973); Karin Kvist Geverts, Ett främmande element i nationen. Svensk flyktingpolitik och de judiska flyktingarna 1938–1944 (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2008); Hansson, Flykt och överlevnad; Rudberg, The Swedish Jews, 36–42; Gunnar Josephson, ‘Our Work for the Refugees’, Församlingsblad för Mosaiska Församlingen i Stockholm, August 1947 (English ed.); Wilhelm Michaeli, ‘P.  M. über die jüdische Einwanderung nach Schweden der Jahre 1933–1945’ [1945], O. 74: 29, Yad Vashem Archives. For a study of the Swedish branch of the Hechaluz movement, see, Malin Thor Tureby, Hechaluz. En rörelse i tid och rum. Tysk-judiska ungdomars exil i Sverige 1933–1943 (Växjö: Växjö Universitet, 2005). 48. Rudberg, The Swedish Jews, 111–112, 159–160, 173. 49. Richard Breitman and Walter Laqueur, Breaking the Silence. The Secret Mission of Eduard Schulte, Who Brought the World News of the Final Solution (London: Bodley Head, 1986); Richard Breitman, Official Secrets. What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew (London: Allen Lane, 1999); Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret. An Investigation into the Suppression of Information about Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980). 50. Rudberg, The Swedish Jews, 50–52; 162–164. 51. Levine, From Indifference to Activism, 116–119; Rudberg, The Swedish Jews, 188–189. 52. Ingvar Svanberg and Mattias Tydén, Sverige och Förintelsen. Debatt och dokument om Europas judar (Stockholm: Dialogos, 2005), 205–206; Åmark, Att bo granne med ondskan, 259; Rudberg, The Swedish Jews, 188–199. 53. Levine, From Indifference to Activism, 116–119. 54. Arthur Koestler, ‘The Nightmare That is a Reality’, New York Times Magazine, January 1944, 5, 8.

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55. Nordlund, Affärer som vanligt, 119; Koestler, ‘On Disbelieving Atrocities’; Rudberg The Swedish Jews, 162–164; 189–199. 56. Levine, From indifference to activism, 103, 280, 282; Åmark, Att bo granne med ondskan, 259–261. 57. Levine, From indifference to activism. See also Mikael Byström, En broder, gäst och parasit. Uppfattningar och föreställningar om flyktingar och flyktingpolitik i svensk offentlig debatt 1942–1947 (Stockholm: Stockholm University, 2006). 58. ‘Utrotningskriget mot judarna’, Svensk Tidskrift, 31 December 1943, 16–19. 59. Sune Persson, Escape from the Third Reich. The Harrowing True Story of the Largest Rescue Effort inside Nazi Germany (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2009); Ingrid Lomfors, Blind fläck. Minne och glömska kring svenska Röda korsets hjälpinsats i Nazityskland 1945 (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2005). See also Lena Einhorn, Handelsresande i liv. Om vilja och vankelmod i krigets skugga (Stockholm: Prisma, 1999). 60. Ivar Philipson, Församlingsblad för Mosaiska församlingen i Stockholm, August 1947, English ed. For a survey of the numbers of Jewish survivors that came to Sweden, see Hansson, Flykt och överlevnad, 278–284. 61. Richard Breitman has stressed Sweden’s need of a better image in the eyes of the Allies as one of the major motivations to the country’s involvement in rescue activities for Jews during the last war year; see Richard Breitman, ‘American Rescue Activities in Sweden’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 7, no. 2 (1993): 202–215. 62. Protocol of the Executive Board meeting of the Jewish Community of Stockholm, 8 October 1945, Huvudarkivet, A1 a: 114, Judiska församlingen i Stockholms arkiv (Archive of the Jewish Community of Stockholm), Riksarkivet ([Swedish] National Archives). 63. Wilhelm Michaeli, Ersättning åt offer för nationalsocialistisk förföljelse (Bundesentschädigungsgesetz) och därmed sammanhängande spörsmål (Stockholm: Nordiska bokhandeln, 1957), 77–78. 64. Hansson, Flykt och överlevnad; Rudberg, The Swedish Jews. 65. Pontus Rudberg is currently working on a major research project, funded by the Swedish Research Council, about the rehabilitation and integration of Holocaust survivors in Sweden. 66. Pontus Rudberg, ‘A Record of Infamy.’ The Use and Abuse of the Image of the Swedish Jewish Response to the Holocaust’, Scandinavian Journal of History 36, no. 5 (2011): 536–554.

CHAPTER 2

In Search of Documentation: Nella Rost and the Jewish Historical Commission in Stockholm Johannes Heuman

Interest in archives within memory studies often tends to concentrate on the political aspects of control and mastery of the past. One important reason for this is that archives are associated with the development of the modern state and, as such, they are institutions connected to the process of selecting, categorising, and making knowledge of the past available to society. To understand the nature of archives, French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s well-known essay on the subject serves as a recurring reference point. Derrida explained in a footnote the relationship between political power and archives in a rather straightforward way, which indeed echoes much of the theoretical reflections on memory and archives: ‘There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory’.1 These collections of documents are indeed vulnerable to political change. But instead of viewing archives as a political tool, one could also turn Derrida’s statement on its head: archives are unlikely to survive throughout the

J. Heuman (*) Jönköping University, Jönköping, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Heuman, P. Rudberg (eds.), Early Holocaust Memory in Sweden, The Holocaust and its Contexts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55532-0_2

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generations without some kind of political support. As part of cultural heritage, archives can both be forgotten and, in some cases, simply dissolved due to a lack of interest or support. This was the fate of several Jewish archives, formed by historical commissions, and documentation centres immediately after the Second World War. These small groups collected documents and presented alternative narratives in the context of rising patriotic memories of the Second World War in Europe. They operated under difficult circumstances such as the context in the so-called displaced persons’ (DP) camps or in nations that fell under Soviet control. Most of these archives disappeared after only a few years due to a lack of support and their activities have, until recently, been neglected.2 The conservation drive, to use Derrida’s terminology, was to rehabilitate the victims in various ways, but the outcome of these documentation projects varied as they struggled to survive the transition of various political regimes during the post-war period. These archives are also closely associated with Jewish immigration within Europe and to Israel and the United States in the late 1940s. The work of these early activists is nevertheless of great value to historians interested in the genocide itself, and it is also an important part of the post-war social and cultural history of Jews in Europe, including the transnational Jewish memory of this catastrophe. It is argued in this book that the latter is of particular importance when seeking to understand the development of Holocaust memory during the post-war period. The present study will analyse one of these less successful documentation projects: one that was both dissolved and consigned to obscurity. The focus is on a small Jewish historical commission in Stockholm, also called the Historical Commission (Historiska Kommissionen), established by the Polish-Jewish activist, journalist, and teacher Nella Rost (1900–1988), within the context of the activities of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) in Sweden. While the documentation project of Zygmunt Łakociński in Lund (Polish Source Institute) and Einar and Gunhild Tegen’s collection of testimonies in Sweden are, at least in a Swedish context, better-known among researchers interested in the period, Rost’s work in Stockholm is less known. This is partly because she only stayed in Sweden for five years, working for the Swedish Section of the WJC between 1946 and 1951, but also due to the lack of historical research on important aspects of Jewish life in post-war Sweden.3 Nevertheless, Rost wanted to spread knowledge about the genocide in the immediate post-war period and already in the 1940s, she had made small contributions to what is today called Holocaust

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Studies—as the field started to grow in the Jewish world within similar documentation projects mostly outside academic institutions.4 Rost’s activities in Sweden offer an important view on how Holocaust memory was formed under the influence of an international Jewish context, including the presence of Yiddish culture among refugees and survivors in the immediate post-war period. By analysing a dissolved archive, we can furthermore illuminate the making of memory from a viewpoint that also pays attention to the fragility of knowledge, and not only its successful breakthrough into society, for instance, in terms of historical research and museum exhibitions. The purpose of this chapter is, therefore, both to show the ways in which the activities of Rost contributed to Holocaust memory in Sweden, and also on a more general level to illuminate how forgotten and dispersed archives could be the subject of research within the field of memory studies. What kind of documents were collected and for what purpose? In what way was the Holocaust represented by Rost and her co-workers? What happened to this Holocaust archive in Sweden? The title of the study, ‘In Search of Documentation’, is admittedly a summary not only of the activities of the Historical commission in Stockholm, but also of my own initial struggle to find relevant documents about this commission and the archive. This eventually gave some results partly with thanks to the assistance of a Rabbi in Cincinnati in the United States and other helpful colleagues.5 The evidence of Rost’s activities can be found in Stockholm, Warsaw, Lund, Heidelberg, Paris, Montevideo and Jerusalem, as well as in other archives that have not been consulted here. Although the subject here is a rather extraordinary survivor of the Holocaust, the methodological approach is nevertheless inspired by how scholars of microhistory tend to work with a variety of sources and a narrow focus on one individual in order to understand a larger context. The present study follows in a rather nondogmatic way the microhistorical shift within the field of Holocaust studies that was expanded in the 1980s,6 but with a focus instead on the aftermath of the genocide. Indeed, a narrow focus might better expose the complex process of memorialisation and historicisation among survivors and ultimately provide a richer understanding of the first attempts to collect and communicate knowledge of this genocide. In this case, however, Rost appears as one of the key actors among Jewish immigrants in Sweden when it comes to the history and memory of the recent past, and she was also involved in several important initiatives beyond the making of an archive. The study does not, nor does

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it claim to, give the full picture of Rost’s extensive activities in relation to the memory of the Holocaust, but instead highlights some important features of her activities. This chapter starts with some elements of Rost’s biography, before shifting attention to the foundation of a Holocaust archive in Stockholm, and outlining the historical perceptions and representations that were communicated by Rost in the context of her work within the Swedish Section of the WJC. The chapter ends with a look at the post-war fate of the archive and expands the chronology beyond the immediate post-war period.

From Jewish Life in Krakow to Post-War Stockholm Nella Rost is a typical survivor of the Holocaust in one important aspect: much of her background and activities before the Second World War belong to the now vanished Jewish-Polish culture and, as such, we only have fragments of information about her life at that time. Her activities in Sweden are closely related to the first generation of survivor-historians and memory activists, often working in various documentation centres and Jewish historical commissions in Europe, some of them in the displaced-­ persons camps. But her formation as a Jewish activist was also due to her interwar experiences. Born in 1900  in Krakow,7 as the daughter of the well-known rabbi and Zionist Ozjasz (Yehoshua) Thon (1870–1936) who was also a member of the Polish parliament during the interwar period, Rost was from a family with a strong sense of Jewish religion and culture, and one that was also involved politically in the Zionist cause as well as national politics in Poland. She would later write a short biography of her father and describe the Jewish milieu that was shaped by the Talmudic tradition and a political activism associated with the Zionist movement. Her father worked for the establishment of the WJC as a member of its general council. He was a close friend of Marcus Ehrenpreis, the legendary chief rabbi (1914–1948) of Stockholm, whom he met in Lemberg (Lviv) and as a student in Berlin.8 This connection was important for her integration into Jewish life in Sweden. With this background, it was not surprisingly that Nella Rost turned both to academic studies and political activism. In 1918, Rost enrolled at Jagiellonian University in Krakow and studied humanities and later also took a master’s degree in law. During the post-war period, she was often presented as a doctor in literature, but this degree was probably taken at another university since her doctoral thesis could not be found at the

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Archives of Jagiellonian University. Rost also worked as a Polish and French language teacher in Jewish Schools and as a private tutor during the interwar period.9 With a population of 60,000 Jews, Jewish life in Krakow developed during the interwar period as a unique subculture within Polish society, with a number of Jewish newspapers, schools, and organisations. At the same time, the Jews in Krakow began a process of integration, interrupted by the Second World War, and educated Jews tended to be more integrated within Polish society compared to other cities in Poland. During the 1930s, Rost emerged as a prominent advocate of Jewish education, but she was equally well-integrated into Polish non-­ Jewish culture and education.10 Rost was furthermore an established writer in the Polish-Jewish press, in particular the biweekly newspaper supplement ‘The Jewish Woman’s Voice’ to the Nowy Dziennik (The New Daily), a Polish-language Krakow-based Jewish newspaper, interested both in Zionism and women’s rights—subjects which Rost addressed in a number of leading articles on the front page.11 This publication served as the press organ of the Women’s International Zionist Organisation (WIZO) of Western Poland and Silesia. Rost played also an active role within the regional leadership of the WIZO movement. This activism within WIZO continued after the War through its Swedish branch. While Rost appears to have found prosperity in the interwar period— she also married the physician and communist activist Bronislaw Rost and had one son, Gabriel Yosef Rost who was born in 1928—the Second World War and the Holocaust was devastating. Like most of the memory activists and early historians of the Holocaust, Rost had direct experiences of Nazi persecution. She was deported to several camps, including the concentration camp Plaszow bei Krakau and Montepulich prison in Krakow, and escaped with the help of the Jewish underground in summer of 1944 and lived in the forest around Warsaw until the liberation.12 Rost’s husband was assassinated by the Germans and her son died in the gas chambers of Belzec in 1942 or in the Montelupich Prison in Krakow. She would become one of the first experts on the Belzec death camp after the war, recording and publishing the key testimony of Rudolf Reder, one of the few survivors, along with her own introduction and detailed descriptions of the camp.13 It is difficult to analyse this kind of history writing in terms of established concepts within the history of historiography, but there was obviously a strong moral dimension that was crucial for this first generation of historians and memory activists. Among the various ways to handle or not handle a personal trauma of this scale, Rost’s approach was

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to join the Krakow branch of the Central Jewish History Commission so as to contribute to the first documentation and historiography of the Holocaust. It is within the framework of the Central Jewish Historical Commission that Rost developed into a non-academic researcher of the Holocaust. In this respect, she was also part of a larger movement beyond the Jewish world. Several national historical commissions and documentation centres appeared in the wake of the Second World War that integrated historians, lawyers, and activists that contributed to establish and reshape the field of contemporary history.14 Under the leadership of the historian Filip Friedman, who was trained as a professional historian prior to the War, the Central Jewish Historical Commission and its different branches in Poland collected documentation, recorded witness accounts, and prepared publications about the Holocaust. Testimonies were collected both to serve history writing and legal processes. Rost served as the vice-director in the district commission in Krakow.15 Together with two other prominent early Holocaust historians, Joseph Wulf and Michel Borwicz, she published at least three books with various testimonies and other sources that detailed the Holocaust in 1945–1946. One of them was a rather extensive book in Polish about the Krakow ghetto, including literature that was written in the ghetto.16 The activists within the Central Jewish Historical Commission sought in this way also to preserve traces of Jewish life in Poland and its different cultural expressions. Wulf and Borwicz were part of Rost’s network of early Holocaust historians, and thus important to her formation as an activist and writer. While Borwicz first moved to Sweden and then settled in Paris to start up his own documentation centre and wrote a dissertation on various kinds of writings during the Holocaust, Wulf moved to Paris for a few years before settling in Berlin in the early 1950s to continue his writings about the Holocaust.17 Their departure from Poland was predictable since the situation rapidly changed, with initial hopes of reconstructing Jewish life among the remaining survivors coming to nothing. Friedman realised early on that research on ‘Khurbn’ had no future in Poland. He left in July 1946 for a new assignment in the US Zone in Germany, before being integrated as a research fellow at the Columbia University in New York thanks to the well-known professor Salo Baron who had taught Friedman in Vienna during the interwar period.18 Several other co-workers within the Central Jewish Historical Commission also left at this point. Indeed, 4 July witnessed the violent Kielce Pogrom where over forty Jews were

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killed by Polish soldiers, police officers, and civilians—a symptom of the strong antisemitic currents that created a wider social malaise among Jews.19 In this political context, it was not surprisingly that Rost also emigrated at the end of April 1946 to work for the WJC in Stockholm. The World Jewish Congress is in an international umbrella federation of Jewish communities and organisations. It was established in 1936 in Geneva to function as a diplomatic corps for the Jewish people in the face of increasing antisemitism and persecution, responding to the needs of interterritorial cooperation and self-assertion among Jews in the diaspora.20 The Swedish section of the WJC was provisionally formed in October 1944 with Marcus Ehrenpreis as chairman and the historian Hugo Valentin as vice chairman—but it was only officially constituted in May 1945. Activities and individual initiatives had taken place on behalf of the WJC in an unofficial sense before 1944 through personalities such as the businessmen and activists Gilel Storch, Fritz Hollander, and Norbert Masur.21 These personalities played an important role in Swedish rescue activities and in other humanitarian activities such as shipping packages of foods at the end of the war.22 Most well-known is the negotiation with Heinrich Himmler through his physician and personal masseur Felix Kersten, which led to thousands of Jews rescued by the so-called Red Cross ‘white-buses’ mission at the end of the War, although the number and motivations have been debated.23 For the WJC, and specifically its Swedish section, these humanitarian activities brought both self-confidence and legitimacy. During the post-war era, it was the foremost organisation assisting with the social, cultural, and religious needs of Jewish immigrants in Sweden. Rost was employed as the leader of the historical commission, but also worked within the cultural department more generally. She assisted, for example, the Yiddish newspaper Jedioth (or Yedies) and functioned as the editor for the Swedish magazine Vår Röst. In August 1949, she replaced Zalman Aronzon, who had been appointed chief rabbi in Oslo, as the general secretary of the Swedish section of the WJC.24 Her personal situation had changed at this time. Before leaving Poland, Rost had remarried with Izaak Süsskind, who had also lost his family in the Holocaust and had been an entrepreneur and businessman before the war, but worked mainly as a weaver in textile production in Sweden.25 Later, due to regulations in Uruguay where the coupled lived, Rost took the name Nella Thon de Hollander and he became Izaak Hollander-Süsskind (his father’s name was in fact Hollander, while his mother was named Süsskind). These changes explain why documents and references to her

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exist under different names, in addition to variations in spellings (Rostowa instead of Rost or Nelly/Nelli instead of Nella). In fact, the police authority in Sweden even made a small investigation into this issue due to ‘uncertainties regarding the foreigners’ names’ already in 1950.26 Rost had temporary status in Sweden as a so-called trans-migrant, which meant that Sweden was initially only offering temporary residency, and she actually never applied for citizenship. Although Sweden adopted a more liberal immigration policy at the end of the Second World War, it was not easy to immigrate to Sweden in 1946. For that reason, Aryeh Tartakower, at that time the Director of the Department of Relief and Rehabilitation of the WJC in New York, had written to Gilel Storch in Stockholm asking him to help Rost obtain a visa. He reminded Storch about her father’s close friendship with Ehrenpreis if there were any problems with her application.27 This fact is important since it indicates that as an immigrant in Sweden, Rost already held a certain status and her background was certainly known among other Jews from Poland. In general, Jewish refugees and recent immigrants obviously did not receive any prominent positions among the important organisations in the immediate post-war period since they were expected to prepare for further migration.28 Only a few weeks after her arrival in 1946, however, Rost was presented in the Swedish media as an expert on the fate of Polish Jews and on the murder of Jews during the War more generally, as will be discussed below.

Reconstructing a Dispersed Archive and Its Functions While humans leave behind traces that hopefully end up in archives and are handled by a careful archivist, the documentation of the archives themselves are all too often not catalogued in a detailed or meticulous fashion. This is particularly true of organisations’ private archives that only in the best-case scenarios contain records about the creation of the collections and their development. The challenge here is even more complex: How can we get an accurate picture of an archive that no longer exists? The obvious answer to this question is that the history of archives is also bound to the activities of humans and in that respect the history of dispersed collections of documents might be represented in other institutions. Information about the collection or the documents themselves will only

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appear again as a result of the traditional historian’s patient search identifying key historical personalities involved in the archive. What Derrida describes as the destruction of the archive intended to cause forgetfulness and amnesia does not necessarily imply an irreversible process. Archives can also dissolve only to reappear in new institutions which turned out to be the case with the collection of documents that Rost worked with.29 The first traces of Rost’s activities in Sweden are in the mainstream Swedish newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Aftonbladet. Only a few weeks after her arrival, Rost exhibited documents gathered in Poland during a speech that she held before the Jewish community of Stockholm, which included maps of camps, facsimiles of documents related to the German railway transports, and witness accounts accompanied by photos from the camps.30 This event indicates the authority of Rost as a newly arrived immigrant and she does not seem to have emphasised her own experiences but acted rather as expert and activist. Rost was quoted in the non-Jewish Swedish press on more occasions during the late 1940s, not only as a leader of the historical commission but also with respect to other roles she played among the survivors (Fig. 2.1).31 While the first press conference was foremost about documents collected in Poland, Rost would soon become more acquainted with the WJC’s own collection of documents. Before her arrival, the organisation had, for example, collected data on refugees in Sweden, published as a list of survivors.32 The list was communicated to other Jewish organisations and the main purpose of this kind of documentation was not to serve as historical writing, but to assist survivors in finding relatives. One and a half years after her first appearance in the Swedish press, Rost presented the archival collection again during a conference in Paris for Jewish documentation centres and historical commissions in Europe. For ten days, representatives from thirteen countries gathered to discuss the first research into the Holocaust and various archives and collections. With her role in the historical commission in Stockholm, Rost was presented as a kind of official representative for Sweden and the other Nordic countries and she delivered two speeches at the conference. These speeches are today kept in the French Holocaust archive at Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris.33 One speech outlined the Holocaust in the Nordic countries and the other gave an overview of the historical commission in Stockholm. Rost stated in the latter presentation that the historical commission in Stockholm was dedicated to all three Scandinavian countries, despite most of the documents concerning Sweden. A significant part of the archive managed by Rost

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Fig. 2.1  Nella Rost speaks in the Jewish Community of Stockholm, 1950. (Yngve Karlsson/Stockholm Stadsmuseum)

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consisted of material documenting the Swedish branch of the WJC’s own activities at the end of the War.34 The Swedish section of the WJC was involved in Folke Bernadotte’s rescue activities and these documents were obviously considered to be of great importance within the WJC. The ambition of the historical commission, however, was more than to communicate the WJC’s own activities. The collection, according to Rost, also consisted of witness testimonies, documents that showed the influence of Nazism in Sweden and the sympathy of the Swedish population towards the Jews. The Polish Ambassador in Sweden also left documentation in the archives, which consisted of documents relating to the persecution of Jews in several countries, clippings from the Swedish press, and copies of telegrams sent to London. Rost also cooperated with the Polish Source Institute in Lund that recorded the testimonies of former Polish concentration camp inmates.35 Survivors had furthermore deposited witness accounts, memoirs, documents, lists of saved and missing persons, as well as photographs. We also learn from the presentation that the historical commission sought to establish a library with books documenting the German occupation of Norway and Denmark, published during and after the War, as well as publications that documented the Swedish Government’s attempts to rescue Jews.36 Rost composed a bibliography of Swedish books published between 1939 and 1946 dealing with ‘the Jewish problem’ that she showed delegates at the conference in Paris: ‘All these books and publications are written in Swedish; it took me a few months to read, understand them, and be able to use them for historical purposes’.37 With these glimpses, it is easy to get the impression from Rost’s speech that she was talking about a huge Holocaust archive that contained both administrative documents and testimonies from survivors, supported by an associated library. It is important to highlight, however, that there was a tendency at this conference to emphasise the importance of each respective archive in front of the international delegates.38 These temporary archival collections in Europe were part of a memory politics in the post-­ war Jewish world. The French hosts of the conference wanted to concentrate all the documents in Paris and did not miss an opportunity to stress the significance of their activities and collections of documents, without speaking about the limited financial support, while other delegates had their own ambitions to maintain independence or alternatively to pass documentation to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem which was created in 1947.39 The importance of the work of the historical commission in Stockholm

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should therefore not be overestimated, considering that Rost worked alone in addition to her other duties. However, the correspondence of Rost does confirm that the archive in Stockholm also mattered for the WJC headquarters in New York, and demonstrates Rost’s ambition to create some kind of centre for Jewish culture and history. Various bulletins, reports, and papers on Jewish life were also sent to the collection in Stockholm, although the headquarters in New York could not deliver the 100 copies of each post that Rost demanded.40 Wolf Blattberg, one of the leaders of the cultural department at the WJC, was nevertheless happy to send books to Rost’s project that would contribute to ‘the cultural rehabilitation of our unfortunate brethren’.41 There is no doubt that the making of the Holocaust archive, as well as the plan to expand it into a Jewish centre, was part of this cultural rehabilitation. The headquarters in New York also sent delegates to Sweden. In 1950, for example, the Polish-born Zionist activist Ignacy Schwarzbart, head of the organisational department at the WJC in New York, visited Stockholm to discuss their activities and meet Jewish representatives as well as a member of the Swedish Government. He wrote a report of his five-day stay detailing interesting aspects of both Jewish life and the WJC in Sweden. Rost arranged a meeting with three different Jewish women’s associations in Stockholm: WIZO and the Jewish women’s club (Judiska Kvinnoklubben) as well as a smaller association of Polish-Jewish women and an ‘immigrant self-help club’ (Emigranten-Selbsthilfe) led by Elsa Meyring.42 Schwarzbart was generally positive and praised the Swedish Government for their support during the War. According to the report, Schwarzbart managed to convince the social democratic Minister of the Interior, Eije Mossberg, to grant the immigrant status to trans-migrant and to grant aliens’ passports to Polish Jews whose passports had expired and did not receive help from the Polish ambassador.43 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to examine whether Schwarzbart and the WJC played a decisive role in these decisions or if he exaggerated his own efforts. However, the fact that the WJC negotiated with the Swedish Government shows the importance of this organisation in the immediate post-war period. In fact, the Swedish section of the WJC had, according to another published memorandum, been in contact with the Swedish Minister of Justice, Herman Zetterberg, to negotiate the transferring of heirless deposits from Jews to Jewish representative bodies and also briefed on the possibility of restitution in Poland.44 Holocaust memory was indeed

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closely related to various social and material needs among survivors during this period, and the Swedish section of the WJC often sought to represent these immigrants in various ways. One of the main concerns for Schwarzbart and the WJC regarding Sweden, however, was to promote Jewish education and cultural work to highlight the ‘slow […] process of estrangement for Jewish culture and history’.45 It is obvious that Rost’s work with the archive and her ambitions to extend her collection to other Jewish publications and books was part of this educational and cultural work. Rost later wrote a report to the headquarters in New York to summarise the visit and this included a more detailed description of the archive just one year before she left Sweden. The report gives an indication of how the archive was used: An archive has been created, which consists of material from the occupation years, i.e. of testimonies, documents, diaries, various facts from the time of the occupation, Aryan papers, as well as photographic material etc. Thanks to the work of the cultural department of the Swedish WJC section, it was possible to provide some historians with material from the archive which they actually used. […] There are several cases against war criminals in this country that are being handled by WJC, and material from the archive is being used in these cases as well. There are some war crimes cases in the country that are being handled by WJC, and material from the archive is being used in these cases as well. Apart from the occupation archive, we also collect material related to the study of the Jewish present. This includes memoranda, as well as pieces of news, which we get from London, New York etc. in the form of books, brochures, etc. We try to rearrange this archive according to topics, thus it is a useful resource for those who are concerned with and writing about Jewish or Judaism-related issues.46

What stands out in this report is that material has apparently been used for judicial cases. This can of course apply to cases in Norway and Denmark, although the report does appear to relate to Sweden. Rost was apparently interested in these legal issues. During a discussion at the Paris conference, she stressed that the search for war criminals was an important topic for the neutral countries.47 For example, she assisted Nehemiah Robinson, legal expert and director of the Institute of Jewish Affairs of the WJC, with material on war crime proceedings dealing with individuals responsible for anti-Jewish persecutions in Denmark and Norway by transferring

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questionnaires to people with knowledge of these processes.48 Another example was information on the case against Otto Bovensiepen, former Chief of the German Security Police in Denmark and the SS General Werner Best.49 The report also alludes to internal processes among Jewish refugees in Sweden. In the immediate post-war period, across Europe, so-called honour courts were held within Jewish communities against those Jews who had collaborated with Nazis in ghettos and camps. These non-official trials often led to the exclusion of members from Jewish communities and organisations.50 We know for certain that various forms of hearings related to such processes that took place in Sweden. Natalie Verständig Axelius, who is the granddaughter of Samuel Janowski, a Holocaust survivor born in Poland, has written a novel about her grandfather based upon his own unpublished memoirs written in the 1980s.51 Verständig Axelius has shown me an excerpt from her grandfather’s notes that details one such process at Grev Magnigatan in Stockholm (WJC premises) where Janowski acted as a witness. And thanks to the historian Simo Muir, we know that Janowski participated in a witness hearing in Stockholm on 24 April 1950, organised by the WJC, concerning a Polish-Jewish survivor in Helsinki, who headed the Food Supply Department in the Lodz ghetto, working under the well-known ghetto leader Chaim Rumkowski. The aim of the trial that took place in Helsinki was to decide whether this Polish-Jewish survivor in Helsinki had committed crimes against humanity. This would result in his membership application of the Jewish congregation being declined. The process was long and in the end the man was accepted as a member of the Helsinki Jewish congregation.52 Rost and the historical commission were involved and called for witness accounts regarding the defendant in the Yiddish paper Jedioth and in the Swedish magazine Vår Röst (Our Voice).53 Muir also found that at least two other cases were investigated in Sweden by the WJC. These complicated trials demonstrate how the making of a Holocaust archive in Stockholm was part of a larger transnational confrontation within the Jewish world of those who under very difficult circumstances had taken on roles that were condemned after the war. I have chosen not to name these stigmatised survivors, although the subject certainly needs to be further investigated as a part of post-war Jewish history in Sweden.

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Between Research and Social Activism Rost dealt with the past in a variety of ways, with her activities encompassing the cultural, legal, and social aspects of the lives of survivors in Sweden. Like the Central Jewish Commissions in Poland, Rost had the ambition to establish a basis of factual knowledge that could serve future history writing, but also support future trials. In this regard, she focused on the evidence of what happened to the Jews and ensured that the historical commission in Stockholm ‘verifies the testimonies, gathers the opinions of experts, comments upon their historical source’.54 This approach differs from that of academics today who tend to give the interviewee more freedom to relate to the past and create their own narratives. For early Holocaust historians, however, contextualisation and interpretation were secondary to verification and the reconstruction of the events themselves—something that was only natural at a time when there was no research to build upon. From this perspective, Rost criticised, for instance, how the Swedish encyclopaedia Svensk Uppslagsbok underestimated Hitler’s persecution of Jews and contained errors and misunderstandings concerning this subject and around antisemitism in general.55 Another example of this approach to the past was evident in a Jewish schoolbook committee on which Rost sat, with, among others, Hugo Valentin. The committee was established in 1949 to examine Swedish schoolbooks on behalf of the WJC with the purpose of studying and correcting how Judaism and Jews were portrayed in these texts. Protocols of the group demonstrate how factual evidence was considered an essential tool in fighting prejudice and negative attitudes towards Jews. The work was coordinated on an international level within other sections of the WJC and in a public statement about the formation of the group, Rost explained that these problems were not as widespread in Sweden, although some information in Swedish books within the disciplines of history, religion (Christianity), and geography presented inaccurate information about Jews and Jewish life.56 The school books commission is also an example of how lessons of the recent past were translated into a new vigilance and activism against antisemitism in post-war Sweden. It was handled by the cultural department of the Swedish Section of the WJC. The advantage of working in Sweden at this time was the relatively strong presence of Jewish refugees and survivors. The Swedish branch of the WJC used different questionnaires; one of them was designed as a

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162-question survey that sought to reconstruct the experiences of survivors. The purpose of the questionnaire was to ‘scientifically examine’ all the crimes committed as a consequence of German anti-Jewish policies.57 The questions were largely aimed at identifying those responsible and addressed the persecution, life in the ghettos and camps (including the observance of Jewish traditions), the Jewish Councils, the perpetrators across all levels of the regime, and also aimed to identify non-Jews who assisted Jews. The form ended with a more open question that left room for opinions and attitudes: ‘How do you think the unprecedented crime of the Germans should be punished?’58 The questionnaire furthermore underlines how research, recognition, and justice were closely related in Holocaust research at that time. This rather non-academic way of writing contemporary history was similar to the work of different national historical commissions that were looking at the Second World War. Collecting testimonies and preserving documents were important parts of how these institutions presented the recent past and assisted justice organisations.59 In Stockholm, the moral motivation behind this approach to the past was evident in a covering letter to the questionnaire: It is the duty of every Jew, who has survived the national and personal tragedy, to transmit to the historical scholarship of future generations the memory of the murder and inhuman cruelties that the Germans committed against our people. With your help, the work of the Jewish Historical Commission will erect a memorial to this suffering, which will stigmatise the murderers and their accomplices for eternity.60

In this way, the collecting of material and the writing of history was an aspect of personal and collective mourning. This was linked to another trend that influenced how Rost approached the past, namely the importance of commemorating the victims and the simultaneous endeavour to strengthen Jewish identity after the Holocaust. The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto was a central symbol that provided evidence of courage, solidarity, and compassion to the understanding of the Holocaust. This was important for Jewish identity after the Holocaust since it was a symbolic event that could unite Jews in a similar fashion to narratives of national resistance movements in Europe. Like Jewish communities elsewhere in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East, Rost and the Swedish Section of the WJC organised commemorations for the Jewish ghetto

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uprising, celebrating Jewish resistance and heroism in April. In Stockholm, seven-hundred people participated during one ceremony in 1949.61 During another commemoration of the ghetto uprising a Polish diplomatic representative and the radical Social Democrat Ture Nerman spoke in addition to Rost and Gilel Storch.62 A programme from the last ceremony in which Rost participated in 1950 shows that the event included both classical music and Jewish partisan songs in Yiddish.63 Rost also held a speech this time that, according to the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, emphasised how the heroes in Warsaw had sacrificed their lives ‘so that the future generation would know that the Jews had defended themselves against the German Nazis’.64 The memory of the Holocaust in Sweden was indeed at this time influenced by trends across the Jewish world, with similar ceremonies on the Jewish ghetto uprising being held in Jewish communities internationally, particularly important among Zionist-oriented groups. Jewish life in Sweden in the immediate post-war years was marked by Jewish refugees and immigrants who brought a new commitment to Jewish traditions and culture from Eastern Europe. Rost and Storch were furthermore involved in a fund-raising drive among Jews in Sweden to the erection of a Holocaust memorial in Warsaw and the Swedish section contributed granite to the memorial.65 In this way, Jews in Sweden could contribute to a transnational symbol of heroism from the Holocaust and take part in this act of remembrance. Unlike the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland, the Swedish section of the WJC and the historical commission never published any studies related to the recent past, besides the list of survivors and material related to its own activities. The Swedish section did, however, publish three different and rather short-lived publications (Jedioth, Congress Nyheter, and Vår Röst) that served as a news bulletin for the WJC and its Swedish branch. To an extent, these publications also served as an arena for the memory of the Holocaust and the challenges that Jews faced in Scandinavia. That is true of the monthly Yiddish Jedioth (1946–1949), a small news-sheet from the Swedish section of the WJC, where the presence of the Holocaust was largely rooted in social needs and practical issues among survivors in Sweden. Compared to the more established Swedish-Jewish press (Judisk Tidskrift and Judisk Krönika), Jedioth was a very simple publication without illustrations and was rooted in a Yiddish culture that flourished for a short time in Sweden prior to the departure of large numbers of refugees who left for Israel and the United States. The paper was published by the Swedish Section’s cultural department, which

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included Rost, and also the Polish-Jewish survivor and Zionist activist Eliasz (Eliyohu) Tisch. He lived in Stockholm in the late 1940s before moving to Israel and was editor-in-chief for Jedioth. Before the War, Tisch had been an active member of the Krakow Jewish Theatre Association and served as editor-in-chief of the Zionist paper Nowy Dziennik in which Rost published on a regular basis. The publication Jedioth is of special interest for this chapter as it mirrors both activities and perceptions of the past within Rost’s personal and professional circles. It is not possible to speak of a coherent narrative of the Holocaust in Jedioth, more than that the starting point of various short texts and announcements often related to the WJC’s actions during and after the War. As in Judisk krönika and Judisk tidskrift, this Yiddish news-sheet paid attention to the situation of Jewish refugees, the DP camps, and issues of justice, but these appeared less distant as the WJC was also an international actor that was actively involved with these issues. The question of justice was particularly important when the Swedish branch of the WJC assisted survivors in Sweden. Jedioth regularly reported on the survivors in Sweden in general and highlighted also the situation of Jewish women refugees.66 The latter was an important area for Nella Rost, who had a background in the WIZO in Poland and also played a key role in the Swedish section of the movement.67 This small paper also gave evidence of a broader culture of remembrance among Jews in Sweden. In the spring of 1948, Jedioth published a report about the formation of a Holocaust Survivors’ Association ‘Räddade judar i Sverige’ (Rescued Jews in Sweden) and the election of Rost as chairperson.68 A two-day conference was held in Stockholm in March and the agenda for that meeting was published in Jedioth. Besides discussing the situation of Holocaust survivors in Sweden and their need for an organisation, the participants also explored cultural activities among survivors, their attitudes towards various Jewish institutions and organisations, as well as the state of Judaism and the Yiddish language in Sweden.69 The memory of the Holocaust went hand in hand with supporting and preserving Jewish culture in line with the WJC’s overall goals. The editor-in-­ chief of Jedioth expressed the hope that the new association would unite the various organisations of German, Polish, Latvian, and Romanian Jews, as well as Jewish landsmanshaftn in Sweden (hometown society of Jewish immigrants from the same town or region) under one umbrella association:

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Nowadays the different landsmanshaftn’s activities are barely known of and noticeable; if, however, they were all united, at least in an umbrella organisation, otherwise maintaining full autonomy, they would form a strong, considerable force, which would manifest itself in all areas, in their own life as well as in that of all Jews in this country. There is no doubt whatsoever that the Holocaust survivors who came here after the war represent the most lively, dynamic, and self-conscious portion of the foreign Jews in Sweden.70

This organisation, which belonged to the WJC, would thus unite the pre-existing groups, and it was immigrants and survivors that were targeted for these activities. These trends indicate that the historical commission and the Swedish section of the WJC were above all rooted in the Jewish world, rather than in political and cultural life in Sweden. Still, the people within this circle had an interest in Sweden and the Scandinavian countries. According to a press account, the survivor association Rescued Jews in Sweden also sent a telegram to the Swedish king and government to recognise their role in rescue activities and positive attitude towards Jews arriving in Sweden, a viewpoint that was shared by the WJC.71 With the emigration of Jews from Sweden, large parts of Yiddish culture also disappeared and Jedioth was successively replaced by Vår Röst (1949–1953), with Nella Rost as editor-in-chief. Now the focus was not so much on the Holocaust—in line with the general trends observed in Swedish-Jewish press.72 The positive attitude towards the Swedish government is again evident when Rost participated in the Paris conference in 1947. She gave probably one of the first international overviews of the Holocaust in Scandinavia. This presentation reflected a rather positive view of the role played by all the Nordic countries during the Holocaust, without downplaying the existence of antisemitism. Rost discussed, for example, the collaboration of Norwegian Nazis, antisemitic newspapers, and the delicate case of a Jewish family who was killed by people within the Norwegian resistance movement.73 At the same time, however, she also emphasised how the Norwegian nation, in the name of humanity, fought German politics by helping Jews by any means possible, as well as the efforts of the Norwegian resistance movement in helping Jews leave for Sweden. This aligned well with the national myth formation surrounding the German occupation of Norway.74 The description of Denmark followed the same pattern, with a positive depiction of the Danish people and their support for rescue efforts. Part of the presentation was dedicated to the WJC’s involvement

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in the rescue activities and the liberation of camp inmates from Bergen-­ Belsen and Ravensbrück: ‘“It’s a miracle”, exclaimed the internees who had just been released when the Red Cross buses arrived, and they received food and medicine. The Swedish people greeted this group of almost lifeless skeletons with flowers’.75 Indeed, the historical commission in Stockholm did not challenge Sweden’s positive self-image built upon its role in the rescue missions and its neutrality during the war.76 On the contrary, the Swedish section of the WJC even defended Sweden from American criticism of passivity regarding the Jews during the war.77 Rost was nevertheless well-aware of the activities of Swedish Nazis such as Einar Åberg and that intellectuals had been supportive of Nazism. She wrote a critical review of Sven Hedin’s autobiography Without Mission in Berlin, where she criticised Hedin for his silence on the persecution of Jews, despite his first-hand information about the Third Reich.78 The most important concern for Nella Rost and the Swedish Section of the WJC with regard to Sweden, however, was the tendency of Jewish immigrants to assimilate. In this vein, a report in the WJC’s international newsletter in 1947 reported positively on the political situation for Jews in Sweden, but with the added caveat— ‘Spiritually, however, they are starved’.79

From Krakow to Stockholm, to Montevideo to Berlin to Heidelberg The post-war fate of various Jewish collections of documents on the Holocaust highlights the chaotic situation facing many Holocaust survivors who lacked a permanent home. While parts of Rost’s documentation would follow her from Krakow to Stockholm to Montevideo, and would later be sent to Berlin and finally Heidelberg, other documents would stay in Stockholm before being sent to Geneva in the 1970s, and later to Cincinnati, Ohio. No wonder that it has been a difficult task to reconstruct the archive. In the beginning of 1951, however, Rost left Sweden for Uruguay. For unknown reasons, she was not interested in staying in Sweden or going to Israel or the United States where she had relatives. The historical commission in Stockholm ceased to exist, while Rost continued to work as a representative for the WJC in Uruguay. In this way, the Holocaust archive in Stockholm met a similar fate to that of other

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comparable organisations in Europe. This was in line with a notable decline in this type of historical activism in the 1950s.80 Those who continued also struggled to survive in the 1950s. The Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, for example, continued to exist during the Cold War, but with severe pressure from the political regime. In London, Alfred Wiener had established a documentation centre that began collecting material about Nazism in the 1930s, including Jewish testimonies of the November pogrom in 1938. After the war, however, the Wiener Library established a bulletin (The Wiener Library Bulletin) that constituted a discussion on Nazism in general rather than focusing on the genocide of the Jews.81 In Paris, in the immediate post-war period, there were at least three different Jewish documentation initiatives relating to the Holocaust, but only one survived. With constant financial worries, the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine, with its tireless leader Isaac Schneersohn, succeeded in pursuing its activities and integrating the archive with a museum and memorial in the 1950s, today called Mémorial de la Shoah. In Sweden, one of the representatives of this institution even met Swedish Prime Minister Tage Erlander to briefly present the idea, but without any results.82 Together with Yad Vashem in Israel, it became the most important centre for Holocaust studies, exhibitions, and commemorations in the 1950s. It is obvious that interest in the archive of the WJC was relatively weak in Sweden. Most of the archive collection of the Swedish Section of the WJC remained in Stockholm until the end of the 1970s. An important question for the WJC in the 1970s was its relationship to the Jewish community of Stockholm: the latter was not part of the WJC.83 Another associated question was the future of the archive holdings of the Swedish branch of the WJC. Material was located at the WJC bureau and in Gilel Storch’s private office. As it was hoped that the Jewish community of Stockholm would enter the WJC, the Swedish section wanted the archive holdings to be managed by the community. One of the members of the board, medical doctor and well-known professor Jerzy Einhorn, furthermore undertook the mission to contact the historical department at Stockholm University in 1977 to make the material available for a doctoral student.84 At this time, the large-scale so-called SUAV-project (Sweden During the Second World War), which had been ongoing since the second half of 1960 in order to study Sweden and the Second World War from several perspectives, was about to come to an end.85 The sudden opportunity to integrate Jewish perspectives and sources with academic research

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on the Second World War, however, did not take place at this time and the forthcoming development would not facilitate the use of the WJC’s archive holdings in Stockholm. As it turned out, the end of the 1970s was another important turning point for this early Holocaust archive in Sweden. Elizabeth Eppler, librarian and bibliographer at the Institute of Jewish Affairs in London, visited Stockholm in 1978 to look at the archive holdings on behalf of the WJC. She wrote a critical report that disclosed that the part of the archive collection found in Storch’s private office was in a terrible mess, but equally of ‘tremendous historical value’.86 As a result, the WJC in Geneva took hold of most of the documentation of the Swedish Section, at least the files in the headquarters, while the material in Storch’s house was still to be catalogued and handed over. Some of the files were also sent to Yad Vashem, the Central Zionist Archive in Jerusalem, where they are available on microfilm, and the Institute of Jewish Affairs in London. A few items were also given to the Jewish community of Stockholm and some of the material was simply destroyed.87 While Eppler was quietly optimistic about the possibility of getting hold of Storch’s documents, she also recounted complaints from the Jewish community of Stockholm that documents relating to the Holocaust, with great value for Swedish scholars, would be taken away from Sweden. Eppler replied that the documents had been available in Sweden for thirty-five years and not a single Swedish historian had looked at them—they had only been viewed by the Israeli historian Leni Yahil.88 This explains why files from the archive under Rost’s management at the end of the 1940s can be found in various Jewish archives. Many of the documents also circulate as copies. Some of the witness accounts collected by the Swedish branch of the WJC have been recently used by the Danish historian Silvia Goldbaum Tarabini Fracapane, who has written the first thorough thesis on the Jews in Denmark that were deported to Theresienstadt. She found fourteen testimonies from Danish survivors in the Israeli archive Yad Vashem and some of them appear in her thesis.89 Unlike later collections of testimonies, the collection of the Swedish Section of the WJC was gathered while the memories of the traumatic past were still fresh and less influenced by post-war discussions on the subject. The main archive of the WJC is today stored in Cincinnati in the United States, where most parts of the material related to the Swedish Section can be found.

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This is not the end of the story of the Jewish historical commission in Stockholm. It transpired that Rost brought some archive holdings to Montevideo where she continued to work for the WJC. This was entirely logical since the documents belonged to the WJC. At the beginning of the 1970s, Rost had remarried again and seems to have been ready to move back to Europe. She also looked for a new home for the collection of documents from Poland and Sweden and contacted her friend Joseph Wulf in Berlin. In this sense, the circle was complete since Wulf and Rost worked together in Krakow in 1945. At this time, Wulf still worked as an independent scholar in Berlin and tried, without success, to establish a Holocaust archive centre in Berlin in the house where the Wannsee Conference had been held in 1942.90 He agreed to take care of the records and received suitcases from Montevideo containing packages of documents, manuscripts, and photographs.91 Rost might have felt relieved to get rid of all this historical baggage carried between nations and continents—at least she expressed a sense of relief in a letter to Wulf since she also owed him a favour.92 As Wulf’s plan to create a document centre in Wannsee was only realised almost two decades after his death in 1974, these documents are archived and catalogued today in a Jewish archive in Heidelberg in Joseph Wulf’s collection (Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland). While important parts of the documents that Nella Rost took care of in the immediate post-war period have thus been located throughout this research, her own destiny remains more obscure as she never received any significant public recognition for devoting her whole life to Jewish politics and cultural works in Poland, Sweden, and Uruguay. The last letter between Wulf and Rost dates from February 1973. At this time, Rost is back in Uruguay after a journey in Europe for reasons that Wulf could not understand.93 Wolf died the next year while Rost ended her days in 1988 in Uruguay and is buried at a Jewish cemetery in Montevideo.

Conclusion It was not only survivors who moved around and sought shelter in various countries in post-war Europe. Documents and archive collections followed the same pattern in the chaotic years after the Second World War, and some of them are still waiting to be discovered. While memory studies in general tend to focus on more successful instances of bringing knowledge into society, a study of a dissolved archive unveils more challenges

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and difficulties in the formation of memory. Nella Rost’s activities in Sweden are an important example of how early Holocaust memory developed within a transnational Jewish context. Her work within the historical commission in Stockholm, within the Swedish Section of the WJC, was in fact a continuation of her activities in Krakow. During her five years in Sweden, she organised a small Holocaust archive with the ambition to expand it into a larger library and even a centre for Jewish culture and history. This was a part of the WJC’s ambition to strengthen Jewish culture and identity in the diaspora, to which Rost had already contributed during the interwar period in Krakow and later in Montevideo in Uruguay. The WJC was particularly concerned with survivors’ eventual loss of identity in Sweden where tendencies of assimilation threatened Jewish life. Indeed, the activities of Nella Rost in Sweden developed particularly among immigrants and was partly articulated in Yiddish—a language that prospered in Sweden during the late 1940s. During a short period in the immediate post-war period, more than 10,000 immigrants had more than doubled the Jewish population. Although many of them left after a few years, their presence had a major impact on Jewish life in Sweden. Research on post-­ war Jewish life in Sweden could benefit much from this context, which has proved to be fruitful in other Western nations.94 Rost’s activities show how justice was an important factor in the formation of memory. When testimonies were collected, questions addressed responsibilities at various levels, with the intention to provide means of evidence for legal proceedings. The historical commission in Stockholm assisted a few so-called honour courts, unofficial proceedings against Jews who under difficult circumstances collaborated with the Nazis in various ways. Previous research on this matter in other European countries underlines again the transnational dimension of Jewish retribution, as a part of the political and emotional reconstruction of the communities after the Holocaust.95 The involvement in such trials of the Swedish Section of the WJC and the historical commission in Stockholm demonstrate how the making of an archive in Stockholm was part of this more controversial confrontation with the past within the Jewish world. The memory of the Holocaust furthermore evolved around the social needs of a more positive Jewish self-identification in post-war Sweden and the heroic uprising in the Warsaw ghetto became a significant symbol that brought evidence of courage, solidarity, and compassion to the understanding of the Holocaust. Like elsewhere in Europe, this event was the subject of commemorations and it involved the WJC and Rost. To the extent that Sweden as a nation

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was concerned by the immediate post-war confrontation with the past, the picture was positive with the rescue activities depicted as a shining example of courage during the Second World War—although currents of antisemitism were not underestimated.96 From a narrow perspective of one individual and one organisation, the study gives further evidence of the important work that Jews undertook in Sweden to confront the horror of the Holocaust in the immediate post-­ war period and to contribute to its memory in various ways. Compared to how the Holocaust today has become a national affair and archive collections are available in both national museums and official websites, however, the relationship of Sweden’s wider society to the historical commission was limited; the commission silently disappeared in 1951 when Rost left for Uruguay. A report from 1978 ordered by the WJC also confirmed that scant attention was paid to valuable documents of the Holocaust in Sweden. This is important to consider in discussions on the development of this memory of the Holocaust and shows the benefits of investigating less successful initiatives. In addition to the scant attention and lack of funds to manage the archive holdings properly, the dissolution of the archive should also be seen in the context of the post-war Jewish immigration from Sweden, which Rost was a part of. Parts of the documentation followed her paths. There remains the task of making an inventory, preferably where historians and archives work together, of all testimonies that were collected during the immediate post-war period and to again make that material available in Sweden. These were the original intentions of Nella Rost and the Swedish section of the WJC.

Notes 1. Jacques Derrida, Archive fever. A Freudian impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 4. 2. Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). See also, for example, Johannes Heuman, Holocaust and French Historical Culture, 1945–65 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Judith Lindenberg (ed.), Premiers savoirs de la Shoah (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2017). 3. Svante Hansson deals with some of the activities of the Swedish Section of the WJC in the late 1940s, see Svante Hansson, Flykt och överlevnad.

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Flyktingverksamhet i Mosaiska församlingen i Stockholm 1933–1950 (Stockholm: Hillelförlaget, Stockholm, 2004), ch. 13–17. On the conflict between WJC and Mosaiska Församlingen i Stockholm, see Pontus Rudberg, ‘The Politics of Jewish Refugee Aid and Relief Work in Sweden’, in Reaching a State of Hope. Refugees, Immigrants and the Swedish Welfare State, 1930–2000, eds. Mikael Byström and Pär Frohnert (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2013); Pontus Rudberg, ‘“A Record of Infamy”. The Use and Abuse of the Image of the Swedish Jewish Response to the Holocaust’, Scandinavian Journal of History 36, no. 5 (2011): 536–554. The rescue actions of the Swedish branch of the WJC at the end of the Second World War has been studied and depicted from different perspectives, see Pontus Rudberg, The Swedish Jews and the Holocaust (London: Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2017); Sune Persson, ‘Vi åker till Sverige’. De vita bussarna 1945 (Rimbo, Fischer & Co, 2002); Lena Einhorn, Handelsresande i liv. Om vilja och vankelmod i krigets skugga (Stockholm Prisma, 1999). For a later initiative to collect Jewish memories of the Holocaust (Nordic Museum in Stockholm), see Jesper Johansson and Malin Thor Tureby, ‘The Making of Cultural Heritage and Ethnicty in the Archive. The example of the Nordic Museum’, in Museums in a time of Migration. Rethinking museums’ roles, representations, collections, and collaborations, eds. Christina Johansson and Pieter Bevelander (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2017), 169–195. 4. For an early assessment of this initial research, see Philip Friedman, ‘The European Jewish Research on the Recent Jewish Catastrophe in 1939–1945’, Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 18 (1948–1949), 179–211. 5. I would like to express my gratitude to Rabbi Noah Ferro who assisted me in American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati in the United States and to Philip Schwartz who assisted me in Heidelberg and helped me with translations of Yiddish and Polish documents as well as providing helpful comments on the manuscript. I would also express my gratitude to the following colleagues for helpful advices, comments or documents: Pontus Rudberg, Simo Muir, Julia Sahlström, Carl Henrik Carlsson, Olof Bortz, Silvia Goldbaum Tarabini Fracapane, Shoshana Ronen and Judith Lindenberg. 6. Claire Zalc and Tal Bruttmann (eds.), Microhistories of the Holocaust (New York: Berghahn, 2017). 7. For unknown reason she changed year of birth to 1902 during the postwar period. Administrative papers at the Jagiellonian University (her own applications), the resident register of Krakow as well as a letter to the police authority in Sweden underline that she was born in 1900. See also Shoshana Ronen, A Prophet of Consolation on the Threshold of Destruction. Yehoshua

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Ozjasz Thon, an Intellectual Portrait (Warsaw: Dom Wydawniczy Elipsa, 2015), 40 (footnote 126). 8. Nella Hollander [Rost], Jehoshua Thon. Preacher, Thinker, Politician (Montevideo: Papel, 1966). 9. Rost’s profession is mentioned in election advertisements that announced her candidacy for the town council. In fall 1938 she ran as a candidate of the party ‘United Judaism’. See Nowy Dziennik, 21 November 1938. In the same newspaper Nella Rost advertised private French classes for children, see Nowy Dziennik, 1 September 1928, p. 6. 10. Sean Martin, Jewish Life in Cracow 1918–1939 (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004). 11. See, for example, articles by Rost in Głos Kobiety Żydowskiej [The Jewish Woman’s Voice] in 17 August 1928; 29 June 1930; 2 August 1930; 11 October 1930; 23 December 1932; 20 December 1934; 23 May 1935; 24 February 1937; 28 July 1938; 29 March 1939. 12. ‘Verfolgungsvorgang’, Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutchland, Heidelberg (ZAH), B. 2/1 (Nachlass Joseph Wulf), Zugang 00/03, no. 73. See also Jockusch, Collect and Record, 218. 13. Rudolf Reder, Bełěec, eds. Nella Rost (intr.), Józef Wulf and Michał Borwicz (Krakow: Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna, 1946). 14. Henry Rousso, La dernière catastrophe. L’histoire, le présent, le contemporain (Paris: Gallimard, 2012). 15. Jockusch, Collect and Record, 92. 16. Michał Borwicz, Nella Rost and Józef Wulf (eds.), W 3-cia ̨ rocznicę zagłady Ghetta w Krakowie (Krakow: Centralny Komitet Zydow Polskich, 1946). See also Michał Borwicz, Nella Rost and Józef Wulf (eds.), Dokumenty zbrodni i męczeństwa, (Krakow: Centralny Komitet Żydów Polskich, 1945); Michał Borwicz, Nella Rost and Józef Wulf (eds.), Pamiętnik Justyny (Krakow: Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna, 1946). 17. Klaus Kempter, Joseph Wulf. Ein Historikerschicksal in Deutschland (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage, 2013). On Borwicz, see Judith Lyon-Caen ‘Michel Borwicz, un parcours vers l’histoire’, in Premiers savoirs de la Shoah, eds. Lindenberg, 77–87. 18. David Engel, Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 68. 19. Jan T. Gross, Fear. Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz. An Essay in Historical Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 20. Unity in Dispersion. A history of the World Jewish Congress (New York: World Jewish Congress, 1948). 21. Judiska Världskongressen: medel och mål (Stockholm: World Jewish Congress, Svenska sektionen, 1947); Rudberg, Swedish Jews and the Holocaust, 200.

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22. On the food packages, see Pontus Rudberg ‘Bistånd trots motstånd. Hjälpsändningarna från judar i Sverige till koncentrationslägerfångar i Nazityskland’, in Nationen så in i Norden. En festskrift till Torkel Jansson, eds. Henrik Edgren, Lars M. Andersson, Urban Claesson & Bo G. Hall (Skellefteå: Artos & Norma, 2013). 23. Ingrid Lomfors, Blind flack. Minne och glömska kring svenska Röda korsets hjälpinsats i Nazityskland 1945 (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2005); Persson, ‘Vi åker till Sverige’. 24. Z. Aronzon to I. Schwarzbart, 16 August 1949; R. Serebrenik to N. Rost, 7 September 1949, American Jewish Archives (AJA), Cincinnati, WJC. Box 17, Folder 14. 25. Riksarkivet (RA), Statens utlänningskommission (SUK). Kanslibyrån vol. F 1 AC203208, Hollander-Susskind, Izaak (personal act). 26. ‘Kriminalpolisens 7:e rotel, Stockholm 8’, 11 December 1950. See also ‘Intyg beträffande Nella Thon de Hollander och Izaak Susskind’, 28 September 1953, RA, SUK, F 1 AC:9326 (Thon de Hollander Nella). 27. A. Tartakower to H. Storch, 5 October 1945, AJA, Cincinnati, WJC. Box H312 Folder 4. 28. Hansson, Flykt och överlevnad, 386–387. 29. Derrida, Archive Fever. 30. ‘Barn med mor något otroligt bland Polenjudar’, Dagens Nyheter, 12 June 1946; ‘Himmler nöjd med bödelsarbetet’, Aftonbladet, 12 June 1946. 31. ‘Få judebarn ha mor i livet’, Hudiksvalls-Tidningen, 15 June 1946; ‘Räddade judar’, Dagens Nyheter, 10 June 1948; ‘Svenskar betalar för judemonumentet’, Svenska Dagbladet, 19 April 1949; ‘Judisk minnesdag för ghettohjältar’, Dagens Nyheter, 4 April 1950; ‘Israels minister välkomnad’, Expressen, 1 December 1950. 32. About Jews liberated from German concentration camps arrived in Sweden in 1945–1946. List no 1 (Stockholm: World Jewish congress relief and rehabilitation dep., 1946); About Jews liberated from German concentration camps arrived in Sweden in 1945–1946. List no 2 (Stockholm: World Jewish congress relief and rehabilitation dep., 1946). For discussion on these publications, see Hansson, Flykt och överlevnad, 279–280. 33. A conference volume, with shortened versions of speeches, was published after the conference, see Les Juifs en Europe (1939–1945). Rapports présentés à la première conférence européenne des commissions historiques et des centres de documentations Juifs (Paris: Éditions du Centre, 1949). 34. ‘Communiqué du docteur Nella Rost (Stockholm)’, p.  1–2, CDJC, MDXXXVI, box 15. 35. See Izabela A. Dahls’ chapter in this volume. 36. ‘Communiqué du docteur Nella Rost (Stockholm)’, p. 1–3.

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37. Ibid., p. 2. (1–3). Unfortunately, this list that Rost mentions in one of her speeches has not been found so far. 38. Les Juifs en Europe. 39. Heuman, Holocaust and French Historical Culture, chap. 4. 40. S. Federbuch to Nella Rost, 24 July 1947, AJA, WJC. Box H315 Folder 11. 41. Wolf Blattberg to Nella Rost, 27 May 1948, AJA, WJC.  Box H315 Folder 12. 42. Ignacy Schwarzbart, ‘Report on my visit to our affiliate. The Swedish section, May 20–24, 1950’, p. 4 (1–8), AJA, WJC. Box B11 Folder 12. For more information on the life and work of Elsa Meyring, see Helmut Müssener, & Wolfgang Wilhelmus, Stettin, Lublin, Stockholm—Elsa Meyring. Aus dem Leben einer deutschen Nichtarierin im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert (Rostock: Ingo Koch Verlag 2014). 43. Schwarzbart, ‘Report on my visit to our affiliate’, p. 6. 44. ‘Der yidisher veltkongres in shtokholm intervenirt in der frage fun yorshim’loze farmegns, vos oyslendishe yidn hobn deponirt in shvedn’ [The World Jewish Congress in Stockholm Intervenes in the Question of Heirless Possessions Which Foreign Jews Deposited in Sweden], Jedioth, 11 June 1948, p. 5. See also Jedioth, 26 September 1947, Vikhtike ufklerung fun yidishn velt kongres benegeye yerushes in Poyln [Important Information from the World Jewish Congress Regarding Inheritances in Poland], p. 7. 45. Schwarzbart, ‘Report on my visit to our affiliate’, p. 7. 46. ‘Übersicht über die Arbeit der Kulturabteilung der schwedischen Sektion des World Jewish Congress’. The report was enclosed to a letter from N. Rost to I. Schwartzbard, 3 August 1950, p. 1, AJA, WJC, Box F17, Folder 15. 47. ‘Journée du mardi 9 décembre’, p. 9–10, CDJC, MDXXXVI, box 11. 48. N.  Rost to N.  Robinson, 31 December 1948, AJA, WJC Box H316, Folder 1. Box H315 Folder 12.; N.  Rost to N.  Robinson, 28 February 1949. Box H316, folder 1. 49. N.  Rost to N.  Robinson, 3 December 1948, AJA, WJC, Box H315, Folder 12. 50. Laura Jockusch, Gabriel N. Finder (eds.), Jewish Honor Courts. Revenge, Retribution, and Reconciliation in Europe and Israel after the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015). 51. Natalie Verständig Axelius, Det var jag som skulle dö (Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 2019). 52. Simo Muir and Riikka Tuori, ‘The Golden Chain of Pious Rabbis’. The origin and development of Finnish Jewish Orthodoxy’. Nordisk judaistik/ Scandinavian Jewish Studies 30, no.1 (2019): 23.

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53. ‘Vittnen sökes’, Vår Röst 5 (September 1949): 17; Jedioth, 29 July 1949. n.p. (back matter). 54. ‘Communiqué du docteur Nella Rost (Stockholm)’, p. 1. 55. ‘Nella Rost, ‘Om den historiska sanningen. Svensk Uppslagsboks artikel “antisemitism”’, Judisk Krönika 18, no. 8 (1949): 86. 56. Nella Rost, (Presentation of the Committee, letter), 31 October 1949; ‘Protokoll (Revision Schulbücher)’, 7 November 1949, Uppsala University Library (Jacob K 8e), WJC Okat-material. More protocol of this group exists in World Jewish Congress archives in Stockholm (RA) and in Cincinnati (AJA). See also ‘WJC:s Lärobokskommitté’, Vår Röst, no. 7 (November 1949); ‘Skolboksrevisionen i Stockholm’, Vår Röst, no. 2 (Feb. 1950): 11. 57. ‘Die Historische Kommission des World Jewish Congress in Stockholm. An Alle Zeugen der Deutschen Verbrechen’, Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutchland, ZAH, B. 2/1, c, no. 1389. 58. ‘Fragebogen der Judiska Historiska Kommissionen’, p.  7 (1–7), ZAH, B. 2/1, c, no. 1309. 59. Rousso, La dernière catastrophe; Pieter Lagrou, ‘Historiographie de guerre et historiographie du temps present. Cadres institutionnels en Europe occidentale, 1945–2000’, Bulletin du Comité international d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale 30–1 (1999): 191–215. 60. ‘Die Historische Kommission des World Jewish Congress in Stockholm.’ 61. ‘Minneshögtid på sexårsdagen efter upproret i Warszawas ghetto’, Vår Röst, no. 1 (May 1949); Nella Rost, ‘De kämpade fastän kampen var utsiktslös’, Judisk Krönika 18, no. 10 (1949): 103–104. 62. ‘Forshtandsmitglider fun yi.v.k. bateylikn zikh in di ondenk-fayerungen lekoved di giboyrim fun varshever geto’ [WJC Board Members Participate in Memorial Ceremonies in Honor of the Heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto], Jedioth, 23 April 1948, p. 11. 63. ‘1943–1950’ [program of the ceremony in 1950], AJA, WJC, Box F17, Folder 15. 64. ‘Judisk minnesdag för ghettohjältarna’, Dagens Nyheter, 20 April 1950. 65. ‘Svenskar betalar för judemonumentet’, Svenska Dagbladet, 19 April 1949; ‘Det får aldrig glömmas’, RA, JFA, WJC, svenska sektionen, Övriga handlingar 1944–1949. F1:1. 66. ‘Der matsev fun yidishe froyen-pleytim in shvedn’ [The Situation of Jewish Women Refugees in Sweden] Jedioth, 12 March 1948, pp. 6–9. For articles about the situation of refugees and survivors in general, see, for example, Yoysef Gliksman, ‘Bay der sheyris hapleyte in shvedn’ [With the surviving remnant in Sweden], Jedioth, 20 February 1948, pp. 7–11; Di shtime fun der sheyris hakhurbn in shvedn [The Voice of the Holocaust survivors in Sweden] Jedioth, 13 February 1948, pp. 11–13; Isaac Schwarzbart, ‘A briv

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tsu di opgeratevete yidn in shvedn’ [A Letter to the Rescued Jews in Sweden] Jedioth, 23 April 1948, pp.  13–15; Otto Schütz, ‘Farblibene yidishe pleytim fun shvedn zukhn oystsuvandern. Shvere lage fun di etlekhe hundert kranke, vos lign in di shpitoln’ [Remaining Jewish refugees of Sweden intend to emigrate. Difficult situation of several hundred ill people who are hospitalised] Jedioth, 28 October 1949, pp. 6–8. 67. On Rost’s activities within the WIZO in Sweden, see, for example, ‘WIZOkongress i Stockholm’, Judisk krönika 16, no. 10 (December 1947): 187; Nella Rost, ‘Vor der internordischen Wizokonferenz’, Unser Blatt (November 1947) 12–13. 68. ‘Konstituirung fun farvaltungsrat fun dem farband fun der sheyris-­hapleyte in shvedn’, [Constitutive meeting of the administrative board of the Holocaust survivors’ association in Sweden] Jedioth, 11 June 1948, p. 21. 69. ‘Der tog ordenung fun der konferents fun der sheyris hapleyte in shvedn’ [The agenda of the conference of Holocaust survivors in Sweden], Jedioth, 16 March 1948, pp. 3–4. 70. Eliasz Tisch, ‘Der ershter shrit’ [The First Step], Jedioth, 16 March 1948, pp. 1–2. 71. ‘Centralkommitté för räddade judar i Sverige’, Trelleborgs Tidningen, 1 April 1948. See also ‘Räddade judar’, Dagens Nyheter, 10 June 1948. See also, for example, ‘Judiskt tack till konungen’, Dagens Nyheter, 15 September 1946; ‘Judisk hyllning till kungen’, Dagens Nyheter, 8 December 1947. 72. Julia Sahlström, Trials and Social Memory. Swedish-Jewish reactions to justice, retribution and the Holocaust (MA Thesis, Uppsala University, 2018). 73. Nella Rost, ‘Les Juifs sous l’occupation allemande dans les pays scandinaves’, p. 2, CDJC, MDXXXVI, box 15. 74. Synne Corell, ‘The Solidity of a National Narrative. The German Occupation in Norwegian History Culture’, in Nordic Narratives of the Second World War, eds. Henrik Stenius, Mirja Österberg and Johan Östling (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2011), 101–125. 75. Rost, ‘Les Juifs sous l’occupation allemande dans les pays scandinaves’, p. 8. 76. On this positive image see, Johan Östling, ‘The Rise and Fall of Small-­ State Realism. Sweden and the Second World War, Nordic Narratives of the Second World War, eds. Stenius, Österberg and Östling, 127–47. 77. ‘Entfer dem senator Elmer Thomas oyf zayne bashuldikungen gegn shvedn’ (Reply to Senator Elmer Thomas’s Accusations against Sweden), Jedioth, 2 December 1949, 4–5. 78. Historiska kommission, ‘Sven Hedins talande tystnad’, Vår Röst, no. 2 (June 1949): 4. 79. Daily Digest of World Jewish Congress Acivities, 195 (February 1947), p. 3, ZAH, 2/1, c, no. 1746.

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80. Jockusch, Collect and Record, 191. 81. Ben Barkow, Alfred Wiener and the Making of the Holocaust Library (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1997). 82. Johannes Heuman, ‘Promoting Global Holocaust Memory in the Era of the Cold War. The Tomb of the Unknown Jewish Martyr in Paris’, History & Memory 27, no. 1 (2015): 143. 83. See, for example, ‘Sammanträde av WJC’s svenska sektionens arbetsutskott’, Protocol no. 162. 18 March 1975, RA, Judiska församlingens arkiv i Stockholm (JFA), World Jewish Congress (WJC), svenska sektionen, Protokoll 1957–1978, A1: 1. 84. Protocol no. 165, 15 December 1977; ‘Sammanträde av arbetsutskottet för World Jewish Congress svenska sektionen’, Protocol n. 166, 9 January 1978. On historial research of the archive, see also: ‘Sammanträde av WJC’s svenska sektionens arbetsutskott’, Protocol, n. 162, 18 March 1975. All documents in RA, JFA, WJC, svenska sektionen, Protokoll 1957–1978, A1: 1. 85. Storch who was particularly eager that someone should explore the sources about the rescue actions also worked to establish research funds for this purpose, see ‘Sammanträde av arbetsutskottet för World Jewish Congress svenska sektionen’, Protocol n. 166, 9 January 1978, RA, JFA, WJC, Svenska sektionen, Protokoll 1957–1978, A1: 1. 86. Elizabeth Eppler, ‘Report on visit to Stockholm office 28 March–3 April 1978’, No date, probably 1978, p.1, RA, JFA, WJC, svenska sektionen, korrespondens 1974–1978, E1:1. 87. Eppler, ‘Report on visit to Stockholm office’, pp. 1–2. 88. Eppler, ‘Report on visit to Stockholm office’, p. 1. Yahil was married to the Israeli ambassador to Sweden and lived in Stockholm at the time. She also conducted more interviews on behalf of the Yad Vashem, see Leni Yahil, The rescue of Danish Jewry. Test of a democracy (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969). 89. Silvia Goldbaum Tarabini Fracapane, Experiences of Persecution and Ghettolife: Danish Testimonies about Theresienstadt (PhD Thesis, Technische Universität Berlin, 2017). 90. Nicolas Berg, Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker. Erforschung und Erinnerung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003), 451–457. 91. Letter from N. Rost to J. Wulf, 24 August 1970; N. Rost to J. Wolf, 5 October 1970; N. Rost to J. Wolf, 24 October 1970; N. Rost to J. Wolf, 12 November 1970; J. Wolf to N. Rost, 31 December 1970, ZAH, B. 2/1, b, no. 327 (correspondence with Nella Rost-Hollander). 92. N. Rost to J. Wolf; 12 November 1970, Zentralarchiv, Bestand B. 2/1, b, Nr. 327. 93. J. Wulf to N. Rost, 1 February 1973, ZAH, B. 2/1, b, no. 327.

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94. David Weinberg, Recovering a voice. West European Jewish Communities after the Holocaust (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015). 95. Jockusch and Finder, Jewish Honor Courts. 96. On this tendency, see also Ulf Zander, ‘Swedish Rescue Operations during the Second World War. Accomplishments and Aftermath’, in The Holocaust as Active Memory. The Past in the Present, eds. Marie Louise Seeberg, Irene Levin and Claudia Lenz (London and Burlington: Ashgate, 2013): 165–185.

CHAPTER 3

Witnessing the Holocaust: Jewish Experiences and the Collection of the Polish Source Institute in Lund Izabela A. Dahl

In early 1945, Count Folke Bernadotte, nephew of the Swedish king and vice chairman of the Swedish Red Cross, made an agreement with Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler to release Scandinavian prisoners from German concentration camps. The international aid expedition, the so-­ called White Buses, was carried out under Swedish leadership.1 The aim was to collect Scandinavian prisoners as well as Swedish-born women from Nazi Germany and bring them back home as soon as possible. However, in April 1945, the operation was unexpectedly extended to non-­ Scandinavian prisoners and, ultimately, it became one of the most significant rescue operations of the Second World War.2 The White Buses expedition was completed during the last days of the war and—following an agreement between the Swedish state and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA)—it was followed by another relief effort that transported survivors from displaced persons camps in

I. A. Dahl (*) Örebro University, Örebro, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Heuman, P. Rudberg (eds.), Early Holocaust Memory in Sweden, The Holocaust and its Contexts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55532-0_3

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Germany to Sweden in the summer of 1945. Despite the uncertain numbers, it can be estimated that through these two rescue operations approximately 25,000 people were transported from the concentration camps to Sweden in 1945. According to a registration overview of the Foreigner’s Commission (Statens Utlänningskommission), there were 15,062 Polish women and men in Sweden in November 1945. Within this group of Polish citizens were around 6000 to 7000 Jews.3 The first contact with the concentration camp survivors was based on an immense social organisation on the part of Swedish society and could not have worked without the participation of active volunteers. Among those volunteers were Zygmunt Łakociński and his wife Carola von Gegerfelt who worked as interpreters helping to communicate with the former concentration camp prisoners.4 Due to Łakociński’s prior interest and activities collating evidence of the losses incurred by Poles as a result of the war and German occupation, direct contact with people who survived and carried with them personal experiences of the recent past opened up a new challenge—how to create a collection of testimonies.5 The Polish Source Institute (Polski Instytut Źródłowy or PIŹ) was therefore established and collected over 500 testimonies in addition to various items from Polish survivors between 1945 and 1946.6 The collection, located at the Lund University Library in Sweden, is today known as the Ravensbrück Archive since many of the survivors came from this camp. The archive is often described as an important source of material on the Holocaust, although most of the testimonies originated from non-Jewish survivors. The present study will analyse the work of Łakociński with the overall aim to understand what role the Holocaust played in this documentation project in the context of its general purpose, methods, and outcomes. The analysis is based on primary sources that comprise the so-called Łakociński collection that can be found today in the library of Lund University.

The Background of the Polish Source Institute Zygmunt Łakociński (1905–1987) was an active Polish intellectual who played a significant role in the lives of Polish exiles in Sweden. His interest in history and art history at the Department of Philosophy of Jagiellonian University in Kraków laid the foundations for his later work. Łakociński spoke fluent German and had substantial international experience due to his studies in Austria, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, and France. In 1932, he received his PhD and the following year was

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awarded a scholarship in London to continue his art studies. On his way to London he visited Lund, where he settled and obtained the newly established position of lecturer in Polish and cultural history at Lund University, a position co-financed by the Polish government. He also continued to work for Poland during the military mobilisation in 1939.7 Łakociński’s main tasks of organising the Swedish-Polish cultural environment in southern Sweden, publishing articles, and organising literature readings and concerts of classical music were not always appreciated activities at this time. One of his friends, Gunnar Gunnarsson, professor in Slavic languages at Lund University, commented in a personal letter to Łakociński about the presence of Nazis supporters in Lund, ‘they are everywhere, just as in Sodom and Gomorra’.8 After the war, Łakociński’s situation in Sweden became increasingly complicated. He did not see a place or future for himself in the ‘New Poland’, a country that lay under Soviet control and where the Polish communists and their Soviet allies were creating a new political order. Meanwhile, Sweden officially recognised the new Polish government on 6 July 1945.9 Engaged in supporting the concentration camp survivors, Łakociński started the weekly newspaper Polak (Pole) that was to be distributed to Polish-speaking persons arriving at the temporary centres setup for concentration camp survivors. The aim was to provide these people with current information on Swedish and Polish issues and give them an orientation in an unfamiliar country. The first issue on 20 July 1945 included the note that ‘(the) organ should be a platform accessible for every political and intellectual direction—with one condition—of Polish character’.10 Łakociński became the editor-in-chief and in his search for a Swedish publisher, he succeeded in involving Knut-Olof Falk, a fluent Polish-speaker who had become a professor in Slavic languages at Lund University the same year.11 While describing the character of the newspaper, Łakociński maintained his loyalty to the view of an eternally independent Poland, and so aligned himself and the publication with this unwavering political position. Łakociński’s oppositional attitude towards the so-called New Poland (Det Nya Polen), which was recognised by the Swedish government, and its Polish representatives in Stockholm, put him at odds with Swedish authorities and threatened both his personal and professional position in Sweden.12 In June 1946, the Polish Legation in Sweden was no longer legal and the documentation of the government-inexile, as well as its international bodies, had to be handed over to the new Polish representatives.13

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Despite the political struggles, Łakociński’s contacts within Poland remained frequent. On becoming a Swedish citizen, Łakociński declared for example his position by remarking that he would fulfil the obligation imposed by Swedish authorities but at the same time ‘the right to active participation in the social life of Polish political emigration and possibility to take up the issue of Polish citizenship again when the occupation of the country is over and life is normal again’.14 Against the background of his activities and not least as editor-in-chief of Polak, Zygmunt Łakociński can be described as a Polish intellectual who remained loyal to the Polish government-­in-exile in London for as long as possible. The political line of the government-in-exile was national conservative and liberal,15 and the anti-communist opposition was not only anti-Soviet but also often antisemitic—as achieving both independence from Soviet influence and a nation without ethnic minorities were important preoccupations.16 While Łakociński can be described as a Polish nationalist, there are no indications that he harboured anti-Jewish sentiments. Łakociński’s documentary work began after German troops invaded Poland in September 1939. Łakociński himself and two other lecturers in Polish, Józef Trypućko in Uppsala and Zbigniew Folejewski in Stockholm, started to collect information and to chronicle its consequences for Poles and Poland. The overarching objective of these early documentary activities was to give a detailed account of the impact of the outbreak of the war on Poland and the unique experience of the country’s devastation under Nazi occupation. To collect evidence regarding the destruction of the Jewish population and culture was not of primary interest to the project, but it was still included because the Nazis used Polish territory as the central extermination site for all European Jewry. The War Archive (Archiwum Wojenne) was organised in five sections that included the war library, war archive, war bibliography, registration of cultural loss, and Polish-German relations. Sweden’s neutrality brought benefits when it came to observing and reporting on the development of the situation in Europe. The collected material contained press clippings in German and Swedish, documents, information, reports, propaganda bulletins, underground press, and pictures and photographs clipped from the press. British and Polish legations cooperated by contributing different kinds of information. The aim was to prepare a collection of primary sources for future historical studies. After the war, the collection was supposed to be handed over to the library of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. The registration of

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cultural loss was performed according to an agreement with the Polish government-in-exile in London with the Department for Reclaiming Cultural Losses (Referat Rewindykacji Strat Kulturalnych). The War Archive inspired both Norway and Denmark to start similar initiatives. The financial situation was, however, an ongoing problem.17 After the war, the decision to stop funding the position of a foreign language assistant in Polish at Lund University considerably complicated Łakociński’s situation. In 1947, he left his position, not without a feeling of relief, according to Anna Wolodarski, librarian at the National Library of Sweden. Łakociński started a new period of his life as a Swedish citizen, holding temporary positions at several museums until 1963, when he became permanently employed at the Lund University Library.18

Collecting Testimonies The post-war collection of the oral testimonies was a new project which followed the same objectives as the previous documentary work conducted by Zygmunt Łakociński during the war. When the first transports of ex-­ prisoners reached the quay in Malmö in spring 1945, Łakociński met the evacuated camp prisoners who arrived in southern Sweden and acted as an interpreter for the Polish-speaking group. Łakociński wrote in one of his memos that the resumption of the documentation efforts was prompted by the sudden arrival of a large number of Polish prisoners—he estimated around 7300—from Germany on 17 May 1945: An extremely important field of war crimes can be examined and documented at the moment with the help of thousands of witnesses—victims— persons who in many cases risking their lives transported documents, constituting an extremely important historical source regarding the camps, prisons of torture and death not only for Poles but also for other nationalities. This material cannot be dispersed. On the contrary, it should be collected as much as possible and multiplied by making the most accurate records with any former prisoner using their stay in a relatively small area and their fresh memories of the recent events.19

The rescued received health support at health care centres and hospitals, and after convalescence those who were in better physical condition were accommodated in temporary centres or, if they chose, could be sent to labour camps: places organised by private individuals or initiatives,

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where the survivors could live and work so as not to depend on state financial aid. Against the expectations of the Swedish authorities, many of those people decided not to go back to Poland, but instead chose to continue their life in exile.20 Poland, bearing the memory of the horrors of war, became a family tomb for those who had lost everyone and everything. Information about the antisemitic pogroms was often the decisive factor that led Jewish survivors to plan for their future outside of Poland. The so-called documentary commissions consisting of four to six individuals were established in the first assembly points (five in Lund and one in Landskrona). These were collecting documentation during the ongoing medical care procedures. After dividing the group into smaller groups that were sent to quarantine lodgings, the commissions reorganised their work to adjust to the new situation. The work was ongoing during the first month of the quarantine. Lund was the site of the documentary work for several reasons: the vast majority of evacuated prisoners from Poland were accumulated in the southern part of Sweden, the access to the university library would back the research related to the documentary activities, professional support could be provided by the university’s professors, and ‘the atmosphere of the peaceful scientific environment create[d] the most favourable working conditions.’21 In the beginning, the engagement with the work was voluntary and its financial base was ensured by the grant-in-aid paid by the Polish authorities to every Polish citizen in Sweden of 120 Swedish crowns a month.22 In May 1945, efforts were made to apply for funds from the Polish authorities in London. However, no funding was granted due to the political situation facing the Polish government-in-exile during 1945. The Institute expanded the search and was finally granted funding by the Swedish authorities and the National [Swedish] Labour Market Commission (Statens Arbetsmarknadskommission).23 Financial support from the Swedish government helped launch the project in November 1945, and interviews were carried out for a period of one year.24 The employment of the PIŹ staff was part of the organised employment of educated foreign employees as so-called archive workers (arkivarbetare).25 Due to limited financial resources, the Institute entered administration at the end of September 1946 and ultimately shut down on 1 December 1946. Institutionally, PIŹ was co-opted to the Swedish Institute of International Affairs (Utrikespolitiska Institutet) in Stockholm. Due to the establishment of diplomatic representatives of New Poland in Sweden, in June 1946, PIŹ was obliged to submit its activities to them.26

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Consequently, PIŹ lost its link to other Polish representative bodies abroad and continued to act independently. Nonetheless, since the first meeting with the concentration camp survivors on the quay in Malmö, the work of collecting testimonies was carried out by a continually growing number of volunteers. The task was to register and systematise different kinds of notes, letters, poems, and personal records as well as various objects that the ex-prisoners had taken with them from the concentration camps. These objects were often burned by the Swedish authorities to prevent the spread of diseases. According to Łakociński, this kind of documentary work could be performed only by people appointed to it—professionals who had proper conditions and certain levels of education. Personal experience of the concentration camps was a necessary requirement to ensure sufficient understanding of the topic as well as of the nature of the collected material. Thereby, the recruitment and employment of the PIŹ team was accompanied by obstacles of a basically formal but also economic nature. Moreover, the establishment of the body was delayed by the repatriation of survivors to Poland between October and December 1945 that resulted in the departure of potential candidates for work at the Institute. Collecting testimonies was a demanding task and was often interrupted by the weakness and psychological condition of the concentration camp survivors who took part. The ongoing repatriation of convalescents to Poland during the autumn and winter of 1945 required urgent work collecting survivors’ testimonies before they left Sweden. Łakociński wrote in a letter to his methodological adviser Sture Bolin, a historian at Lund University, about the difficulties both for the person who witnessed and for the protocol writer. Although the psychological strain on the interviewing assistants seemed to ease somewhat with time, this was not the case with the witnesses. ‘Now, more than a year after liberation, they return to the memory of their experiences increasingly unwilling, and it requires a lot of work and persuasion to make them testify’, he wrote.27 The personal acquaintance of the PIŹ employees with the potential interviewees or other connections was often key for the work to be conducted in an effective way. By the same token, PIŹ workers personally knew many ex-prisoners spread across Sweden who owned valuable belongings. The assistants tried to collect as much as possible through correspondence. In most cases, however, people simply refused to take the pen in hand, and in these cases the team had to meet with them personally. The major work of collecting testimonies was carried out in January 1946, when five assistants visited 14 temporary centres in Sweden.28 In

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February 1946, the PIŹ team were made up of nine individuals, all former political prisoners. Restricting the number of employees to nine was due to the National Labour Market Commission’s limited funds and to the fact that no other potential candidates received work permits from the Swedish authorities. To carry out the collection of material efficiently, there was a division of tasks within the group. One of the PIŹ assistants, Ludwika Broel-Plater, drew up a list of words from the concentration camps which were considered important since many of the words used in the camps and in the protocols reflected the conditions. Another coworker, Helena Dziedzicka, translated correspondence to and from English and French. Irena Jaworowicz typed out all the documents for the group. Krystyna Karier oversaw meetings and financial matters. Boěysław Kurowski worked with legal issues. Helena Miklaszewska was responsible for accounting and listing the ex-prisoners who died, while Luba Melchior worked with the archive and was responsible for Jewish matters. Józef Nowaczyk mapped out places that related to the concentration camps, and Halina Strzelecka produced different card index registers.29

Methodology and Purpose of Collecting Testimonies The reliability and authenticity of the testimonies was the highest priority to the interviewing team and of utmost importance to the collection. In Łakociński’s words, the records should ‘document the truth against all myths’.30 This ambition required professional methodological engagement and for this purpose professor Sture Bolin was appointed as a scientific supervisor by the Institute’s executive board.31 In fact, the extent of Bolin’s involvement in PIŹ’s work is not well documented. Bolin was a history professor at Lund University and from the early 1920s until the 1940s, he was an active member of the National Youth League of Sweden (Sveriges Nationella Ungdomsförbund), a right-wing antisemitic organisation in Sweden. In the years 1945–1950, he worked for the Department of Foreign Affairs (Utrikesdepartementet), assigned to the task of assessing the department’s war documentation.32 It has been argued that Bolin played a central role for the entire project as both its initiator and its research designer.33 However, despite his prominent position in PIŹ’s framework, the source material indicates that he had a rather passive role and acted as a sounding board supporting the project with casual advice. In fact, the only direct involvement of Bolin in the assistants’ work was in giving a lecture on 22 November 1945, addressing methodological issues

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regarding the collection of interviews.34 Bolin’s estate at the library of Lund University contains a folder with only three letters from Łakociński. They all touch upon PIŹ matters and were intended to inform Bolin about the state of the work regarding the collection of the testimonies.35 Nevertheless, Bolin’s professional opinion and participation in the project was certainly of high value for the ongoing work with regard to methodological questions related to the procedure of collecting oral material. He was also an important link to Lund University and was able to give advice on questions around the project’s funding. A set of specific recommendations had been proposed by Bolin and these were incorporated into an overarching set of guidelines that guided the process of collecting testimonies. According to the guidelines, the imprisonment and the brutality of the life in the concentration camps were to be documented in a recorded hearing. This method aimed at recalling and documenting most of the facts the witnesses experienced as victims or the witnesses knew about from other people and believed these reports to be highly plausible. The individual accounts had to be transcribed in their full length and in line with their original wording, while the PIŹ staff was obliged to draw up short notes and comments reflecting the credibility of facts and supplementing the witness descriptions to get as detailed a record as possible. Also, according to the guidelines, the records should distinguish between self-experience and relation to other witnesses’ experience. The geographical location of where the crimes took place was to be mentioned with the greatest possible accuracy. The chronological order of the described events required particular attention. The description had to be organised according to the actual course of events, if the testimony permitted. The records had to name rather than describe what rights to political self-determination the Germans used as justification for executing the death penalty decisions: such as physical punishment, torture, and so on, including the persecution of ‘non-Aryan’ ethnic groups. During the revision of the sampled material, the assistants were asked to identify to what extent torture was used on political prisoners in the concentration camps and what impact did this have on their lives. Finally, special attention would be paid to determine how the Nazi institutionalised plans worked in different camps and how they were put into practice. The guidelines were demanding and not easy to follow considering the kind of experiences the interviewees had to share. Many people were incapable of revisiting their war experience at all. In a letter to Bolin, Łakociński wrote that the slow progress in collecting testimonies was because the

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witnesses’ ‘infirmity and their mental instability cause delays lasting weeks in the case of each single record’.36 According to the interview guidelines, all victims of Nazi violence were to be interviewed in the same way, regardless if they were Jewish or non-Jewish. From this perspective, the starting point for Łakociński’s project was a rather uniform view of persecution and camp experiences in Poland that did not take into account the different experiences of Jewish and non-Jewish victims. However, the Jewish testimonies were nevertheless collected by a specific section within the PIŹ—the so-called Jewish section. In 1945, the idea behind the project was to collect as many testimonies of Nazi crimes as possible in order to build a fact-oriented documentation of the recent past. The destruction of peoples’ lives had to be documented, preserved, and not forgotten. A significant factor motivating the team to engage with the extensive documentary work was hope for justice and reparation. In this context, the documentation quickly proved to be a valuable source, as it was used in the first trial against the doctors and SS-men of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, which ran in Hamburg from 5 December 1946 to 3 February 1947. Three survivors, all of them non-Jewish ex-prisoners, were invited from Sweden to serve as witnesses in Hamburg: Zofia Sokulska, Stanisława Szewczykowa, and Helena Dziedzicka. Helena Dziedzicka was the only PIŹ representative and the delegation was supplemented by the institute’s lawyer, Boěysław Kurowski, as well as Zygmunt Łakociński himself.37 In July 1946, Keith Mant, the British representative of the War Crimes Investigation Team, that was responsible for—among other things—gathering evidence of Nazi crimes by exhuming the bodies of victims, interrogating individuals who cooperated with the SS, and investigating concentration camps, visited Lund and was impressed by the scale of the archive: ‘I was able to gather a large quantity of important material for the prosecution of the accused and also obtained addresses of many valuable witnesses.’38 In addition to the submitted testimonies, that were written in Polish, there were other personal belongings included such as prisoners’ notebooks, diaries, letters, poems, recipes, photographs, drawings, lists of prisoners, maps of the camps, lists of the names of those who lived and died in the various blocks, and transcripts of protocols and original documents from Ravensbrück. In fact, it was Helena Dziedzicka who was the prosecution’s second witness at this trial. She made notes on her observations from the trial during her stay in Hamburg. Her handwritten and typed notes, together with other evidence, make up the group’s collection of material on the trial in Hamburg.

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Another twelve testimonies were used at the trial on 22 October 1948 of the SS officers who had presided over the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. Moreover, some pictures were sent for the Auschwitz trials, which were conducted in the years 1963–1968. However, it remains unknown if and to what extent this material was used at court in the Auschwitz cases. In other words, as well as providing a record for future generations, the testimonies were important sources in the contemporary search for justice.

The Testimonies and Jewish Voices Łakociński’s collection consists of 512 handwritten testimonies that are based on in-depth interviews. All testimonies follow a standardised template that includes information regarding the place and date of the record, the record number, as well as personal information regarding the interviewees, including their religious affiliation. According to the records, the collection contains the accounts of 61 Jews, 2 Protestants and 1 Baptist. The remaining majority are about individuals categorised as Roman Catholics. Nine of the testimonies have been missing since the 1940s and hence have never been a part of the collection. Most of these witness reports are between five and ten handwritten pages long and all are written in Polish. The final records are signed by both the witness and the staff member who was in charge of the particular document, usually the interviewer. All follow an overarching reliability approach consistent throughout the collection that includes an additional text at the end of each record. These texts include verbatim witness accounts confirming, complementing, or critically reviewing the testimony. According to the guidelines, these comments would substantiate the witness accounts by another witnesses, who in practice were the PIŹ assistants themselves. These figures suggest that the Polish-Jewish survivors represent about 12 percent of the collection of testimonies and the experiences of what we today call the Holocaust were thus only a small part of the assemblage. This does not, however, mean that Łakociński and his team were completely ignorant of the particular Jewish experiences or that these were just recorded by coincidence together with the others. As mentioned before, Łakociński established a Jewish section within PIŹ where Luba Melchior was in charge. Melchior’s responsibility was to conduct interviews with the Jewish survivors, to collect their testimonies and to take care of the collected Jewish documentation. She was employed on 22 November 1945, a month after the two first employees started their work.39 According

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to the PIŹ sources, she was as devoted to her work as all the non-Jewish assistants. However, financial constraints considerably complicated her work in June 1946 when she had just initiated cooperation with the Jewish historical commission of the WJC led by Nella Rost.40 Rost was most likely an important professional link for Melchior in her work with Jewish testimonies in Sweden, as Rost was a Polish-Jewish survivor, and served as vice-director of the Krakow branch of the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Lodz before she left on an assignment for Sweden in April 1946.41 The termination of funding for the project in Lund forced Luba Melchior—as well as all the other assistants of PIŹ—to search for other assignments. According to the attestation signed by Łakociński, Luba Melchior responded positively to an invitation from the Conseil des Associations Juives de Belgique and left in the second half of 1946 for Belgium, although she was still officially employed at the institute in December 1946. Melchior’s strong interest in PIŹ’s situation confirms her commitment to her work there and her good relationship with Łakociński.42 As with all the non-Jewish testimonies, Jewish voices saved in the Łakociński archive are recorded in Polish. All records contain autobiographical expressions of the experience of the war and, as such, the Jewish testimonies differ from the others. Jewish records describe Jewish everyday life in Poland before the war and later under German occupation and give insight into different aspects of the survivors’ destiny from when they left the concentration camps until they were provided with accommodation in various parts of Sweden. The witness reports focus on freedom and belonging to the Jewish community, life in ghettos as an experience of discrimination and social isolation, expressions of loneliness, the brutality of deportations, and different strategies for survival. They involve narratives of local people’s attitudes towards the situation, express the fear ‘when human life became very cheap’, and/or gratitude in cases of help. Indeed, Jewish experiences varied from that of other prisoners in the concentration camps. In the last preserved letter from Zygmunt Łakociński to Sture Bolin, Łakociński writes that he had contact with a Polish Jew, Leon Jakubowicz, regarding documents from the ghetto in Lodz and that there were plans to translate the collected material by the PIŹ into German and French with the help of one of the institute’s coworkers, Ludwika Broel-Palter.43 However, Łakociński’s hopes for publishing the protocols were ultimately dashed. In a letter to Broel-Plater, Łakociński writes that ‘at last Bolin has

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clearly expressed why he refuses to translate the camp protocols—it is because his department deals with Swedish things only, and this material is arousing interest in general history […]’.44 A similar tendency is also evident concerning Jewish testimonies among the Polish survivors in Sweden—these were certainly not a priority for the PIŹ despite the fact that a Jewish section was already established. The Polish-Swedish writer Artur Szulc has argued that the relatively limited representation of Jewish voices in the PIŹ collection can be explained by, among other things, a difficulty to win over Jewish Poles for interviews because of their fear.45 However, it is more likely that the main focus was simply on the non-­ Jewish Polish survivors and political victims. According to the organisation chart of PIŹ, the aims of the institute were collecting, recording, and editing of any Polish sources concerning the Second World War for relevant Polish scientific institutions. Life in prisons and in concentration camps was of special interest of the Institute’s work.46 This organisational chart was signed by nine people involved with PIŹ, but not by Luba Melchior. This might indicate that Melchior’s activities to focus on the Jewish survivors were regarded as something apart from the institute’s core activity. Indeed, in the immediate post-war period, the wartime experiences of non-Jewish Poles and Jewish Poles were regarded as two separate stories—a fundamental ‘division of memory’ separated the two groups.47 Łakociński noted in a letter that the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Lodz, led by the famous early Holocaust historian professor Filip Friedman, carried out a similar project except that it focused ‘on the subject of Jewish martyrdom’.48 Did this mean that Łakociński regarded his activities as complementary to Friedman? There are no such clear indications, although Łakociński was well aware of the Jewish initiatives in Poland for collecting the testimonies of survivors. According to the guidelines, however, Łakociński’s project focused mainly on ‘political prisoners’, which in general did not involve Jewish survivors.49 Reflecting the disproportion of non-Jewish and Jewish testimonies, it is important to remember the composition of the PIŹ team as well as to keep in mind the general tense atmosphere in different temporary centres and camps. As previously mentioned, the PIŹ team members were themselves ex-prisoners of the German concentration camps, and their relationships with Polish Jews cannot be described as entirely harmonious. Some of the non-Jewish Polish survivors did not recognise Polish Jews as Poles at all.50 After the primary quarantine and on behalf of Swedish authorities, the survivors were generally assigned shared temporary accommodation.

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The conflicting atmosphere between non-Jewish Poles and Jewish Poles in Sweden is also documented by Inga Gottfarb. She worked on behalf of the Jewish Community of Stockholm (Judiska Församlingen i Stockholm) as a social worker from the beginning of the Second World War in the Working Committee for Polish Jewish Relief in Stockholm, and collected food and clothes that were sent to ghettos and camps.51 After the first survivor transports reached Sweden, she was involved in the Jewish community’s aid work for Jewish survivors, and described open conflicts that flared up between the survivors. Different dining rooms had to be arranged for Polish Jewish and non-Jewish women to reduce the risk of antisemitic incidents. At the same time, Gottfarb assumed that ‘even if antisemitism from the Polish side was high in many Swedish camps, Swedish authorities often did nothing against that’.52 In the eyes of the Swedes, they all came from Poland and had suffered persecution at the hands of the Nazi regime. However, the existence of antisemitism and tensions between Jewish and non-Jewish Poles may explain why Łakociński established a Jewish section to interview Jews.

The Unfiled Documents Some of the collected testimonies were neither completed nor registered. These unfiled and unregistered documents are stored as a separate deposit belonging to the larger Łakociński archive but have never been included as a part of the official records. This deposit consists of unfiled records containing about 69 documents and 7 fragments, about half of which are from Jewish survivors.53 The major difference between the unfiled documents and the collection of testimonies is that the unregistered documents do not follow the standardised questionnaire. Hence, they are far more heterogeneous in regard to their textual form. Unlike the official records, they do not follow the fact-oriented approach of the collection and include neither confirming nor criticising extensions. The variety of genre represented in these documents makes the unfiled documents particularly interesting for historical studies as they provide a high explanatory value and permit the expression of emotions. They give, for example, a nuanced picture of the ongoing change in social relations between polish Jews and non-Jews during the 1930s and early 1940s, accelerated by the introduction of the Nazi legislation on the occupied territories. These personal accounts include thorough descriptions of everyday life and a social order shaped by religious traditions and social norms; descriptions of love,

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family life before the war, and the gradual isolation of Jewish populations in the cities; Jewish life in the ghettos, including the fight against famine, deportations, killings, death, and escape; life in the concentration camps; and the end of the war, including arrival and experiences in Sweden. The documents involve individual assessments of the experiences of changing situation, places, events, and of meeting people and how they acted. Moreover, while the records that are a part of the Łakociński collection have already been mapped in some previous studies, the unfiled records stored in the archive remain unexplored.54 In order to substantiate and refine this dense description of Jewish experiences of the war depicted in the records, I will refer to three unfiled testimonies illuminating various aspects of the early Jewish Holocaust memory collected in Sweden. The first example is the testimony of Frida Katz which, at 56 pages, is one of the longest testimonies. In this document, entitled Memorials, Frida gives a comprehensive and detailed account of her story, which included both the Lodz ghetto and Auschwitz.55 From her perspective as a Jewish girl, she described the ongoing process of change in the city: the call-up, the bombings, the raid of the German troops, marking Jews with yellow stars. She described living in the city when ‘the word Jew meant death’.56 People were caught on streets for work, loaded in trucks, taken out of the town, beaten, humiliated, and killed. It was seldom that they came back home after work, and those that did return were beaten and exhausted and later, at home, waited for death. Frida described the organisation of the Lodz ghetto and life there as a graveyard with no way out.57 In the beginning, ‘the wealthy prospered well in the ghetto, they had everything in abundance’.58 However, this situation gradually changed for everybody. Frida described the starvation and how people around her gradually disappeared, how parents ascribed their families for deportations in the hope of better living conditions for their children, and then how they followed the organised transports. She described deaths at homes and on the streets when famine and diseases decimated the ghetto population, and how these circumstances altered people’s minds and destroyed their morality. She wrote about how parents robbed parts of children’s food rations to survive, the violent repression by the Jewish police and the guards. She mentioned Chaim Rumkowski, the head of the Council of Elders in the Lodz ghetto, and described the harsh abuse he meted out. She also assumed that it was Jewish police themselves who decided about life and death in the ghetto. Rumkowski’s speech Give me your Children, delivered at the time when the Germans demanded his compliance with

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the deportation of 20,000 children to Chelmno extermination camp, is a part of Frida’s family history when her sister had to give up her two children. ‘What a terrible trial to be a powerless witness to the death of those who were for us everything we had in our life’.59 Frida described the constant fear and the process of loss when elderly and sick people were gathered up for deportations and when people chose death by refusing to eat or desperately jumping out of the windows of the tenement houses. ‘Yes, those days human life was very cheap, just a toy in the murderer’s hands’.60 Frida had six brothers. In the first months after the ghetto was organised, the post was reaching the recipients living in the ghetto and, based on temporary contact with her brother, Frida described the differences between the living conditions in the ghetto in Lodz and in Warsaw. One of the brothers succeeded in escaping the ghetto. ‘Lodz was incorporated into the Reich, and Warsaw became a General Governorate. It was easier to get some food elsewhere; it was possible to travel from one village to another, smuggle, and save oneself’.61 Unfortunately soon after, the isolation in the ghetto was complete and outside contact with the world, including through the post, was broken. Frida’s father was a deeply religious person. According to Frida’s narration, his appearance was a verdict of death. He covered his beard with a handkerchief because he refused to shave it. When in 1941 food in the ghetto was difficult to obtain, his greatest concern was the bookshelf with books that must not be destroyed. He spent days praying and refused to eat food that was not kosher even if the family begged him to do so. He became weaker and weaker until one day he rose from his bed no more. Frida’s mother also followed the religious rules and died soon after her husband. Frida’s story ends unexpectedly, and the testimony seems either to be unfinished or not fully preserved. The reader follows Frida to Auschwitz where she described her first days in the camp, but the narrative never gets to her liberation and arrival in Sweden. The second example is Franka Silbersztein-Salomonowicz’s 16-page-­ long testimony. Franka also survived the ghetto in Lodz. The testimony is interesting because Franka discussed the different individual attitudes of German people towards the victims of war. However, the aspect to be focused on here is the thorough passages regarding Franka’s encounter with Sweden. Franka came to Sweden on 3 May 1945, and thereafter left for Chicago on 7 January 1946. With profound gratitude, she described her first meeting with Swedes who showed love and devotion with their assistance to the survivors. She also addressed her saviour, Folke

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Bernadotte, by sending him her feelings of gratitude, even if the ‘king of the beggars’ did not show up in Malmö,62 when she, together with other survivors, arrived. During her first days in quarantine at the Museum in Malmö, she worked as a translator and soon after was moved to Heberg, a small village in southern Sweden. For Franka, the place was truly beautiful and an inspiration for artists but ‘you cannot forever stay in the forest and admire the gifts of nature’.63 Her life was completely dominated by the sense of loneliness she felt among people who did not share an experience of the Holocaust and of personal loss. ‘I wish I could be a bird and would not need to go back to this grey crowd where no one cares’.64 Franka put all her energy into searching for her lost family: six brothers, four sisters, and her husband. Meanwhile, she worked in the fields of a Swedish farm together with 103 other women. Franka found working in the field an interesting experience because she had never performed this type of work before. However, she had to ‘live this monotonous life when one day is similar to another’.65 In September 1945, she was sent to another work camp in Sweden, and commented upon the conditions, We are like Gypsies without a harbour. We don’t find a place to stay anywhere. One camp is a school. So, we need to leave this place of our living in two months. The other camp is a theatre and because Swedes needed their place of entertainment, we had to leave this theatre as well. We are placed in Oskarström now, in a temporary camp where we have stayed for five weeks: this is how people without a harbour live.66

With help from the World Jewish Congress, Franka received a message from her uncle in the United States that one of her brothers had survived the war in Poland. When she wrote her testimony, she was living in her fifth temporary centre and planned to stay no longer than two months before her brother and his family from Poland would join her in Sweden, from where they would all together leave for Chicago. The uncle and one of Franka’s cousins, a lawyer, helped to organise their travel as soon as it was possible.67 Franka’s testimony is an example of how the unfiled testimonies, that did not follow the usual questionnaire, could contain more personal expressions of emotions. Finally, the third example is the handwritten testimony of Izrael Wajdling recorded by Luba Melchior.68 Izrael was born in 1915  in Walbrom, and he started his testimony with the description of the atmosphere in this shtetl when the Germans arrived. In the beginning, the

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repressions towards the Jews were limited to some settlement rules. At that point in time, Jews were not allowed to live in certain districts of the city and were not allowed to use the sidewalks. They were also required to wear a white armband with the Star of David on the left sleeve of the outer clothing and regularly check in for forced labour. The work camps were monitored by German civilians and the work was physically exhausting. Izrael wrote that in one of the camps in 1941, ‘the foreman Meryn—a German, haunted us massively. He beat us to unconsciousness. Once even to death’.69 The situation in the town gradually deteriorated due to food shortages and Jews were forbidden to leave. They did not get necessary permits for trips to the countryside which could result in better supplies. In order to stop the illegal trips, the Germans announced a reward for denouncing a Jew. A local who reported a Jew to the German authorities would receive one kilogram of sugar and some eggs. Izrael explained that until the deportation of Walbrom’s Jews in summer 1942, there were several such denunciations and many Jews were killed. According to the record, during the deportations arranged by the Germans, Polish paramilitary volunteers, police, and gendarmerie also participated. During the raid, Jews were robbed and women raped. Women, children, and men who were unable to work were sent to Belzec extermination camp. ‘For the first time in my life, I saw what a rag man became’.70 In addition to the different cultural conditions of Polish Jews during the interwar period and to the systematic implementation of the Nazi policy leading to the Holocaust, the most striking contrast with the non-­ Jewish testimonies is that Jewish narrations are full of loneliness. People started to become lonely when their family members gradually disappeared from their lives, and they continued to be lonely in Sweden as they desperately searched for their lost relatives. While each narration is unique, some common themes typical of Polish-Jewish memory of the Holocaust can be found. With the advance of German troops, many Polish Jews had been desperately struggling to survive. People often fled from small towns in the aftermath and sought help in the countryside. Risky yet profitable, providing such assistance required great civil courage to oppose the brutal occupation policy and was pivotal to life and death for people on the run. However, research on Jewish survival strategies in the occupied territories of the General Government in the years 1942–1945 shows that two out of three Jews seeking help from their Polish neighbours perished. This crushing figure illustrates the extent of participation by Polish non-Jewish citizens in the Holocaust,71 and this impacted Jewish memories of the

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Holocaust. The deep demoralisation of civil society was a consequence of the war which went far beyond the physical destruction of cities and mass killings that were openly conducted.72 Nonetheless, for most Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivors, Sweden was not the place to rebuild their live in the post-war world.

The Collection Today and the Jewish Testimonies Due to the lack of funds in Sweden, in 1949 the Łakociński documentation was transferred to the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University in the United States. Meanwhile, despite the lack of financial support, PIŹ continued to exist on the basis of voluntary and unpaid work by two of the former PIŹ members, Ludwika Broel-­ Plater and Łakociński himself.73 In the beginning of the 1970, Łakociński, with the help of his son Martin, negotiated the return of the material from the Hoover Institution back to Lund, and in 1984, the estate of the Polish Source Institute was handed over to Lund University and the museum Kulturen. After an exhibition in 1999 at Kulturen, in 2002 Lund University Library launched the project Voices from Ravensbrück to make this internationally unique collection known and accessible to researchers and the public. In 2004, the Ravensbrück Archive was officially donated to Lund University Library by the heirs of Łakociński. The work to arrange the collection in a professional way began with a translation of twenty-five interviews into English. Since autumn 2017, the collection has been digitalised and testimonies are available and open for research through the university library’s webpage. The Łakociński collection contains detailed individual descriptions of suffering from Nazi terror in occupied Poland provided by both non-­ Jewish and Jewish concentration camp survivors. The character of PIŹ’s activities was nationally motivated. Despite the fact that the concept of Polish national identity tended to and still does exclude Jews, the documentation project in Lund includes Jewish voices, which were collected within the so-called Jewish section represented by Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor Luba Melchior. The fact that a Jewish section was established in order to record the Jewish survivors showed a certain interest in these experiences, although it was far from the central focus. Only around 12 percent of the collected testimonies are from Polish Jews in Sweden. The Holocaust was thus pushed to the margins of this project that documents Nazi atrocities in Poland. The presence of these experiences in the archives

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was still a markedly different approach to how, due to antisemitism, the Holocaust was both marginalised and even externalised in parts of Eastern Europe after the War.74 For the vast majority of Polish Jews in Sweden, the exclusion from the Polish national community, as well as experiences of antisemitism in the temporary centres and camps, played a significant role in decisions about their lives following the Holocaust—emphasised by the fact that only 2 percent of Polish Jews were willing to return to Poland in the beginning of 1946.75 The Jewish records of Łakociński’s archive contain descriptions of everyday Jewish life in Poland during the interwar period and later under German occupation. The main topics addressed in the records concern the value of freedom and belonging, changing circumstances of life in ghettos, the isolation and death of relatives and friends causing gradual loneliness, and different ways of survival during the war. The records also give insight into local people’s attitude towards the situation. They describe the fear and/or the gratitude felt when help arrived, as well as disappointments when non-Jews and sometimes friends before and after the war became indifferent or contributed to Jewish loss. In addition, Jewish accounts are also present among the unfiled documents that were never registered. While the testimonies in general were rather fact-oriented, these unfiled testimonies have a more personal approach and express emotive responses to the Holocaust. Both the PIŹ collection of the testimonies and the unfiled documents that are part of the larger Łakociński archive are highly valuable, not only because the testimonies were collected shortly after the survivors’ arrival in Sweden, but also due to the high academic standards of the documentary work. Today, the question of what we have learned from history is discussed both inside and outside academia. It is important to listen to the answers given by the survivors themselves in this regard, by those who experienced the unthinkable. In fact, some of the testimonies in Lund include a kind of conclusion, as the Polish-Jewish survivor Franka Silbersztein-Salomonowicz put it in her testimony: ‘One thing that should disappear from the horison is fascism. When there is no fascism, there will be no war!! It is necessary to nip it in the bud, not allow these seeds to grow again into the vast forest. […]Let our future generations live their years in peace, in a real, democratic spirit.’76

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Notes 1. Therkel Stræde, ‘Die Aktion Weiße Busse’, in Befreiung Sachsenhausen 1945, eds. Günter Morsch and Alfred Reckendrees (Berlin: Hentrich, 1996), 42–52; Simone Erpel, Zwischen Vernichtung und Befreiung. Das Frauen-­Konzentrationslager Ravensbrück in der letzten Kriegsphase (Berlin: Metropol, 2005). 2. Ingrid Lomfors, Blind fläck. Minne och glömska kring svenska Röda korsets hjälpinsats i Nazityskland 1945 (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2005); Sune Persson, Vi åker till Sverige. De vita bussarna 1945 (Rimbo: Fischer & Co, 2002); Stræde ‘Die Aktion’, Weiße Busse’, 42–52; Erpel, Zwischen Vernichtung und Befreiung; Izabela A.  Dahl (2008), ‘Die “Weißen Busse” und Folke Bernadotte. Zur Rezeption der Hilfsaktion in Deutschland und Skandinavien’, in KZ und Nachwelt. Dachauer Hefte. Studien und Dokumente zur Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, eds. Wolfgang Benz and Barbara Distel (Dachau: Dachau Selbstverlag, 2008), 203–220. In fact, according to the Red Cross report from 2000, it succeeded in transporting to Sweden 15,345 or 15,445: 7795 or 7895 of whom were of Scandinavian origin and 7550 non-Scandinavians. No specification regarding gender or nationality is provided. See Agneta Greayer, Sonja Sjöstrand and Martin Wikberg, Vita bussarna. Svenska Röda korsets räddningsaktion till Tyskland under Andra världskriget (Stockholm: Svenska Röda Korset, 2000). 3. Andrzej Nils Uggla, I nordlig hamn. Polacker i Sverige under andra världskriget (Uppsala: Centrum för multietnisk forskning, Uppsala Universitet, 1997), 198. 4. Carola von Gegerfelt (1904–1972) was a historian and librarian at the University in Lund and was honored with the Swedish Royal Order of the Polar Star (Nordstjärneorden). She was an active social activist who had good command of Polish language. 5. For similar government initiatives aiming at collecting Holocaust testimonies in Western European countries, see Pieter Lagrou. ‘Historiographie de guerre et historiographie du temps présent. Cadres institutionnels en Europe occidentale, 1945–2000’. Bulletin du Comité international d’histoire de la 2éme guerre mondiale, 30–31 (2000), 191–215; Henry Rousso, The Latest Catastrophe. History, the Present, the Contemporary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 6. The web portal of Lund University providing the digitised collection translated the name of the working group, Polski Instytut Źródłowy as ‘The Polish Research Institute in Lund’, see: https://www.ub.lu.se/witnessinggenocide. In the sources, the Institute calls itself ‘Polish Historical Institute in Lund’ (PIZ: 44). The translated name differs from the language of the

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sources and in the following, I will refer to the name of the working group as the Polish Source Institute. 7. For biographical details, see Anna Wolodarski, ‘Zygmunt Otto Łakociński (1905–1987)’, Biuletyn Historii Sztuki, no. 3–4 (2000): 695; Izabela A.  Dahl, ‘“…this material arousing interest in common history…” Zygmunt Łakociński and Polish survivors’ protocols’, Jewish History Quarterly 223, no. 3 (2007): 319–338. 8. Letter to Zygmunt Łakociński (30 October 1941), see Eugeniusz Kruszewski, Polski Instytut Źrodłowy w Lund (1939–1972). Zarys historii i dorobek (London: Polski Uniwersytet na Obczyźnie 2001), 99. See also, Thomas von Gegerfelt, ‘Min far Zygmunt Łakociński’, Svensk-Polsk Bulletin, Mars, 2006. 9. ‘England och USA har erkänt Polen’, Ny Dag, no. 153 (6 July 1945): 3. For more on the transformation of the new government, see Anne Appelbaum, Iron curtain. The crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (London: Allen Lane 2012). 10. Polak, no. 1, 20 July 1945, p. 1. On press addressing Polish-Jewish and non-Jewish survivors and refugees in Sweden in the years 1945–1948, see Izabela A.  Dahl, Ausschluss und Zugehörigkeit. Polnische jüdische Zwangsmigration in Schweden nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Berlin: Metropol, 2013), 157–165, 174–183. 11. Zygmunt Łakociński to Knut-Olof Falk, 16 June 1945, Lakocinski collection, PIZ: 46, Universitetsbiblioteket, Lunds Universitet (Lund University Library, LUB). 12. Dahl, ‘“…this material arousing interest in common history…”’, 319–338. 13. Polak, no. 47, 14 June 1946, p. 2. 14. Zygmunt Łakociński to Presidium of the Polish Refugee Council in Sweden, 10 October 1947, Lakocinski collection, PIZ: 46, LUB. 15. For more on the Polish government-in-exile, see David Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz. The Polish Government-in-exile and the Jews, 1939–1942 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); David Engel, Facing a Holocaust. The Polish Government-in-exile and the Jews, 1943–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). 16. Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 88. 17. Wołodarski, ‘Zygmunt Otto Łakocinski’, 693–695. 18. Kruszewski, Polski Instytut Źrodłowy w Lund (1939–1972), l03–104; Wołodarski, ‘Zygmunt Otto Lakocinski’, 693–695; Zygmunt Łakociński obtained his Swedish citizenship on 26 September 1947. See Zygmunt Łakociński to Presidium of the Polish Refugee Council in Sweden, 10 October 1947, Lakocinski collection, PIZ: 46, LUB. 19. PM, 17 May 1945, Lakocinski collection, PIZ: 44: 1c, LUB.

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20. Dahl, Ausschluss und Zugehörigkeit. 21. PM, 17 May 1945, Lakocinski collection, PIZ: 44: 1c, LUB. 22. PM w sprawie Polskiego Instytutu Źródłowego w Lund, 17 May 1945, Lakocinski collection, PIZ: 44: 1c, LUB. 23. ‘PM w sprawie Polskiego Instytutu Źródłowego w Lund’, 3 October 1946, Lakocinski collection, PIZ: 44: 2j, LUB. 24. ‘PM w sprawie Polskiego Instytutu Źródłowego w Lund’, April 1946, Lakocinski collection, PIZ: 44: 2d, LUB. 25. ‘Sprawozdanie za okres 22/10.1945–30/9.1946’, September 1946, Lakocinski collection, PIZ: 44: 2k, LUB. 26. ‘PM w sprawie Polskiego Instytutu Źródłowego w Lund’, April 1946, Lakocinski collection, PIZ: 44: 2d, LUB; Zygmunt Lakocinski to Johannes Lindblom, 20 May 1946, Lakocinski collection, PIZ: 44: 2f, LUB. 27. Zygmunt Łakociński to Sture Bolin, 3 August 1946, Sture Bolin collection, LUB. 28. ‘Sprawozdanie za okres 22.10.1945–30.9.1946’, 21 September 1946, Lakocinski collection, PIZ: 44:2k, LUB. 29. ‘Sprawozdanie za okres 22/10.1945–30/9.1946’. 30. ‘PM angående en polsk kvinnlig intellektuell arbetsgrupp i Lund’, 20 June 1945, Lakocinski collection, PIZ: 44: 1d, LUB. 31. PM w sprawie Polskiego Instytutu Źródłowego w Lund, 3 September 1946, Lakocinski collection, PIZ: 44:2j, LUB. 32. For more information on Sture Bolin and his links to the right-wing movement, see Birgitta Odén, Sture Bolin. Historiker under andra världskriget (Stockholm: Kungl. Vitterhetsakademien, 2011); Sverker Oredsson, ‘Några synpunkter på Sture Bolin och Sveriges Nationella Förbund’, Scandia 77, no. 2 (2011): 101–107. 33. Kristian Gerner, ‘The Holocaust and Memory Culture. The Case of Sweden’, in Historicizing Uses of the Past. Scandinavian Perspectives on History Culture, Historical Consciousness and Didactics of History Related to World War II, eds. Helle Bjerg, Claudia Lenz, Erik Thorstensen (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2011), 94. 34. ‘Sprawozdanie za okres 22/10.1945–30/9.1946’. 35. Zygmunt Łakociński to Sture Bolin, 3 August, 1946, Sture Bolin collection, LUB. 36. Ibid. 37. Zygmunt Łakociński to R.  Sutton Pratt, 4 November 1946, Lakocinski collection, PIZ: 46, LUB. 38. ‘Brev/handlingar till/från myndigheter, institutioner och organisationer i utlandet’, Lakocinski collection, PIZ: 41, LUB; Zygmunt Łakociński to Sture Bolin, 3 August 1946, Sture Bolin collection, LUB. 39. ‘Sprawozdanie za okres 22/1945–30/9.1946’.

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40. Kruszewski, Polski Instytut Źrodłowy w Lund, 76. 41. Jockusch, Collect and record!, 89–94, 218. See also Johannes Heuman’s chapter about Nella Rost and the historical commission and the WJC in this volume. 42. ‘Intyg rörande Luba Melchior’, 3 August 1946, Lakocinski collection, PIZ: 44: 2i, LUB; Zygmunt Łakociński to Franciszek Stefaniak, 12 December 1946, Lakocinski collection, PIZ: 46, LUB; Luba Melchior to Zygmunt Łakociński, 21 January 1947, Lakocinski collection, PIZ: 49, LUB. 43. Zygmunt Łakociński to Sture Bolin, Udden, 21 July 1947, Sture Bolin collection, LUB. 44. Zygmunt Łakociński to Ludwika Broel-Platter, 1 October 1952. See also Kruszewski, Polski Instytut Źrodłowy w Lund, 66. 45. Artur Szulc, Röster som aldrig tystnar. Tredje rikets offer berättar (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2005). 46. ‘Stadga för PIZ’, 20 February 1947, Lakocinski collection, PIZ: 44: 3 a, LUB. 47. Jockusch, Collect and record!, 96. See also Jerzy Tomaszewski, ‘Polish History on the Holocaust’, in Nazi Europe and the Final Solution, eds. David Bankier and Israel Gutman (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2003), 111–135; Natalia Aleksiun, ‘Polish Historiography of the Holocaust. Between silence and public debate’, German History 22, no. 3 (2004): 406–432. 48. ‘PM w sprawie Polskiego Instytutu Źródłowego w Lund’, 3 September 1946, Lakocinski collection, PIZ: 44:2j, LUB. 49. ‘PM w sprawie Polskiego Instytutu Źródłowego w Lund’, April 1946, Lakocinski collection, PIZ: 44:2d, LUB. 50. See, for example, ‘Unsigned letter to Presidium of the Polish Refugee Council in Sweden’, 12 October 1948, Lakocinski collection, PIZ: 46, LUB. 51. For more on the relief work coordinated in Stockholm by the Jewish Community of Stockholm, see Pontus Rudberg, The Swedish Jews and the Holocaust (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017). 52. Inga Gottfarb, Den livsfarliga glömskan (Höganäs: Wiken, 1986), 190. 53. Lakocinski collection, PIZ: 19 and 20, LUB. 54. Dahl, ‘“…this is material arousing interest in common history”’, 319–338; Izabela A.  Dahl, Collective Memory and National Identity Construction. Polish Survivors’ Records in Sweden, in Landscapes after Battle: Justice, Politics and Memory in Europe after the Second World War, eds. David Cesarani, Suzanne Bardgett, Jessica Reinisch and Dieter Steinert (London and Portland: Vallentine-Mitchell Publishers, 2011), 169–186; Szulc, Röster som aldrig tystnar.

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55. Frida Katz, Pamiętnik, Halmstad, (56 p. in Polish), Lakocinski collection, PIZ: 32, 1, LUB. 56. Ibid., 6. 57. Ibid., 17. 58. Ibid., 16. 59. Ibid., 17. 60. Ibid., 20. 61. Ibid., 7. 62. ‘Franka Silbersztein-Salomonowicz’, 10, Lakocinski collection, PIZ: 20, LUB. 63. Ibid., 15. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid., 16. Lakocinski collection, PIZ: 20, LUB. 68. Interview with Izrael Wajdling, recorded by Luba Melchior, 4 August 1946, Lakocinski collection, PIZ: 20, LUB. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid. 71. Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski (eds.) (2018), Dalej jest noc. Losy Żydów w wybranych powiatach okupowanej Polski (Warszawa: Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, 2018), vol. 1 and 2. 72. Jan Grabowski, Rescue for Money. Paid Helpers in Poland, 1939–1945 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2009). 73. Paul Rudny, Polski Instytut Źródłowy w Lund (PIZ), (n.d.), http://www3. ub.lu.se/ravensbruck/piz-presentation.pdf Accessed 29 April, 2018. 74. See for example Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, ‘The Tale of Szydlowiec. Memory and Oblivion in a Former Shtetl in Poland’, in The Holocaust on Postwar Battlefields. Genocide as Historical Culture, eds. Klas-Göran Karlsson and Ulf Zander (Malmö: Sekel, 2006), 191–224; Klas-Göran Karlsson, ‘The Holocaust and Russian Historical Culture. A CenturyLong Perspective’, in Echoes of the Holocaust. Historical Cultures in Contemporary Europe, eds. Klas-Göran Karlsson and Ulf Zander (Lund: Nordic Academic Press 2003), 201–222. 75. Dahl, Ausschluss und Zugehörigkeit, 175. 76. Franka Silbersztein-Salomonowicz, 13, Lakocinski collection, PIZ: 20, LUB.

CHAPTER 4

Holocaust Testimonies in Jewish Compensation Claims in the United Restitution Organisation’s Archive in Stockholm Pontus Rudberg

I would be very grateful if you would send to me further details concerning the new German law about compensation for stay in ghettos and concentrations camps, and forms if available. 1:- krona in stamps is enclosed. What possibilities do I have to get legal help without any cost? I work in a factory in Bromölla (25 km from Kristianstad) and have no possibility to travel to Stockholm or Gothenburg. I have been in K.Z. [concentration camp] for five years, lost my husband and four children and have several witnesses who can testify under oath that they have been together with me in K.Z. I also have a number tattooed on me. (Sincerely, H W1)

In 1952, the Federal Republic of Germany reached an agreement with the state of Israel and twenty-three Jewish organisations, which were joined into the gremium ‘Conference of Jewish Material Claims against P. Rudberg (*) Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Heuman, P. Rudberg (eds.), Early Holocaust Memory in Sweden, The Holocaust and its Contexts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55532-0_4

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Germany’ with headquarters in New York. Israel was granted 3  billion Deutsche Mark (DM) compensation and the ‘Claims Conference’ a general restitution of 450  million DM. Germany also obliged itself to pay reparations to individual victims of Nazi persecution. The agreement led to the making of a law, the Federal Compensation Act of 18 September 1953,2 which regulated such claims. It concerned claims from German Jews as well as Jews who came from what was at that time the Eastern bloc. Under the condition that the latter were either stateless or political refugees, they too were able to file claims for compensation for deprivation of liberty, for bodily injury, and under certain conditions for the death of close relatives caused by Nazi persecution. From the victim’s perspective the law was, of course, in many regards considered unsatisfactory.3 At the time of the creation of the law, a relatively large number of people in Sweden were directly affected by the German legislation: refugees who came after Hitler came to power in Germany, throughout the Nazi era, and the Holocaust survivors that came to Sweden in the post-­ war period. Dr Wilhelm Michaeli, a German-Jewish legal expert in exile, estimated that there were at the time the law was passed around 4000–4500 individuals who were eligible to make compensation claims. Of these, Michaeli expected that between 3000 and 4000 would in fact file their claims.4 As we shall see, this estimation was relatively accurate. A legal aid bureau prepared and submitted most of the claims made by Jews in Sweden, and each one of the bureau’s files on these legal cases contains information about the Holocaust and its repercussions for the victims. This information was available from the very first contact between the individual and the bureau—as in H W’s short letter above—through the correspondence between the claimant and the bureau, and from the completed forms and supporting documents of the claim itself. For many of the survivors, this was the first time that they had the opportunity to relate their experiences to a legal expert and to have their recollections documented. By showing how the survivors’ experiences were filtered through the legal system, this chapter offers a legal perspective on the memory of the Holocaust. The testimonies in themselves provide information about the attitude towards the genocide during the 1950s in this particular context, but they are also important sources to the history of the Holocaust itself from the victims’ perspective. The aim here is to explore the different documents pertaining to the claims for restitution and compensation as early Holocaust testimonies. How, by who, and under what particular

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circumstances were these testimonies produced and what sort of information do they contain? How do they describe the victim’s experiences of the Nazi persecution and their consequences?

The Legal Aid Bureaus After the war had ended, the International Law Association, an association of notable lawyers, were raising the question about legal aid for refugees and survivors. They stressed that refugees and stateless people in foreign countries were not only in need of economic support: they also often had difficulties with the language and the legislation of their new country that was generally alien to them. Furthermore, they were in urgent need of help to obtain documents, and to settle agreements with employers, landlords, and authorities. Not least, they needed to be informed about if and how they were to make arrangements to secure their property and legal interests in their former home countries. Organisations for legal aid were therefore created in countries where there were considerable numbers of refugees, like in the United States, Canada, and in Europe, in the United Kingdom and Switzerland.5 Meanwhile, the occupying powers adopted laws for their territories or parts of them, without there being a comprehensive, universal arrangement for compensation. For example, in March 1947, the British Military Government issued a law in the state of Nordrhein-Westfalen that pensions should be paid out to victims of Nazi oppression. And when the Süddeutsche Landrat proclaimed a law for Wiedergutmachung for ‘injustices’ committed under the Nazi regime, for the provinces under the control of the US Military Government on 26 August 1949, German decision-makers were also involved. This law later became the basis for the Federal Compensation Act of 1953. Initially, the popular attitude among Germans towards Wiedergutmachung was divided. According to a poll in the winter of 1945/46, more than 60 percent of the respondents agreed to restitutions of confiscated assets while compensation payments were almost unanimously rejected, as they had also suffered, and continued to suffer, as a result of Nazi rule. The issue of compensation was also controversial among religious Jews since the taking of blood money for murder is prohibited according to Biblical code.6 In the American zone, restitution laws had been issued according to which stolen property would have to be reported before a certain date. However, only property that was ‘identifiable’ could be registered and

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there was not yet any legislation that granted the right to compensation for the deprivation of liberty, loss of the lives of relatives, and so on, due to Nazi persecution. In the British zone, there were provisions about how to report these crimes but not yet any real legislation on compensations. In the Russian zone, there were no particular legal provisions whatsoever, only general laws.7 In Sweden, attention was given to the problem when the social workers of the Jewish Community of Stockholm started to receive questions from refugees and survivors about legal issues which they could not answer. Therefore, in February 1948, the Jewish Community of Stockholm created the Bureau for Legal Information [Byrån för juridisk information]. The bureau was not a legal firm as such, but the aim of the bureau was rather to provide Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors in Sweden with information concerning legal issues, assist them in preparing their applications and claims and, when needed, to refer them to lawyers. The bureau, which had its offices in central Stockholm, was led by Dr Kurt Stillschweig, and it was mainly staffed by legal experts who were themselves in exile. Most of its clients were refugees who were making claims for restitutions from Germany and other countries, but it also assisted with other legal issues. According to Stillschweig, in its first year the bureau had ‘informed about commercial law, on how to obtain a Swedish citizenship, corresponded about the deblocking of frozen assets in Britain and the US, tried to obtain death certificates, and had even received inquiries concerning criminal law’. Above all, it had concerned itself with stolen property in Germany and other countries, and these issues, Stillschweig explained, sometimes had to be dealt with according to foreign legislation and in other cases to Swedish law.8 Already the year before, in May 1947, the Jewish Community of Stockholm had created a division for restitution claims in Poland [Avdelningen för restitutionsanspråk i Polen]. The bureau was led by a Polish Jewish lawyer, Pawel Friedman. From 1949 this division was incorporated as a division of the Bureau for Legal Information and the following year the Bureau for Restitution Issues [Byrån för ersättningsfrågor] was created by the Jewish Community and the Swedish Section of the World Jewish Congress. The bureau above all aided Jewish refugees and survivors to register and report stolen property in the former home countries, primarily Germany. The archive of the Bureau for Legal Information also includes the documents of the division for claims on Poland and the Bureau for Restitution

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Issues. It contains 398 files with ‘general’ claims cases, 169 files for claims on ‘lost’ property in Poland, 3 volumes of unsorted material, as well as one volume of correspondence. At the end of 1953, a new legal bureau was created to replace the former initiatives and to assist those who wished to file claims for restitution and compensation in accordance with the new German law, the Bundesergänzungsgesetz. The following year, after an agreement between the Jewish Community of Stockholm and the Joint Distribution Committee, the bureau officially became a branch of the London-based international Jewish organisation, United Restitution Office, later the United Restitution Organisation (URO), but it was still run with the administrative support of the Jewish Community of Stockholm. The international URO was led by a General Director, Dr Hans Reichmann, a former lawyer in Berlin and legal representative of the Zentralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith), who had been in exile in London since 1939. Before the war had even ended, groups of Jews in the United Kingdom and in Palestine—mostly consisting of former German legal experts belonging to the so-called Council of Jews from Germany—started to engage with the issue of future restitutions and compensations, or Wiedergutmachung in German. The chairman of the council, a former lawyer from Berlin named Dr Siegfried Moses, later the State comptroller of Israel, was particularly active in this work, as was the famous Berlin rabbi Dr Leo Baeck. Baeck involved another famous jurist, Norman Bentwich, professor in international law, to create and lead a legal aid bureau. Among the initiators was also Dr Kurt Alexander, a former Rechtsanwalt in Krefeld, later with the URO in New York. The aim was to create an organisation that could assist the victims of Nazi oppression who were scattered all over the world, and who lacked the resources to engage a lawyer to commence legal proceedings to recover their property that had been confiscated by the Nazis. However, it soon expanded its remit to also help victims file claims for compensation.9 In 1959 the URO, according to Reichmann, represented some 125,000 individuals with more than 200,000 retribution claims of which 3000 claims came from clients in Sweden. In total the URO organisation had around 1150 employees and offices in fourteen countries. In some countries it had several. In Israel there were three, in Canada there were also three, there were six offices in South America, two in Australia, one in South Africa, and in Europe there were offices in all major centres where

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there were Jewish survivors—in the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Austria, and Sweden. In Germany there were five URO-­ offices and one central body that represented the clients with the authorities and courts. In a 1958 interview, Reichmann told a Swedish interviewer how the URO had begun its work a decade earlier: At that time, we had restitution cases that concerned identifiable property, like real estate, factories, shops, objects of art, mortgages, etc. This program is now largely finished. However, a number of Swedish compensation claims are still being processed, especially at the higher courts. This is for example the case in Berlin at the Supreme Restitution Court.10

The Supreme Restitution Court in Berlin had begun its work in 1953 and was composed of a judge from each of the three Western occupying powers, three German judges, and one ‘neutral’ presiding judge from Sweden—the Supreme Court Judge Torsten Salén.11 Apart from that, the majority of URO’s work at the moment is concerned with the sort of reparations that the Federal Republic produces for personal injuries, for the deprivation of freedom, for health injuries, and for the loss of lives, caused by the Nazi atrocities. Claims made due to damage caused through the exclusion from occupations that are listed in the Bundesentschädigunggesetz is now our principal scope.12

Reichmann explained that most cases that were based on deprivation of liberty had now been closed. However, that was not the case with the many claims based on health injuries. In these cases, there was a rather complicated investigation procedure that led to many people not yet receiving compensation. Neither, Reichman stressed, had there been satisfactory conclusions to the claims based on the exclusion from practising one’s occupation. ‘This is one of our foremost concerns, since there is a risk that older individuals who are entitled to restitutions could die before they receive compensation for the damage that was done to them 15–25 years ago’.13 Although the term was already at the time seen as inadequate, the German restitutions were known as Wiedergutmachung (to compensate or make up for). When Reichman was asked if any real Wiedergutmachung existed, he replied that the crimes that the Nazis had committed could

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never be compensated for and that the restitutions were only a small help to the victims. ‘Generally, no one has been even near to getting full compensation for the suffering they have endured’, he added.14 With help from the URO’s offices in Germany, the URO-bureau in Stockholm represented the claimants in Sweden to the courts and authorities primarily in the Federal Republic, but also in Austria. While most of the former refugees who had come before and during the war could afford to instruct a law firm, the Holocaust survivors could not generally afford this action. The bureau, which was headed by Michaeli, primarily aided more or less destitute individuals for a small fixed price (15 kr.) and a part of the eventual retribution in order to cover a part of their costs (the majority of the funding came from the Jewish Community of Stockholm and the Claims Conference). Meanwhile, claimants who had sufficient funds were directed to private legal firms.15 At least two such firms were headed by other German-Jewish legal experts in Stockholm, Julius Hepner and Ernst Baburger, whose archives contain the individual claim-files of their clients. Like Michaeli, in 1938 Baburger was one of the founders of a Jewish relief organisation for self-help, Emigranten-Selbsthilfe.16 Michaeli had previously been the Director of the Jewish Community’s emigration division, and since 1938 had been offering legal aid to his fellow Jewish refugees through the Emigranten-Selbsthilfe.17 He stayed on as Director of the URO-bureau until his retirement in 1966, when he was succeeded by one of his former co-workers, Ruth Liebenthal. In 1974 the number of claims handled by the bureau dropped considerably and over the next year the office was closed. The URO-bureau had fixed office hours when they were open for anyone to visit and ask for assistance, but as their clients were spread all over the country and since many clients had difficulties in putting their claims into the required form of writing, they also travelled around the country to assist them to file their claims. In 1957, and after incessant lobbying by Michaeli, the Swedish Parliament decided that the Nazi victims would not have to pay taxes on the retributions. That year the bureau had submitted claims on behalf of around 2000 individuals and 1350 of them had received restitutions totalling nearly 11 million Swedish kronor.18 In 1958 the bureau was handling claims for more than 2000 individuals and until 31 December 1957, the bureau mediated compensations to 1382 individuals for a total of 12.7  million kronor.19 In the Jewish Community of Stockholm’s bulletin in 1959, Michaeli reported that ‘no less than 1,600 individuals have through our [the URO-bureau]

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mediation received compensation money from Germany for a total sum of 20,000,000 kronor’.20 According to an official at the Jewish Community of Stockholm, David Köpniwsky, it was demanding work that was being carried out by the URO-bureau. The extensive evidence that was needed was often difficult to obtain. The clients who had come to Sweden as children and that knew very little of the fate of their parents faced challenges in producing the details that were needed to file a claim. The legislation itself was also relatively complicated, Köpniwsky wrote, and he added that Dr Michaeli was very knowledgeable in this regard. Earlier in 1957, Michaeli had published a book that aimed to explain the provisions in the German law to lawyers and individuals who preferred to submit their own claims. He also emphasised that it was important that each and every individual who was eligible for restitutions was aided to file their claims on time. On 31 March 1958, the right to make claims for restitutions expired and those who failed would then lose their right to restitutions.21 In 1958, the URO-bureau in Stockholm reported that until then most claims had concerned the deprivation of liberty. However, the bureau advised that now people who had been crippled had begun to receive compensation. This was true, also, of former German Jews who were compensated for the loss they suffered due to not being able to complete their education in Germany or because they had been unable to continue in their trades or industries.22

The Claims Files The bureau’s archive, which is a part of the Jewish Community of Stockholm’s archive, consists of different kinds of individual claims files, primarily from the years 1953 to 1975. It contains some 3000 files kept in 634 volumes in its main archival series. There is also another series containing twenty-five volumes of cases of people that arrived in Sweden from countries in eastern Europe after 1953. Each file contains all the correspondence and documentation from the clients’ applications for reparations. Often the same client made several claims for different categories of compensations. The first document in a file is often a letter where the client introduces themselves and asks if the German law is applicable to their case. This is generally followed by a copy of the bureau’s reply advising that this seems to be the case. The bureau would then forward forms to fill out as well informing the client of the

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conditions and the kind of details and supporting documents they needed to file their claims. Generally, the file consists of this documentation, including the filled-out forms and the claimants’ description of how they were affected by Nazi persecution, along with testimonies, certificates, and other supporting documents. Thus, it is possible to categorise the sources in one of two categories. The first is the more or less direct letters and testimonies from the potential clients and their witnesses. Among these sources are introductory letters, standardised accounts, and personal statements: like the forms that the clients were first asked to fill out to allow the legal bureau to prepare their cases. The second category includes the mediated testimonies that were edited by the legal experts, but based on the details and testimonies given by their clients. Who were the clients of the bureau? According to Michaeli, there were no official statistics concerning the number of refugees and survivors residing in Sweden that had been the victims of Nazi persecution. Nevertheless, according to his estimation, the number did not exceed 7000 in 1957. According to Michaeli, they could largely be divided into the following groups: 1. Around 2500 Jewish refugees, who came to Sweden before the end of the war. 2. Around 3000 Jewish refugees, who arrived in Sweden in connection to the Bernadotte or UNRRA-operations in 1945. 3. Around 1000 Jewish refugees, who came to Sweden after 1945 as skilled workers, transmigrants, illegal immigrants, or because they have had relatives in the country, or if they were suffering from a disease. 4. More than 500 non-Jewish, political or former political refugees.23

The Clients Approach the Bureau The Jewish Communities in Sweden and the legal bureaus in Stockholm took it upon themselves to inform surviving victims of Nazi terror of the legal developments of their rights to restitutions from Germany and elsewhere—through personal letters and adverts in the Jewish as well as the daily press. As mentioned above, following the issuing of the new law, Michaeli and his staff also travelled around the country to inform potential

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claimants and to explain the conditions and the relatively complicated application process. The information seems to have been communicated effectively since the letters from potential claimants started to come to the legal information bureau in Stockholm from all corners of the country. Judging by the content of many of these letters, it is obvious that the refugees and survivors also discussed this issue among themselves. Sometimes they only requested forms to fill out in order to apply for the reparations. In other instances, they asked for advice or simply wanted to ask if they were eligible for compensation. Many of the individual files in the URO-bureaus archive include a first approaching letter similar to the following: In reply to your letter of the 12th I would like to inform you that I and my son […] have been in the camp Buno-Monowitz by Auschwitz during the period from 7-9-1943 until 18-1-1945, where we worked as slave labourers. We have the numbers B-3360 and B-3361 tattooed on our arms. Hoping that this information will suffice I sign. (A Z24)

It is clear that Mr. Z intended to submit a claim for compensation for deprivation of liberty for himself, his wife, and his son, since Z had been forced to work as a slave labourer in Buno-Monowitz near Auschwitz for the I G Farben company. The Bureau for Reparations sent him two forms to fill out detailing his forced labour.25 However, as we shall see below, the process was often much more complicated. Often, the same person, like Z, was eligible for compensation for several reasons. On 16 September 1953, again the Bureau for Restitution Issues (soon to be replaced by the URO-bureau) in Stockholm sent out information about the new German law, this time about the right to compensation for bodily injuries. Since Z had also been injured during his time as a slave labourer, he wrote back to the bureau to ask about the process: ‘We are three persons in this household, I, my wife, and my son, for whom this question is urgent. I also want to ask if there are any particular provisions for persons who have become disabled, as I was severely injured in the camp’.26 Others had already begun to prepare their own cases when they contacted the bureau, often because they needed documentation that supported their claims, death certificates, medical records, and so on. Sometimes the Jewish Community of Stockholm would write attestations for this purpose. For instance, a Mrs E W had arrived in Sweden in June

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1944 and now wanted attestation of the poor condition she was in when she arrived: We came to Stockholm on 26 June 1944. Frau Haberland, Herr and Frau Feiler, Herr Steinthal (half-lame), stayed two days with Frau Unger and we landed in Stockholm after horrible years here. Later, Dr. Mays came via Gothenburg. In our shocked and exhausted condition, you gave us kind care and advice. You then told us that we all looked very bad, but the worst—Mrs. W, that was me. This is, what I would very much like you to confirm, please.27

W’s case is particularly interesting as she was part of a transfer agreement in 1941, according to which a group of Jews bought a shoe factory in Guatemala from a German citizen. In exchange, they would be saved from deportation and be allowed to emigrate. However, their emigration was delayed until June 1944. In many cases, in their first letters, the clients provide a detailed account of their experiences and suffering under the Nazis. Sometimes women who could not write in Swedish or German, and who had married Swedish men, let their husbands contact the bureau. Like Mr. A A, a Swede in Landskrona who had married F A from Czechoslovakia: ‘Since my wife, F A […] cannot write in German or Swedish, I want to tell you what my wife has told me about her time in the concentration camps. She says that she is willing to take an oath that what she says is true’.28 The husband then writes that his wife’s family, consisting of her mother and father, four brothers, and herself, had been living in Nizny Ladyce in Czechoslovakia. Before one night in May 1940, at midnight, German soldiers came to arrest them. They were all loaded on a cargo train: Then the train went to Auschwitz, where they were separated, men and women apart. They got their hair cut off and were given military clothing, consisting of a jacket and trousers, and heavy clogs. The first thing they had to do was to repair the barracks, which among other things included carrying gravel and all sorts of heavy work. That lasted for about 3 weeks. Then she came to a coal mine where she and her mother were loading [coal] for the Germans. The coal mine was about a 3 miles march from the barrack. It was there, during such a march that her mother fainted and was given a heavy beating by SS-men in my wife’s sight. After that, they took her on a lorry and my wife has never again seen her mother. Most likely she was sent to the gas chamber. The march guard consisted of four male SS-men and

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one woman, who had a large dog. After having worked in the mine, my wife was made to work, as she says, in the water. Probably it was a lake that she was forced to go out in to cut reed. And she was there until she came to Braunschweig. There she had to shovel snow during the winter. The last camp she was in was Hamburg. There she worked as a clearer, meaning that she had to roll off stones from Hamburg that had been bombed to the ground. She worked there until the Red Cross brought her here in May 1945. Also, my wife claims that she was not made to wear the star, only those who were in the ghetto did.29

Mr. A’s letter is only one of many similar introductory letters that summarise personal experiences of suffering during the Holocaust to find out if there was legal cause for claims for restitution. These letters also often include details about the consequences of their experiences during the Holocaust, such as physical and psychological conditions or childlessness. Others not only wrote about their experiences of Nazi terror, but also described experiences of their arrival and convalescence in Sweden. Mrs W, in her introductory letter, described how another Jewish survivor helped her to get in contact with a specialist physician, Dr Herbert Bjerlöv in Stockholm, who she saw for two and a half years while living in the town of Södertälje near Stockholm, and who she recalled as having saved her life. ‘Soon after my arrival there I was exhausted, having contracted a total fracture of the ankle, which forced me to lie for a long time, partly in the Södertälje hospital, partly in private’. Through a contact, she was brought to live in Stockholm but decided to leave Sweden and go to Berlin to, as she put it, defend her interests. She now wanted the URO-­ bureau to help her with documentation of her health status when she had arrived that could be used as evidence for her legal claims.30

Standardised Testimonies The URO-bureau’s officials generally replied to those who had contacted them and informed them of the restitution process. If the person was able to pay for legal aid privately, they provided them with the forms to fill out and send directly to the German courts. In the cases where they were entitled for the URO-bureau to represent them, however, they were sent their own forms that were used as the basis for the actual claim that the URO-bureau completed. The standardised forms, generally referred to by the German term Fragebogen, were printed in both German and Swedish

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and they stated that the claimants could choose their preferred language. In addition to personal details such as name, date and place of birth, and civil status, the forms asked about what trade they had learned or previously performed and their current trade. F A, who like many of the women had been a young girl when she was arrested, filled out ‘house daughter’ and ‘warehouse worker’ in response to these questions. The claimants were also asked to detail the kind of passport they had and where they were living in 1947, where they were presently living, as well as if they had ever been residents in Germany. F A replied that she had a so-called alien passport, that she lived in Värnamo in 1947 and that she was presently living in Landskrona. She had never been a resident in Germany, she wrote. The claimants were asked if they had been stateless or political refugees. Interestingly, they generally replied ‘No’ to the latter question. As mentioned in the introduction, the Holocaust survivors who had been transported to Sweden at the end of the war or thereafter were not considered refugees but repatriandi or displaced persons, while those who had come to Sweden as refugees due to the threat of persecution and murder because of their ‘race’ were not considered political refugees. The form was then divided into three sections, one for each of the initial causes of a claim: one section (A) for claims concerning ‘deprivation of freedom’, one (B) for ‘health injuries’, and one for (C) the ‘loss of lives’ of family members. In the heading of the first section (A), it was underlined that all questions had to be carefully answered and that evidence, such as testimonies by witnesses, had to be provided. The first question of the section was: ‘Where, when and in what way did the deprivation of freedom begin? (For example, Jewish star, forced labour, prohibition to tread certain streets, etc.)’. The claimants were asked to fill out where they had been arrested, and if, when and where they had been in a ghetto, labour camp, and/or a concentration camp, and if they had also been forced to carry out work elsewhere for the Germans. They were also asked if they had a number of committal, and if that were the case, from what camp or prison. Finally, they were asked to provide the place and date of their liberation. There was also a space where the claimants were requested to ‘relate everything else that is important about the above-mentioned deprivation of freedom’. F A responded that she had been arrested with her family in their house in May 1940  in Nicny Ladyce, Czechoslovakia, and that she had been ‘from May 1940–May 1943 in Auschwitz in Poland, from May 1943–May 1945 in Braunschweig in Germany’. She also wrote down the number she

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had been tattooed with in Auschwitz and that she had been liberated in May in Braunschweig. Like most claimants she left the final space, where they were asked to fill out ‘everything else that is important’, blank. When it came to the section about health injuries (B), the claimants were asked to specify the injury and confirm that the injury was a direct result of suffering experienced during the Nazi era. All injuries had to be confirmed with a doctor’s certificate and the claimant had to be unable to work a 30-percent part-time role. F A responded that she had back pains and that her left leg was swollen as a result of suffering during the Nazi years. However, she also stated that she was working full time, although she quickly got tired and that her leg hurt. In the third section (C), concerning the loss of family members, the first question read: ‘Has your husband/wife, parent, or sibling died as a result of Nazi persecution?’ The claimant was then required to state the names, last place of residence, trade, citizenship, and what they knew about the circumstances of their family members’ death. They were also asked to specify if ‘the Germans’ had caused the death and whether they had any evidence for this assertion. A filled out the names of her mother and father, her three brothers and her sister. As occupation she simply stated that they had owned a Wine and Tobacco shop. On the last question, she stated: ‘Know that mother was gassed to death and have not received any signs of life from the rest of the family’. These standardised forms are included in near every individual file in the archive of the URO-bureau. This makes these sources quantifiable and for uncovering patterns. For instance, without systematically going through the entire archive, I have indications from written testimonies that several of the Polish-Jewish women who survived the Holocaust had been in the same ghettos, were deported to Auschwitz around the same dates, and were sent to forced labour at the same factories. A quantitative study of these sources could thus provide insights into different survivor strategies and patterns in the claimants’ paths to survival, as well as the consequences of their experiences a decade later.31

Personal Statements In addition to the form, the claimants were asked to enclose a so-called Schilderung des Verfolgungsvorganges (declaration of the process of persecution). For example, A L in her declaration explained that she, until the

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beginning of March 1944, had lived as ‘a young, and healthy human being in Porozzlo in Hungary’. Then I had to go to the Ghetto in Tizsafuered and from there I was deported, first to the KZ Auschwitz and then to Bergen-Belsen. In KZ I was treated inhumanely and suffered terribly from hunger and cold, the clothing was very insufficient. I was forced into slave labour and had to carry stones and from these heavy loads that exceeded my strength, I got back pain that I still have to this day. In the summer of 1944, my face became completely swollen and my teeth were ruined, so I lost many teeth. My previously good health worsened, and I got a fever that persisted all the time. I did not get any treatment, so my condition got worse and worse. In the winter I froze my toes because I did not have the necessary footwear and I was also in great pain. Finally, I got typhoid in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and I was taken to the hospital in Bergen-Belsen as a seriously ill person, where they also discovered that I had pulmonary tuberculosis. When I came to Sweden after the liberation, I was in the lung sanatorium in Sigtuna and in Ribbingslund and then in Älmhult until the year 1946, and from then I am under constant medical supervision for my lungs. Also, as a result of the lung thing my heart was affected, and my nerves are completely destroyed. I am sick to this day and only capable to work to a small percentage.32

It was also possible to seek compensation from Germany if a person had his or her education or professional career interrupted due to Nazi persecution. As mentioned in the introduction, this was one of the causes for compensation that the URO-office found it difficult to obtain for their clients. One of the files in the URO-bureaus archive belongs to R A who had been nine years old when he came to Sweden as one of 500 children on a special Kindertransport-quota. He contacted the URO-bureau in 1954 and wanted to apply for Wiedergutmachung. Due to psychological depression, he was unable to work, and he had not been given a chance to get an education. In the archive there is a form that R A has filled out and signed on 20 January 1954. In the same file there is a Schilderung des Verfolgungsvorganges, which is his own description of the prosecution: I, R. A., born 5.10.1930 in Leisnig, near Leipzig, write the following with the best of my knowledge and conscience:

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My parents were divorced since 1932 and I lived with my father for the first few years. In 1939 I came to Sweden and lived with the Herman Schwarz family until 1941. I corresponded with my father and learned that he lived illegally in Berlin under the protection of the Swedish church. Pastor Perwe was his particular protector. However, my father was arrested in late 1944 or early 1945 and deported to Buchenwald, where he died. Death declaration is enclosed. In 1941, I came to a Swedish teacher, Mrs S A in Julita in Katrineholm, and then to a Jewish orphanage, Stigbo, Alby Gård in Tureberg, where I stayed until 1943. I attended elementary school in those years. In 1943 I came to another Jewish orphanage near Uppsala, Tullgarn, where I stayed until 1945 and attended high school. Then I went on to a Swedish family, A, also in Uppsala, and attended high school where I graduated with the first-years. Since I had no means for further education, I had to start working immediately and began in 1947 as an office apprentice. Later, I had other office positions, but I could not work at all because of psychological depression. I wish to continue my interrupted education and apply according to 55% of the BEG-compensation for my interrupted education to the amount of DM 5000.33

These sources, although bound by the factual style of the legal genre, offer more qualitative information, details, and context. If digitised and made searchable, or catalogued with relevant meta-data, these sources could be used in many ways since they provide us with numerous details of the Holocaust, as well as the victims’ experiences of persecution and genocide, and the consequences these experiences had for their everyday lives in the post-war years.

The Bureau Prepares the Cases When the URO-bureau officials received the Fragebogen and the Schilderung des Verfolgungsvorganges, they began to prepare the cases for submission. In some cases, the URO-bureau conducted a tremendous amount of work to help the claimants. In the case of Mrs. E W, Michaeli investigated all her documents at the Jewish Community of Stockholm, including correspondence with family members and foreign Jewish relief organisations. Based on these documents, in June 1954 Michaeli wrote the attestation requested by W. Michaeli confirmed W’s miraculous escape

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from Germany to Sweden in 1944 and that she had arrived in Sweden in poor condition.34 Seven years later, however, it seems that W had still not been able to come up with the necessary evidence to prove that her health condition was a direct consequence of Nazi persecution and that it had led to a reduced ability to work. The last letter in W’s file is a letter from the URO-­ bureau reminding her to provide supporting documents, or the bureau would be forced to drop her case.35 Every claim had to be supported by evidence, which often led to lengthy correspondence between the bureau and the clients. The bureau informed them of the kind of documents that were needed and provided advice on how to go about acquiring it. In her 1994 PhD thesis, the former social worker of the Jewish Community Mirjam Sterner Carlberg wrote that the process could be very difficult for the victims, since they were forced to recall the memories of events that they had tried to forget. Often the bureau helped the claimants to trace witnesses that could testify in support of their statements, but the survivors also helped each other.36 The testimonies were generally written down by a notary public and often provided by other survivors who had also been transported to Sweden with the ‘white busses-mission’ of the Red Cross or with the UNRRA-­ transports. For instance, in support of F A’s statement, a young woman, Mrs M K, now married to a Swede and living in Värnamo, made the following statement: I know Frau F A, […], born 12.1.1920 in Nizny Ladyce (C.S.R.) personally. I first met her in May 1944 in Auschwitz, from where we were transferred to Bergen-Belsen in October 1944, and after about two months there we were brought to Braunschweig to do forced labour. Then, in January 1945 we came to Bendorf and in March 1945 to Hamburg. For the entire time we were in the same camps and had to endure heavy slave labour. After that we were transported here and there, until we were liberated in early May.37

In F A’s file, there is also a short note written by her husband in support of her claim. In his statement, Mr. A A certified that his wife had her ‘work name’ tattooed on her arm and that she was ‘getting medication for her nerves’. He added that ‘She has lost her Father and Mother and four siblings, who were burned in crematoria’.38 Despite, or perhaps because of, the very brief almost monosyllabic style of the statement, it manages to

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convey how difficult these events must have been for the victims—and their Swedish spouses—to recall and discuss. F A’s claim for compensation for deprivation of liberty was approved in December 1957,39 but the process concerning compensation for her health injury dragged on for years with visits to doctors to obtain a certificate that could prove that her condition was a direct consequence of Nazi persecution. However, it seems the only certificate that she managed to obtain was not detailed enough,40 and in 1962 F A’s claim was ultimately rejected. In response to the refusal, F A’s husband wrote a more expansive letter to Ruth Liebenthal at the URO-bureau seeking an appeal against the court’s decision. She has certainly tried to work, but it has only been for a few months a year. She has pain in her arms as well as her legs and is nervous, bites her nails so that there is hardly anything left of them. She has had that ever since she came from the concentration camps, and her family she can never forget. Sometimes she wakes up and says that she sees her Mum, and she can’t have a baby. All of this because of her time in the concentration camps.41

The husband explained that he and his wife could not understand how the court could dismiss his wife’s claim, as both her physical and psychological condition and her childlessness were all direct consequences of Nazi persecution. There are also cases where the claimants simply gave up when faced with the formal requirements of supporting evidence. In R A’s case for instance, Michaeli had written to him and explained that the URO-bureau wanted to submit two separate claims for compensation: one for the loss of his father’s life and one for the interrupted education. Michaeli therefore asked R A to fill out a new form and to inform the bureau of his father’s last-known home-address before his deportation, as well as the date of the deportation.42 However, R A does not appear to have responded to Michaeli’s letter. A month later, Michaeli wrote R A a note explaining that since he had not heard back from him, he would drop the case if R A did not get back to him before 20 December.43 This does not necessarily mean that R A did not proceed with his claim. He could have decided to proceed with a private lawyer who could perhaps also help him to collect the necessary documents. However, it seems likely that he was discouraged by the difficulties in obtaining the required information, not least since he suffered from

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depression to the extent that he was unable to work. His father had tried to come to Sweden but was denied a visa as late as 1944: the condition for the Kindertransport-quota had been that the parents would not come to Sweden. The choice not to proceed with the claim might also have been a political decision, as there was a fierce debate about whether or not to accept the Wiedergutmachung as it served to re-legitimise Germany as a state in the international community. We can only speculate from the extant documents. In F A’s case, however, it seems clear that if the couple had only been able to find a more knowledgeable, or simply more sympathetic, doctor, her claim may have been approved. Factors like social class and contacts could of course be crucial in this context. But as the Mrs. E W’s case showed, neither class nor good connections were a guarantee for approval. It could also be a question of personality, where perhaps a more demanding person would be more successful in getting a doctor to write the certificate in the way that was needed. The actual post-traumatic symptoms themselves, like depression and apathy, likely also played a part. In an article published in Judisk Tidskrift in 1958, Michaeli rhetorically asked who was responsible for the scarcity of evidence. Was it not the Nazi authorities, who had stolen the Jews’ assets and destroyed all the evidence, who were responsible for the lack of evidence, not least since they had sent the living witnesses to the gas chambers. According to Michaeli, only those who concerned themselves with the restitution work on a daily basis were able to understand the issues around the lack of evidence. How could a child, who had come to Sweden in 1939, at the age of three as a ‘quota child’, be able to know what damages his deceased parents had been afflicted in 1942, Michaeli asked. One could possibly find out one or both parents’ occupations, and possibly after extensive research find some relative who can give a rough estimate about their previous living standards. ‘Shall such a child, orphaned, be punished for not being able to tell anything about the parents, and shall because of lack of evidence all his claims be dismissed?’ Would it not be fair and just if the law allowed the restitution bodies to reconstruct the course of events on the basis of typical experiences? Michaeli asked. He wrote that anyone who was working with the restitutions on behalf of the victims of Nazi persecution was bound to experience the inadequacies of the German authorities. They lost themselves in details and made things unnecessarily complicated in terms of evidence. The level of disability was also evaluated by the Germans. It may be, Michaeli wrote, that there have been a few isolated cases of illegitimate

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claims. ‘On the other hand, would it not be desirable if independent bodies would evaluate these people who have often been beaten to cripples, instead of German physicians—one would then get a clear and objective picture’.44 Michaeli is here referring to the so-called Vertrauensärzte (Medical referees) who were authorised by the German authorities to evaluate claims for indemnities on the ground of physical damage. This was done by examining the physical condition of the claimant along with their medical condition and other supporting documents. Previous research has described the humiliating review process and the way former concentration camp inmates and other victims of Nazi terror were placed under suspicion. Another obstacle was the very short deadlines. There were also many survivors that were initially reluctant to seek compensation since they did not want to stir up trauma and appear before the German courts as humble petitioners. One scholar, Christian Pross, has even called these proceedings a small-scale war against the victims.45 In his acclaimed literary memoir of his father, a survivor of Auschwitz, the Swedish author Göran Rosenberg tells of how his father’s claims for compensation became an obsession and of the humiliating nature of the process, as it put him into role of petitioner: with his statements questioned and viewed as exaggerated and calculated.46 From a source critical point of view, it may be argued that the claimants had an incentive to fabricate or exaggerate the facts in their statements. It is of course possible that such individual statements exist, not least if this was believed to be justified from the perspective of the victims of persecution. What is striking with the sources, though, is that above all—especially when considering the brutality of the atrocities they refer to—the objective and restrained way that the claims are stated. Although the reality was that for some Holocaust survivors it was extremely difficult to get any compensation for their suffering, due to missing documentation of their assets, or difficulty in proving that their physical or psychological condition was a direct result of Nazi persecution. The claimants knew that every statement would be placed under scrutiny and evaluation. Not only would it have to be backed up by supporting documents, but also be credible in the eyes of the German courts and consulted experts.

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Conclusion As we have seen, the testimonies examined in this chapter are heterogenous as they are produced by different actors at different stages of the restitution and compensation processes and thus varyingly filtered by these. There are principally two kinds of documents in the files in the archive of the URO-bureau. The first category is the documents that are either produced by Jewish refugees and survivors themselves, or ‘mediated’ or produced by the legal bureau, but based on statements made by the clients. The second category is correspondence and supporting documents from doctors, financial records, birth and death certificates, and so on. In general, the first document in a file is an introductory letter where the prospective claimant gives a brief and factful personal account of his or her own experiences and their consequences. This letter is generally followed by a form, Frageboge, that the claimant has completed containing personal details and the facts and dates regarding their persecution and the damages it caused the claimant. These standardised forms make it possible to detect patterns as they include facts concerning the background of the claimants, like gender, age, and their place of origin. They also include details about their whereabouts at different times and about their and their relatives’ response to—as well as details about their fate under—Nazi terror. Since these forms are standardised, it is possible to conduct a quantitative study of them. In addition to these forms, the claimants appended their official personal statements detailing their suffering under Nazi persecution. This was the so-called Schilderung des Verfolgungsvorganges, which, although still written in a factual style, provides more details and context to the information stated in the Fragebogen. The documents in the claims files are important sources that speak to how Holocaust refugees and survivors experienced Nazi persecution, the Holocaust, and the immediate years thereafter. They can also tell us about their various paths to Sweden. For example, many of the claimants were either Holocaust refugees who had come to Sweden from Germany or Austria in the 1930s with the help of Swedish Jews, or Holocaust survivors who had first been in Auschwitz, where they had been selected for slave labour and finally been evacuated from camps in Northern Germany to Sweden. Another category was TB-infected Jews from Displaced Persons camps who were helped to Sweden in the summer of 1945. These categories of refugees and survivors are well documented, in addition to the

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claims files many of them also testified in the early post-war years to Gunhild and Einar Tegen’s collection, to the Polish source institute, and later to other documentation initiatives. From the sources, it is possible to see patterns, not only in the persecution and terror that was afflicted on the survivors, but also in their response to these atrocities. The claims files are also unique as they often describe the everyday life of the refugees and survivors only a few years after the Holocaust: while they were still trying to trace their families, relatives, and friends, at the same time as trying to rehabilitate and think about how to build new lives, in the United States, Israel, Sweden, or elsewhere. The documents can also tell us something about the Swedish reception of the Jewish refugees and survivors. Where did they settle and why? Did they marry and how did they make a living? They include details about work, families and social life, including their relation to the local Jewish communities. The medical certificates and correspondence between the claimants and doctors and other experts can shed light on the relation between the Jewish victims and Swedish physicians, as well as on the Swedish physicians and other experts’ views and understanding of their trauma. Finally, the sources can provide an insight into the very processes of seeking compensation, restitution, and justice, and the impact that these processes had on the victims—and are still having today.

Notes 1. H. W. to Byrån för ersättningsfrågor’, 2 May 1954, URO-byrån för rättshjälp, E1: 1, Judiska församlingen i Stockholms arkiv (Archive of the Jewish Community of Stockholm, JFA), Riksarkivet ([Swedish] National Archives, RA). In order to protect their integrity, I have omitted the names of the claimants and their relatives. 2. Bundesergänzungsgesetz zur Entschädigung für Opfer der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung (BErG) of 18 September 1953. The law was replaced by the so called Bundesgesetz zur Entschädigung für Opfer der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung (BEG) of 29 June 1956. For an account of the activities of the Claims Conference and its negotiations with Germany see for example Ronald W. Zweig, German Reparations and the Jewish World. A History of the Claims Conference (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1987). 3. Wilhelm Michaeli, ‘Rättshjälp för nazismens offer’, Församlingsblad för Mosaiska församlingen i Stockholm (FB), no. 6 (1953): 82–83. 4. Ibid. 5. Kurt Stillschweig, ‘Rättshjälp åt flyktingar’, FB, no. 2 (1948): 38–39.

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6. Manfred Schmitz-Berg, Wieder gut gemacht? Die Geschichte der Wiedergutmachung seit 1945 (Düsseldorf: Grupello Verlag, 2017), 12–13. 7. Ibid. 8. Stillschweig, ‘Rättshjälp åt flyktingar’, 38–39. 9. B. Maier, ‘Aktuellt om URO’, FB, no. 4 (1958): 54–56; Norman Bentwich, ‘Tenth Anniversary of U.R.O. Address at Staff Conference on November 12’, AJR Information 12, no. 1 (1959): 1. 10. Maier, ‘Aktuellt om URO’. 11. Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 27 October 1953; Svensk Juridisk Tidskrift, 15 October 1953. 12. Maier, ‘Aktuellt om URO’. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Wilhelm Michaeli, ‘Rättshjälp för nazismens offer’, FB, no. 6 (1953): 82–83. 16. Helmut Müssener, Exil in Schweden. Politische und kulturelle Emigration nach 1933 (München: Hanser 1974), 111. 17. Ibid, 276. 18. Ibid; Michaeli, ‘Rättshjälp för nazismens offer’; David Köpniwsky, ‘Ersättning åt nazismens offer’, FB, no. 5 (1957): 77. 19. ‘URO-byrån för rättshjälp’, FB, no. 2 (1958): 30. 20. ‘Wilhelm Michaeli 70 år’, FB, no. 2 (1959): 33. 21. David Köpniwsky, ‘Ersättning åt nazismens offer’, FB, no 5, 1957: 77; Wilhelm Michaeli, Ersättning åt offer för nationalsocialistisk förföljelse (Bundesentschädigungsgesetz) och därmed sammanhängande spörsmål (Stockholm: Nordiska bokhandeln, 1957). 22. “URO-byrån för rättshjälp”, FB, no. 2 (1958): 30. 23. Michaeli Ersättning åt offer för nationalsocialistisk förföljelse, 79. Michaeli’s numbers on point a to d are based on the official statistics of the Jewish community of Stockholm. The figures in point d are based on ‘an estimation’. 24. A Z to Byrån för ersättningsfrågor, Malmö, 25 January 1953, URO-­byrån, E1: 1, JFA, RA. 25. Byrån för ersättningsfrågor to A Z., Stockholm, 30 January 1953, URO-­ byrån, E1: 1, JFA, RA. 26. A Z to Byrån för ersättningshjälp, Malmö, 30 November 1953, URO-­ byrån, E1: 1, JFA, RA. 27. E W to Mosaiska församlingen i Stockholm, Berlin 29 May 1954, URO-­ byrån, E1: 1, JFA, RA. 28. A A to URO-byrån Stockholm, Landskrona den 5 November 1955, URObyrån, F1: 7, JFA, RA. 29. Ibid.

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30. E W to Mosaiska församlingen i Stockholm, Berlin 29 May 1954, URO-­ byrån E1: 1, JFA, RA. 31. For recent research on survival strategies, see: Evgeny Finkel, Ordinary Jews. Choice and Survival during the Holocaust (Pricenton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019). 32. A L, ‘Schilderung des Verfolgungsvorganges unter Darlegung der Geltend gemachten Körperschäden’, Stockholm 1 January 1959, URO-­byrån F1: 68, JFA, RA. 33. ‘Schilderung des Verfolgungsvorganges’, R A, Stockholm, 3 February 1954, URO-byrån, F1: 7, JFA, RA. 34. Wilhelm Michaeli to E W, Stockholm 23/6 1954, URO-byrån, E1: 1, JFA, RA. 35. M M to E W, Stockholm 5 May 1961, URO-byrån, E1: 1, JFA, RA. 36. Miriam Sterner Carlberg, Gemenskap och överlevnad. Om den judiska gruppen i Borås (Göteborg: Göteborgs Universitet, 1994), 239–240. 37. M K, Testimony given in support of F A’s claim for restitution. Copy, n.d., URO-byrån, F1: 7, JFA, RA. 38. A A to Mosaiska Församlingen i Stockholm, Landskrona, 17 August 1954, URO-byrån, F1: 7, JFA, RA. 39. URO-byrån to F A, Stockholm, 12 July, 1957, URO-byrån, F1: 7, JFA, RA. 40. Dr Tore Emgård, Copy of doctor’s certificate, reading (in its entirety: ‘defernsförändr. i knäna /broskförslitningar m. värk/ rekom. befrielse fr. arbete av mera anstr art och kallt, fukt dyl. Rekom. sålunda om möjl. 15/1 –60 T Emgård’, URO-byrån, F1: 7, JFA, RA. 41. A A to Ruth Liebenthal, Landskrona, 10 October 1962, URO-byrån, F1: 7, JFA, RA. 42. Wilhelm Michaeli to R A, Stockholm, 11 February 1954. Copy, URO-­ byrån, F1: 7, JFA, RA. 43. Wilhelm Michaeli to R A, Stockholm, 2 November 1954. Copy, F1: 7, JFA, RA. 44. Wilhelm Michaeli, ‘Fallet Schäffer’. Judisk Tidskrift 31, no. 2. (1958): 49–53. 45. Kurt R.  Eissler, ‘Die Ermordung von wievielen seiner Kinder muß ein Mensch symptomfrei ertragen können, um eine normale Konstitution zu haben?’ Psyche 17, no. 5 (1963): 279–280, 289; Nils Asmussen, Der kurze Traum von der Gerechtigkeit. “Wiedergutmachung” und NS-Verfolgte in Hamburg nach 1945 (Hamburg: Ergebnisse Verlag, 1987); Christian Pross, Wiedergutmachung, Der Kleinkrieg gegen die Opfer (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum-Verlag, 1988).

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46. Göran Rosenberg, Ett kort uppehåll på vägen från Auschwitz (Stockholm: Bonnier, 2012). For other Swedish Jewish authors recollections of their parents claims for “Wiedergutmachung”, see Helena Trus, Ett kilo socker. Farmor glömmer aldrig priset på sitt liv (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2019); Kenneth Hermele, En shtetl i Stockholm (Stockholm: Weyler, 2017); Bertil Oppenheimer, Till Sverige. Historien som aldrig blev berättad (Stockholm: Jure, 2010).

CHAPTER 5

‘The Greatest Pogrom in World History’: Hugo Valentin and the Holocaust Olof Bortz

On New Year’s Eve in 1942, the Swedish Jewish historian Hugo Valentin labelled the ongoing mass murder of the European Jews, ‘the greatest pogrom in world history’.1 Throughout the 1930s, Valentin had reported on the increasingly dire situation facing the Jews of Europe. During the Second World War, he alerted his fellow Swedes to the reality of the Holocaust through his writings in newspapers and Swedish Jewish journals such as Judisk Tidskrift and Judisk Krönika. After the war, Valentin wrote several texts relating to the Holocaust, thus contributing to the creation of Holocaust memory in Sweden. For a proper understanding of that contribution, it is important to analyse Valentin’s writings on Jewish matters during the 1930s and throughout the war years. Valentin was an expert on Swedish history, a public intellectual focused on Jewish affairs, and a Zionist activist. To understand his contribution to the early discussion about the Holocaust in Sweden, we need to take a closer look at his personal background. Born in 1888 into a Swedish

O. Bortz (*) École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden © The Author(s) 2021 J. Heuman, P. Rudberg (eds.), Early Holocaust Memory in Sweden, The Holocaust and its Contexts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55532-0_5

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Jewish family of German origin, he studied history at Uppsala University and wrote his doctoral dissertation on eighteenth-century Swedish political history.2 In the wake of the First World War, a time when minority rights were at the centre of international politics, Valentin began to explore Jewish history and Jewish politics. In 1924, he published a book on Swedish Jewish history often seen as the foundational document of this field of historical enquiry. It remains, in its revised edition, the work of reference on the topic.3 His early approach to the history of Sweden’s Jews has been described as a ‘Whig interpretation’, outlining a course of progress from migration and discrimination to emancipation and integration into Swedish society.4 During the early 1930s, however, his understanding of Jewish affairs started to change. Influenced by political developments in Europe, he departed from his earlier historical narrative. He took an interest in antisemitism and published a study of the topic in 1935, which was translated into several languages, making him an internationally renowned expert on the question. Moreover, and more importantly, he became an outspoken and fervent defender of the Zionist cause.5 Apart from being a writer and intellectual, Valentin was a long-term member of the representative assembly of the Jewish community of Stockholm.6 He took part in refugee relief work during the 1930s and 1940s and was instrumental in bringing Jewish youths to Palestine by collecting funds for the Kinder-und Jugendalijah and within the Swedish Hechaluz movement.7 He was also the go-to person for refugees, especially academics, seeking help and together with his wife Fanny he created an orphanage for refugee children in Uppsala.8 In 1939, he wrote to a women’s rights activist involved in refugee aid, saying that he and his wife were ‘breathing refugees from morning to night’.9 This text leaves aside Valentin’s work on behalf of Jewish refugees and focuses instead on his campaign to raise awareness of the unfolding genocide during the war, and to commemorate it afterward. Its purpose is to situate his writings within the political context of Swedish society and international Jewish affairs during the mid-twentieth century. In more general terms, the analysis elucidates the reaction of the outside world to the Holocaust and the emergence of Holocaust memory in Sweden and internationally. The text is structured as follows: first, it analyses Valentin’s interpretation of Nazi anti-Jewish persecution during the 1930s and the war in relation to Swedish wartime politics and Valentin’s public persona. Thereafter, it examines the Zionist interpretation of the Holocaust that he

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presented and defended during the war within the context of Jewish and liberal politics. Finally, it concludes by looking at his post-war writings from the perspective of the politics of commemoration.

Acknowledging the Holocaust in Wartime Sweden Writing in Judisk Tidskrift in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Valentin observed and reported the situation of the Jews of Europe as he perceived it. The Jewish people were threatened by what he regarded as the twin threat of growing antisemitism in Central and Eastern Europe and assimilation in Western and Northern Europe. It might appear striking from a post-Holocaust perspective to place assimilation somehow on par with anti-Jewish persecution as comparable threats to the future of the Jewish people. There were however several reasons for this statement. First, it was a common idea among European Jews in the first half of the twentieth century that Jewry faced both external and internal threats, the latter which included increasing rates of conversion and intermarriage. This idea gained traction especially, but not exclusively, within Zionist circles, and made the much-vaunted assimilation appear more as a form of self-disintegration rather than a success. Second, this formulation established a link between Jews in antisemitic countries, such as Germany or across Eastern Europe, with those in the Nordic countries where political antisemitism remained a fringe phenomenon. In the face of such challenges, Valentin staked out a direction of self-assertion with Zionism as a unifying force that would reinvigorate the Jewish people.10 He was convinced that the Jewish people would overcome these obstacles, but his optimism was imbued with a sense of foreboding. Valentin kept a close eye on political developments in Germany and presented a pointed interpretation of Nazism and the role of antisemitism within it. In his view, this was no ‘ordinary antisemitism but pogrom baiting of the crudest kind’.11 He noted that a third of all German voters had cast their ballots for antisemitic parties in the elections of November 1930 and argued that large parts of the German population had succumbed to a ‘wild psychosis of hatred’.12 From the perspective of later research on the sources of German support for Nazism prior to 1933, this was an exaggeration of the importance of antisemitism for Nazi electoral successes.13 However, from the contemporary viewpoint and as an assessment of the Nazi movement before it had come to power, it represented a realisation of the centrality of Jew-hatred for Hitler and Nazism more generally.

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In the mid-1930s, Valentin used the formulation ‘war of extermination’ and wrote about the ‘total eradication of German Jewry’.14 He employed these terms in a figurative sense to mean that the Nazis—by depriving Jews of their livelihoods and inducing either expulsion or mass suicide—sought to render Jewish collective life in Germany impossible. Since German anti-Jewish policies were not yet lethal in intent, this terminology might strike the reader as unwarranted. Yet, just like knowledgeable observers of the German Jewish scene in other European countries, Valentin was reaching for the strongest possible terms to denote a situation that in his view was already catastrophic.15 How then did he react a few years later when the meaning of words such as extermination were turning from the figurative to the literal? 1941 and 1942 marked a turning point in the annals of Holocaust history from policies pointing in various directions to large-scale massacres in the killing grounds and extermination camps of Eastern Europe. In the summer of 1942, what Raul Hilberg called the destruction machinery switched into a higher gear. In July, the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka became fully operational. The same month saw deportations from France and the Netherlands to the killing centres and during the following months, most inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto were killed. The autumn of 1942 was also a watershed moment in the history of knowledge of the Holocaust in the Allied and neutral nations.16 The Swedish public had been well informed about German anti-Jewish persecution from the onset of the Nazi regime and throughout the first years of the Second World War, but there was a slump in reporting from the summer of 1941 to late 1942.17 It was in this context that Valentin decided to go from refugee activism and articles in Jewish publications to a campaign of information aimed at the general Swedish public. In the early autumn of 1942, he composed a text entitled ‘The war of extermination against the Jews’, based on reporting in Swiss and English newspapers.18 In the writing and publication of this article, he was confronted with the limits of what could be written about Nazi anti-Jewish persecution in Sweden with official permission. Two years earlier, Valentin had published a book about ‘the struggle for Palestine’ under the auspices of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, a state-funded but nominally independent organisation created two years earlier and devoted to research and information on international affairs. The head of the institute now rejected his article by saying that he could not publish it due to concerns voiced by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.19 Valentin replied in an

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agitated tone and claimed that the ministry was misleading the Swedish public by acceding to German demands regarding press censorship. This produced, according to Valentin, a false understanding of ‘the Nazi mentality’ and the fate that awaited Europe at the mercy of Hitler and Himmler.20 He tried to have his article published by the most prominent Swedish newspapers, the liberal Dagens Nyheter and the conservative Svenska Dagbladet, but both rejected it. A friend of Valentin’s who worked at Svenska Dagbladet claimed that the editor-in-chief was afraid of ‘German ghosts’.21 There was, in addition to official censorship, a fair amount of self-censorship by Swedish newspaper editors at the time.22 Eventually, the article was published on 13 October, in the liberal Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning, a newspaper noted for the anti-Nazi stance of its editor, Torgny Segerstedt.23 Valentin worked within the boundaries set by the Swedish Government and asked Segerstedt to revise the text so that it would pass censorship restrictions.24 Scholars have referred to Valentin’s article as a turning point for the history of Swedish knowledge about the Holocaust.25 However, the article is as notable for what it did not say as for what it said. Valentin outlined the catastrophic situation in the ghettos of Eastern Europe and mentioned large-scale massacres and deportations from the Warsaw ghetto. At the same time, he stressed the uncertainty surrounding the facts and the difficulty of verifying information or obtaining reliable statistics, careful not to push his case too hard and mindful of appearing to inflate the figures or giving credence to mere hearsay. This was a result of Valentin’s desire to see his article in print and thus having to conform to press censorship. In a letter to Segerstedt, he claimed to have omitted reference to the most shocking details: I have refrained from emotion-laden judgments and almost completely left aside even reliable accounts of the Nazis’ hair-raising deportation and execution methods in Eastern Europe. But I have to admit that facts are not ‘neutral’.26

This reticence to state the facts plainly was not only due to Swedish wartime censorship but also to his academic persona. As a historian of Swedish Jewish history and a representative of the Swedish-Jewish community, he spoke about the onslaught on the European Jews with authority. He did not want to appear biased or unbalanced. ‘Source criticism’,

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the careful evaluation of historical sources, was the most important part of the Swedish historian’s playbook. In the winter of 1942, Valentin was expressing his commitment to that ideal, even when trying to raise awareness of the mass murder of his own people. His tone was factual rather than strident. A specific Swedish context was at play here. By tradition, Sweden, and in particular its political and cultural elite, was close to all things German. Many Swedes, especially among the educated classes, expressed a measure of understanding and sympathy for Nazism, thinking that it could be ‘good for Germany’.27 That group accepted the official German explanation—established during the 1930s as a way of shooting the messenger— that reports on German atrocities constituted Gräuelmärchen or ‘atrocity fairy tales’.28 Thus, information about the systematic killing of Jews and death factories reached a public bound to dismiss information on German anti-Jewish massacres, hence Valentin’s cautious approach. He was aware of, and deeply disturbed by, the fact that some of his compatriots chose to disbelieve the facts.29 In his letter to Segerstedt, Valentin explained that his article was written with the problem of Swedish support for Nazism in mind: such as that of the explorer and antisemite Sven Hedin, who was an acquaintance of Valentin’s from a student association in Uppsala.30 This accounts for his careful and measured tone, as well as his insistence on objectivity and reliable information. In 1942, Valentin was not sounding the alarm but addressing the sceptics. He wrote knowing that many of his readers would not believe him. The end of 1942 saw several important developments in terms of the public acknowledgement of the Holocaust, both in Sweden and across the globe. At the end of November, American Jewish organisations proclaimed 2 December a day of mourning for the deaths of the millions already killed. On 3 December, Stockholm’s main Jewish congregation held a ceremony for the victims of the Holocaust in the synagogue of Stockholm, with a particular focus on the Norwegian Jews. The editors of Judisk Tidskrift, Valentin and Marcus Ehrenpreis, the rabbi of the Jewish community of Stockholm and a noted intellectual, issued a special edition dedicated to the anti-Jewish persecution.31 Furthermore, Valentin’s ‘The Greatest Pogrom in World History’, mentioned in the introduction and published in Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning on New Year’s Eve in 1942, was more straightforward than his previous article, coming as it did after the Synagogue ceremony on the 3 December and the Allied declaration on the Holocaust on 17 December. This time, Valentin left the reader

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no room for doubt that Germany was engaged in a systematic effort to physically eradicate the Jews of Europe. He quoted Hitler’s speech in the Berlin Sportpalast on 30 January 1942, in which the German leader referred to his pre-war prophesy connecting the outbreak of a new world war and the ‘extermination of the Jewish race in Europe’.32 Valentin placed emphasis on the specificity of Nazi antisemitism as a factor accounting for the ongoing genocide and posited that the Nazi view of Jews as ‘evil incarnate’ was a crucial component of Nazi ideology. This belief was, according to Valentin, the reason why the German Nazis were not content with a more ordinary antisemitic battle against ‘Jewish influence’ but were intent on mass-murder. During the years 1943 to 1945, Valentin presented an interpretation of the Holocaust in a series of articles for Swedish newspapers, public lectures and a booklet issued by the Institute of International Affairs (which was more willing to publish information on the Holocaust in 1945 than they had been three years earlier).33 Apart from outlining the facts and numbers involved, he underlined the importance of antisemitism for Nazi ideology and the attempt to spread it across Europe. In line with the so-called spearhead theory of antisemitism, he interpreted it as a weapon to break down democracy and ‘prepare the ground’ for Nazism.34 He also stressed that the killing of Jews was imbedded in German culture, emphasising the efficiency, innovativeness and technical perfection of the genocide. And he interpreted it in historical terms and called the killing centres ‘gigantic symbols for the Nazi era, its technical ‘greatness’ and its mentality’.35 In short, Valentin rendered the Holocaust as a terrible triumph of German efficiency and technical progress. As part of his role as a public intellectual, Valentin had the task of situating the Holocaust in a wider framework than the fate of the Jewish people, the Germans, and the history of antisemitism. In an article published in late December 1943, Valentin stressed the incompatibility of the worldview represented by the swastika and that which has characterised the Western world for centuries, and whose guiding principle has been and still is the respect of human life.36

Following a common tendency in the democratic response to Nazism, Valentin described the Second World War as a struggle between civilisation and barbarism with the anti-Jewish genocide adding to the indictment against Nazi ideology and violence. Writing in one of the main

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Swedish newspapers, this presented a universalised interpretation of the Holocaust rather than the internal Jewish debate that characterised Valentin’s interpretations in Jewish journals. His message was that what was happening to the Jews threatened everybody in the long run if Nazism was victorious. According to this perspective, it seemed as if the fate of the Jewish people was bound up with the greater good of humanity. Valentin balanced different roles in his reporting on the Holocaust. He was a Jew reporting on the mass murder of his people, but he was also a historian and public intellectual with the attendant demands of factuality. Knowledge of the Holocaust did not happen suddenly in a flash but rather developed incrementally over an extended period of time through reports of deaths, massacres, and death camps. In reporting on the genocide, Valentin entered a debate where significant numbers of the Swedish public were disinclined to believe reports on German atrocities. This, in addition to Swedish wartime censorship, accounts for his measured tone and aim for neutrality. Moreover, in a country such as Sweden, traditionally aligned with Germany, he had a mission to alert the public to the fact that Nazism represented a greater threat to world peace than Soviet Communism. Only towards the end of 1942 did he become one of those the Hungarian English author Arthur Koestler called ‘the screamers’. Like Koestler, he sought to inform his fellow citizens of the mass murder Germany was perpetrating and alert them to the danger of Nazism.37

Zionism and the Future of the Jewish People In his activities for refugee relief, Valentin worked hand in hand with Jews of different political stripes in the Jewish community of Stockholm. From a general perspective, and certainly from Valentin’s viewpoint, there was no contradiction between serving the Jewish people as a whole and furthering the Zionist cause. For him, these two goals were one and the same. Training German Jewish youth in agricultural work through the Chaluz movement, for example, both rescued potential victims of Nazi Germany and furthered Jewish colonisation in Palestine. However, Valentin was a Zionist with a specific political interpretation of Jewish politics, and this came to shape his thinking on the Holocaust. In his 1940 book on Palestine, he discussed the respective Arab and Jewish arguments for Palestine and claimed that ‘Palestine is a necessity for the homeless, hounded Jewish people’.38 Given the mounting assault on European Jewry and the difficulties of finding a safe haven for Jewish refugees, creating a

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Jewish state in Palestine became the only answer. In this sense, Valentin’s interest in and interpretation of the Holocaust was subordinated to and influenced by his interest in solving the Jewish problem. In November 1943, he wrote to a Danish friend and fellow Zionist traveller who had come to Sweden two months earlier as a refugee. Reminiscing about a Zionist conference they attended together in the early 1930s, Valentin argued: The bloodstained soil of Europe had already started to tremble. The instability of the situation of diaspora Jewry, perceptively analysed by Herzl 35 years earlier, started to become visible for all who dared to see.39

This assertion gives the impression that Valentin experienced the Holocaust more as a confirmation than a revelation. As extreme and unique as the Holocaust was, it is also important to note that it made sense to some of its contemporaneous observers, since it fell into a pattern of historic Jewish insecurity. The question of whether this was more than the benefit of hindsight is less important than the fact that Zionism provided Valentin with firm analytical ground, to borrow the metaphor in the quote above, in the midst of catastrophe. Its assessment of the insecurity inherent in leading Jewish lives, as a minority at the mercy of the majority, offered a way to make sense of the Holocaust. For Valentin, Theodor Herzl was a modern secular prophet of sorts, not in the sense that he predicted the Holocaust, but in the sense that he understood the direction in which history was turning for the Jewish people. From this perspective, the Holocaust was a harbinger of the end of the diaspora, showing that Jewish life had to start anew in a Jewish state. Initially, Valentin left Jewish politics aside when reporting on the Holocaust in Swedish newspapers. In 1943, however, four years after the British White Paper limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine, one year after the news of the systematic murder of the Jews of Europe had broken, and half-a-year after the Bermuda Conference of April 1943, which promised next to nothing to the Jewish refugees, he developed a more openly partisan approach to the Holocaust. Valentin started working on a book that would integrate the still unfolding genocide in a history of the Jewish people.40 It was published during the winter of 1944, and written, as he put it, ‘under the impression of the bottomless plight of the Jewish people in the diaspora’.41 It constituted a popular historical account of Jewish history from the perspective of its catastrophes, and presented the story of an

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ethnic community, a people (‘folk’), attempting to maintain its identity in the face of outward threats and the peril of assimilation, at times through religion and at others through statehood. Seen from the longer perspective of modern Jewish historiography, Valentin’s version of Jewish history contained elements of what Salo Baron famously criticised as a ‘lachrymose conception of Jewish history’.42 Valentin saw the Middle Ages as a period of decay and political vulnerability rather than of cultural privileges and, at times, political autonomy emphasised by Baron and others. He was influenced by the Zionist criticism of Jewish political impotence in the diaspora. In this sense, Valentin adhered to an unsophisticated version of the nationalist historiography being developed during the 1930s and 1940s by Palestine-based historians who saw Jewish history in its entirety as the history of the Jewish nation.43 Yet, his objective was less to develop a new way of writing Jewish history than to derive its political lesson. In his view, the threats of antisemitism and assimilation remained constant throughout Jewish history due to the fact that Jews were a minority everywhere. According to Valentin, Jews were initially accepted in their host countries, only to be attacked or driven away because of antisemitism. On the other hand, if they were not threatened by antisemitism, they risked dissolution through assimilation. The Holocaust appeared to Valentin as the culmination of this pattern repeating itself throughout Jewish history.44 However, it was also a unique occurrence, in the sense that it created the preconditions for Jewish statehood. The Nazi regime had elevated the Jewish problem to a question of international affairs. As noted above, Valentin argued that the Jewish people had become involved in a struggle concerning civilisation itself. Jewish affairs were no longer a parochial matter of concern only to Jews, their supporters and detractors, but an issue of world politics. As Valentin put it, the ‘Jewish problem’ had become a ‘world problem’.45 As never before, the fate of the Jewish people had become linked to that of the world. History was stacked against the Jewish people, but in the midst of catastrophe, a pathway to the realisation of political Zionism had appeared on the horizon. Before the war, most Jews had still, in Valentin’s view, staked their hopes on assimilation and the development of peace and prosperity as a remedy to their problems. Moreover, the world had not been attuned to the nationalistic aspirations of what was still a minority within the minority. Under the pressure of war, genocide, and the struggle against Nazi Germany, Jews everywhere, or so Valentin argued, realised that the creation of a Jewish state was the only

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viable solution to the Jewish problem. Instead of a crazy idea, Jewish statehood had become a vital necessity. As he concluded, the fantastical dreams of Don Quixote had the better of the rational down-to-earth attitude of Sancho Panza.46 Valentin was not alone in his Zionist interpretation of the Holocaust. For example, speaking in 1933, the American Jewish leader Stephen Wise claimed that a ‘tragic vindication has come to Zionism in these unhappy days’.47 Similarly, Chaim Weizmann, the British head of the World Jewish Congress, interpreted Nazi anti-Jewish persecution as an argument against the German Jewish belief in assimilation.48 In a similar way, Norman Bentwich, the erstwhile British Commissioner to Palestine, commenting on the fate of Germany Jewry, later wrote in his autobiography that ‘the foundations of Jewish emancipation as well as of European liberalism were undermined’.49 For Valentin, as for other Zionists of his time, German anti-Jewish persecution during the 1930s—and the ensuing genocide— was the final nail in the coffin of the belief in assimilation and democratic progress as a remedy to the problems of the Jewish people.50 When presenting his Zionist interpretation of the Holocaust, Valentin entered a contentious debate about the Jewish future. Herbert Tingsten, the liberal editor-in-chief of Dagens Nyheter, and one of Sweden’s leading intellectuals, reviewed Valentin’s book in February 1945. Although Tingsten would evolve into a defender of the Jewish state a few years later, at this point he took exception to Valentin’s conclusions. From Tingsten’s perspective, Jewish nationalism was a potential threat to the status of Jews as citizens in their respective countries, rather than the solution to their problems.51 Nazi anti-Jewish persecution had discredited antisemitism once and for all, ushering in a ‘wave of sympathy and compassion’ for the Jewish people, that would contribute to the absorption of Jews in their host nations.52 As a Zionist, Valentin did not see assimilation as desirable, nor did he believe, as Tingsten, that the ongoing catastrophe would lead to it. In his reply, Valentin countered Tingsten’s suggestion that he had formed his views merely because of the Nazi annihilation of the Jews, by explaining that he had become a Zionist before the advent of the Nazi regime, not through some prophetic insight about the coming victory of Nazism but because of an empirically grounded conviction that the situation of the Jews in a nationalistic Europe was untenable.53

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For Valentin, the Holocaust was not an historical aberration, but a confirmation of the precarious nature of Jewish life in the diaspora. He referred to ‘perceptive Jewish sociologists’ of the Weimar era, who had come to the conclusion that the German Jews would be forced out of their positions in society, regardless of whether Nazism would accede to power or not. In his view, antisemitism was still on the rise everywhere in the spring of 1945, and Nazism, far from defusing it, had cast an unforgiving light on Jewish particularity. Valentin’s book also elicited discussion within, the Swedish-Jewish community. Valentin was a secular Swedish Jew and a supporter of Theodor Herzl who believed that the only way to solve the problems of the Jewish people was to remove the theological underpinning that made them endure the hardships of their history without doing anything to remedy their situation.54 Marcus Ehrenpreis, by contrast, argued that threats to Jewish existence had existed throughout the course of Jewish history. Jews had survived then and would survive again.55 As a religious leader, steeped in the traditions of Eastern European Jewry, and as a cultural Zionist, Ehrenpreis took exception to Valentin’s reading of Jewish history, which to him seemed to reduce it to nothing but misery. For Ehrenpreis, Jewish history was elevated above the ebb and flow of secular history. Millennia of Jewish life, religion and suffering did not simply usher in the secular struggle for statehood, but were flowing with a spiritual energy that no catastrophe either in ancient or modern history could extinguish. He opted for the cultural Zionism of Ahad Ha’am, with its vision of Palestine as the centre, and the diaspora as the periphery of a spiritually invigorated Jewry.56 Ehrenpreis envisioned a symbiotic relationship between Palestine and the diaspora and the continuity of a tradition that considered the latter as valuable in its own right rather than a problem to be overcome and supplanted by a Jewish national home. For Ehrenpreis, Valentin seemed to subscribe to the so-called negation of the diaspora, according to which the diaspora was doomed by antisemitism and assimilation. Valentin, for his part, had criticised Ehrenpreis for representing an apolitical reading of Zionist ideology.57 In a public debate between the two during the spring of 1945, Valentin responded that he had no intention of reducing Jewish history to its catastrophes but that it was ‘unrealistic and dangerous to believe that we are immortal’.58 Furthermore, he argued that the modern world presented Jewry with new challenges. As he perceived it, political developments had rendered the perspective of Ahad Ha’am obsolete, and both Eastern and Central European Jewry had been doomed

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well before Hitler came to power. The polemic between Ehrenpreis and Valentin concerned both the secular/religious divide and different strands of Zionist ideology, as well as different conceptions of Jewish history and the significance of the Holocaust in it. Valentin progressed from a more factual approach to the Holocaust, with an emphasis on antisemitism with universal implications, to a Zionist agenda. As the possibility of helping the Jews of Europe grew ever slimmer, Zionism increasingly seemed to him to be the only remedy to a hopeless situation. As seen in the debate with Ehrenpreis, the Holocaust not only united Jews in the struggle to help the victims of Nazism, it also divided them and political fault lines were as important as the concern for the common Jewish good. The place to accord the Holocaust in Jewish life was by no means a foregone conclusion. Situating the Holocaust at the centre of contemporary Jewish life, and earlier catastrophes at the centre of Jewish history, as Valentin had done, had far-reaching implications for the link between Jewish history and Jewish religion. The solution to the Jewish problem envisaged by Valentin represented from Ehrenpreis’s perspective a dissolution of Jewish religion. From the different and politically liberal perspective expressed by Herbert Tingsten, Valentin attempted to derive a rule out of what Tingsten considered to be an historical aberration, destined to integrate the Jewish people in their host countries rather than to push them out. The Holocaust did not alter Ehrenpreis’s and Tingsten’s respective beliefs in the meaning of Jewish history and religion and the progress of liberal society. Their poise and conviction that Jewish religion and assimilation would continue its course despite the genocide marked a contrast to Valentin’s acute sense that something fundamental had to change for the Jewish people. For him, this was not merely a passing disturbance but the symptom of a permanent condition which had a nationalist solution.

The Politics of Early Swedish Holocaust Memory Valentin continued to elaborate the position delineated above during the post-war period. He wrote several reviews, articles, and prefaces to books relating to the Holocaust that in various ways served commemorative purposes while carrying on the ideological struggle.59 In 1950, he took issue with the German Jewish sociologist Eva G Reichmann’s analysis of Nazi antisemitism, published that same year. His reaction to Reichmann addressed similar questions as the discussion with Tingsten, only this time

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within the context of the internal Jewish debate on assimilation.60 In Valentin’s view, Reichmann’s book sought to vindicate the German Jewish belief in assimilation—which from his and other Zionists’ perspective had been fatal. Writing under the title ‘Did the Demise of Germany Jewry Depend on Coincidences?’, he penned a polemical response.61 As Valentin presented her argument, there had been no Jewish problem in Germany in the first place, and Germans were one of the least antisemitic peoples in the world. This interpretation made the demise of German Jewry into an inexplicable coincidence, unrelated to Jewish affairs in the present. If, as Reichmann argued, Jews were merely used as scapegoats and there was no particular Jewish question, then, Valentin asked, why didn’t the Nazis pick some other group? As in the debate with Tingsten, Valentin faced an opponent who saw the Holocaust as the exception rather than the rule of Jewish history. Had it not been for the peculiarity of Nazi antisemitism and the coincidence that the Nazi party came to power, so Reichmann argued according to Valentin, nothing serious would have befallen the Jews of Germany. By implication, nothing serious would happen to them in Europe, now that the Nazi regime was gone. From Valentin’s perspective, this was a gross error of judgment, both concerning German antisemitism prior to the Nazi regime and of the difficulties facing Jews in the post-war era. He concluded with an assessment of the Jewish diaspora that was as grim before the Holocaust as it was afterwards: annihilation in antisemitic countries or dissolution through assimilation in friendly nations. Valentin’s post-war writings indicate that the creation of Holocaust memory was a difficult and tortuous process. Two years after taking Reichmann to task for her assimilationist philosophy, he reiterated his Zionist interpretation of the Holocaust in a review of the first book-length account of the event, Léon Poliakov’s Bréviare de la haine. Valentin claimed that the position of the Jews had proven ‘more dangerous than what even the most pessimistic of Jews had believed’ and that the ‘Jewish response’ was the creation of the ‘Jewish state’.62 In the same issue of Judisk Tidskrift, he reviewed one of the first books about the rescue of the Danish Jews.63 While praising the book and the episode it recounted, he also expressed discomfort about the passive role played by the Jews in their own rescue: ‘It is trying for Jewish pride to read about Jews being placed as “cattle or bags” at the bottom of a wagon, so as not to be seen by the Germans, to be transported to the coast’.64 In this way, Valentin added his voice to the choir of criticism regarding the response of Jewish victims to

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Nazi persecution. From this perspective, the Holocaust was a painful reminder of how far the Jewish people were from realising Zionist ideals. In the following year, the decennial of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, Valentin praised the memory of the Jewish fighters who decided to ‘sell their lives costly’ by taking up arms.65 In the early 1960s, when he was nearing the end of his life, he wrote the preface to the Swedish translation of the concluding chapters of Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews, published in 1963 (which incidentally was the first translation of Hilberg’s work). Valentin placed particular emphasis on what Hilberg described as the lack of resistance of the Jewish victims, their ‘defeatism’ and ‘active participation’ in their own demise.66 The post-war criticism of Jewish behaviour during the Holocaust was part of the painful reckoning with the memory of Jewish helplessness. In this sense, Valentin’s personal memory of the Holocaust was a tortured one, infused with the feeling of Jewish impotence. In the post-war period, he continued the political struggle of the 1930s. For him, the stark choice between statehood and salvation on the one hand, or diaspora and doom on the other, never lost its poignancy. From that perspective, the later advent of Holocaust memory is perhaps most fittingly described as the exorcising of wartime political conflicts.

Valentin and the Swedish Encounter with the Holocaust Hugo Valentin played a singular role for the Swedish encounter with the Jewish genocide. His analysis of Nazism was focused on its antisemitism and his understanding of antisemitism was geared towards its most destructive possibilities. Furthermore, his Zionist reading of Jewish existence in the diaspora made him expect the worst at a time when the worst was indeed to come. When attempting to inform the Swedish public about the ongoing genocide in 1942, Valentin acted within the political and cultural confines of his time. He had to contend with the limits of Swedish wartime censorship, but he also had to balance his public identity as a representative of the Jewish people and a Zionist on the one hand, and a historian and a public intellectual on the other. This implied stressing the uncertainty surrounding the facts available to him as well as placing emphasis on different aspects of the Holocaust for different audiences. In some cases, he emphasised that the fate of Western civilisation hung in the

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balance, and in others, he focused on the future of the Jewish people, two questions that at least for some time appeared to be one and the same. Responding to the Holocaust was not simply a matter of information, acknowledgment, and commemoration, but a question of political interpretation. Working for the greater good of the Jewish people—be it refugees in Europe or settlers in Palestine—brought Jews of different political stripes together, but it was also divisive. The debates and polemics involving Marcus Ehrenpreis, Herbert Tingsten, and Eva Reichmann demonstrate that the significance of the Holocaust for the Jewish people was anything but a foregone conclusion. The emergence of early Holocaust memory was thus fraught with tensions, just as much as Jewish politics in general—if not more so. Valentin was not only a participant observer, but a partisan one, caught up in the political struggles of his time. From this perspective, he was less interested in commemorating the Holocaust as a symbol of modern Jewish martyrdom than in conveying what he saw as its political lesson. For Hugo Valentin, then, the acknowledgement and political interpretation of the Holocaust was part of a struggle for the present and for the future of the Jewish people.

Notes 1. Hugo Valentin, ‘Världshistoriens största judepogrom’, Göteborgs Handelsoch Sjöfartstidning, 31 December 1942. 2. On Valentin’s background, Harald Runblom, ‘Framstående 1700-­talshistoriker och sionist’, in Svenska historiker. Från medeltid till våra dagar, ed. Ragnar Björk and Alf W.  Johansson (Stockholm: Nordstedts, 2009), 460–473. 3. Hugo Valentin, Judarnas historia i Sverige (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1924); Hugo Valentin, Judarna i Sverige, 2nd ed. (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1964). 4. Pontus Rudberg, The Swedish Jews and the victims of Nazi terror, 1933–1945 (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2015), 16. 5. Hugo Valentin, Antisemitism, historically and critically examined (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936). 6. Rudberg, The Swedish Jews and the victims, 17. 7. On the Hechaluz movement in Sweden, see Malin Thor Tureby, Hechaluz. En rörelse i tid och rum: tysk-judiska ungdomars exil i Sverige 1933–1943 (Växjö: Växjö University Press, 2005); Pontus Rudberg, The Swedish Jews and the victims, 67–75. 8. Pontus Rudberg, ‘Rädda våra barn! Svensk-judisk hjälp till flyktingbarn från Nazityskland’, in På flykt från krig. Asylsökande, ensamkommande och

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i­nternflyktingar i Sveriges historia, ed. Anna Fredholm (Stockholm: Armémuseum, 2017), 82–117. 9. Valentin to Mia Leche Löfgren, 2 February 1939, Leche-Löfgrens Papper, Kungliga Biblioteket (The Royal Library, KB); Quoted in Runblom, ‘Framstående 1700-talshistoriker och sionist’, in Svenska historiker. Från medeltid till våra dagar, 469. 10. Hugo Valentin, ‘Judisk Månadsrevy’, Judisk Tidskrift 3, no. 3 (1930), 103. 11. Hugo Valentin, ‘Judisk Månadsrevy’, Judisk Tidskrift 3, no. 5 (1930), 173. 12. Hugo Valentin, ‘Judisk Månadsrevy’, Judisk Tidskrift 3, no. 8 (1930), 276–277. 13. Oded Heilbronner, ‘German or Nazi Antisemitism?’, in The Historiography of the Holocaust, ed. Dan Stone (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2004), 9–23. 14. Hugo Valentin, Judisk Krönika, 5, no. 7 (1936): 103; Hugo Valentin, Judisk Krönika 5, no. 10 (1936), 155. 15. Dan Stone, Responses to Nazism in Britain, 1933–1939. Before war and Holocaust (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2003), 102–105. 16. Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe, 151–155. 17. Ingvar Svanberg and Mattias Tydén, Sverige och Förintelsen: debatt och dokument om Europas judar (Stockholm: Dialogos, 2005), 39–40. 18. Valentin to Segerstedt, 5 October 1942, Torgny Segerstedt Papers, (TSP), Göteborg University Library. 19. Ragnvald Lundström to Valentin, 26 September 1942, Hugo Valentin Papers (HVP) Courtesy of Suzanne Hellström. 20. Valentin to Ragnvald Lundström, 27 September 1942, HVP. 21. Greta Bolin to Valentin, 1943, n.d. [November], HVP. 22. Göran Leth ‘Mediernas svek i skuggan av Förintelsen’, in Sverige och Nazityskland. Skuldfrågor och moraldebatt, eds. Lars M.  Andersson and Mattias Tydén (Stockholm: Dialogos, 2007), 173–176; Alf W. Johansson, ‘Censur och självcensur i Sverige under andra världskriget’, in Sensur og selvsensur i nordisk presse, ed. Hans Fredrik Dahl (Fredrikstad: Institutt for Journalistikk, 1999); For an overview of Swedish wartime censorship, see Klas Åmark, Att bo granne med ondskan. Sveriges förhållande till nazismen, Nazityskland och Förintelsen (Stockholm: Bonnier, 2011), 209–234. 23. Hugo Valentin, ‘Utrotningskriget mot judarna’, Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning (GHT), 13 October 1942. 24. Valentin to Torgny Segerstedt, 22 December 1942, TSP. 25. Svanberg och Tydén, Sverige och Förintelsen, 242–246; Åmark, Att bo granne med ondskan, 259. 26. Valentin to Segerstedt, 5 October 1942, TSP. 27. Gunnar Richardson, Beundran och fruktan. Sverige inför Tyskland 1940–1942 (Stockholm: Carlsson, 1996).

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28. See Per Jegebäck, ‘Att adla tvånget till frihet. Hugo Valentin, Greuelmärchen och förhållandet till Tyskland som främmande makt 1933–1945’, in Bilder i kontrast. Interkulturella processer Sverige/Tyskland i skuggan av nazismen 1933–1945, ed. Charlotta Brylla, Birgitta Almgren, Frank-Michael Kirsch (Aalborg: Institut für Sprache und internationale Kulturstudien, 2005), 263–288. 29. See Greta Bolin to Valentin, 19 December 1942, HVP; and Bertil C. to Valentin, 14 December 1942, HVP; Hugo Valentin, ’Du må ikke sove…’, GHT, 7 July 1944; and Hugo Valentin, ‘Tyskland i svensk opinion’, Dagens Nyheter, 31 August 1945. 30. In March 1944, Valentin published an open letter berating Hedin for claiming that Soviet atrocities trumped their Nazi equivalents. Hugo Valentin, ‘Ännu ett öppet brev till dr Sven Hedin’, Aftontidningen, 2 October 1944. I am indebted to Stéphane Bruchfeld for this reference; Sven Hedin, Aftontidningen, 25 September 1944; On Hedin, see Sarah K. Danielsson, The explorer’s roadmap to National-Socialism. Sven Hedin, geography and the path to genocide (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). 31. Hugo Valentin, ‘Världshistoriens största judepogrom’, Göteborgs Handelsoch Sjöfartstidning, 31 December 1942; Nordiska röster mot judeförföljelse och våld. Special issue of Judisk Tidskrift 15 (1942); Rudberg, The Swedish Jews and the victims, 263. 32. Valentin, ‘Världshistoriens största judepogrom’. 33. Hugo Valentin, ‘Judeförföljelsernas innebörd’, Dagens Nyheter, 28 December 1943; Hugo Valentin, ‘“Likfabriken” som symbol’, Dagens Nyheter, 4 April 1945; Hugo Valentin, Judarna under det andra världskriget (Stockholm: Utrikespolitiska Institutet, 1945). 34. Valentin, ‘Judeförföljelsernas innebörd’; Valentin, Det judiska folkets öde, 160. 35. Ibid., 168–169; See also Hugo Valentin, ‘“Likfabriken” som symbol’, Dagens Nyheter, 4 April 1945; Valentin, ‘Bödlarna vittnar’, 189; Hugo Valentin, ‘Förord’, Hur de europeiska judarna förintades (Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 1963), 6. 36. Hugo Valentin, ‘Judeförföljelsernas innebörd’; R. Rogberg to Valentin, 9 November 1943, HVP. 37. Arthur Koestler, ‘The Nightmare that is a reality’, New York Times, 9 January 1944; See Eric J. Sundquist, ‘Silence reconsidered. An afterword’, in After the Holocaust. Challenging the myth of silence, eds. David Cesarani and Eric J.  Sundquist (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 207; On Koestler, see David Cesarani, Arthur Koestler. The homeless mind (London: Heinemann, 1998). 38. Hugo Valentin, Kampen om Palestina (Stockholm: Kooperativa förbundets bokförlag, 1940), 141.

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39. Valentin to Mogens Nathan, 12 November 1943, HVP. 40. Valentin to Mogens Nathan, 12 November 1943, HVP; Valentin to B. W. Therborn, 7 December 1943, HVP. 41. Hugo Valentin, Det judiska folkets öde. Forntid - nutid - framtid (Stockholm: Kooperativa förbundets bokförlag, 1944). 42. Salo W. Baron, ‘Ghetto and emancipation: Shall we revise the traditional view?’ The Menorah Journal 14, no. 6 (June 1928): 515–526. 43. David N. Myers, Re-inventing the Jewish past. European Jewish intellectuals and the Zionist return to history (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 109–110, 117–118, 142–143. 44. Valentin, Det judiska folkets öde, 11–12. 45. Ibid., 7 and 171. 46. Valentin, Det judiska folkets öde, 119. 47. Aaron Berman, Nazism, the Jews and American Zionism, 1933–1948 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 20. 48. Berman, 26. 49. Norman Bentwich, My seventy-seven years, 123 and 126. I am indebted to Pontus Rudberg for this reference. 50. There were, and are, different meanings to assimilation. For Valentin it implied the dissolution of particular identities. 51. On the development of Tingsten’s thought, see David Andersson, Med skulden som drivkraft. Om svenska Israelvänner och västfiender (Stockholm: Timbro Förlag, 2017), 15–19. 52. Herbert Tingsten, ‘[review of] Hugo Valentin, Det judiska folkets öde’, Dagens Nyheter, 25 February 1945. 53. Hugo Valentin, ‘Fredstidens judefråga’, Dagens Nyheter, 6 March 1945. See also Hugo Valentin, ‘Det judiska problemet inför segermakterna’, Svenska Dagbladet, 22 May 1945. 54. Valentin, Det judiska folket, 100–102. 55. Marcus Ehrenpreis, ‘“Sekulariserad” historieuppfattning: randanteckningar till Hugo Valentins bok’, Judisk Tidskrift 18 (1945): 1–6. 56. Marcus Ehrenpreis, ‘Den dubbla renässansen’, Judisk Tidskrift 22 (1949): 33–35; Stephen Fruitman, Creating a new heart: Marcus Ehrenpreis on Jewry and Judaism (Umeå: Umeå University, 2001); Stephen Fruitman, Cultural Zionism in Sweden. Judisk krönika, 1932–1979 (Umeå: Umeå Universitet, 1987); On Ha’am, see Steven J. Zipperstein, Elusive prophet. Ahad Ha’am and the origins of Zionism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 57. Hugo Valentin, ‘Marcus Ehrenpreis som Zionist’, Judisk Tidskrift 17 (1944): 196–199.

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58. Marcus Ehrenpreis and Hugo Valentin, ‘Palestina och diaspora. Offentligt samtal mellan M. Ehrenpreis och H. Valentin’, Judisk Tidskrift 18 (1945): 163–171. 59. See Hugo Valentin, ‘Minnesbok om underbar räddning, [review of Aage Bertelsen, Oktober 43, Oplevelser og Tilstande under Jodeforfolgelsen i Danmark]’, Judisk Tidskrift 25 (1952): 158–159; Hugo Valentin, ‘Tio-­ årsdagen av Warszawaghettots resning’, Judisk Tidskrift 26 (1953): 95–96; Hugo Valentin, Preface to, Alexander Cybulski Weissberg, Historien om Joel Brand, trans. Irmgard Pingel (Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 1958). 60. Eva G. Reichmann, Hostages of civilization. The social sources of National Socialist anti-Semitism (London: Gollancz, 1950). 61. Hugo Valentin, ‘Berodde den tyska judenhetens undergång på tillfälligheter?’, Judisk Tidskrift 23 (1950): 181–184. 62. Hugo Valentin, ‘Bödlarna vittnar’ [review of Léon Poliakov, Bréviare de la haine], Judisk Tidskrift 25 (1952): 190. 63. Valentin, ‘Minnesbok om underbar räddning’, 158–159. 64. Ibid., 159. 65. Hugo Valentin, ‘Tio-årsdagen av Warszawaghettots resning’, Judisk Tidskrift 26 (1953): 95–96. 66. Hugo Valentin, ‘Förord’, in Raul Hilberg, Hur de europeiska judarna förintades (Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 1963), 5.

CHAPTER 6

Tracing the Holocaust in Early Writings in Post-War Sweden Karin Kvist Geverts

Introduction The aim of this chapter is to provide the first systematic review of early writings on the Holocaust in post-war Sweden. It is widely known that Holocaust research appeared relatively late in Sweden.1 It is also known that the early post-war years have not been the focus of previous research due to the often repeated claim of ‘a silence’ during that period.2 However, this changed in 2008, when two dissertations appeared that both studied the early post-war reception of the Second World War in Sweden. One of them, by the Swedish historian Johan Östling, highlighted in his thesis that Swedes were by no means ignorant of the fate of the Jews and that the liberation of concentration and death camps attracted significant attention. Nevertheless, according to Östling, the interpretations of Nazism in the 1940s and 1950s tended to consider antisemitism and racism as ‘subsidiary elements that resulted from the subordinate nature of nationalism’, and that the extermination of Jews was ‘only one aspect of the Second

K. Kvist Geverts (*) National Library of Sweden, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Heuman, P. Rudberg (eds.), Early Holocaust Memory in Sweden, The Holocaust and its Contexts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55532-0_6

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World War’.3 This assumption follows a general idea that the Holocaust was rarely discussed as a separate and independent historical phenomenon and process in its own right during the first decades after the War. The other dissertation, by Finnish historian Antero Holmila, had a more critical approach to this general idea. He compared early interpretations of this genocide in the British, Swedish, and Finnish press during the period 1945 to 1950, and argued that the Holocaust was an important topic in Swedish public debate.4 Holmila showed that the Swedish press particularly focused on the fate of Norwegian and Danish Jews because this aligned well with the national narrative of ‘Nordic victimhood’: reports on Eastern European Jews were often omitted.5 These different viewpoints can partly be explained by different scholarly perspectives, sources, and conceptualisation of the Holocaust, but also by the expectations of the scholars. The latter is at least one possible argument provided by Hasia Diner when she discusses why scholars failed to discover the early memorialisation of the Holocaust in America. Diner has shown that there was certainly not a silence among publications by Jewish authors in early post-war America. She explains this ‘myth of silence’ by arguing that we can lack the ability to see and interpret the small, sometimes scattered and unorganised examples of books and texts that were published from 1945 to 1962. Diner contends that because these books did not resemble later expressions and commemorations of the Holocaust— that are more familiar today—they have not been recognised as such.6 On that very same note, David Cesarani highlights that testimonies, reports, and memoirs quickly appeared in the United States and in Europe, and were distributed globally as translations, both by Jewish and non-Jewish authors.7 Another perspective has been provided by Tom Lawson’s study of Holocaust historiography, in which he recognises a tendency to universalise the Holocaust to a human catastrophe, but without completely disregarding the Jewish experiences. He highlights a more diverse history writing related to the Holocaust during the first decades after the war: one in which the voices of the survivors were also heard.8 Building on these international studies, it seems fruitful to return to the early post-war years in Sweden. Thus, this chapter is a systematic survey of early writings on the Holocaust both by Jewish and non-Jewish authors in the 1940s and 1950s. Instead of merely stating that there was no academic research on the Holocaust, this chapter seeks to show how both academic and non-academic writers handled the subject in books that concerned the genocide. Given the limited amount of space, this chapter will only outline

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some general tendencies departing from the following questions: What was published in Sweden about the Holocaust from 1941 to 1960? How did these books describe the Holocaust, and within which framework(s) was the narrative of the Holocaust told? Who were the authors of these books?

Limitations and Methodology Tracing the early writings on the Holocaust in Sweden is a huge task that needs to be defined and limited. First, and most importantly, I define the Holocaust, in accordance with this book, as the genocide of the European Jews by the Nazi regime from 1941 to 1945. What makes it complicated is that there was no established term of the Holocaust in the 1940s and 1950s, although variations of the word can already be found in the 1940s.9 Thus, one task of this chapter is to examine what this event was called and how it was described at the time. Previous research has provided in-depth knowledge of what was known in Sweden about the Holocaust during the war—and when.10 The Historian Hugo Valentin’s article ‘Utrotningskriget mot judarna’ (The War of Extermination of the Jews) in Göteborgs Handelsoch Sjöfartstidning in October 1942 was a clear turning point,11 and at least from the summer of 1943 it was possible for the Swedish public to have knowledge of the Holocaust. At the same time, to have knowledge and to understand are clearly not the same thing, as has been shown in previous research.12 Since the books were published already before the liberation in 1945, I will start in 1941, when the Holocaust began, to trace the earliest Holocaust literature in Sweden.13 Research on the press is well covered, and I have therefore limited the scope of the study to early writings in books published in Sweden. There are basically two paths to choose between when it comes to limitations. The philosopher Berel Lang chooses the broad path when he defines ‘Holocaust writings’ as a genre that holds three subgroups. The first group contains diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, documentary novels, and short stories that all claim to be historically accurate. Poems, lyrics, and other texts that only refer to the Holocaust indirectly, assuming it has happened and that it is known, compile the second group. And the final sub-­ group contains historiographical texts.14 For the Swedish case, this approach has been used by the literary scholar Anders Ohlsson in his study of Holocaust literature in Scandinavia. As previously mentioned, Ohlsson claims that the publishing of books on the Holocaust was insignificant

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during the first decades after the war.15 His corpus therefore consists of books published primarily in the late 1960s and 1970s, and most of them are fiction.16 Being a historian and not a literary scholar, I decided to follow a somewhat narrower path, inspired by Cesarani’s study. He focuses on ‘published factual writing, including contemporary diaries, depositions, testimony, reports and memoirs’ and disregards novels, poetry, and drama, that is, what Lang categorises as the second subgroup of Holocaust writings.17 Cesarani also includes translations since ‘the publishing history of these works can serve as a basis for some tentative conclusions about the audiences they were intended for and the markets they found’.18 I will follow Cesarani’s delimitation, thus easing comparisons between his research and this current chapter. Since many books are autobiographies, diaries, and testimonies written by individuals who were not professional historians, it follows that the term historiography is too narrow, and I have therefore chosen to present these books as ‘early writings’ instead.19 There is also the question of outreach.20 Even though some contemporary biographers argued that ‘practically all Jews in the World understood German’,21 I’ve limited the scope of this chapter to early writings in Swedish (including translations to Swedish) published in Sweden during the years 1941 to 1960, to guarantee that the books were accessible to a Swedish audience. Furthermore, it was a criterion that these books had to mention or relate their content to the Holocaust one way or another. This meant that books that relate their content to the Holocaust and Nazism have been included, whereas books that only discuss Nazism have not.22 I have included writings by Jewish and non-Jewish authors, due to Cesarani’s point that ‘one of the most important questions relating to this early period is how far those who reported their experiences in the camps identified what we today term the ‘specific fate’ of the Jews’.23 There was no established term for this genocide. My methodologies therefore had to be creative, flexible, and multifarious so as to map the relevant books. Since these books are not catalogued as ‘Holocaust historiography’, an initial search in the library catalogue was not particularly helpful. Instead, I started by going through previous research, trawling it for books published during the years 1941 to 1960 claiming to deal with the Holocaust or the Second World War. I examined the titles to see if the author wrote about the Holocaust—and if they did, the text was included. This meant that books that dealt with, for instance, Nazism and the Holocaust were included, while books that solely dealt with Nazism were

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not. I did not expect to find many titles, but to my surprise, the trawling resulted in a few titles and the names of some authors. The next step was to search for other titles by these authors, and in this way I found a series published by the liberal student association Verdandi, in which the book cover advertised more books with similar topics. This gave me a few more titles, as well as access to a weekly publication called NU (‘Now’), which had even more advertisements by other publishers on similar topics. From previous research, I also found bibliographies, some of them contemporary, which I searched for titles.24 I also studied the reviews in the Jewish periodicals Judisk Krönika and Judisk Tidskrift during the period 1944 to 1945. This turned out to be particularly fruitful.25 Finally, I used the library categorisation given to several of the titles that had now been found, and made a renewed search of the catalogue. More titles emerged this way, and after a selection process where books that did not mention the Holocaust, and/or books that turned out to be fiction, were eliminated. This resulted in 53 titles to be included in this study.26 The table below gives an overview of when each book was published and whether it was published in Swedish or as a translation. In this table, I have included books that deal with aspects related to the Holocaust. Admittedly, in some of the books, the Holocaust—understood as the genocide of the Jews—was not an important part of the narrative and Jews were mentioned together with other victim groups. In other cases, the Jewish experiences of persecution were an important element of the analysis. This will be discussed further below. Categorisations discussed above such as ‘Holocaust writings’ should be used carefully on this broad selection of books. A few of the books in the presentation below even contain antisemitic conceptualisations of the persecution of Jews. My argument, however, is that a more open view on this early writing can show greater nuances and complexity in how this genre developed in post-war Sweden. Table 6.1 shows the period and number of books published during that time, divided into books with Swedish as the original language, and books that were translated into Swedish. As can be seen, a third of the books were translations.27 This table suggests that translated books were already being published during the early period, and that the culmination of the Swedish production came immediately after the end of the war. What we cannot see from the list below is that important accounts—mentioned by Cesarani in his article—were not translated and distributed in the Swedish market.28 What is striking though, is that so many of the books were already published during the war years, when the Holocaust was still

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Table 6.1  Year of publication and language Time period

Swedish

Translations

Sum

1941–1944 1945–1950 1951–1955 1956–1960 Total

13 17 1 4 35

6 6 3 3 18

19 23 4 7 53

occurring, reaching a peak between 1945 and 1950. What happened in 1950? The same trend is spotted by Cesarani, who concludes that ‘the market was satiated. People had heard enough’.29 Holmila supports this conclusion, and adds that ‘the main factor contributing to the marginalisation of the Holocaust was a need to look to the future’.30 From this overview, it seems reasonable to break down the early writings into three phases: early writings during the war (1941–1944), the peak of early post-­ war writings (1945–1950), and the decline in publication (1951–1960).

Early Writings During the War (1941–1944) I found no books published in 1941 that mention the Holocaust. The first that does was published in 1942, and translated into Swedish as Polens martyrium (The Martyrdom of Poland). Immediately after its publication, it was retracted by the state.31 We know this because the book has a handwritten note on the inside of the cover.32 But the book, or at least knowledge of it, must have reached the public anyway, because it is mentioned in other publications at the time.33 It was printed by Trots allt!, a weekly magazine known for its anti-Nazi position and its outspoken editor, Ture Nerman, who was even sentenced to jail for ‘defamation of a foreign power’.34 Nerman actually published the book in Sweden three times, and every time it was retracted.35 The book itself contained documents collected by the Polish Information Ministry on ‘the new order’ from the occupying Nazi authority.36 The book gives quite accurate descriptions of Jewish suffering in Poland at this stage, with chapters such as The persecution of the Jews and Deportation of the Jews, while at the same time gives more room to the suffering of the non-Jewish Poles in line with the national focus of the book. We must also remember that the book only deals with events that happened up until the autumn of 1941: this was the very beginning of the Holocaust.

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In all, 19 books were published in Sweden during the years 1941 to 1944, of which six are translations. All but one was written by a man. The majority were written by journalists or authors, followed by professors and pastors. Interestingly enough, four of the authors were pastors who wrote within the Christian debate. This explains the framework into which they place the Holocaust—one of antisemitism, with titles that mention ‘the Jewish question’.37 They perceive ‘the Jewish Question’ as a ‘problem’ that requires a ‘solution’—and their preferred solution is that the Jews return to Israel and convert to Christianity. Four additional publications connect the Holocaust with antisemitism, but they do not accept the idea of ‘a Jewish problem’. Three of these books are written by the Swedish-­ Jewish Zionist activist and editor of Judisk Krönika, Daniel Brick.38 During this first phase, there are examples of scattered and chaotic reporting, as Cesarani has described.39 For instance, we find examples of paraphrases of the Holocaust such as ‘the treatment of the 2 million Polish Jews belongs to the horrors in World history’, ‘Europe’s chambers of horrors’, ‘the bloody half-year’ and ‘the Jewish tragedy’.40 But there are also more universalised phrasings such as Gilbert Vansittart’s descriptions of Nazism, concentration camps and ‘one of the people who are annihilated in cold blood’—while not explicitly mentioning the Jews.41 At the same time, there are also more explicit descriptions where the term ‘extermination’ (in Swedish: ‘utrotning’ or ‘förintade’) and variations of this were common. When the Jewish author Daniel Brick talks about ‘the extermination war’, for instance, or when the Swedish-Jewish historian Hugo Valentin describes the Holocaust as ‘the Nazi extermination struggle’.42 Some writers also use the word ‘systematic’, like Zander Åberg, who writes that ‘the solution of the Jewish Question’ is ‘to annihilate’ (‘tillintetgöra’) the Jews.43 These are insightful comments made before the war had even ended. These early books of the Holocaust were written with a clear moral and political purpose: to raise awareness in the world about the ongoing persecution rather than critically analysing and interpreting the course of events—although there were already tendencies at the end of the war to understand the evolution of events from a post-­ war perspective.44 There are several examples of the use of the word ‘pogrom’ to describe the Holocaust, and it is often connected to the November pogrom (the ‘Reichskristallnacht’): as when Stefan Szende calls the Holocaust ‘the November pogrom of 1942’, or Valentin calls it ‘the largest Jew pogrom in World history’.45

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The scale of the genocide is also expressed in numbers. Brick, for instance, writes about the ‘death for millions of people’.46 Describing the methods of killing is also often a way of describing the Holocaust, and these descriptions are, for the most part, quite accurate. Torgny Brehmer mentions a pogrom in Vilno and Rovno, Åberg writes about ‘the new killing camp Sobibor’, and Szende presents witness accounts of Belzec and Treblinka.47 Perhaps most interesting during this first phase are two books by non-­ Jewish journalists, Arvid Fredborg and Gunnar Th:son Pihl.48 Both books are also analysed by Östling, who argues that Fredborg only mentions the Holocaust ‘en passant’, and I agree that most of the book does not deal with the Holocaust.49 But what Fredborg actually writes in these passages is quite detailed. He describes mass executions of Jews and gives an account of Jews killed in Poland and Lithuania. He singles out the SS as responsible and argues that soldiers need to be intoxicated to implement the mass executions (mass shootings). He calls the Holocaust ‘the extermination’ (‘utrotningen’) and describes mass shootings in open graves or ‘gas in special chambers’ (‘gas i särskilda kamrar’).50 When it comes to numbers, an even more detailed account is provided by Th:son Pihl in the chapter Under the star of David (‘Under judestjärnan’). He writes about mass deportations and camps, as well as mass executions, and describes the different phases of the persecution of the Jews. He writes that the third phase began in the fall of 1941: ‘Its characteristics was the emigration ban, the deportations and large scale mass executions’.51 He concludes that ‘If the time and the effort is enough, it is possible that the world will witness a final amuck against the Jews’ which will end in ‘a blood bath’ in ‘Jewish blood’.52

The Early Post-War Writings (1945–1950) At the end of the war, efforts were made by the survivors of the Holocaust, as well as the rescuers, to record and publish their accounts.53 Overall, Sweden did not differ from this global trend. Twenty-three titles were published from 1945 to 1950, of which six were translations from other languages. Most of these early writers were men, while four were women.54 The majority were professors, journalists, or authors, or held military rank.55 Nine of the books could be characterised as Jewish and non-Jewish witness accounts or memoirs, while ten were reports or historical accounts written by journalists or academics.

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Holmila has shown that the Holocaust was slotted into a national narrative where issues related to national identity and neutrality were important. Nazism and the Holocaust were furthermore seen as things of the past even at a time when many refugees continued to be kept in displaced persons camps and refugees, as well as survivors, struggled to integrate or left Sweden.56 Are these trends also reflected in the book production in Sweden? The national narrative was common in the early writings. This was especially true when it came to the narrative of the White Buses, in which the Holocaust was told within a national framework. This narrative included witness accounts and memoirs from several people who had participated in the rescue, including doctors such as Hans Arnoldsson and Gerhard Rundberg; military men like the head of the Red Cross mission, Count Folke Bernadotte, as well as Sven Frykman and Åke Svensson; the masseur Felix Kersten; Norbert Masur, the representative of the Swedish Section of the World Jewish Congress; Save the Children official Margit Levinson; and finally the survivor Fredy Bauer, who was rescued in the Swedish Red Cross White Buses operation. In this group, the books by the doctors Arnoldsson and Rundberg, as well as the books by Bauer, Masur and Kersten, stand out, since they provide more detailed accounts of the Holocaust. Arnoldsson describes gas chambers, while Rundberg reports on medical experiments.57 More detailed yet are the descriptions in Bauer’s book. He was a Jewish survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Bauer testifies of crematoria, the selection process, Sonderkommando, and also, interestingly enough, rape.58 Masur also gives an account of the crematoria and numbers of Jews still alive in camps, whereas Kersten writes about ‘Maidanek’ and about ‘mass executions of Jews in concentration camps’.59 Both give descriptions of death marches, although in different terms,60 and talk about the magnitude of the mass murders, describing it, for example, as a complete destruction and extermination.61 The books by Bernadotte, Frykman, Svensson, and Levinson provide a more general description of the concentration camps in Germany and they do not separate concentration camps from extermination camps. These four books make no direct reference to the Holocaust per se: instead, they describe Bergen-Belsen or Neuengamme as ‘the camp of horror’.62 This is perhaps not surprising since it was in Neuengamme that all the Scandinavian prisoners were gathered before they were moved to Sweden in the buses. In all of the above-mentioned books, but mostly in the accounts by Bernadotte, Frykman and Svensson, the narrative is told from the

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perspective of the rescuers, with a focus on the Red Cross mission and the rescue operation, rather than on the rescued. The same shift of focus from rescued to rescuer, has been noted by the Swedish historian Ulf Zander.63 Having described the witness accounts, what can be said about the reports and historical accounts? In this group, the book by Gunhild and Einar Tegen is included.64 She was an author and he was a professor in sociology, and the book is a compilation of interviews conducted by the Tegens with liberated survivors who arrived in southern Sweden in 1945. The book has a chapter named ‘Facts about the Extermination Camps’ (‘Fakta om förintelselägren’). Although many camps are mentioned, they underline the importance of Auschwitz: ‘Everyone feared the name Auschwitz. For millions this was the last place in life. No witnesses should survive to reveal the truth about the extermination camps’.65 They also provide descriptions of crematoria, selections, and ‘Sonderkommando’.66 Even though the book deals with all kinds of victims, they observe a specific fate for the Jews when writing ‘the Jews were subjected to a systematic extermination’, arguing that the Germans ‘did not manage to exterminate everyone who was determined for death, “Vernichtung”, as it is called in its original language’.67 Four other books, published during this period, that also give detailed accounts and acknowledge the persecution of the Jews are those by Franz Arnheim and Bo Enander, Abraham Brody, Victor Vinde, and Kurt Stillschweig. Three of the authors were active in the Jewish community: Arnheim and Stillschweig (a German Jewish legal history scholar) were involved in the rescue operations, whereas Brody taught language and religion within the Jewish congregation.68 Arnheim and Enander use industrial metaphors such as ‘corpse factory’.69 They describe different killing methods, such as ‘gas’ and ‘gas wagons’.70 They also mention that of the 3.5 million Jews living in Poland, it is estimated that 3.2 million are dead.71 The term ‘extermination’ was still common when describing the event, such as when Abraham Brody stated that ‘The extermination war against the Jews, which culminated with the mass murder during the World War, in fact started already with Hitler’s takeover of power’.72 Brody describes the magnitude of the mass murders as ‘the systematic war’.73 The Holocaust was also often presented as a ‘struggle’ in the national socialist world view, like when Stillschweig wrote that ‘This extermination struggle is fully understandable only after a study of the national socialist “World view”’.74 He also describes the Holocaust as a step-by-step process where

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deportation shifted to extermination,75 and acknowledges that the killing is done with modern technology.76 Perhaps the most famous of the above-mentioned books is Victor Vinde’s report from the Nuremberg trial. Vinde described the concentration camps in the chapter The Third Reich is exposed (Tredje riket avslöjas) and he writes about the Jewish suffering with words such as ‘extermination struggle’.77 Although he reported from a court room, his book does not fall within the linear perspective, only relying on documents, as was common for books published within the category of ‘legal framework’.78 A book that fits well within this category is that by Odd Nansen. Nansen was a Norwegian architect who was first imprisoned in Grini, Norway, and later sent to the camp Sachsenhausen in Germany. He mentions Eugen Kogon’s book Der SS-Staat (1947), an important international account that was not translated into Swedish, and gives well-informed descriptions of the purpose of the concentration camps and the different kinds of camps.79 Nansen relates the numbers of murdered mentioned in the Nuremberg Process, uses Lemkin’s term genocide (‘genocidium’), and describes the concentration camps as ‘fundamental institutions for the Nazi regime’, where he estimates that about 60 percent of the Jews had been killed.80 Belonging to this group of reports is also the four-volume anthology Kriget 1939–1945 (The War 1939–1945).81 Even though these volumes primarily dealt with the war front, there are exceptions, such as the chapter in volume three that discuss the concentration camps and the ‘extermination camps in Poland and East Germany’, adopting industrial metaphors such as ‘corpse factory’.82 For the most part, these are general descriptions and there is no mention of specific groups. When they do mention groups, they tend to see the Nazi policies of persecution from a universal perspective and give equal space to all groups. Another example of universalisation can be found in the photo book by Gerhard Liebenthal.83 In a similar manner, the journalists Stig Dagerman and Mia Leche Löfgren primarily discuss Nazism as a threat to democracy, rather than the persecution of Jews.84 The two latter examples show that strong anti-Nazi voices in Sweden did not necessarily see the genocide of the Jews as a specific historical process, but rather saw Nazism as a threat to democracy and all of humanity.

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The Decline in Publications (1951–1960) From the 1950s until the 1960s, there is a noticeable decline in the number of books published. All in all, ten relevant books were published during these years, half of which were translations into Swedish. Of the authors, three were women, and they all held different occupations.85 Recalling Cesarani and Holmila’s arguments—had the Swedes also ‘heard enough’ about camps and Nazi atrocities and preferred to turn their attention to the future? The empirical evidence gives no clear answer. The story of the White Buses is still an important topic and helps lay the foundation for the master narrative of ‘the Good Sweden’ in the post-war era. This can be seen both with regard to books that situate the Holocaust in the past, as well as in books that focus more on the rescuers than the rescued. A good example of the latter is Aage Bertelsen’s account Oktober 43, where he portrays himself as a hero and even looks back at the event with joy, contrary to the experiences of many survivors.86 The importance of the White Buses is also evident in the diary by Ellen Sundberg. She was the wife of a priest and the housewife of the guest house at Sigtunastiftelsen, and her account provides an insight into a meeting with Danish-Jewish survivors, as well as those rescued by the White Buses.87 Sundberg is a borderline case when it comes to Holocaust memory. On the one hand, she names Auschwitz and Belsen, on the other, her account mostly assumes that her readers already have knowledge of these events, and she therefore focuses instead on the health and well-being of the survivors at the time. This could be interpreted as an example of the Holocaust being viewed as an event in the past, and that Sundberg’s ‘task’ is instead to write about the present and look to the future. Two other such examples—of a wish to situate the period in a distant past and without focusing on the Holocaust per se—are Kerstin Hellner’s book on the refugees, which hardly mentions that many of them are Jews, and the account on the Red Cross Mission with the White Buses published by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.88 As has been described above, several accounts of this period only mention the Holocaust briefly. At the same time, two of the most detailed and insightful accounts are published at this time, namely a Swedish translation of The Scourge of the Swastika by Lord Russell of Liverpool, and Elie Cohen’s dissertation Human behavior in concentration camps.89 Russell was one of the chief legal advisors during the war-crimes proceedings of the Nuremberg trials before he resigned following criticism of his role.

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The book is based on documents and testimonies given during the trials and he mentions names of the concentration camps and separates them from the death camps.90 He discusses numbers of dead and industrial killing methods: ‘A murdering developed into mass production in gas chambers and ovens in Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Majdanek and Oranienburg’.91 He describes the different steps of the persecution, from registration to ghettoisation, from liquidation of the ghettos to deportations, resulting in ‘the final solution—the mass murder in the extermination camps’.92 He even touches upon the denial of the Holocaust when writing that ‘This was Auschwitz, the ‘Death camp’, but I only told you half of the story. If I should write about it all, it would not be read. And if it would be read, it would not be believed’.93 The other detailed book was written by Elie Cohen. He was a doctor who had tried to escape to the Netherlands, but was caught together with his family and imprisoned in Dutch concentration camps. He and his family were sent to Auschwitz, where his wife and son were murdered, while he was placed as a camp doctor at Monowitz. Cohen survived the war and wrote a medical thesis on the psychology of the perpetrators and the behaviour of humans in concentration camps.94 Cohen states in his introduction that people had ‘had enough’ of books on the camps,95 and describes the purpose of the concentration camps with the help of Eugen Kogon’s influential book Der SS-Staat.96 He refers to the different kinds of camps and underlines that ‘In a category of its own are the extermination camps’, naming them as Auschwitz, Maidanek, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Chelmno.97 He furthermore points out the ethnic dimension of the different victim groups: ‘All of this fade in front of the unbelievable which took place in the extermination camps. In these camps people were murdered en masse, whole ethnic groups were exterminated, such as Jews and gypsies’.98 He concludes by stating that ‘This kind of extermination is called ‘genocidium’ (a term first used by R. Lemkin)’.99

Conclusion As has been shown in this chapter, 53 books were published during the period under investigation, with various forms of references to the Holocaust. The first two were published in 1942 while the peak in publications was during the years 1945 to 1950. Of the 53 titles studied, 43 books (or 81 percent) were written by men and seven were written by women (13 percent): for three of the books, the author is unknown. Most

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authors were middle-aged or older, and over a third were journalists or writers, while a fifth were university professors. Two-thirds of the authors were Swedish citizens who already enjoyed positions within Swedish society. Cesarani has argued that age and the pre-war status of the authors ‘was crucial to their success as authors’.100 One interesting difference between this study and Cesarani’s is that only three of the authors were in the medical profession, whereas Cesarani found an extraordinarily high proportion.101 Another interesting finding is that most of the authors were non-Jewish—with only a third who were Jewish. However, the Jewish authors generally tended to focus more on the Holocaust and less on other victim groups or Nazism more broadly. Some of the authors were historians, like Abraham Brody and Hugo Valentin, while others were active in different disciplines, but most of the early writers in Sweden were not academics. As Diner found in the American context, there were diverse early narratives during the war and in the early post-war period, and it seems reasonable to believe that this was because it was a new story. There was no existing framework or narrative pattern in which to place the survivor stories. This is also true for the early writings in Sweden in general, where detailed stories and witness accounts already existed during the war for those in Sweden who wanted to find out what happened in Nazi Germany. As expected, the Swedish context was present in half of the books and the references to the Holocaust tended to place the event within this national framework.102 The national context was evident, either with regard to Sweden and the Swedish rescue efforts, or in a larger Nordic context in which the Scandinavian concentration camp prisoners were included. Both Mikael Byström and Paul A Levine have explained this with the notion of ‘the Nordic prerogative’ (‘den nordiska tanken’), arguing that it was a feeling of common brotherhood with ‘our’ Nordic brethren that explains why this narrative was so strong during the War,103 and this tendency also continued during the post-war period. The White Buses was an important topic in these books, especially at the end of the 1940s, and, as Zander has highlighted, it aligned well with Swedish post-war identity and the dominant narrative of the recent past.104 But which victims were included in this narrative? From the beginning, the mission of the White Buses was to rescue Scandinavian prisoners in concentration camps located in Germany—not to rescue Jewish refugees from extermination camps in Poland—meaning that most of the rescued were non-Jewish. Does this mean that the Jewish suffering was suppressed

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or absent? This could be argued for some of the books, where the particular Jewish experience was only mentioned briefly together with other victim groups. At the same time, the fate of the Norwegian Jews made the headlines at the end of 1942, and the rescue of the Danish Jews in October of 1943 equally engaged public debate. Both were part of the national narrative and often included in the narrative of the White Buses.105 Holmila argues that the Swedish press—unlike the British press that focused on the enemy—did report detailed witness accounts of the survivors. This is also true of the early books, but the perspective quickly shifted from the rescued to the rescuers. Present within the early writings in Sweden is also the tendency to universalise the Holocaust into a human catastrophe rather than to situate it within the framework of Jewish history and antisemitism. However, it is not the only framework and the literature analysed in this chapter shows, just as Holmila found, many examples of how the specific Jewish experiences were also an important focus. This is especially true of books by Jewish authors. Most of the books presented in this chapter did not downplay antisemitism and racism, although it was not necessarily a focal point, as it tends to be in contemporary literature on the Holocaust or Nazism in general. Still, this chapter underlines the importance of looking more closely at the early writings to understand how knowledge and public awareness of the Holocaust has developed. This might have been underestimated by Östling’s analyses of post-war writings on the Second World War and Nazism, as well as by those who expect to find a general silence around the Holocaust after the war. Knowledge about and perception of the Holocaust developed in a rather complex and sometimes contradictory way. This should be further examined to better understand the legacy of this genocide today.

Notes 1. Early examples are Steven Koblik, The Stones Cry Out. Sweden’s Response to the Persecution of the Jews 1933–1945 (New York: Holocaust Library 1988), Ingvar Svanberg and Mattias Tydén, Sverige och Förintelsen. Debatt och dokument om Europas judar 1933–1945 (Stockholm: Arena 1997) and Paul A.  Levine, From Indifference to Activism. Swedish Diplomacy and the Holocaust 1938–1944 (Uppsala: Uppsala University 1998).

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2. This is, for instance, claimed by Anders Ohlson in his book ‘Men ändå måste jag berätta’. Studier i skandinavisk förintelselitteratur (Nora: Nya Doxa 2002), 9. For a critique of the idea of a post-war silence on the Holocaust, see Antero Holmila and Karin Kvist Geverts, ‘On Forgetting and Rediscovering the Holocaust in Scandinavia. Introduction to the special issue of the histories and memories of the Holocaust in Scandinavia’, in Scandinavian Journal of History 36, no. 5 (2011). 3. Johan Östling, Sweden after Nazism. Politics and Culture in the Wake of the Second World War (New York: Berghahn Books 2016), 94–95. See also the Swedish original version, Johan Östling, Nazismens sensmoral. Svenska erfarenheter i andra världskrigets efterdyning (Atlantis: Stockholm 2008), 99–100. 4. Antero Holmila, Framing Genocide. Early Interpretations of the Holocaust in the British, Swedish and Finnish Press, 1945–1950 (PhD Diss., Royal Holloway, University of London, 2008), 242. The book was published in 2011 by Palgrave Macmillan under a new title: Reporting the Holocaust in the British, Swedish and Finnish Press, 1945–1950. 5. Holmila, Framing Genocide, 75. 6. Hasia R. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love. American Jews and the myth of silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York: New York University Press 2009). 7. David Cesarani, ‘A New Look at Some Old Memoirs. Early Narratives of Nazi persecution and Genocide’ in Justice, politics and memory in Europe after the Second World War, eds. Suzanne Bardgett, David Cesarani, Jessica Reinisch and Johannes-Dieter Steinert (London: Vallentine Mitchell 2011), 121–168. See also After the Holocaust. Challenging the myth of silence, eds. David Cesarani and Eric J.  Sundquist (Abigdon: Routledge, 2012); Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Post-­War Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 8. Tom Lawson, Debates on the Holocaust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 20 and 30. 9. For a discussion on the Swedish concepts on the Holocaust, see Stéphane Bruchfeld, ‘Är det dags att göra sig av med “Förintelsen”? Reflektioner kring ett begrepp’ in En problematisk relation? Flyktingpolitik och judiska flyktingar i Sverige 1920–1950, eds. Lars M. Andersson and Karin Kvist Geverts (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2008), 31–70. 10. Svanberg and Tydén, Sverige och Förintelsen; Levine, From Indifference to Activism; Karin Kvist Geverts, Ett främmande element i nationen. Svensk flyktingpolitik och de judiska flyktingarna 1938–1944 (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2008); Pontus Rudberg, The Swedish Jews and the Victims of Nazi Terror, 1933–1945 (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2015).

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11. Hugo Valentin, ‘Utrotningskriget mot judarna’, Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning, 13 October 1942. 12. See for example Laurel Leff, Buried by the Times. The Holocaust and America’s most important Newspaper (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Even though it would most certainly be interesting to examine outreach and impact with regard to published copies of the books and reviews, etc., it unfortunately falls out of the scope of this article. 13. Holmila, Framing Genocide, 14. 14. Berel Lang, Holocaust representation. Art within the Limits of History and Ethics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 20ff. 15. Ohlsson, ‘“Men ändå måste jag berätta”’, 9. 16. Only one title overlaps with my study, and that is the translation of Aage Bertelsen’s autobiography Oktober 43 (Århus 1952), which deals with the rescue of the Danish Jews. 17. Cesarani, ‘A New Look’, 122. 18. Ibid., 123. 19. Diner (We remember) has shown that there were professional historians who collected testimonies and published books in the early post-war years. Holmila has pointed out that journalists often write the first draft of history, and this is certainly true for the Swedish case, see Holmila Framing Genocide, 23. 20. Unfortunately, information on editions are a trade secret, but I have used the national database on digitised newspapers to check for reviews (using book titles and author name as keywords) in order to get an estimate of the outreach. This showed that almost all the books were reviewed in at least one newspaper, and often in several. 21. C.  W. Jacobowsky, Den judiska litteraturen i Hitlertidens Tyskland (Stockholm: Särtryck ur Judisk Tidskrift, 1947), 2. 22. Thus, there are eight titles which overlap with the books studied by Östling (Sweden after Nazism) and they are: Arvid Fredborg, Bakom stålvallen. Som svensk korrespondent i Berlin 1941–1943 (Stockholm, 1943), Stig Dagerman, Tysk höst (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1947), Bo Enander and Franz Arnheim, Så härskade herrefolket (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1945), Felix Kersten, Samtal med Himmler. Minnen från Tredje riket 1939–1945 (Stockholm: Ljus, 1947), Armas Sastamoinen, Hitlers svenska förtrupper (Stockholm: Federativs förl., 1947), Gunnar Th:son Pihl, Tyskland går sista ronden (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1943), Robert Gilbert Vansittart, Mitt livs lärdomar (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1943), Victor Vinde, Nürnberg i blixtljus (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1946). 23. Cesarani, ‘A New Look’, 122.

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24. Jacobowsky Den judiska litteraturen; C. W. Jacobowsky, Nyare judisk litteratur på svenska och norska, särtryck ur Judisk Krönika, nr 2 (Stockholm 1947); C.  W. Jacobowsky, Jewish Literature in Sweden and in Swedish, Reprint from Jewish Book Annual, Volume 19, 1961–1962, Jewish Book Council of America; Hilde Rohlén-Wohlgemuth, Svensk-judisk litteratur 1775–1994. En litteraturhistorisk översikt (Spånga 1995). 25. I am very grateful to Pontus Rudberg for suggesting this source. 26. An additional 20 titles were disregarded either immediately because they turned out to be fiction, or after I’ve read them through and found that they didn’t discuss the Holocaust at all. 27. 35 books have Swedish as the original language. In the 18 translations, the original language was English (8), German (3), Norwegian (2), Polish (2), Dutch (2) and Danish (1). 28. Why this was the case still needs to be investigated. Some of these accounts mentioned by Cesarani are, for instance: Warsaw Ghetto. A Diary by Mary Berg (1945), No Traveler Returns by Henry Shoskes (published in Yiddish in 1943), and Yankiel Wiernik’s report on Treblinka (1944), see Cesarani ‘A New Look’, 123–125. Wiernik’s book appeared in Polish and English in Sweden in 2003. One book mentioned by Cesarani which was translated and published in Sweden in 1946, I dödens skog by Ernst Wichert, is in the collection at the National Library but is unfortunately not lent out due to restrictions and thus not included in this study. 29. Cesarani, ‘A New Look’, 161. 30. Holmila also mentions two other explanations often given, namely the foundation of the state of Israel 1947–1948 and the Cold War metanarrative, see Holmila, Framing Genocide, 249–251. 31. Polens martyrium. Förhållanden under tyska ockupationen belysta av Polska informationsministeriet (Stockholm: Trots allt!, 1942). 32. The story of the book is told by Staffan Thorsell, who argues that it was difficult to ‘tell the world the truth’ about the situation in Poland, and that newspapers who tried also got retracted by the state, see Thorsell, Warsawasvenskarna. De som lät världen veta (Stockholm: Bonnier, 2014), 12–13. 33. See Ropp, Syndabocken Juden, 8; Torgny Brehmer, Kriget mot juden (Örebro: Örebro missionsförening, 1943), 31. 34. Nerman was charged in November of 1939 for publishing an article with the headline ‘Hitlers helvetesmaskin’ (‘Hitler’s hell-machine’) and was sentenced to three months in jail, see Louise Drangel, Den kämpande demokratin. En studie i antinazistisk opinionsrörelse 1935–1945 (Stockholm, 1976), 39.

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35. This information was given by professor Ester Pollack in her inagural lecture titled ‘Försiktighet, protest eller anpassning? Judarnas öde i svensk press 1933–1945’ (‘Caution, protest or adaption? The faith of the Jews in the Swedish Press, 1933–1945’) on November 15, 2019, at the Department of Media Studies, and will be published in an upcoming article. 36. The foreword by the Polish information ministry shows that it covers the period from September 1939 to June 1941, i.e. before the first phase of the genocide, but I have included it nevertheless since it was published in 1942 and tells about the faith of the Jews. 37. These authors are Caspari, Åberg, Brehmer and Lidby. Some of these books or books published by these authors in the 1930s have been analysed previously by Henrik Bachner in ‘Judefrågan’. Debatt om antisemitism i 1930-talets Sverige (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2009). 38. These are edited or authored by Daniel Brick, Varför anklagar man judarna? (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1944), Mot antisemitismen. Svenska författare uttala sig (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1943) and Antisemitismen. En folkfara (Stockholm: Kämpande demokrati, 1944). The forth publication is written by Bert Ropp, titled Syndabocken juden (Stockholm: Trots Allt, 1942), but unfortunately no biographical information on him has been found. 39. Cesarani, ‘A New Look’, 159. 40. For ‘horrors’ see Ropp, Syndabocken juden, 8 or Heinz Caspari, ‘4o miljoner judar i stöpsleven’ (Uppsala: J. A. Lindblad, 1943), 12. For ‘Europe’s chambers of horrors’ see Zander Åberg, Hatet mot judarna (Örebro: Evangeliipress, 1943), 42 and Hugo Valentin, Det judiska folkets öde (Stockholm: Kooperativa förbundets bokförl., 1944), 171. For ‘the bloody half-year’, see Stefan Szende, Den siste juden från Polen (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1944), 239. For ‘the Jewish tragedy’ see Carl Lidby, Skall jag taga vara på min broder (Stockholm: Lindqvist, 1944), back cover text. 41. Vansittart, Mitt livs lärdomar, 284. Two more books with similar tendencies are Etta Shiber, Under jorden i Paris (Stockholm, 1944) and Torgny T:son Segerstedt, Inför framtidens demokrati (Stockholm: Kooperativa förbundets bokförlag, 1944). 42. For instance Brick, Antisemitismen. En folkfara, 3; Ropp, Syndabocken juden, 4; Caspari, ‘4o miljoner’, 14; Åberg, Hatet mot judarna, 52; Brehmer, Kriget mot juden, 27; Elis Håstad, Krigets folkförflyttningar (Stockholm, 1943), 37; Kurt Stillschweig, Det judiska minoritetsproblemet. En efterkrigsfråga (Stockholm: Geber, 1944), 57; Valentin, Det judiska folkets öde, 169.

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43. Åberg, Hatet mot judarna, 98. Valentin also writes about ‘the systematic mass murders’, see Valentin, Det judiska folkets öde, 171. 44. Stillschweig, Det judiska minoritetsproblemet. 45. Szende, Den siste juden, 239 and Valentin, Det judiska folkets öde, 156. See also Enander, Så härskade herrefolket, 35. 46. Brick, Varför anklagar man judarna?, 5. Rudberg writes that the journal Judisk Krönika continuously reported on the persecutions and did estimations of mortality rate in the occupied countries, see Rudberg, The Swedish Jews, 248. A quite early example of an author who points to the magnitude is Norbert Masur who in 1945 describes the Holocaust as ‘the most ­extensive mass murder in history’, see Norbert Masur, En jude talar med Himmler (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1945), 15. 47. Brehmer, Kriget mot juden, 32; Åberg, Hatet mot judarna, 55; Szende, Den siste juden, 118 and 297. Descriptions about ‘mass executions’ can also be found in Brick, Varför anklagar man judarna?, 4. 48. Fredborg, Bakom stålvallen and Th:son Pihl, Tyskland går sista ronden. 49. Östling, Sweden after Nazism, 81. 50. Fredborg, Bakom stålvallen, 340–341. 51. Th:son Pihl, Tyskland går sista ronden, 284. 52. Th:son Pihl, Tyskland går sista ronden, 283. 53. Cesarani, ‘A New Look’, 160. 54. These four were Pauline Kohler, Gunhild Tegen, Margit Levinson and Mia Leche Löfgren. 55. The other occupations were doctor, masseur, architect, NGO, maid or unknown. 56. Holmila, Framing genocide, 242. 57. Hans Arnoldsson, Natt och dimma (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1945), 41 and Gerhard Rundberg, Rapport från Neuengamme. Svenska Röda korsets hjälpaktion bland koncentrationslägerfångar i Tyskland den 7 mars–5 maj 1945 (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1945), 159–160. 58. Fredy Bauer, Jag sjöng mig genom helvetet (Borås: Almström, 1945), 30–32, 63 and 33. 59. Masur, En jude talar med Himmler, 17 and 20; Kersten, Samtal med Himmler, 136 and 231. 60. Kersten, Samtal med Himmler, 251; Masur, En jude talar med Himmler, 34. 61. Masur, En jude talar med Himmler, 15 and 34; Kersten, Samtal med Himmler, 136. 62. Sven Frykman, Röda korsexpeditionen till Tyskland (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1945), 152. An alternative description is given by Levinson who calls Bergen-Belsen ‘the place of horror’, see Margit Levinson, ‘Barnen i det krigshärjade Europa’ in Rädda barnen. Arbetet för barn i krigshärjade

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länder (Stockholm: O. Eklund, 1947), 14. See also Ann Nehlin, Exporting visions and saving children. The Swedish Save the Children Fund (PhD Diss., Linköping University, 2009). 63. Ulf Zander, ‘Swedish Rescue Operations During the Second World War. Accomplishments and Aftermath’, in The Holocaust as Active Memory. The Past in the Present, eds. Marie-Louise, Seeberg, Irene Levin, and Claudia Lenz (London: Routledge 2013), 178–179. For more examples of the focus on the Scandinavian group and the rescuers, see Johannes Andaenes, Svek och motstånd under Norges ockupationsår (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1950) and Åke Svensson, De vita bussarna (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1945). 64. Gunhild Tegen and Einar Tegen, (eds.), De dödsdömda vittna. Enquêtesvar och intervjuer (Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 1945). See also PiaKristina Garde, De dödsdömda vittnar – 60 år senare (Bromma: Megilla förlag, 2004). 65. Tegen and Tegen, De dödsdömda vittna, 26. 66. Ibid., 27, 28 and 30. 67. Ibid., De dödsdömda vittna, 43 (first quote) and 75 (second quote). 68. Rudberg gives a good description of persons involved in the relief work within the Jewish community, see Rudberg, The Swedish Jews, 13–16. 69. Enander, Så härskade herrefolket, 38. 70. Ibid., 72. 71. Ibid., 69. Se also Masur, En jude talar med Himmler, 28. 72. Abraham Brody, S.  Hand and W.  Furstenberg, Judarnas historia (Stockholm: Ljus, 1950), 246. See also, Mia Leche-Löfgren, Hård tid (Stockholm: Hökerberg, 1946), 53; Arnoldsson, Natt och dimma, 17. 73. Brody et. al., Judarnas historia, 254. 74. Kurt Stillschweig, Den nationalsocialistiska antisemitismen (Stockholm: Kooperativa förbundets bokförlag, 1946), 16. 75. Stillschweig, Den nationalsocialistiska antisemitismen, 48–49. 76. Stillschweig, Den nationalsocialistiska antisemitismen, 49. 77. Vinde, Nürnberg i blixtljus, 163f. The book has previously been analysed by Holmila in Framing Genocide and Östling in Sweden after Nazism. 78. Lawson, Debates on the Holocaust, 25–26. 79. Odd Nansen and Tim Geve, Koncentrationslägren i Hitler-riket (Stockholm: Verdandis småskrifter, 1950), 10, 4 and 15–17. 80. Nansen, Koncentrationslägren, 4, 6 and 24 (estimation of killed Jews). 81. Ragnvald Lundström ed., Kriget 1939–1945 (Stockholm: Kooperativa förbundet, 1945–1947, vol. 1–4). See also Stéphane Bruchfeld, ‘Är det dags att göra sig av med “Förintelsen”?’. 82. Lundström, Kriget 1939–1945, vol 3, 136 and 157. For a description earlier, see Valentin, Det judiska folkets öde, 171.

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83. Gerhard F. Liebenthal, Hitlerrikets storhet och fall. Fyra hundra dokumentariska bilder (Stockholm: Åhlén & Åkerlund, 1945). A later example of this is Kurt von Tippelskirch, Östfronten under andra världskriget (Stockholm: Hörsta, 1956). 84. Leche Löfgren, Hård tid; Dagerman, Tysk höst. See also Sastamoinen, Hitlers svenska förtrupper; Pauline Kohler, Jag var Hitlers kammarjungfru på Berchtesgaden (Stockholm: Federativ, 1945). 85. As during the earlier phases, we can find a professor, a journalist and an author. But there are also a librarian, a wife of a priest, a curator and a child, for example. 86. Berthelsen, ‘Oktober 43’, 131. See also, Ohlsson ‘Men ändå måste jag berätta’. 87. Ellen Sundberg, Höstliga utblickar. Blad ur en prästfrus dagbok (Stockholm: Diakonistyr., 1959). 88. Kerstin Hellner, De landsflyktiga och Sverige (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1952); 1945 års svenska hjälpexpedition till Tyskland. Förspel och förhandlingar (Stockholm: Utrikesdepartementet, 1956). 89. Edward Frederick Langley Russell, Hakkorsets gissel (Stockholm: Arbetarkultur, 1955) and Elie Cohen, Människor i koncentrationsläger (Stockholm: Tiden, 1957). 90. Russell, Hakkorsets gissel, 178. 91. Ibid., 179. 92. Ibid., Hakkorsets gissel, 248, 250 and 264 (the quote). 93. Ibid., Hakkorsets gissel, 193. 94. Cesarani, ‘A New Look’, 145. 95. Cohen, Människor i koncentrationsläger, 17; Cesarani, ‘A New Look’, 145. 96. Kogon’s book was published in Sweden already in 1947 but only in German, and is therefore not included in this article. 97. Cohen, Människor i koncentrationsläger, 32. 98. Ibid., 40. 99. Ibid., 41. 100. Cesarani, ‘A New Look’, 158–159. 101. Ibid. Hans Arnoldsson, Gerhard Rundberg and Elie Cohen were doctors. Arnoldsson and Cohen were also professors and are categorised as such in the table on occupation. 102. See also Holmila, Framing Genocide, 242. 103. Mikael Byström, En broder, gäst och parasit. Uppfattningar och föreställningar om utlänningar, flyktingar och flyktingpolitik i svensk offentlig debatt 1942–1947 (Phd Diss., Stockholm University, 2006); Levine, From Indifference to Activism. 104. Zander, ‘Swedish Rescue Operations’, 178–179.

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105. In Danish historiography the word ‘flight’ is often used, while Swedish historiography tend to replace it with ‘rescue’, see Karin Kvist Geverts, ‘Mottagningen av de danska judiska flyktingarna i oktober 1943 och den svenska flyktingpolitikens janusansikte’, in Dansk jødisk historie i Anden Verdenskrigs epoke. En antologi, eds. Sofie Lene Bak et. al., (København: Dansk Jødisk Museum 2011), 133–145.

CHAPTER 7

‘A Hellish Nightmare’: The Swedish Press and the Construction of Early Holocaust Narratives, 1945–1950 Antero Holmila

Introduction Allan Bell has written that ‘[j]ournalists do not write articles. They write stories. A story has structure, direction, point, viewpoint […] Much of humanity’s most important experience has been embodied in stories’.1 The aim of this chapter is to examine how the story of the Holocaust began to emerge on the pages of the Swedish press following the liberation of the concentration camps in spring 1945.2 An investigation into the Swedish press is important, especially given the dominant historical wisdom that the world’s press—especially the Anglo-American press—failed to respond to the Holocaust, and when it did, the ‘uniqueness of Jewish suffering’ did not stand out. Adhering to the well-established argument, Laurel Leff, writing on the New York Times’ response, has dryly noted that ‘the unique tragedy of the Jews did not emerge from the ashes of the

A. Holmila (*) University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Heuman, P. Rudberg (eds.), Early Holocaust Memory in Sweden, The Holocaust and its Contexts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55532-0_7

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liberated camps’.3 While the Anglo-American press might have failed to report the Holocaust, for reasons that Tony Kushner has called ‘liberal imagination’, it does not mean that such failure was a universal trait. As Josef Gorny has remarked in relation to the Jewish press in Britain, the United States, the USSR, and Palestine, the Holocaust ‘was reported uninterruptedly and usually on the front pages’.4 In the same fashion, the Swedish press also responded to the Holocaust in its immediate aftermath with considerable interest and benevolence, as will be argued below. The precedents for the Swedish press reporting on Jewish suffering in the post-war era were set during the war. While the Swedish press was placed under censorship during the war, the policy did not substantially shape reporting on the war or the Holocaust. The current scholarly consensus largely agrees that during the war, the press reported the fate of Jews steadily and in an uncensored manner.5 Public interest was aroused if not before, then certainly by November to December 1942, when the ‘Judenaktion’ began in Norway.6 Yet, the discourse on Jews and their extermination in Nazi Germany was multi-layered and complex, and not always supportive of the idea that Jewish survivors should stay in Sweden, lest it stir local antisemitism.7 I will argue, however, that contrary to the dominant Anglo-American historiography, which holds that the first post-­ war decades were marked by silence surrounding the German genocide, the Swedish press regularly wrote about the Holocaust and in a more nuanced way than the dominant scholarly wisdom would have it.8 The reporting grappled with issues that today form the core of Holocaust studies: the victims’ identities and their experiences, including gender; the acts and motivations of perpetrators; and the Europe-wide geographical scope of the genocide. Overall, the Swedish approach to grappling with the Holocaust was more inclusive than in neighbouring Finland or in the United Kingdom and the United States. Perhaps nowhere was this more evident than in the case of Auschwitz, which received far more attention in the Swedish press than in other liberal press of the day. Similarly, the Swedish press paid more attention to Jews in general, and while portraying the victims in terms of their nationalities was a typical feature, it was nevertheless also common to discuss the Jews as Jews. I will examine the following four themes in this chapter: Swedish reporting and the ways victim identities were discussed; the role of ordinary Germans and their knowledge of the crimes, as well as the prevailing conditions inside Hitler’s Germany; depictions of the Holocaust during the Nuremberg trials in the Swedish press; and how the Swedish press

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reported on Jewish displaced persons and their desire to emigrate to Palestine. These themes have been selected because they were the most significant themes through which the Swedes discussed the Nazi genocide. In addition, these themes are important for they all nuance—if not challenge—the more dominant Anglo-American perspectives that have argued that victims’ identities were obfuscated, the Holocaust did not feature at Nuremberg, and immediately after the war the Holocaust disappeared from public view. All the cases illustrated above tell a more complex story. As for the sources, I have utilised the leading nation-wide daily press in Sweden that includes political leanings and opinions in the left-liberal-­ conservative axis.9

From Concentration Camps to Sweden: Jewish Survivors in Swedish Press Narratives As Steven Koblik remarked in the first work written about Sweden and the Holocaust, news of the arrival of the rescued victims was nearly totally blacked out in the Swedish media until late April 1945.10 Indeed, it is fair to say that Swedes came into contact with the liberation of the camps, including the first post-liberation portrayals, in a roundabout way. Initially, the news reports concerning the liberation of the Western camps—Buchenwald, 11 April, by the Americans and Bergen-Belsen, 15 April, by the British and Canadians—grappled with strong British reactions to the news of liberation, rather than the news itself.11 The depictions of events led to debate between the conservative Stockholms-Tidningen and the liberal, newly established Expressen when the former paper’s correspondent, Christer Jäderlund, in the face of British anger, defended ordinary Germans by saying that they had been unaware of the atrocities. Expressen challenged Jäderlund’s ‘truth’ by noting that the majority of Jäderlund’s ‘good Germans’ had never protested Hitler’s actions, how antisemitism was widespread amongst Germans, and how ordinary Germans were also members of the Nazi party.12 Apart from relying on second-hand accounts, the other major reason behind the reserved attitude in the Swedish press was not because of an inability to grasp what was happening, discomfort in the face of gruesome facts, or willingness to downplay the catastrophe. Instead, the press silence was attributable to the Swedish rescue mission—the controversial ‘White Buses’ operation—which was underway in Germany at the same time.

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Since early 1945, in collaboration with the Swedish Red Cross and the World Jewish Congress (WJC), the Swedish Government had been in touch with Reichsführer Himmler in an attempt to free Scandinavian prisoners from German concentration camps. The success of these negotiations, as well as the whole mission, depended largely on the silence of the Swedish press.13 When the Swedish journalists toured the liberated camps, their restrained attitude quickly changed. A case in point, in fact the starting point of framing the liberation news that soon created a narrative, could be labelled as ‘Nordic brotherhood’—a concept first used by Paul A. Levine when he argued that in relation to Jews in general, Norwegian Jews were different. They belonged to a broderfolk (a fellow people): they were (or at least most of them were) fellow Scandinavians.14 The idea of Nordic brotherhood can be seen in Dagens Nyheter’s correspondent Daniel Wiklund’s first eye-witness account from Buchenwald, published on the paper’s frontpage on 25 April 1945: 5 Norwegians—probably the only survivors of the approximately 1,000 deported Norwegian Jews—found their way here [Buchenwald] in January from the now disbanded ‘death camp’ in Oswiecim… Nothing that British and American correspondents have written [over the last week] has been exaggerated… The 5 Norwegians here are students Samuel Steinmann from Oslo, and Assar Hirsch from Trondheim, clerks Asriel Hirsch and Julius Paltiel, both from Trondheim, and doctor Leo Eitinger from Molde.15

On examining the article, certain key issues emerge: the rate of survival was thought to be about five out of a thousand, Jews were clearly targeted for destruction, and the ‘death camp’ at Oswiecim was mentioned. Above all, the Jewish survivors’ humanity was restored as all five Norwegian Jews were named, as were their places of residence. Additionally, the reporting was not limited to the liberal Dagens Nyheter, but other papers followed the same story, including the conservative Stockholms-Tidningen, that was known for its German sympathies. After the paper’s foreign correspondent Hugo Björk had visited Buchenwald and interviewed the Norwegians, his paper published the story under the telling headline: ‘Concentration camp was a hellish nightmare’. Like Dagens Nyheter, Björk told the readers that merely 5 out of 1000 Norwegian deportees had survived.16 Now, the experiences of these five Norwegians raise the major issue within the case of Swedish responses to the Holocaust: to what extent did

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the fact that these survivors were Scandinavian help to bring their suffering into focus? According to Alf W. Johansson, ‘The Swedish engagement [with the Holocaust] had…a regional character. It is the events in Norway which provoked the strongest reactions. The fate of the Polish Jews could not induce similar engagement.’17 Johansson’s assessment relates to the events in 1942, but it does have a continuum into the post-war thinking too, as evinced by the keen interest the press showed towards the five Norwegian-Jewish survivors. No doubt, proximity bred interest and helped to conceptualise the horror better. Stockholms-Tidningen brought the point closer by noting that the five survivors had relatives in Sweden.18 The idea of ‘Nordic brotherhood’ meant that as the ties between Scandinavian countries (including Finland) had been historically strong— encompassing all areas of life, from the economy and politics to society and culture—politicians and citizens were more sensitive to the problems within the Nordic region than in other areas, especially Eastern Europe. In many ways, the outbreak of the Second World War put the traditional ties to the test. While national histories and war experiences, including the Holocaust, are widely different, an essential element of ‘Norden’ remained. On the one hand, while Sweden did not involve itself militarily in the Russo-Finnish Winter War in 1939 and 1940, 7000 thousand volunteers left for Finland. The prominent slogan at the time was ‘Finland’s case is ours’.19 On the other hand, Sweden took nearly 70,000 Finnish children to safety during the Second World War. Furthermore, at the early stages of the war (when more than 10,000 Finnish children had already been evacuated to Sweden), the Swedish Government continued to tighten its refugee policies, mainly directed against European Jewry. As the war progressed, further manifestations of Nordic brotherhood were demonstrated. The failed rescue of Norwegian Jews caused significant dismay,20 while the successful rescue of the Danish Jews in 1943 remains another remarkable example of ‘Nordic brotherhood’: although the position of the Danish Jews was far more ambivalent than the role of ‘ethnic Danes’.21 It is certainly true that the concept of Nordic brotherhood was not fully applied to Jews, especially in terms of refugee policy: they were, in the words of Mikael Byström, ‘step-brothers’ who did not have a clear place in the ‘family’. But it is also worth pointing out that especially in comparison to other liberal press responses, like in the cases of the United Kingdom and Finland, for example, seeing Nordic Jews as ‘half-brothers’ did not stop the mainstream press from recognising the key issues that Holocaust scholarship has confronted ever since.22

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Unlike in the Anglo-American or Finnish press, for example, the focus on the individual stories of the Norwegian Jews (and occasionally others) enabled an important theme to emerge: the German camp system extended far beyond the liberated Western camps, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen, that received the most attention in the British and American papers. While the Norwegians offered a regional (i.e. Scandinavian) focus on the liberation narrative, the geographical focus of their stories was not limited to their experiences in the Western camps. On the contrary, based on the accounts of the surviving Norwegian Jews, Auschwitz emerged as the most horrific camp.23 Dagens Nyheter described it as ‘Upper-Silesian horror-­ filled Himmler-hell (fasansfulla Himmler-helvete)’. Similarly, in accounts of the Nazi system of selection, they told how upon arrival Jews were ‘immediately divided into two groups: women and children in one group and men in another. After a fleeting medical examination most of the women and children were driven directly into the gas chambers and killed. Others were put in slave labour [only] to die after they were too tired to carry on’. The article’s conclusion is worth emphasising since, despite the ambivalence towards the Jews, the paper noted emphatically that the Norwegians ‘told their disclosures truly and objectively. But those who only have seen Buchenwald are prepared to believe them without any doubt.’24 On the whole, the liberation discourse in Swedish press displayed a level of sensitivity to the Jewish plight not readily seen elsewhere, characterised by Deborah Lipstadt’s comment that journalists’ ‘failure to comprehend the Jewish aspect of this entire tragedy was reflected in their description of the victims and explanations of why they were in the camps’.25 Apart from the depictions from Buchenwald, in early May, a heated debate about the suffering of the Jews erupted when the Swedish Nazi paper Dagsposten claimed that the Swedes had concocted totally unnecessary hassle over Count Bernadotte’s White Buses and the liberation of the camps. The only thing wrong with the camps, it was claimed, was that they were over-crowded.26 The following day, Dagens Nyheter challenged the Nazi propagandists in its editorial, commenting that ‘The Red Cross expedition did not succeed in encountering Norwegian Jews […] Apart from the five named surviving Jews in Buchenwald, two more stateless Jews who lived in Norway have been found. Put together, seven out of 784, barely one percent!’27 Thus, the reality of the Nazi’s racial policies was explicitly accounted for in the Swedish press, and the fate of the five

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named Norwegian Jews—to whom the press returned—vividly illustrated the fact. The Swedish papers estimated that in spring 1945, from late April to early May, over 15,000 camp survivors landed in Sweden.28 Apart from instrumentalising the fate of Norwegian Jews as the medium for constructing the early encounter with the Holocaust, the fact that southern Sweden virtually became a temporary haven for such a significant number of survivors formed another medium. Once the story about the Bernadotte expedition became known in the media, the Holocaust became an explicitly Swedish story. When Expressen published a collage of photos from Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen in early May, the first picture depicted Folke Bernadotte, with the caption ‘[h]e tried to help everyone’.29 Indeed, the Holocaust was domesticated by way of framing the story through Swedish humanitarian aid, as the Dagens Nyheter front page headline in early May exemplified: ‘New clothes for 16,000 prisoners’.30 The horror stories typically included an addendum that spoke about the positive self-­ image of the Swedes and Swedish humanitarianism itself: that survival was often dependent on (food) aid provided by the Swedish Red Cross. According to the Norwegian (non-Jewish) survivor, an anti-Nazi and anti-­ Church writer Arnulf Överland, it was not an exaggeration to say that the parcels saved the lives of ‘hundreds and hundreds among us’.31 Finally, while Danish and Norwegians were the primary focus of the press reports, it is not to say that the other survivor stories were omitted. After the Nordic victims, perhaps the second most frequent category was that of Polish Jews, especially women, who also appeared in reports. For example, discussing the Bernadotte expedition, Dagens Nyheter wrote that Polish Jewesses fill coach after coach, and they all come from Auschwitz (Oswiecim) and proudly show their number tattooed on their left forearms. The Jews had, according to a German principle, a special numbering system in these concentration camps […] Every serial went up to 30,000. But there were many who never had a number tattooed, a young Jewess, a student of technical studies from Lvov said.32

The description, written by Dagens Nyheter correspondent Gunnar Gunnarsson, may seem at odds with today’s dominant Holocaust historiography, as the correspondent wrote about how the survivors were proud to display their numbered forearms.33 While silence and melancholy may be the dominant frame in historiography, epitomised by Primo Levi’s

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comment that ‘[i]n the majority of cases, the hour of liberation was neither joyful nor lighthearted’, Gunnarsson’s interviews depicted another sentiment.34 Gunnarsson’s main frame was not triumphalist, but it did expose a fleeting sentiment of relief at being alive and spirited away from the horror—as expressed by the Polish Jewish women he interviewed. Another theme in that report—although implicitly, by discussing the German method of tattooing and the fact that not everyone was given a number—was the question of German perpetrators.

German Perpetrators and the Swedish Press Unlike in the United Kingdom, where press stories on the liberation of the camps principally focused on the acts that Nazis—or ‘Huns’—had committed, the main focus of the early liberation story in Sweden was placed on the victims and their experiences. This was followed by other themes, including the matter what German society knew of the crimes and identifying the perpetrators.35 While the Swedish press argued that ‘the truth about the Nazi regime is unpleasant’,36 for the most part, Germany was not viewed through the prism of an enemy, as was the case in the United Kingdom. There was simply no conceptualisation of Germans as the enemy. Immediately after the liberation of the camps, the Swedish press sought to domesticate the violence by referring to the lack of awareness among ordinary Germans. Although some papers like Expressen took a more principled stance by apportioning blame to all Germans, if for no other reason than highlighting the silence and passive acceptance of the masses. For the Swedish right, traditionally sympathetic to Germany, the extent of ordinary Germans’ role in the Holocaust presented a problem, and the response, too, was ambivalent. As noted above, Stockholms-Tidningen’s Christer Jäderlund caused controversy when he defended ordinary Germans immediately after the liberation. He claimed that the handful of Nazis were imposters, pretending to represent the whole population, holding that ‘the brown storm troopers “played people” on the stage’ and that ‘Germany was also, according to our standards, an occupied nation, so that in the concentration camps there were considerably more Germans than Jews!’37 In its editorial in late April, Stockholms-Tidningen also discussed ‘the other Germany’. Seeking to divert attention away from the Jews and other major groups of victims, the editorial told of a Weimar

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citizen who had been incarcerated in different camps during the twelve years of Hitler’s reign. ‘His own wish was now’, the paper wrote, ‘to be able to show the world that a Germany other than the Nazi one exists’.38 The left-­liberal Expressen challenged Stockholms-Tidningen’s editorial, arguing that Stockholms-Tidningen ‘valiantly cultivates facts for “the other Germany”, which their German correspondent has clearly been unable to find’.39 Contributing to the Swedish debate on the question of German guilt and the future re-building of the country, Svenska Dagbladet argued that Buchenwald would play a prominent role in the construction of the ‘new Germany’. According to the paper, there was a well-organised antiNazi elite among the Buchenwald survivors, and their role would be to assist in the process of re-building post-war, democratic German society.40 The ambivalence was not limited to the right, however. For example, the initial reaction of the liberal Dagens Nyheter was narrated in the same fashion: 99 percent of the German population did not know what had happened [in the camps], but it is also surely true that they did not know because they did not have courage to find out […] I believe now what I never believed before: not only the Germans, but the whole world will need the courage to find out and to understand the truth.41

In its efforts to understand the role of ordinary Germans and wider society in the atrocities, the Swedish press utilised the frame of (mental) disease as an explanatum. According to Dagens Nyheter, the German population had ‘ceased to think for themselves’ because through incessant propaganda their brains were slowly ‘scrubbed out’. Consequently, by limiting the role of collective German guilt, the paper simply argued that the people ‘cannot be held responsible’. The message was reinforced by utilising an account of a Dutch survivor who ‘greatly emphasised that terror and atrocities were committed by the Nazis, not the German people’.42 Arnulf Överland also sought to explain the role of ordinary Germans through the mental analogy. He told Dagens Nyheter that the German national character had become sick. According to him, the whole nation had become collectively sick as it had identified with Nazi ideology year after year, which was like swallowing ‘stealthy poison’.43 In other words, according to Överland’s authoritative voice, the Germans could be understood as having accidentally swallowed poison—this could have happened to anyone.

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On the whole, the reactions of the Swedish press in the wake of the liberation of the camps were more inquisitive about the role of German society than about the sadistic traits of the German ‘Huns’, such as Josef Kramer, ‘the beast of Belsen’, and Irma Grese, ‘the bitch of Belsen’, the duo who came to symbolise German brutality in British public opinion.44 What is more, interviews with the survivors also offered fragments of the trans-European dimension of the persecution and camp system. Dagens Nyheter wrote that ‘according to the unanimous testimony of many inmates’ who had survived Buchenwald, the most brutal guards ‘were SS recruits from Belarus and Ukraine, although they always operated under German command’.45 In another piece, Dagens Nyheter wrote about a Jewish camp survivor who described the camp-system in the following way: ‘every barrack […] had a so-called “Lagerälteste”. They were often criminal inmates […] They were often brutal humans. The most brutal of them all were the Croats’.46 However, while the focus was less on the brutal acts perpetrated by Germans, it did not mean that the Swedish press was disinterested in the Nazis. This became obvious during the Nuremberg trials in which Nazi criminality and Jewish suffering were both discussed against the background of newly-emerging legal concepts such as crimes against humanity and genocide.

The Swedish Press and the Holocaust at the International Military Tribunal The opening of the Nuremberg trials on 20 November 1945 was attended by the largest group of journalists ever gathered to cover a single event.47 At the time, it was widely believed that the purpose of the trial far exceeded the need to bring the leading Nazis to face judgement. Apart from justice, the major purpose of the trial was didactic: it would be an organised history lesson in which the Nazi system would be scrutinised and exposed for all the world to see. As Britain’s chief prosecutor, Sir Hartley Shawcross, argued, the trial ‘would provide […] an authoritative and impartial record to which future historians may turn for truth’.48 Part of the record was the Nazi extermination policy. The ways in which the Holocaust was portrayed at the major war-crimes trials at Nuremberg have elicited diverse opinions and attitudes within historiography, ranging from the argument that the Holocaust was downplayed or marginalised in the proceedings to more nuanced perspectives.

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While the key interest of the Swedish press revolved around the high politics of the Nazi regime, the personal lives and ties with Sweden of defendants like Göring, and relationships between the defendants, the extermination of the Jews was one of the most captivating issues throughout the trial. This started with Robert Jackson’s opening statement and concluded with the verdicts—as we shall see. In tying the historiography of the Holocaust in general with the representations of the Holocaust at Nuremberg in particular, it is important to examine the way in which the Swedish press portrayed the Holocaust in the Nuremberg trials. This adds more nuance to the current, dominant perspective that the genocide was overlooked in the courtroom. Apart from the opening and closing speeches, the descriptions of the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, the testimonies of Nazi perpetrators Otto Ohlendorf, Dieter Wisliceny and Rudolf Höss offered gruesome details about the unfolding of the Jewish genocide. However, unlike in the case of the liberation of the camps, where the first focus was on the victims and their stories, the trial concentrated on the deeds of the perpetrators: victims were rarely heard or offered a chance to testify. The most important question for the Swedish press regarding the whole venture was its jurisprudential legitimacy, meaning the battling allegations of victors’ justice and retroactive legislation. A substantial part of the legitimation strategy relied on original Nazi documents and examining the actions of the Nazis.49 Ever since the trial began, the Swedish press recounted the defendants’ attempts to exonerate themselves and their arguments that they were not accountable for the atrocities that were examined in the courtroom.50 According to the defendants, Hitler planned the war against peace, and the army had no choice but to obey because they had sworn an oath of loyalty. Hitler, they argued, had taken control over military operations and only delegated his wishes to carry out the ‘Final Solution’ to a select few. As Stockholm-Tidningen’s article put it in December 1945, the men in the dock collectively displayed hostility towards Hitler and his leadership style in an attempt to exculpate themselves from responsibility.51 The Nazi elite’s attempts to exonerate themselves appeared ridiculous in the face of the mounting evidence of the regime’s brutality. Robert Jackson’s opening statement on 21 November 1945 set the stage. His speech, which was about 20,000 words in length, lasted nearly a whole day and made frequent references to the Jews. On reporting the opening statement, Stockholms-Tidningen observed on a front page sub-heading

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the consistent theme of the trial: Nazi crimes ‘culminated in the destruction of the Jews’.52 The full horror of the Nazi’s extermination policies was further illustrated in mid-December 1945, when the prosecution detailed the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. According to Michael Marrus, the American prosecutor William Walsh’s presentation was one of the key events at Nuremberg that offered intense and dramatic evidence on the Holocaust.53 The presentation was also depicted in the Swedish press. Even the conservative and previously cautiously pro-German papers such as Svenska Dagbladet and Stockholms-Tidningen offered detailed commentary. The former noted that ‘On 23 April [1943], Himmler ordered that the Warsaw Ghetto must be destroyed without mercy. I [Stroop] therefore decided to destroy the area by setting it on fire’.54 Stockholms-Tidningen also reported on the ‘Warsaw ghetto’s ghastly end’ by noting that on Himmler’s orders, 56,000 Jews were burned and drowned in Warsaw.55 Similarly, showing the importance of the Warsaw ghetto liquidation to the contemporary view, Victor Vinde dedicated the last 23 pages of his 1946 book Nurnberg in a Spotlight to the topic of the Warsaw ghetto. Victor Vinde (1903–1970) was an experienced journalist who from 1937 to 1945 worked as Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning’s Paris correspondent and after the war worked for Dagens Nyheter. While France was his passion (he wrote eight accounts of France), he also authored timely works such as America at War (1943) and his impressions on the Nuremberg trials, Nurnberg in a Spotlight.56 While this chapter is based on newspaper reporting, Vinde’s book is worth highlighting here since it shows the contemporaneous writing of a journalist, but with a more detailed and analytical bent than space offered in the pages of the newspapers. It is worth noting that while his book had no conclusion as such, the last section of the book that dealt with the Warsaw ghetto worked as an epitaph for the whole Nazi era: With this document [Stroop’s report], the Germans have unwittingly erected a monument to those men and women, ‘Juden, Banditen und Untermenschen’, who the murderers’ bullets killed. They fought for their freedom and for their people—alone, encircled, abandoned and they died like free people should. Their memory must live on.57

While the destruction of the ghetto epitomised the cruelty of Nazi crimes, the testimonies of Otto Ohlendorf and Dieter Wisliceny were

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significant, for they illustrated the multi-national and trans-European organisational aspects, and indicated that systematic extermination was Nazi policy. Ohlendorf’s testimony has been characterised as ‘astonishing’ and ‘most notable’ in the historiography of the period.58 Press commentary in Sweden gave a prominent position to discussions of his testimony, offering a glimpse into the abyss of the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Svenska Dagbladet reported how under Ohlendorf’s leadership, 90,000 men, women, and children were killed in Russia. The same story also noted that Adolf Eichmann had the death of at least five million Jews on his conscience.59 Stockholms-Tidningen wrote in a bold caption that ‘38-year-old […] Otto Ohlendorf gave a terrifying testimony about the German mass killings of Jews in the occupied Soviet territory’.60 Further evidence of these tendencies was supplied in connection to Dieter Wisliceny’s extraordinary testimony, and the Swedish press did not fail to grasp its significance.61 After chronicling the ‘path to genocide’— reasonably accurately within current historical understanding—the article told how Wisliceny, working on Eichmann’s orders, had organised the transportation of the Jews of Salonika to the ‘death factory’ of Auschwitz. Overall, these testimonies were significant for several reasons. First, they were a reminder of the trans-European dimension of the Holocaust: Ohlendorf’s testimony encompassed the Soviet Union, sections on Eichmann captured the tragedy of the Hungarian Jews, and Wisliceny’s testimony reached into Southern Europe. Second, in the press commentary, Auschwitz formed a central point in the extermination process: whether it was the deportations of Hungarian or Greek Jews, all Nazi roads seemed to lead, momentarily at least, to Auschwitz. Third, as has been illustrated in connection to Stockholm-Tidningen’s report, the murder of Jews was based on (as the current understanding on crimes against humanity has it) their belonging to a certain group rather than their personal traits.62 During spring and early summer 1946, the reports from Nuremberg were generally short, more infrequent and confined to the inner pages of newspapers. Only on one occasion, albeit briefly, did the reporting from Nuremberg garner any interest and demand a more vivid portrayal. Significantly, it was Rudolf Höss’ testimony—accounting for the role of Auschwitz—that temporarily revived the wilting press interest in the trial. Dagens Nyheter’s report ran as ‘Auschwitz boss confesses the murder of 2 million Jews’. Below the headline was the by-line that introduced what was to come in the article in a bland characterisation of Höss: ‘“Were you

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the commandant of Auschwitz from 1940 to the end of 1943?” “Yes.” “Is it true that two million Jews died there during that period?” “Yes.”’ What followed was a chilling report on Auschwitz, reiterating many of the central themes relating to the camp: two million Jews were murdered there (in reality the figure is about one million and a quarter),63 the doors to the gas chambers had signs saying either ‘shower’ or ‘delousing’ in numerous languages, and the people in the vicinity of the camp knew what was happening because of the sickening smell emitted by the burning bodies.64 Svenska Dagbladet reminded its readers of the abominable nature of Nazi violence. First it was told that 2000 people were murdered each day, followed by the conceptualisation of the cruelty: ‘dying took 3–5 minutes and shouts from the gas chambers could be heard’.65 On the whole, Swedish press coverage of the Nuremberg trials demonstrates that the Holocaust was depicted as an important part of the Nazi regime and the significance of the genocide was also understood, as illustrated with reference to Vinde (and numerous articles throughout the chapter), although the matter was not elaborated on to any great extent. The final evidence for the attitude of the press can be gauged from the press coverage when the trials ended. After the judgement, Stockholms-­ Tidningen contextualised the death sentences, and the extermination of the Jews was a key explanatory factor. On Göring’s sentence, the paper wrote that ‘he was the director of the slave labour programme and the instigator of the tyranny against the Jews’. Discussing von Ribbentrop’s role, it told how he ‘played an important role in Hitler’s Final Solution of the Jewish Question’. Kaltenbrunner, the paper argued in bold print, ‘murdered approximately four million Jews in concentration camps’, while Rosenberg’s ‘subordinates were involved in the mass murder of the Jews’.66 Similar comments were also made about Streicher, Frank, and Seyss-Inquart. Thus, crimes against humanity—essentially the Holocaust— underlined the whole purpose of the proceedings. As Vinde pleaded, the memory of the Jewish victims must live on.

Jews Outside the Courtroom: The Swedish Press and the DPs in Germany The complex ways in which the Swedish press discussed the Holocaust apart from the Nuremberg trials, especially in connection with the problem of Europe’s displaced persons and the Jewish desire to emigrate to

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Palestine, cannot be fully accounted for here, so the argument is limited to two illustrative events.67 These are the so-called (controversial) Harrison report that was published in the European press in autumn 1945 and detailed the conditions of Jewish displaced persons (DP) in the camps, and the other is the sorry tale of the Exodus ships carrying Jewish immigrants to Palestine, that eventually returned to Hamburg in summer 1947. When concentration camps were liberated and Jews were placed into the DP camps, their numbers were around 150,000, peaking in early 1947 at 250,000.68 It is now well-known in historiography that the surviving remnants of Europe’s Jewry were ‘liberated but not free’. The Jews were assembled in makeshift DP camps and divided between national groups, meaning that Jewish victims and their ex-guards could be found under the same roof.69 In 1946, Zorach Warhaftig’s book Uprooted. Jewish Refugees and Displaced Persons after Liberation was published to bring the plight of Europe’s displaced persons to the attention of the First Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations.70 In the book, a lawyer from Warsaw, who was a native of Byelorussia, a Zionist, and later became Minister for Religious Affairs in the Israeli Government, simply pointed out the situation facing European Jewry: ‘[e]ighteen months after liberation the war is not yet over’.71 In an atmosphere of chaotic material conditions, rumours about the mistreatment of Jews, prevailing antisemitism, and a general sense of post-­ war crisis, the Truman Administration decided to investigate the conditions in the camps, with special attention afforded to the experiences of the Jews.72 The dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Earl G Harrison, who had also represented the United States in the Inter-­ Governmental Committee on Refugees, was appointed to the task. During summer 1945, Harrison toured the camps and his report was published in the European press at the turn of September and October 1945. Many papers placed the news on the front page, as well giving it editorial attention. His conclusion—that largely concentrated on the handling of the camps by the United States—was not only critical of US management, but also advocated sweeping changes to American policy, writing that [t]he first and plainest need of these people is a recognition of their actual status and by this I mean their status as Jews […] Jews as Jews (not as members of their nationality groups) have been more severely victimised than the non-Jewish members of the same or other nationalities.73

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Dagens Nyheter quoted Harrison in the now famous passage: ‘As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except we do not exterminate them’.74 The news made the front page. The same line was also published in Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning’s main foreign news section under the heading, ‘Truman criticises the handling of the Jews: circumstances in the camps barely better than under Nazis’.75 Stockholms-Tidningen’s news article cited in bold a comment made by Jewish Agency representative Alexander Easterman that ‘Belsen had become a Jewish prison camp’ and ‘A number of prominent Jews who participate in relief work in Lüneburg have described the complaints against the circumstances under which 60,000 transfer Jews in the British, American and French Zones live’.76 Apart from discussing the plight of the Jews, the report—essentially by the way it was described in the press—also put a spotlight on the mounting tensions between the British and American administrations over the question of Palestine’s future. For example, GHT observed the reaction in the British press to the report by citing the Daily Mail: ‘England should not be responsible for Palestine alone. If the USA will give advice, it should also take over [some] obligations’.77 Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning’s London correspondent wrote a lengthy column that looked at the issue. It told how ‘President Truman’s intervention in the Palestine question has got a cold reception in London’.78 The heart of the matter was the immediate entry of 100,000 displaced Jews into Palestine and the British reaction to it. In a sense, the humanitarian problem was overshadowed by ‘the new Palestine crisis’ (as the column’s title suggested). The ‘new crisis’ now referred to as the rift between British and American policies towards the Jews and Palestine, and not so much to the misery of Jewish DPs. What press discourses on the Harrison report pointed out was the overwhelming Jewish desire to emigrate to Palestine, and between 1946 and 1948—until the establishment of the state of Israel—most news relating to Jews grappled with this issue. Simply put, the fact that the number of Jewish DPs was increasing while the number of non-Jewish DPs was diminishing partially helped to keep the question of Jewish immigration to Palestine on the agenda. What is more, the link between Jewish DPs and Palestine was increasing in importance by the day. Nowhere else was the triangle between the DP problem, Palestine, and the Holocaust as prominent as in the case of the so-called ‘Exodus affair’ in summer 1947. On 11 July 1947, the steam ship Exodus 1947, previously called the President Warfield, carrying over 4500 prospective Jewish immigrants to

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Palestine departed from France. The voyage is now remembered as the Exodus affair—made famous by Leon Uris’ 1958 bestseller novel Exodus, followed by Otto Preminger’s 1960 film, starring Paul Newman.79 At the time, in 1947, it was the very occasion that highlighted the connection between the Jewish DP problem and rising tensions in Palestine.80 The beginning of the Exodus voyage was similar to other organised illegal voyages of Jewish immigration, that the (particularly British) press had grown accustomed to publicising. As Idith Zertal observed, there was nothing clandestine about the journey, but from the outset it was a demonstration, ‘a journey of political protest’.81 The first time that the affair received more than short news commentary was in the second half of July when the Royal Navy boarded the ship, resulting in the death of one crew member and two immigrants. News commentary of the incident was publicised in the world’s press. Svenska Dagbladet’s news article, with a Jerusalem dateline, was a typical one and could be repeated many times over, when it told about the ‘fight with tear gas and smoke bombs when the Jewish immigration boat was boarded’.82 A few days later, the paper stated the obvious when it explained that British policy towards (what were now described as) ‘illegal’ immigrants was becoming more forceful. ‘Contrary to earlier practice,’ the paper said, ‘the last contingents of illegal immigrants to Palestine have been returned to France in greatest secrecy’.83 Contrary to the article in Svenska Dagbladet, the operation was not a secret one. The Jews were taken to three British ships and sent back to France where the French authorities said they would only receive the immigrants if they disembarked voluntarily. None of them did, and the determination of the Jews (with or without Zionist/Haganah pressure) together with their worsening situation inside the ships, guaranteed global press coverage. As the Svenska Dagbladet front page comment made clear: ‘“Rather dead than disembark” say the returned Jews’.84 More often than not, the press was sympathetic to the plight of the passengers. The Swedish afternoon paper Expressen published an interview with a Jew who had landed in France. The interviewee told how there was no food on the ships and that Jews who were kept in cages were dying.85 The liberal Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning reported on the international reactions to the landings, noting that there had been a Jewish demonstration against Britain in New York where people were carrying banners saying ‘Englishmen in the Nazis’ footsteps’.86 The sorry finale for the debacle was the UK Government’s decision to return the Jews to Germany, the land of the extermination of their

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brethren—a gruesome irony that did not escape the press.87 On arriving to Hamburg, according to the Manchester Guardian, 170 journalists were waiting to witness such a tragedy loaded with the symbolism of the Holocaust as the Jews were herded from one form of transportation to the next, heading to Bergen-Belsen, now a British-run DP camp. The unloading of the first two ships took place without the anticipated conflict. However, when the last vessel, S/S Runnymeade Park, was unloaded, violence erupted. GHT reported how one of the Zionists onboard shouted ‘here come the Nazis! Remember Belsen!’ when British troops ‘scrambled’ on him.88 Expressen focused on the Jews when they were put in trains. Under the sub-heading, ‘I was in Auschwitz’, the paper quoted a Jewish girl who stated that ‘I have been in Auschwitz together with my sister […] since then, we have always been together. You cannot separate us now’.89 Expressen also editorialised the incident. Under the title ‘Operation Oasis’, which referred to the cover name for the British action against the Exodus Jews, the paper wrote that the action was most of all a terrible human tragedy. It is tragic that Englishmen in their bitterness resort to the final solution (en ultima ratio) and it is awful that the 4,500 refugees, most of them with experiences of Auschwitz and other concentration camps behind them, are forced to return to the very country which was the root and the source of their affliction.90

Thus, what Expressen’s article revealed was that already in the 1940s, the press was sensitive to and fully aware of the plight of the Jews and the sorry irony symbolised by the Exodus affair. While the full details of Auschwitz and Belsen were still unknown—to be uncovered over decades of research—it is nevertheless significant that they were used as the axiom for the Holocaust’s horror.

Conclusion As I have argued in this chapter, the Swedish press responded to the Holocaust with considerable interest. Importantly, its focus varied and changed from the Jewish victims to Nazi perpetrators. The narrative construction of the liberation of the camps first focused on Jewish survivors and their experiences. Going against the grain of the dominant wisdom in Holocaust literature regarding the bystanders’ attitudes, the Swedish press was in fact interested in victims’ experiences: who they were, where they

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came from, what they had endured, and how they had survived. Thinking about the emerging view of the Holocaust, it can be said that it was a story with a structure, direction, and viewpoint. Unlike in the dominant Anglo-­ American paradigm, in the Swedish case the horrors faced by the Jews was above all contextualised through the lens of Nordic brotherhood, which offered an intimate level of meaning and gravity to the reports. The link to fellow Scandinavians offered the structure and viewpoint for understanding the event of liberation. As I have written above, an important part of the Nordic brotherhood was the extensive reporting on the role of Sweden’s humanitarian aid in the form of parcels organised by the Swedish Red Cross. They functioned as an intimate tie between Nordic countries, connecting Swedes to the plight of Norwegian and Danish Jews, thereby making the Holocaust a part of Sweden’s historical experience, too. In contrast, at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, the focus changed, and the Nazi perpetrators were given a spotlight in the Swedish press. However, the issue was tied to the tribunal’s logic that sought to establish maximum credence for the shaky jurisdictional ground on which the IMT operated. In such schema, the legal opinion at the time was that it was best to concentrate on the documentary evidence, gathered from Nazi archives, rather than on the testimonies of victims. But it is still worth remembering that the fate of the Jews also structured the depictions of Nazi criminality. It was through several notable perpetrator testimonies, like those of Otto Ohlendorf, Dieter Wisliceny, and Rudolf Höss, that key tenets of the Holocaust emerged: the murder was systematic, ardently executed, efficient, and covered the whole continent. As the press narratives on the tribunal’s opening statements and final verdict indicated, the Holocaust played a prominent part in shaping the judgement. Finally, at the same time as the IMT was in session, the surviving Jewish remnants lingered in DP camps across the German occupation zones. Again, it was the fate of the survivors that offered the structure and viewpoint for the Swedish press, as DPs increasing willingness to immigrate to Palestine and mounting tensions between the British authorities and Jews kept Jewish affairs on the pages of the Swedish newspapers. As the two important media events, the publication of the Harrison report and the Exodus affair vividly portrayed, the Swedish press was acutely aware of the recent suffering of European Jewry, and it set the backdrop for all discussions about the future of the Jews stuck in Europe until 1948.

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Notes 1. Allan Bell, ‘News Stories as Narratives’, in The Discourse Reader, eds. Adam Jaworski and Nikolas Coupland (London and New  York: Routledge, 1999), 236. 2. This chapter is a revised and updated version of research done and published in Antero Holmila, Reporting the Holocaust in the British, Swedish and Finnish Press, 1945–50 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011). 3. Laurel Leff, Buried by the Times. The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 296. For earlier American and British studies with similar views, see Deborah Lipstadt, Beyond Belief. The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (New York: Free Press, 1986); Robert, Moses Shapiro, (ed.), Why Didn’t the Press Shout? American and International Journalism During the Holocaust (Jersey City, NJ: Yeshiva University Press, 2003); Julian Scott, The British Press and the Holocaust 1942–1943 (PhD Diss., University of Leicester, 1994); Tony Kushner, ‘Different Worlds. British Perceptions of the Final Solution during the Second World War’, in The Final Solution. Origins and Implementation, ed. David Cesarani (London: Routledge, 1994). 4. Yosef Gorny, The Jewish Press and the Holocaust, 1939–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 269. On Tony Kushner’s ‘liberal imagination’, see Antero Holmila, Reporting the Holocaust in the British, Swedish and Finnish Press, 1945–50 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 21–22. 5. For example, see: Pontus Rudberg, The Swedish Jews and the Holocaust (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017); Harald Rundblom, ‘Sweden and the Holocaust from an International Perspective,’ in Sweden’s Relations with Nazism, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, eds. Stig Ekman and Klas Åmark (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2003), 213–221, esp. 217–218; Ingmar Svanberg and Mattias Tydén, Sverige och förintelsen. Debatt och Dokument om Europas Judar 1933–1945 (Stockholm: Arena, 1997); Paul A. Levine, From Indifference to Activism. Swedish Diplomacy and the Holocaust, 1938–1945 (Uppsala: Studia Historica Uppsaliensia, 1998), 120–133; Malin Thor Tureby, ‘Svenska änglar och hyenor möter tacksamma flyktingar. Mottagningen av befriade koncentrationslägerfångar i skånsk press under året 1945’, Historisk tidskrift 135, no. 2 (2015): 266–300. 6. Svanberg and Tydén, Sverige och förintelsen, 249. 7. Thor Tureby, ‘Svenska änglar och hyenor möter tacksamma flyktingar’, 297.

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8. The popular contemporary terminology used in the Swedish press to describe the Holocaust included especially the terms ‘utrotning’ (extermination) and ‘förföljelser’ (persecution). 9. The papers included: Dagens Nyheter (DN, liberal centrist), Expressen (liberal-­left), Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning (GHT, liberal-left), Stockholms-Tidningen (StT, conservative-right) and Svenska Dagbladet (SvD, conservative). 10. Steven Koblik, The Stones Cry Out. Sweden’s Response to the Persecution of Jews, 1933–1945 (New York: Holocaust Library, 1988), 134–135. 11. For example, SvD, 15, 18 and 19 April 1945; DN, 19, 20 and 21 April 1945. 12. Expressen, 23 April 1945. 13. For the polemics of the Swedish rescue mission to Germany, the literature is abundant—and contentious. See, for example, Ingrid Lomfors, Blind fläck. Minne och glömska kring Svenska röda korsets hjälpinsats i Nazityskland 1945 (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2005); Koblik, The Stones Cry Out, chapter 4; Sune Persson, ‘Folke Bernadotte and the White Buses’, in Bystanders to the Holocaust. A Re-evaluation, eds. David Cesarani and Paul A.  Levine (London: Frank Cass, 2002), 237–271; Ulf Zander, ‘To Rescue or be Rescued: The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen and White Buses in British and Swedish Historical Culture’, in The Holocaust on Post-War Battlefields. Genocide as Historical Culture, eds. Klas-Göran Karlsson and Ulf Zander (Malmö: Sekel, 2006), 343–383; Folke Bernadotte, Slutet. Mina humanitära förhandlingar i Tyskland våren 1945 och deras politiska följder (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1945); Felix Kersten, The Kersten Memoirs, 1940–1945, with an introduction by H.R.  Trevor-Roper (London: Hutchinson, 1956); Norbert Masur, En Jude talar med Himmler (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1945). 14. Paul A. Levine, From Indifference to Activism, 140. 15. DN, 25 April 1945. 16. StT, 25 April 1945. 17. Alf W.  Johansson, Den nazistiska utmaningen. Aspekter på andra världskriget (Stockholm: Prisma, 2000), 256. 18. StT, 26 April 1945. 19. For Sweden and the Winter War, see especially Alf Johansson, Finlands sak. Svensk politik och opinion under vinterkriget 1939–1940 (Stockholm: Allmänna förlaget, 1973). For the ’Finnish question’ in Swedish politics, see Krister Wahlbäck, Finlandsfrågan i Svensk politik 1937–1940 (Stockholm: Nordstedt, 1964). 20. Svanbeg and Tyden, Sverige och förintelsen, 251.

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21. Mikael Byström, En broder, gäst och parasit. Uppfattningar och föreställningar om utlänningar, flyktingar och flyktingspolitik i svensk offentlig debatt 1942–1947 (PhD Diss., Stockholm University, 2006), 104–105 and 112–116; Svanberg and Tyden, Sverige och förintelsen, 312–325. 22. For Nordic Jews and the concept of broderfolk, see Mikael Byström, ‘En talade tystnad? Ett antisemitik bakgrundsbrus i riksdagsdebatterna 1942–1947’, in En Problematisk Relation? Flyktingpolitik och judiska flyktingar i Sverige 1920–1950, eds. Lars M. Anderson and Karin Kvist Geverts (Uppsala: Swedish Science Press, 2008), 129–130; Levine, From Indifference to Activism, 140. 23. For a similar assessment, see also Zander, ‘To Rescue or be Rescued’, 357. 24. DN, 3 May 1945. Emphasis added. See also SvD, 27 April 1945. 25. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief, 255; see also Holmila, Framing Genocide. 26. Dagsposten, 2 May 1945. Dagsposten was the main Swedish paper supporting German Nazism and the Swedish National Socialist Party, SNF (Sveriges Nationella Förbund). See, for example, Stephane Bruchfeld, ‘Grusade drömmar. Svenska ’nationella’ och det tyska nederlaget 1945’, in Bilder i kontrast : interkulturella processer Sverige/Tyskland i skuggan av nazismen 1933–1945, eds. Charlotta Brylla, Birgitta Almgren and Frank-­Michael Kirsch (Aalborg: Univ. Aalborg, 2005) 27. DN, 3 May 1945. Emphasis in original. 28. For example, see SvD, 2 May 1945; DN, 3 May 1945. 29. Expressen, 5 May 1945. 30. For example, DN headline on 3 May 1945 reads ‘New clothes for 16,000 prisoners.’ 31. DN, 4 May 1945. 32. Gunnar Gunnarsson, ‘Där är ett under att jag är här’, DN, 5 May 1945. 33. The exact phrase in Swedish that Gunnarsson used: ‘de kommer alla från Auschwitz (Oswiecim) och visar med stolthet upp sina på vänstra underarmen tattuerade nummer’. 34. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (London: Michael Joseph, 1988), 53. 35. Holmila, Reporting the Holocaust, 49–53. 36. DN, 21 April 1945. 37. StT, 14 April 1945. 38. StT, 27 April 1945. 39. Expressen, 28 April 1945. 40. SvD, 28 April 1945. 41. DN, 18 April 1945. 42. DN, 27 April 1945. 43. DN, 4 May 1945.

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44. Holmila, Reporting the Holocaust, 53. 45. DN, 27 April 1945. 46. DN, 5 May 1945. 47. Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgement. Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 11; Michael Marrus, The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial 1945–46. A Documentary History (New York: Bedford/St.Martin’s Press, 1997), 242. 48. Bradley Smith, Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 103. 49. For the debates about the trial’s legitimacy and victors’ justice, see esp. StT, 3 Februay 1946 and Expressen, 6 February 1946. 50. Holmila, Reporting the Holocaust, 91–93. 51. StT, 13 December 1945; see also StT, 18 December 1945; GHT, 4 January 1946; Expressen 20 January 1946. 52. StT, 22 November 1945. 53. Marrus, The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, 13. 54. SvD, 14 December 1945. 55. StT, 14 December 1945. 56. Victor Vinde’s books included Revolution i Paris. Tre kapitel om en kris (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1935); Det franska sammanbrottet (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1940); En stormakts fall (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1941); Frankrike efter nederlaget (Stockholm: Utrikespolitiska institutet, 1941); Amerika slår till (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1943); Det fria Frankrike (Stockholm: Utrikespolitiska institutet, 1944); Nürnberg i blixtljus (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1946); Det nya Frankrike (Stockholm: Utrikespolitiska institutet, 1947); Revolution i Algeriet (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1958); De Gaulle och Frankrike (Uppsala: Verdandi, 1962); Vietnam. Det smutsiga kriget (Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren, 1966). 57. Vinde, Nürnberg, 185. Emphasis added. Vinde had earlier discussed the destruction of the ghetto, arguing that the killing of innocent men, women and children by the troops which were armed to teeth, and then making it into a heroic tale represented ‘the deepest depravity to which any nation or tribe had ever sunken…’, Vinde, Nürnberg, 57. 58. Douglas, The Memory of Judgement, 69. 59. ‘Slaughtering resulted in the death of 5 million Jews’, SvD, 4 March 1946. 60. ‘Execution groups followed the German Army’, StT, 4.1.1946. 61. StT, 14 April 1946. 62. StT, 4 January 1946. 63. The death toll of the murdered Jews in Auschwitz has been estimated at 1,250,000. See, for example, Ronnie S.  Landau, The Nazi Holocaust (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992), 177.

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64. For example, see ‘Auschwitz boss confesses the murder of 2 million Jews’, DN, 16 April 1946. 65. SvD, 16 April 1946. 66. StT, 2 October 1946. 67. For more detailed examinations, see Holmila Reporting the Holocaust, 125–172; Antero Holmila, ‘The Holocaust and the Birth of Israel in British, Swedish and Finnish Press discourse, 1947–1948’, European Review of History. Revue européenne d’histoire 16, no. 2 (2009): 183–200. 68. Yehuda Bauer, Out of the Ashes. The Impact of American Jews on Post-­ Holocaust European Jewry (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1989), 45. 69. Arieh J.  Kochavi, Post-Holocaust Politics. Britain, the United States, and Jewish Refugees, 1945–1948 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 89; Michael Brenner, After the Holocaust. Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 10–15. For a current synthesis of the liberation, see Dan Stone, The Liberation of the Camps. The End of the Holocaust and (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). 70. Zorach Warhaftig, Uprooted. Jewish Refugees and Displaced Persons after Liberation (New York: Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1946). 71. Warhaftig, Uprooted, 39. 72. Kochavi, Post-Holocaust Politics, 89. 73. Cited in Mark Wyman, DP: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945–51 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), 136. For the full report see for example, Leonard Dinnerstein, America and the Survivors of the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), appendix B, 291–305. 74. DN, 30 September 1945; Wyman, DP, 135. 75. GHT, 1 October 1945. 76. StT, 1 October 1945. 77. GHT, 1 October 1945. 78. GHT, 1 October 1945. 79. Leon Uris, Exodus (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1958). 80. For example, Ruth Gruber, Exodus 1947. The Ship That Launched a Nation (New York: Times Books, 1999). 81. Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 44–45. 82. SvD, 19 July 1947. 83. SvD, 21 July 1947. 84. SvD, 30 July 1947. 85. Cited in Nicholas Bethell, The Palestine Triangle. The Struggle between the British, the Jews and the Arabs 1935–48 (London: Andre Deutsch, 1979), 336.

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86. GHT, 2 August 1947. 87. See Holmila, Reporting the Holocaust. The British decision marked a new phase in their Palestine policy and was taken in the middle of the rising Jewish terrorism in Palestine. 88. GHT, 10 September 1947. 89. Expressen, 8 September 1947. 90. Expressen, 8 September 1947.

CHAPTER 8

Jews, Gender, and the Scandinavian Subject: Understanding the Context and Content of the Film Vittnesbördet [The Testimony] Kristin Wagrell

‘And photographs of the victims of war are themselves a species of rhetoric. They reiterate. They simplify. They agitate. They create the illusion of consensus’.1 This assertion, taken from Susan Sontag’s seminal book Regarding the Pain of Others, encapsulates a crucial point about the symbolic value of war-time footage. The title of Sontag’s book is also dualistic in its meaning. ‘Regarding’ is both seeing and concerning and, as Sontag argues in her book, seeing pain does not always mean that one is concerned with the pain portrayed. Regarding or watching the pain of others can evoke a variety of responses such as abhorrence, pity, anger, and empathy. Such responses are not merely dependent on the spectator’s emotional range or psychological attributes but are also contingent upon the context in which both the image(s) of pain and the spectator are constructed.

K. Wagrell (*) Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Heuman, P. Rudberg (eds.), Early Holocaust Memory in Sweden, The Holocaust and its Contexts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55532-0_8

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The sequence of images that constitute the short film Vittnesbördet— the subject of this chapter—has been understood and reinterpreted over time. When it was made in 1945, the film that depicts Swedish operations to rescue the victims of Nazi persecution at the end of the Second World War, was a representation of Swedish benevolence and humanitarian power. This aligned well with what has been referred to as the ‘small-state realistic narrative’ and the post-war celebration of Sweden’s policy of neutrality.2 At this point in time, those who had suffered under the Nazi regime were not the main focus of the filmmakers. Rather, the wounded and weakened figures on the screen embodied the destructiveness of war as well as these bodies’ need for care and comfort in the safe haven that was post-war Sweden. In contrast, when footage from the film was reused in 2011 in the documentary Hoppets hamn (‘Harbour of Hope’), the victims and their life stories had become a central feature. The focus on Sweden nevertheless remained: a focus that has permeated post-war public and scientific discourse in Sweden, thereby obfuscating the complexities inherent in the survivor experience. This chapter examines the ways in which survivors of Nazi atrocities were portrayed and represented in Vittnesbördet in relation to contemporary notions of victimisation, as well as the context in which these portrayals were produced. Are there differences between how men and women are represented and how are Jews made visible in the film? Furthermore, by referring to the film Hoppets hamn and the related book Hoppets hamn: när överlevarna kom till Sverige (‘Harbour of Hope: When the Survivors came to Sweden’) I wish to reflect upon how the ‘ideological investments’ made by the Swedish Government into films such as Vittnesbördet have affected current uses of history.3

Audio-Visual Forms of Representation and the ‘Erasure’ of Victims’ Experiences Swedish research on the treatment and representation of Holocaust victims in the 1930s and 1940s has been characterised by a focus on refugee policy, as well as representations of survivors in the printed press.4 In the past few years, however, there has been an increase in scholarly publications on the functions of newsreels and short films in relation to representations of Holocaust victims and survivors.5 The printed press was one of the foremost mediums in which Swedes received information about their

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own society and the world around them during the Second World War making this particular medium an appropriate source for studying public discourse at the time. Film, however, and specifically newsreels and short films, also contributed to communication around the experiences of the Holocaust during the 1930s and 1940s in a variety of ways. During this period, film was regarded as a highly efficient tool and was used by the Government to shape public opinion on issues deemed important to the war effort.6 As media scholar Mats Jönsson notes, ‘during the interwar years, those in power gradually recognised the medium’s increasingly important role as a communicative platform with great social, didactic, and propagandistic impact’.7 Furthermore, Jönsson contends that since the film medium emanated during a period of great social experimentation, ‘Swedish citizens have never been as visually and audio-visually disciplined’ as they were between 1920 and 1960.8 Films were thus a significant platform for representations of a wide range of social phenomena and they had a meaningful impact on the discursive construction of refugees and Holocaust victims at the end of the war. In analysing Vittnesbördet, different categorisations are also significant in understanding how the Holocaust survivors were constructed in relation to idealised conceptions of the victim. One of the categories that will be examined in greater detail is that of gender. Although gender studies of the Holocaust have developed into a prolific field over the past forty years, the focus has primarily been on the experiences of women in ghettos and camps.9 While this chapter does contribute to an understanding of gendered suffering during the war, the primary aim is to explore how gendered representations of camp survivors were constructed in the direct aftermath of the war and the potential discursive effects that have come from such constructions. This remains a largely underexplored aspect of representation and survival in Holocaust studies. Particular attention is also paid to what the American historian Carolyn Dean refers to as the ‘erasures’ of victims’ experiences.10 In her study of French and American post-war debates on Jewish victimisation, Dean contends that ‘while the representation of injury is always culturally mediated in some fashion, we should still pay attention to the ideological investments in such mediations and their impact on victims’.11 In relation to Vittnesbördet, then, Dean’s contentions can be applied to question how national consensus-driven representations of rescue efforts affect the construction of victim experiences in public discourse. However, the mediators of experience also function within aesthetic boundaries that are

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conditioned by norms of what a victim should be. It is this intersection between political strategy and the normative (and normalising) aesthetic that the coming sections will explore.

Creating a Media Consensus: The Swedish Board of Information, Film, and the Press The film Vittnesbördet premiered on 22 May 1945 as the pièce de résistance in a series of short films depicting Swedish efforts to aid and rescue refugees from the European continent and Norway.12 Vittnesbördet, roughly translated as ‘The Testimony’, is a 21-minute-long compilation of moving images showing the sanitation and rehabilitation work undertaken by the Swedish Red Cross as part of their mission to rescue individuals from German concentration camps. It was produced by the dominant film company in Sweden at the time, Svensk Filmindustri (SF), and directed by Nils Jerring. Although the film was not explicitly requested by the Swedish Government, it conveyed many of the themes included in the state’s efforts to construct a national consensus around Sweden’s role in the war. One of the most controversial institutions for regulating the media during this period was Statens Informationsstyrelse (‘The National Board of Information’, SIS). SIS was formed in 1940 to oversee and manage the ‘flow of information’ in Sweden during the war and was absolved of its duties in September 1945.13 Between 1940 and 1944, SIS worked to censor media outlets that worked to shape public opinion in an ‘undesirable’ manner. This included overtly Nazi daily newspapers such as Dagsposten, as well as the major dailies in their publishing of issues that were ‘sensitive’ for the Nazi regime.14 Another of SIS’s central tasks was to inform the population on Swedish Beredskap (‘readiness’) and the looming threat of war.15 In an overview of SIS’s specific work with images and films, it is stated that during the spring and summer of 1940, SIS was also tasked with creating films that depicted ‘Swedish societal values’ and how these needed to be protected.16 From 1943 onwards, however, the fear of invasion waned with the shifting tide of the war and the thematic content of the short films changed from ‘readiness’ to issues with relevance to the coming post-war reality, such as refugee relief and economic growth.17 In his article on SIS’s production of films dealing with refugees, Aaron Seth Kahn shows how the Swedish Government attempted to bolster the image of a rescue nation—an image that would help legitimise Sweden’s policy of neutrality—through short films depicting the arrival and

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reception of refugees in Sweden. Flyktingar finner en hamn (‘Refugees Find a Harbour’), which was first shown in Swedish cinemas in January 1945, was directed by the Danish filmmaker Bjarne Henning Jensen and produced by Svensk Filmindustri under the supervision of SIS.18 The film is divided into two parts: the first depicting a drifting boat between Denmark and Sweden holding a Danish architect, his Norwegian wife, and their two children who are rescued by a passing Swedish navy vessel. The second part shows a lonely man being helped by Swedish military and medical personnel to cross the Norwegian border into Sweden. Before SIS requested for Flyktingar finner en hamn to be made, Svensk Filmindustri had produced the short film (a mere four minutes long) Flykten över sundet (‘Escape Across the Sound’) depicting the rescue of the Danish Jews in October 1943. Although the latter was not explicitly requested by SIS, the film was made to promote Swedish rescue efforts. In fact, many filmmakers chose to make films that contained a pro-Swedish or patriotic message during the war. As Kahn keenly observes, ‘an early internal SIS memorandum notes with approval that commercial filmmakers “often at their own initiative” chose to portray issues relevant to Sweden’s neutrality’.19 In addition, two of the studio managers at SF— one of whom had previously ‘overseen production of the board’s short films’—were also active members of SIS’s film council (Filmrådet).20 Thus, although there was no direct control over private film companies during the war, there was considerable overlap between the institutional forces that shaped the content and production of film at that time.21 Vittnesbördet, also a product of Svensk Filmindustri, was not explicitly requested by SIS, but followed the same themes as the previous films about refugees and rescue work, emphasising the importance of Sweden’s policy of neutrality and the rescue efforts that this facilitated. The humanitarian mission depicted in Vittnesbördet, often referred to as the ‘White Buses’ mission, was initiated on behalf of Scandinavian concentration camp internees who were to be saved from ‘desperate Nazi fanatics,’22 as the allied forces moved ever closer to the German camps. Count Folke Bernadotte, the head of the Swedish Red Cross at the time, negotiated together with the representative for the Swedish section of the World Jewish Congress, Norbert Masur, for the release of individuals from concentration camps and workhouses all across Germany. The camp Neuengamme was assigned as a round-up point for all Scandinavian internees who were to be released into the care of the Red Cross. An estimated 15,000 prisoners were rescued, about half of whom were

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Scandinavian and half of other nationalities: most in the latter category were women of French, Belgian, and Polish descent who were transported from Ravensbrück to Sweden in April 1945.23 There is no absolute estimate regarding the numbers of Jews saved by the mission. However, Svante Hansson asserts that approximately 4500 Jews were rescued, a majority of whom were women.24 According to SIS’s internal organisational history, the mission became one of their most extensively publicised actions during the war and constituted a ‘grand finale’ of the organisation’s activities. Because the negotiations between Bernadotte and Himmler were of such a delicate nature, SIS issued a ‘gag order’ on all media outlets regarding the mission.25 This request for media silence also constituted a stipulation issued by Himmler for the release of Norwegian and Danish concentration camp internees.26 The argument was that knowledge about these concessions could tarnish German pride and should therefore not be circulated in the foreign press. Thus, a secret press conference was held at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Stockholm in February 1945, specifically for the Stockholm-based press, where Bernadotte disclosed details of the mission and asked the journalist corps to refrain from writing about the Swedish Red Cross’s activities as this could endanger the lives of the rescuees.27 When the gag order was lifted on 1 May, the press were quick to relay the details of the mission, enveloping them in stories of heroism, tragedy, and hope.28 They had followed the mission each step of the way through information given by SIS and most newspapers could, therefore, provide details of all stages of the mission. A couple of daily newspapers had, however, already begun to publish news about the rescue operation before this point. As Holmila shows in his study on the response of the Swedish press to the Holocaust in the spring of 1945, the liberal daily Dagens Nyheter published a story on 25 April, an article that contained an interview with five Jewish Norwegian survivors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald.29 Furthermore, Holmila contends that few newspapers chose to show pictures from the camps, the tabloid newspaper Expressen being one of the only exceptions.30 Indeed, in Dagens Nyheter, it was even argued that the publishing of camp images was both ‘unpleasant and unsuitable’ for Swedish newspapers.31 Visual culture and its significance for the communication of Holocaust experience is, by now, a much-explored subject. In her well-cited book Remembering to Forget: The Holocaust through the Camera’s Eye, Barbie Zelizer declares that,

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Western epistemology has always been ocular-centric or vision-based. With ‘the seen’ taken as a primary ground of knowledge in Western thought, ‘seeing’ has become in many cases a metaphor for perspective. In this sense, the ways in which the Holocaust is visually represented have become a concrete corollary for our sense of what the Holocaust means.32

Most Swedes had not been exposed to the many photos and films emanating from the liberated camps during the spring of 1945 due to the collective position of the press that it was unethical to publish these images. As such, Vittnesbördet must have been an impactful presentation of Nazi cruelty, being one of the first visual representations of camp survivors presented in Sweden.

Vittnesbördet: An Exhibition of Swedish Excellence Approximately twenty percent of those saved by the ‘White Buses’ were Jews. A vast majority of the Jews deported from Denmark in the autumn of 1943 were rescued from Theresienstadt and as most Norwegian Jews had been sent directly to their deaths in 1942, most of the remaining rescued Jews came from the women’s camp Ravensbrück—a camp that Jewish women had been sent to as part of various evacuation schemes in late 1944 and early 1945.33 Although there were Jewish women featured in Vittnesbördet, their Jewish identity was never noted or commented on in the film. With regard to Jewish men, it is difficult to know whether they were featured in the footage, as there was no mention of the individuals’ religious identities. With regard to the women, however, we know from the documentary film Hoppets Hamn that two of the women featured in Vittnesbördet—Irene Krausz-Feinman and her mother—were Jewish. None of the men shown in Vittnesbördet, however, feature in Gertten’s film or in the book Hoppets Hamn, so we simply do not know whether the men shown at the end of Vittnesbördet are Jewish or not. In contrast to Flykten över sundet and Flyktingar finner en hamn that included only Scandinavian refugees, Vittnesbördet includes clips of people from many nations.34 When the camera spans over the refugees standing on the boat deck or in line at the harbour, waiting for food and a newspaper, the narrator refers to Belgian and French women in need of Swedish aid after their traumatic experiences in the camps. At the end of the film, Norwegian and Danish men are also singled out and given background

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stories. However, no references are made to Jewish victim-survivors. Instead, the small-state realist narrative of the sturdy rescue nation coming to the aid of war-torn Europe takes precedence over the identities of these survivors. Vittnesbördet begins with a scene showing Count Folke Bernadotte leaving his wife at Bromma airport. According to the narrator, he is off to South Germany to do what he has done so many times during the spring of 1945: to facilitate the rescue of concentration camp internees. The next clip shows military buses being prepared for the long journey down to the continent. At this point, the buses are still in camouflage colours with a red cross painted on top of white circles. Although the mission was humanitarian and not military, the music playing in the background to this scene is Franz Schubert’s Marsh Militaires (known by many Swedes as the theme music to the Disney short film Santa’s Workshop, shown every Christmas Eve on Swedish public broadcasting television). The music and the images of military gear being loaded onto military vehicles thus ties Swedish neutrality to the humanitarian rescue mission. The rest of the film shows the arrival of the former concentration camp prisoners and how they are cared for by the Red Cross staff, both during the sanitation period and the later period of convalescence. In passing, the narrator mentions that the interpreters hired by the Red Cross struggle with the religious strife amongst the former prisoners, alluding to the conflict-ridden relationship between Catholic Poles and Jews. Beyond this comment, however, the refugees are only attributed a gender and/or a nationality. With regard to Flykten över sundet and Flyktingar finner en hamn, Kahn argues that this representation of refugees was predicated on the political issues that were perceived to be important to Swedish public opinion.35 Flyktingar finner en hamn, for instance, was edited so that no non-Scandinavian refugees were shown in the footage.36 As Kahn notes, the decision to limit the portrayal of refugees in [Refugees find a Harbour and Escape Across the Sound] to Norwegians and Danes, and specifically to excise all references to Jews, likely came directly from SIS. Notations by a state censor in the copies of Henning-Jensen’s scripts preserved in the board’s papers clearly mark all descriptions of Jews and non-Nordic asylum seekers for deletion.37

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Furthermore, SIS asked the filmmakers to highlight the Scandinavian organisations that were working from Sweden to support citizens in exile. This was an important point for SIS since it was believed that the financial cost of the refugees was a crucial issue for the public.38 It is also remarkable that Jews are not mentioned in Flykten över sundet but are ‘portrayed simply as Danish,’39 when thousands of Danish Jews were rescued by boat from Nazi-occupied Denmark in October 1943—an event that garnered significant publicity in the Swedish press with explicit references to the Jewish identity of those that were rescued.40 How can we understand this exclusion of Jews in Swedish war-time short films? Both Karin Kvist Geverts and Paul A Levine have shown that Sweden’s restrictive immigration policy shifted and became more generous as the Holocaust impacted Jewish populations in Scandinavian countries, starting with the deportation of the Norwegian Jews in 1942.41 This could have meant that the inclusion of Scandinavian Jews was less of a ‘problem’ than the inclusion of non-Scandinavian or Eastern European Jews. Nevertheless, antisemitic ideas or, as Kvist Geverts terms it, an ‘antisemitic background noise’ regarding Jewish immigration and what it might bring still lingered in public discourse, making it a tenuous issue with politicians, policymakers, and the social-democratic shapers of public opinion.42 Previous research on Sweden and the refugees of 1945 has shown that Jewish refugee survivors were under-represented in public discourse.43 This has been highlighted both in relation to the reporting on the ‘White Buses’ mission as well as the so-called UNRRA mission, which brought a greater portion of Jewish survivors to Sweden than the ‘White Buses’ mission.44 Still, Holmila shows that Jewish victims and survivors figured more prominently in the Swedish press compared to the British and Finnish press. Yet, he still concludes that ‘the narrative was predominantly constructed along the lines of “Nordic victimhood”, which was, in a sense, diverted Nationalism’.45 As Kvist Geverts also expounds in her dissertation, from 1943 onwards, the differentiation between refugees based on race became a contentious issue in Swedish public discourse.46 Several influential opinion-makers, among them the economist Karin Kock, directed a fierce critique against the National Board of Health and Welfare’s decision to publish figures relating to Norwegian-Jewish refugees in Sweden in the autumn of 1943. The rescue of the Danish Jews in October 1943 also added fuel to the fire with commentators connecting such classifications to antisemitism and racial persecution. Although many government agencies still referred to

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the numbers of Jewish refugees in their internal communications, formal statistics on immigration largely lost their references to ‘race’ and religious affiliation after 1944.47 In addition, the ‘White Buses’ own registers did not contain any information about ‘race’ or religious background. Rather, these statistics were gathered by aid-workers, both Jewish and gentile, throughout the mission and as a part of the continuing aid work in Sweden.48 Although Vittnesbördet was not commissioned by SIS, and was therefore not technically a government product, it still depicted one of the most extensive Swedish humanitarian efforts during the war, making it an important reflection of government practice. Thus, public references to Jews as a distinct group among the refugees could have been perceived as something that would make them more vulnerable to further instances of antisemitism and persecution. This tendency to represent Jews according to their nationality was also prominent in other Western countries.49 Perhaps this can also explain internal SIS references to the vulnerability of survivors. SIS had a representative at Ramlösa convalescent centre to oversee the press coverage of the internees. In addition, SIS called all relevant government agencies concerned with immigration to a conference where they attempted to create a consensus regarding the language that should be used in public matters concerning refugees.50 Another conference was held after the weekly magazine Se had published a report from an internment camp near Kalmar that contained information about the identity of internees.51 In their activities overview, SIS described these measures as a way to ensure that ‘the humanitarian perspective was considered and that the refugees’ identities were protected in those cases where retaliatory measures were feared’.52 Although this most probably referred to the protection of German army deserters (some interned in and around Kalmar), SIS made sure that information about the refugees and their backgrounds was tightly controlled, making any reports on the refugees in the press subject to the good opinion of SIS officials. Moreover, this opinion was most often based on the subject’s ability to promote the positive image of Swedish neutrality to its neighbouring countries and across Europe. In SIS’s comments on Flyktingar finner en hamn, it was noted by an official that Norwegian refugees must be emphasised as the Government needed to create good-will in Norway.53 In fact, SIS also described the Norwegian refugee group in Sweden as highly problematic for the very reason that they were vocal in their criticism of Swedish neutrality (and were thereby deemed ungrateful). The explicit references to different nationalities in Vittnesbördet can thus be seen as a

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way for the Swedish Government to communicate to other European countries (Norway, in particular) that their citizens were being cared for—a care facilitated by the policy of neutrality. Through such an interpretation, the Jewish survivors were not exactly hidden from view, but were instead constructed as Polish, Danish, French, and Belgian nationals. In the eyes of the Swedish Government, the national diversity of those rescued demonstrated the superiority of Swedish policy, they were caring for citizens that their own governments had failed to care for. As Johan Östling notes, Self-righteousness was a salient feature [of small-state realism]. Admittedly, Sweden had in some ways deviated from strict neutrality, but on the whole the Swedish policy had been that of resistance and a major effort for peace. ‘We have made our contribution, we have struggled in our own way’ the Swedish Prime Minister Per-Albin Hansson concluded in a speech on the very last day of the war. To his mind his wartime coalition government had not only acted successfully but that the whole Swedish order and way of life was superior.54

This somewhat arrogant position was to be communicated outwards to silence critics and to convince them that Sweden’s policy of neutrality benefitted all of Scandinavia. It is difficult to give any conclusive answers as to why those that were featured in Vittnesbördet were not referenced as Jewish or non-Jewish along with their nationalities and genders. This is partly due to the fact that little research has been conducted on antisemitic discourse as a specific phenomenon during and in the direct aftermath of the war. Most studies (including those referenced above) have focused on migration policy and/or discourses surrounding migration. The intellectual historian Henrik Bachner has studied Swedish antisemitism in the 1930s as well as post-1945, thus leaving a chronological gap in this area of research.55 It is possible, however, that references to Jews were omitted due to a combination of antisemitic discourse, described as a ‘background noise’ by Kvist Geverts, and the notion that references to Jews constituted an act of antisemitism in itself—something that government officials were keen to avoid after the war shifted in 1943. As the intentions behind the film were to display Swedish excellence, the inclusion of references to Jewish suffering was, most likely, a secondary issue. It is this lack of care for the particularity of Jewish suffering that reveals an antisemitic ‘background noise’, whereas

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the deliberate exclusion of such references (if these were ever made explicit) was the direct result of considerations regarding the dangers of making Jewish victims visible to Swedish publics.

From Objects of Torture to Objects of Care Women made up the majority of those who arrived with the ‘White Buses’, as well as those who arrived with the UNRRA mission in the spring and summer of 1945.56 It is therefore not surprising that Vittnesbördet includes several different portrayals of female survivors. The female group was also more diverse in terms of nationality than that of the rescued men who were primarily of Danish or Norwegian descent.57 Even though little emphasis was placed on the survivors’ identities (beyond national signifiers) in the film, the way that women, in particular, are portrayed shows that the representation of their victimhood was important to building a national consensus on Sweden’s rescue efforts. Their representation also differs significantly from how men are represented not merely because the groups were different in their composition but because they were to convey different messages to audiences. In Vittnesbördet, women are shown in groups where they are seen both as happy and grateful as well as sad and fragile. They are also depicted as mothers, struggling to carry carefully swathed babies in clunky make-shift mattress cots. One scene in the film focuses on these women as well as on a small girl who appears to be around six years old. As a way of portraying the sanitation process that the prisoners had to go through the camera follows a large group of female survivors as they disrobe, go into a sauna, an outdoor shower, and receive new clothes. The narrator emphasises the fact that the women get to go into the sauna and then shower in ‘open air’ (‘i det fria’), making it seem as if they were at a Nordic spa retreat. In the scene, the women are shown naked and they hunch and slouch as they are ushered between the tents and the outdoor shower. It is unclear if this is done to avoid the cameraman and the eye of the camera or if this protective posture is due to cold weather. Either way, it is clear that the women are uncomfortable. In a clip where the women are shown disrobing, the forearms of two women are held up to the camera by a medical professional. The narrator states that these women were treated ‘like cattle’ by the Nazis. However, the juxtaposition of this phrase with the image of these women reinforces the notion that they are ‘cattle’, rather than communicating that things had changed. In a sense, these women were

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still being treated like cattle, big groups ushered between rooms for disrobing, the sauna, and the outdoor showers. Instead of being objects of torture or death, they had become objects of care. The projection of these women as objects of care is further entrenched by the description of them as previously neglected. As the camera closes in on the doctor removing a bandage from the back of an emaciated woman, the narrator comments that the wounds the woman exhibits are a result of ‘vitamin deficiency and neglect’.58 The Swedish word for ‘neglect’, vanvård, which is used by the narrator, connotes negligent practice directed towards children or animals. It thus implies that the prisoners were not cared for properly by Nazi authorities, implying that the Nazi’s had somehow been the legitimate caretakers of these individuals at one point in time. During the earliest decades of Swedish Social Democracy, the idea of the state as a benevolent father, ordained by science and rationality to ‘set things right’ in the life of his children, permeated the higher echelons of social-democratic political life. The foremost and, arguably, the most successful proponents of this notion were the socialist intellectuals and politicians Alva and Gunnar Myrdal. The Swedish historian, Yvonne Hirdman, argues that there were two ways in which the Myrdals envisioned that the state could legitimately interfere in people’s lives: if the state had the scientific/expert authority on a matter and if the state had given something to the individual. As Hirdman notes, ‘if people received help they had to give something back in return’.59 Thus, in being rescued by the Swedish Government, these women had to bear witness by literally baring their bodies to Swedish cinema goers. The state had cared for them through the activities of the Swedish Red Cross and now they had to return that favour by providing this essential social service. The camera shows these women in their most vulnerable states, carrying their babies, without their clothes in the shower, preparing for a new life and completely at the mercy of the Red Cross staff. This is a representational phenomenon which Zelizer has labelled the ‘overgendering of women’,60 a strategy that reproduces ‘stereotypes of women as nurturing, domesticated, fragile, and vulnerable’.61 However, in the camp photographs that Zelizer analyses, only dead victims are shown in the absolute vulnerable state provided by female nudity. Survivor women, in contrast, were shown to be the upholders of domestic ideals under extreme conditions. In addition, Rochelle Saidel notes that

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because of the social relations between women and men, girls were brought up to be modest, and many women were traumatized when forced to parade naked before men and even other women. Women were also taught to be submissive and ‘the weaker sex,’ and they had to overcome this ingrained self-image in order to stay alive.62

It is, therefore, rather remarkable that the filmmakers of Vittnesbördet show these women in the nude—especially considering the fact that the female body, at this time, signified sex while the male body could signify many different aspects of the human condition such as strength, dominance, sophistication, health, and so on.63 The fact that the Red Cross helpers did not consider the potential re-traumatisation of the female survivors in having to undress in front of male aid-workers is less surprising than the fact that their bodies were put on display in front of cinema audiences in Sweden. In a way, the camera’s intrusion on the most intimate parts of these women’s lives underscores the inability of the filmmakers to view the women as human, and, more specifically, as women. It did not matter who they were, where they were from, or if they were uncomfortable with the camera on their bodies, so long as their very existence testified to the Nazi’s perpetration and the efficient and caring work of the Red Cross. This is also something which, in later representations of the Holocaust, has become a question of representative form. As film-studies scholar Aaron Kerner explains, the parade of naked Holocaust victims in archival footage in a documentary is not necessarily read as offensive—insofar as it is representing a historical fact—while on the other hand Steven Spielberg’s gas chamber/shower scene […] has been roundly criticized for the fetishistic and sadistic portrayal of the naked (female) victim.64

The documentary form or the fact that Vittnesbördet was filmed as a reportage of current events thus somehow made the nudity more acceptable: both in 1945 and when this footage was reused in 2011. In another scene of Vittnesbördet, one woman is given particular attention. She is said to be an old lady but cannot be more than thirty-five. The narrator describes her tawdry clothes and the disintegrating shoes on her feet as the camera follows her into a room where a nurse helps her disrobe. No background story is provided. The camera stays on her boy-like figure

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as the Red Cross worker helps her to remove her shirt. Her upper body is exposed to the camera and her flat chest symbolises the de-feminisation and the de-humanisation created by Nazi violence. This woman is also objectified by the camera and the narrator’s words display the filmmakers’ ignorance of how experiences in a Nazi camp could age a person. For many camp survivors, an essential aspect of recovering some of their humanity lay in the regaining of gender-signifiers which made them feel feminine/masculine and desirable: not as objects but as human subjects. In her article Scarlet Lips in Belsen, Anna Reading highlights the example of a shipment of lipstick, sent by the allied forces to the Belsen concentration camp after its liberation that was greatly appreciated by the female survivors. In the introduction to her article, Reading comments that, Liutenant-Colonel M.W. Gonin agonised, as did [she] on reading his report, whether lipstick was an appropriate response on the part of the Allied welfare teams, given that, on arrival, 10,000 unburied dead were found in the camp which was without water or electricity and that typhoid was raging among 40,000 starving women and men.65

One might be prone to agree with such an assessment, but as Reading explains, because of the Nazi’s cultural policies, that targeted both gendered and ethnic/religious aspects of cultural life, ‘lipstick signified, in that moment in history, the cultural display and recognition of an element of Jewish femininity—an aspect of humanity, along with Jewish men and women, that Nazi policies attempted to destroy’.66 In both the book and the film Hoppets hamn, this phenomenon is conveyed through the example of colourful dresses. The little girl from the shower sequences named Irene (now an elderly woman, living in Johannesburg, South Africa) states in the film that the women were so excited about choosing their own dresses.67 In the book, she is quoted saying that her mother thought they would all vie for the most colourful dress. This was, according to Irene, because the grey, striped, dull prison uniforms had stripped the women of their individuality, something that was reinstated through the bright dresses given to them by the Red Cross.68 In early representations, the camp survivors were constructed as grateful and humble, thanking Swedish society for feeding them, caring for them, and providing the opportunity to return to their home countries.69 To be sure, in contrast to their previous experiences in one or several

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camps, life in Sweden must have seemed heavenly. In the film Hoppets hamn, for example, Irene narrates these scenes, pointing out her mother and herself. She smiles at the images and states that they were all just so grateful to be able to wash and that her mother repeated to her, ‘look Irene, everything is so clean!’.70 In the book Hoppets hamn: när överlevarna kom till Sverige, however, Irene is also quoted stating that I also remember that she was upset about the delousing treatments and about the fact that there were men there, Swedish soldiers. They were in charge of the inspection, but we had been through similar things with the Germans and it felt degrading for the women to undress and be naked in front of these men.71

She also recalled being disappointed in having to take vitamins before she was allowed her food (meaning that she was kept standing up while she struggled to swallow the pills) and that they were not given very big portions. In the same breath, however, Irene also remembers being given dolls and declares that everyone was so nice to her, ‘all Swedes were so nice’—so much so that her favourite colours became blue and yellow (the colours of the Swedish national flag).72 Thus, when footage of Vittnesbördet was reused in the film Hoppets hamn, the notion of Sweden as the perfect safe haven was reiterated and further entrenched by only showing the parts of Irene’s interview where she speaks positively about her experiences. There is no mention in the film of Irene’s mother ever being uncomfortable with being naked in front of the aid workers or the camera. Yet, when a more extensive record of the interviews with the survivors and their descendants were published in Åberg and Gertten’s book, this image was challenged through more complex, and sometimes contradictory feelings toward the Swedish treatment of those rescued. Such contradictory feelings are also evidenced in other, marginalised voices which demonstrate that some were unhappy with the way they were treated by Swedish officials and rescue workers. The Swedish historian Malin Thor Tureby has, for example, shown that the refugees were vocal at times about the restrictions placed on them by their new care-takers.73 At an internment camp in Kalmar, for instance, the internees were not allowed to move freely between the floors, making communication between family members impossible. In addition, the survivors attested to being punished by having their radios removed, making it impossible for them to hear when lists were read over survivors in different displaced

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persons camps across Europe.74 Hence, far from all were pleased with their experiences in Sweden, perhaps some were not even grateful to be alive having lost all their family in the genocide. Such stories are rare, or non-­ existent, in public discourse on Sweden and the Holocaust, and they do not feature in any significant way in most of Swedish historiography concerning the Holocaust. It is also interesting (albeit understandable given the great temporal gap between the films) that, when clips from Vittnesbördet were reused in Hoppets hamn, the women’s experiences were narrated by what Susan Rubin Suleiman has termed the ‘1.5 generation’—a term that is more commonly referred to as ‘child survivors’.75 As previously mentioned, Irene Krausz-Feinman—born into a Dutch-Jewish family and deported with her mother and brother in 1942—is the girl who features in several frames of Vittnesbördet. She came with her mother to Sweden through the ‘White Buses’ mission after spending sixteen months in Westerbork and approximately fifteen months in Ravensbrück. Ewa, another of Gertten’s interview subjects, is the daughter of Polish-Catholic parents and came to Sweden as an infant, her mother having been rescued by the ‘White Buses’. Since Ewa was born in Ravensbrück, she narrates her mother’s Holocaust experience rather than her own. Thus, she tells the story of Joanna, a woman weighing 39 kg when rescued and whose pitiful state is displayed on the cover of both the book and film Hoppets Hamn. One of the most prominent stories told of Joanna’s Holocaust experience in the film Hoppets hamn regards the malnourished mother’s heroic efforts in retrieving her baby after the Red Cross convoy had come under attack on their way from Ravensbrück to Malmö. Joanna had to run into the forest and hide. As she was so weakened by her difficult labour and experiences in the camp, another woman carried Joanna’s new-born baby. In the chaos, Ewa was dropped and her mother, although deemed too weak to even carry her daughter, scoured the ground on all fours in order to find her child. Later in the film, Ewa also states that her mother always talked about the generosity of the Red Cross as they arrived in Sweden, how they were given food, clothes, and cigarettes. Ewa presents the image of a self-sacrificing mother who was rescued from the gates of hell. Appearing only as a footnote in the film, however, is the fact that Ewa and her mother were separated for three years by the Swedish Government because Ewa had contracted tuberculosis in the camp. As Ewa was only a small child at the time, she is unlikely to remember this long-term

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separation from her mother. However, in the story of Joanna’s life, this period of separation must have been significant and reflects another traumatising aspect of life after the catastrophe. Moreover, Irene states that there is a lot that she cannot remember from her time both in the camp and in Sweden, and that her mother refused to give her any details as she preferred to forget that part of her past. Irene’s fragmentary memory is also demonstrated by her confusion at seeing footage of women disembarking at Malmö harbour, some of whom are wearing normal attire (i.e. not prison uniforms). She marvels at this and says that she does not know where they got those clothes from since, as she remembers, they were all dressed in prisoners’ uniforms. At the end of the war, however, with Ravensbrück receiving thousands of prisoners from other camps, there was a lack of uniforms and instead the new arrivals were given clothes from murdered victims, with an X added on the back to mark them as prisoners. Dori Laub famously posits that there are ‘three, separate, distinct levels of witnessing in relation to the Holocaust experience: the level of being a witness to oneself within the experience, the level of being witness to the testimonies of others; and the level of being witness to the process of witnessing itself’.76 While Irene is a witness to herself as a child in the camp, Ewa, who has no memories of her Holocaust experience, instead narrates her mother’s story. The fact that Irene cannot remember her fellow camp prisoners in normal clothing is not a detail that puts her testimony into question. Perhaps most women were in striped prison uniforms where she was in the camp, as well as in the specific Red Cross bus that she travelled in with her mother. However, she also states that her mother used to cover her eyes in the camp to protect her from its most gruesome scenes. Irene also remembers coping by daydreaming and pretending that she was somewhere else. This certainly did not prevent her from witnessing many of the things that went on in the camp, but it did protect her from certain experiences that were common for child survivors of the Holocaust, such as taking on the responsibilities of an adult, making decisions for their own and their family’s survival, and so on.77 Irene was only eight when she arrived in Sweden, making her five years old when she was first deported to Westerbork. She thus fits into Rubin Suleiman’s second age group within the 1.5 generation, children aged 4–10 who are ‘old enough to remember but too young to understand’.78 This prompts the question posed by many Holocaust scholars—‘who can retell?’79 And, perhaps more importantly, what can they retell? Is it

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possible for Ewa and Irene to convey the experience of adult survivors, in this case their mothers, who lived through the Holocaust? In her studies on ‘Post-memory’, Marianne Hirsch argues that photographs and other objects or embodiments of traumatic experience are integral to how the ‘second generation’ remembers.80 Although Irene and Ewa both technically belong to the 1.5 generation, Ewa constructs her memory of the Holocaust around her mother’s narratives and pictures that she has been given (some of which are shown in the film as well as the book Hoppets Hamn). Moreover, Vittnesbördet also constitutes a form of pneumonic object around which Ewa and Irene tell their stories. In a way, then, Vittnesbördet both conditions and facilitates the narration of Holocaust experience by compelling Irene and Ewa to comment on what is shown in the frames. For example, the film clips shown to Ewa incites her to describe Joanna as the protective maternal figure, clutching her child although she can barely hold herself upright. Joanna as mother then becomes a central theme in Ewa’s testimony. In addition, the images of Irene and her mother receiving clothes prompts memories of how the women rejoiced in the most colourful dresses and how everyone treated Irene with such kindness in Sweden. Her narrative thus revolves around how her childhood was restored by Swedes and Swedish aid. However, although it is not included in the film Hoppets hamn, Irene’s memories of her mother’s unease at the soldiers’ presence while the women undressed also demonstrates how the film not only conditions the narrative, but also teases out memories that might not have otherwise been deemed important or appropriate by the person being interviewed. In the grand scheme of the Holocaust, such details, especially ones that relate to gender-specific experiences, have often been considered insignificant, by interviewees and interviewers alike.81

The Scandinavian Subject and Jewish Masculine Identity In Vittnesbördet, ‘male Scandinavians’ constitute the only victim group where the subjects are individualised. A handful of male survivors are depicted in the latter part of the film. The narrator explains that these individuals are Danish and describes what happened to them: one has tuberculosis because of the cramped sleeping quarters in the camp, while another is said to be an architect and the camera captures him drawing

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life-like pictures of the view from his window in Dachau. The narrator goes on to explain that a third man is both blind and deaf due to the severe torture he endured at the hands of the Gestapo. It is added that the man did not relay any information to the Germans, despite the torture. A still-­ shot of the man was also reproduced in Dagens Nyheter and the weekly magazine Vecko-journalen where his story was recounted.82 Together with the female victims of special stature (e.g. Nadine Huang and Charlotte Jackson), the Danish man is fashioned into the ‘exemplary’ victim. He is of Scandinavian descent, a man who resisted the Nazi occupiers, and he has suffered greatly under the Nazi regime without betraying his countrymen. The man is smiling in the pictures circulated in the Swedish press—a smile that signifies his resilience and, by extension, the unbreakable spirit of the Scandinavian countries. This is also demonstrated in another scene where several men are shown laughing and smoking while one of them attempts a card-trick, a stunt made more difficult since his finger was broken by camp guards. The narrator comments that it is astounding how well the patients are coping mentally after all they have been through. He adds that ‘the Danish joviality and the Norwegian jauntiness remains’.83 Such characterisations of national traits are also consistent with newspaper reports on survivor refugees in 1945. Thor Tureby, for instance, shows how French women were represented in Southern Sweden’s local press as good seamstresses and Polish women were described as proficient at needlework due to their respective nationalities.84 The female non-Scandinavian survivors tended to receive ‘useful’ characteristics, whereas the male Scandinavian survivors were attributed qualities of character and mental strength. The male Scandinavian subject can be understood in relation to the female non-Scandinavian object as reinforcing gender norms of that time. As defenders of the nation, men embodied resistance and resilience, while women constituted the ‘unproblematic’ victim: the victim that had to be defended and protected.85 Even in much later studies of women in the Holocaust, they were (and still are to some degree) portrayed as passive, selfless, and self-sacrificial victims. For instance, Zoë Waxman writes that ‘studies of women and the Holocaust tend to portray female witnesses in much the same way as child witnesses, as simply being unproblematic victims’.86 The conflation of women and child victims is, of course, something that can be found in contemporary news reports of ‘women and children’ being persecuted, fleeing, dying, etc. Male victims, in this case of Scandinavian descent, are represented in Vittnesbördet as resilient and

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strong—the antithesis of the women who passively suffered the treatment of their oppressors and must now receive care and support. The men are also portrayed at a much later stage in the reception process where they are already beginning to recover and show signs of rehabilitation. As such, the men come to symbolise the rapid recovery of formerly occupied Denmark and Norway, whereas the women embody the cruelty of the Nazi regime. It is also significant that the men are only shown clothed. The camera spans over their well-made beds and they are shown reading newspapers with coffee cups snuggly resting on their bed-­ side tables. These images create a blatant contrast to the earlier depictions of female bodies that were shown wounded and scarred to the camera (see Figs. 8.1 and 8.2). War—the World Wars in particular—has been described as constituting transformative points in history when normative masculinities were renegotiated.87 For instance, Maddy Carey states that the effect of war has been to curtail conventional masculine practice, as, amongst other things, conscription distanced them from their work and

Figs. 8.1 and 8.2  Fig. 8.1 (left) shows Scandinavian men recuperating at a convalescent facility in southern Sweden while Fig.  8.2 (right) shows the doctor removing a bandage from a naked woman’s back in one of the sanitising tents erected in the vicinity of Malmö harbour. (Stills from the film Vittnesbördet)

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families and thus any immediate capacity to provide or protect—although certainly the defence of a nation was an alternative form of protection on which many men could hang their masculinities.88

The pictures in Figs. 8.1 and 8.2 display this seeming contradiction between the suspension of traditional masculinity, as conceived of in prewar Swedish society, and the masculine ideal of the soldier/national protector. The newspapers and pristine pyjamas allude to images of the father, lying in bed on Sunday morning with his paper and breakfast tray. This portrayal of the men shows them as if they were back in a state of domestic bliss. Instead of being pampered and cared for by their wives, female nurses tend to their needs. Rather than having their masculinity suspended, like the women portrayed in Vittnesbördet, the Scandinavian men are shown to have regained their masculinity—well on their way to resuming fatherhood and their status as strong pillars of society and as family providers. The potential Jewish identities of the men portrayed in Vittnesbördet are never noted or commented upon. This, however, is something which has been ‘rectified’ in the film and the book Hoppets hamn where the story of the Polish Jew Jozef (‘Joe’) Rozenberg has been included. Joe came to Sweden with his sister in July 1945 and befriended a Swedish dock-worker named Stig Kinnhagen, who is also featured in the film and the book Hoppets Hamn. In addition, the book includes the story of Hungarian-­ Jewish Ivan Newman who was rescued from Ravensbrück as a young boy by the ‘White Buses’. The inclusion of Ivan and Joe into the narrative of Sweden’s rescue efforts during the final months of the war and beyond adds another layer to the portrayal of those who came to Sweden in the spring and summer of 1945. Although a majority of those arriving with the ‘White Buses’ and UNRRA were women, some non-Scandinavian male Jewish survivors, like Joe, came to Sweden as close relatives to those rescued. The addition of a Jewish male perspective into the reconstruction of this part of Swedish history also provides some interesting insights into the intricacies of how Jewish men negotiated norms of masculinity after the war. In telling the story of how he came to Sweden, Joe describes how he, after being liberated from a camp outside Hannover, found his sister alive in Bergen-Belsen, albeit sick with tuberculosis. He vowed to his sister that he would take care of her and provide for her from then on and says in his interview that ‘in that moment I felt as both father and mother to her’.89

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As Carey highlights in her work on Jewish masculinities during the Holocaust, there was never one homogenous Jewish masculine identity, but rather, these identities were individually negotiated and have to be understood within their historical context.90 However, Carey also argues that, in inter-war Europe, there was one dominant masculine norm, the ‘bourgeoisie masculinity’, within which physical fitness and health as well as ‘duty, honour and respectability’ reigned supreme. An integral aspect of all these traits was also the ‘man’s ability to provide for, and manage, his own family,’91 something which, together with physical fitness and health, was destroyed by the Holocaust. Joe was nineteen years old when he came to Sweden in 1945. As a Polish Jew from Lodz, his Holocaust experience had begun in 1939 when the Nazis occupied Poland. This occurred just after his bar mitzvah, so Joe was in his early teens when war broke out in Europe.92 In a sense, he never had the opportunity to adhere to this bourgeois masculine norm during the war, having his humanity and masculinity suspended during that time. In finding his sister, however, and in finding his future wife only weeks into his stay in Sweden, this masculine norm of provider and protector could slowly be reconquered. Like Irene and Ewa, Joe is a member of the 1.5 generation, albeit in an older age-bracket and with a much different experience as he went through both ghettoisation and several camps. Although not featured heavily in the film Hoppets hamn, Joe’s interview, partly disclosed in the book, details life in the Lodz ghetto—a much studied example of the Holocaust in Poland.93 No other interviewed survivor shown in the footage from Vittnesbördet came from a country where ghettoisation was practiced to the degree that it was in Poland, so Joe’s example contributes this particular aspect of the Holocaust experience. In addition, the testimony is given by a man who was an adolescent during the war and thereby both vividly remembers and, as a teen, also understood what was going on around him. The inclusion of Joe into both the film and the book Hoppets hamn is perhaps also indicative of how Swedish memory culture surrounding the Holocaust has changed over the course of the twentieth century and moving into the twenty-first century. There is a greater emphasis on the victim’s suffering and victim stories today compared to the direct aftermath of the Second World War. As Annette Wieviorka has so eloquently phrased it, the latter part of the last century developed into ‘the era of the witness’.94 This is partially true for Sweden as well.95 However, representations of survivors—as victims, as witnesses, and as heroes—have continuously been discursively tied to notions of Swedish action and

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Swedishness. Because of this, the survivors’ experiences of Sweden have often taken precedence over any interest in questions regarding the survivors themselves and their post-war lives.96

Some Concluding Remarks The widely held perception that film was a powerful medium for shaping public opinion meant that Swedish war-time short films about rescue were strictly controlled. Notions about what the public thought of immigration and its effects also came to affect the way survivors were portrayed in Vittnesbördet, amongst other films. The fact that Jewish survivors were exposed but at the same time excluded from the narrative is not surprising given the political context in which the film was produced and the themes the film broached. The camp survivors depicted in Vittnesbördet all embody a normative view of the ‘exemplary victim’. The women are depicted as passive ‘unproblematic’ victims that submit to sanitising treatment and having their tattooed arms held up to the camera. In contrast, the male Scandinavian victims are shown to be on the mend, recuperating in clean pyjamas and sheets, their humanity restored after only a few weeks in Sweden. A prominent theme in later reports on the Belsen trial, held during the autumn of 1945, was that of the female victim having to degrade herself to the Nazis by marching and standing naked in front of her tormentors.97 She, as the most vulnerable victim (next to children), had come to symbolise the inconceivable cruelty of the Nazi regime. In Vittnesbördet, then, the representation of female and male victims both follow gendered conceptions according to the dichotomy object/subject, whilst at the same time embodying the Nazi’s inhumanity and Swedish humanitarianism. Although we can only speculate about the long-term effects of such representations for the individuals involved, we know that particular gendered representations have made it more difficult for survivors to speak of experiences and feelings that go beyond them. It is perhaps also time to consider the subjects of Vittnesbördet in relation to how we study and portray survivors in documentary form. Although the film Hoppets hamn is more focused on the survivors themselves than Sweden’s rescue efforts, it still unreflexively reproduces Vittnesbördets images of the female camp survivors. This is done without considering how these women shown in the newsreel (some still alive when Hoppets hamn premiered) would feel about

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having their bodies re-exposed to Swedish audiences. Furthermore, the film Hoppets hamn never touches on issues that might nuance the image of Swedish rescue work at the end of the war. This can instead be found in the longer excerpts from the survivors interviewed in the book. This demonstrates how conceptions of Swedish righteousness and benevolence at the end of the Second World War live on, continuing to obscure the inherently complex experience of the camp survivors that arrived in Sweden with the ‘White Buses’ mission.

Notes 1. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York and London: Penguin Books, 2013), 3. 2. See, Johan Östling, ‘The Rise and Fall of Small-State Realism’, in Nordic Narratives of the Second World War. National Historiographies Revisited, eds. Henrik Stenius, Mirja Österberg and Johan Östling (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2011), 127–148. 3. See Magnus Gertten, Hoppets Hamn (Malmö: Auto Images 2011); Lars Åberg and Magnus Gertten, Hoppets hamn. När överlevarna kom till Sverige (Stockholm: Roos och Tegnér förlag, 2011); ‘Ideological investments’ is a term used by American historian Carolyn Dean in her book Aversion and Erasure. The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2010), 29. 4. For Swedish refugee policy during the Second World War, see for example: Karin Kvist Geverts, Ett Främmande Element i Nationen. Svensk Flyktingpolitik och de Judiska Flyktingarna (PhD Diss., Uppsala University, 2008); Paul A.  Levine, From Indifference to Activism Swedish Diplomacy and the Holocaust, 1938–1944 (PhD Diss., Uppsala University, 1996); Lars M.  Andersson and Karin Kvist Geverts eds. En problematisk relation? Flyktingpolitik och judiska flyktingar i Sverige 1920–1950 (Uppsala: Opuscula Historica Upsaliensia 36, 2008). For research on early representations of Holocaust Survivors see for example Antero Holmila, Reporting the Holocaust in the British, Swedish and Finnish Press, 1945–1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Ingvar Svanberg and Mattias Tydén, Sverige och Förintelsen: Debatt och dokumentation om Europas judar, 1933–1945 (Stockholm: Dialogos, 1997). Mikael Byström, En broder, gäst och parasit. Uppfattningar och föreställningar om utlänningar, flyktingar och flyktingpolitik i svensk offentlig debatt 1942–1947 (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 2006); Pontus Rudberg, The Swedish Jews and the victims of Nazi terror, 1933–1945 (PhD Diss., Uppsala University, 2015); Malin Thor Tureby, ‘Svenska änglar och hyenor möter tacksamma flyktingar.

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Mottagningen av befriade koncentrationslägerfångar i skånsk press under året 1945’, Historisk Tidsskrift 135, no. 2: 266–300; Malin Thor Tureby, ‘Swedish Jews and the Jewish survivors. The first public narratives about the Survivors in Swedish-­Jewish Press’ in, Reaching a State of Hope— Refugees, Immigrants and the Swedish Welfare State, 1930–2000, eds. Mikael Byström and Pär Frohnert (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2013). 5. See, for example, Åsa Bergström & Mats Jönsson, ‘Screening War and Peace: Newsreel Pragmatism in Neutral Sweden, September 1939 and May 1945’, in Researching Newsreels: Global Cinema, eds. Ciara Chambers, Mats Jönsson & Roel Vande Winkel, (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). See also Marie Cronqvist & Lina Sturfelt, War Remains: Mediations of Suffering and Death in the Era of the World Wars, (Lund: Nordic Aacademic Press, 2018). 6. Mats Jönsson, ‘Non-Fiction Film Culture in Sweden circa 1920–1960: Pragmatic Governance and Consensual Solidarity in a Welfare State’, in A Companion to Nordic Cinema, eds. Mette Hjort & Ursula Lindqvist (Malden, MA: John Wiley and Sons, 2016), 125. 7. Jönsson, ‘Non-Fiction Film Culture in Sweden’, 125. 8. Jönsson, ‘Non-Fiction Film Culture in Sweden’, 125. 9. For an introduction into this field see, Marion Kaplan, ‘Did Gender Matter during the Holocaust? Jewish Social Studies 24, no. 2 (2019): 37–56. Zoë Waxman also explores gender in relation post-Holocaust representations of survivors in ‘Unheard Testimony, Untold Stories. The Representation of Women’s Holocaust Experiences’, Women’s History Review 12, no. 4 (2003): 661–667. For further readings on gender and representation in the context of memorialisation and the camps see, for example, Janet Jacobs, ‘Gender and Collective Memory: Women and Representation at Auschwitz’, Memory Studies 1, no. 2 (2008): 211–225; Janet Jacobs, ‘Remembering Genocide: Gender Representation and the Objectification of Jewish Women at Majdanek’, iRne ligion, Violence, Memory and Place eds. Oren Baruch Stier & J. Shawn Landres, (Indianapolis & Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 163–173. 10. See chapter 4 ‘Erasures’ in Dean, Aversion and Erasure, 143–177. 11. Dean, Aversion and Erasure, 29. 12. On the 22 of May 1945 it was notably advertised in the daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet that the cinema Röda Kvarn in central Stockholm would be showing a number of newsreels pertaining to the liberation of Oslo as well as Swedish rescue work. The first two films on the schedule were Flyktingar finner en hamn (Refugees Find a Harbour) and De kom över fjällen (They Came Across the Mountains) as well as Då Norge blev fritt (When Norway Became Free). These were presented in smaller type, while a filmed speech by Folke Bernadotte and Vittnesbördet were pre-

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sented in large, bold type. Vittnesbördet’s title was also accompanied by a description of the film’s content. As such, being the last film on the list, in significantly larger and bolder type (including a description), Vittnesbördet was presented as the film in a series depicting current events in a newly liberated Europe. 13. Johnny Wijk, ‘“Censur och propagandaministeriet”, en översikt av Informationsstyrelsens verksamhet 1940–1945 utifrån dess efterlämnade arkiv’, Historisk Tidsskrift 1 (1990): 21. 14. ‘Verksamhetshistorik’, 219. Statens Informationsstyrelse (SIS), vol. 109, Riksarkivet Marieberg. 15. Wijk, ‘“Censur och propagandaministeriet,”’ 34–40. 16. SIS, vol. 109, 3–4. 17. Ibid. 18. Aaron Harris Kahn, ‘Creating a Safe Harbour. Depictions of Swedish Refugee Assistance Actions in Wartime Propaganda Film’, Journal of Scandinavian Cinema 2, no. 3 (2012): 223. 19. Kahn, ‘Creating the Safe Harbour’, 219. 20. Ibid., 220. 21. See also Stig Hjavard’s characterisation of the film medium’s position in Swedish society between 1920–1980 in Stig Hjavard, ‘The Mediatization of Society. A theory of the Media as Agents of Social and Cultural Change’, Nordicom Review 2 (2008): 120. 22. SIS, vol. 109, ‘Verksamhetshistorik’, 222. 23. SS-officer Walter Schellenberg was also a significant actor in Bernadotte’s negotiations with Himmler. Felix Kersten, Himmler’s masseur claimed to have played a crucial role in these dealings as well but the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper questioned the validity of Kersten’s claims as early as the 1950s and he has therefore not been included as a credible witness to events in later historiography regarding the event. See Sune Persson, Vi åker till Sverige. De vita bussarna 1945 (Stockholm: Fischer & co, 2002). For literature on the ‘White Buses’ mission in Swedish collective memory and arguments regarding the missions’ treatment of Jews, see Ingrid Lomfors, Blind Fläck. Minne och glömska kring Svenska röda korsets hjälpinsats i Nazityskland 1945 (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2006). 24. Svante Hansson, Flykt och överlevnad. flyktingverksamhet i mosaiska församlingen i Stockholm, 1933–1950 (Stockholm: Hillelförlaget, 2004), 279. 25. SIS, 109, ‘Verksamhetshistorik’, 222. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 224. 28. SIS did suggest that nothing be written until the 4th of May as some rescuees were still being transported which meant that most dailies held off until 5 May 1945.

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29. Holmila, Reporting the Holocaust, 42. 30. Ibid., 38. A reportage showing images of Auschwitz was also published in the weekly magazine Se in late April 1945. Se, no. 16, 19–24 April 1945. 31. Holmila, Reporting the Holocaust, 38. 32. Barbie Zelizer, ‘Gender and Atrocity: Women in Holocaust Photographs’, in Visual Culture and the Holocaust, ed. Barbie Zelizer (London: The Athlone Press, 2001), 2. 33. See Rochelle Saidel, ‘The Jewish Victims of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp’, in Lessons and Legacies Volume VII. The Holocaust in International Perspective, ed. Dagmar Herzog (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2006). 34. Gertten, Hoppets Hamn. 35. Kahn, ‘Creating the Safe Harbour’, 225. 36. Ibid., 225. 37. Ibid., 225. 38. Ibid., 226. 39. Ibid., 222. 40. Kristin Wagrell, ‘Chorus of the Saved’. Constructing the Holocaust Survivor in Swedish Public Discourse, 1943–1966 (PhD diss., Linköping University, 2020), 107–139. 41. Kvist Geverts, Ett främmande element, Levine, From Indifference to Activism. 42. Mikael Byström has explained this shift in policy as a ‘Nordic prerogative’ meaning that the Scandinavian identity of the rescues trumped that of ‘race’ ethnicity or religion. This, however, did not mean that xenophobic and antisemitic ideas and attitudes lessened or changed with regards to other immigration-­ related matters. See, Byström, En broder, gäst och parasit. 43. Byström, En broder, gäst och parasit; Thor Tureby, ‘Svenska änglar och hyenor’. 44. Byström hypothesises that the discrepancy in the reporting between the UNRRA mission and the ‘white buses’ mission was due to antisemitic attitudes but also because the UNRRA mission brought more female survivors. Thor Tureby, on the other hand, postulates that the media market had become saturated with survivor refugee stories at the beginning of June which is why little attention was paid to the UNRRA mission. UNNRA is the acronym used for the United Nations Relief and Rehabiliation Administration. 45. Holmila, Reporting the Holocaust, 46. 46. Kvist Geverts, Ett främmande element; 230. See also Byström, En broder, gäst och parasit, 114. 47. Kvist Geverts, Ett främmande element, 221–222.

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48. See Gottfarb, Den Livsfarliga Glömskan, 276. 49. See for example, Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination. A Social and Cultural History (Oxford: Paul Springer Publishing, 1994); Pieter Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation. Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000); Annette Wieviorka, Déportation et genocide. Entre la mémoire et l’oubli (Paris: Plon, 1992). 50. SIS, 109, 213. 51. SIS, 109, 214. 52. SIS, 109, 213. 53. SIS, 108; ‘Till Flyktingfilmen’, 1. 54. Östling, ‘The rise and fall’, 128. 55. Cf. Henrik Bachner, ‘Judefrågan’: Debatt om antisemitism i 1930-talets Sverige, (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2009); Henrik Bachner, Återkomsten: Antisemitism i Sverige efter 1945 (Stockholm: Natur & Kultur, 2004). 56. Byström, ‘En broder gäst och parasit’, 119. 57. See Persson, Vi åker till Sverige, 432–438. Persson does not divide the categories of rescuees into men and women, but goes through the different archives that he has explored in search for the most accurate total figure of rescuees, discussing different parts of the mission etc. However, since many of the rescued were of Scandinavian descent, with the exception of the rescued from Ravensbrück women’s camp, it can be concluded that this latter group was more nationally diverse than the men who were rescued from other camps. 58. Nils Jerring, Vittnesbördet (Stockholm: Svensk Filmindustri AB, 1945). 59. Yvonne Hirdman, Att lägga livet tillrätta (Stockholm: Carlsson, 2000), 126. 60. Zelizer, ‘Gender and atrocity’, 256. 61. Ibid, 256. 62. Rochelle G. Saidel, The Jewish Women of Ravensbruck Concentration Camp (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 210. 63. See Patrick Steorn, Nakna Män. Maskulinitet och kreativitet i svensk bildkultur 1900–1915 (Stockholm: Norstedts akademiska förlag, 2006). 64. Aaron Kerner, Film and the Holocaust: New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries, and Experimental Films (New York: Continuum, 2011), 7. 65. Anna Reading, ‘Scarlet Lips in Belsen. Culture, Gender and Ethnicity in the Policies of the Holocaust’, Media, Culture and Society 21 (1999): 481. 66. Ibid., 497. 67. Gertten, Hoppets Hamn. 68. Åberg, Hoppets Hamn, 101. 69. See for example: Thor Tureby, Svenska änglar och hyenor, 295. 70. Gertten, Hoppets Hamn.

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71. Åberg & Gertten, Hoppets Hamn, 101. 72. Åberg, Hoppets Hamn, 102. 73. Malin Thor Tureby, ‘På tröskeln till Kalmar. Kommittén för flyktinghjälp, den mosaiska församlingen och flyktingarna i Kalmar 1945–1946’, in Samhällshistoria i fokus. En festskrift till Lars Olsson om arbete, migration och kultur, ed. Lars Berggren (Malmö: Malmö University, 2010). 74. Ibid., 198–200. 75. Susan Rubin Suleiman, ‘The 1.5 Generation: Thinking About Child Survivors and the Holocaust’, American Imago 59, no. 3 (2002): 277–295. 76. Dori Laub, (1992): ‘An Event Without a Witness. Truth, Testimony and Survival’, in Testimony. Crises of Witnessing in Psychoanalysis, Literature and History, eds. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (Abingdon and New York: Routledge), 75. 77. See Rubin Suleiman’s discussion on this in ‘The 1.5 Generation’, 286. 78. Rubin Suleiman, ‘The 1.5 Generation’, 283. 79. Henry Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors. Beyond Testimony (St Paul, MN: Praeger Publishers, 2010), 11 80. See for example, Marianne Hirsch, ‘The Generation of Post-Memory’, Poetics Today 29, no. 1 (2008): 103–128; Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Post-Memory. Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 81. See for example, Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage. Women, Men and the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 14–17; ‘Unheard Testimony, Untold Stories. The Representation of Women’s Holocaust Experiences’, Women’s History Review 12, no. 4 (2003): 661–667. For a discussion on silences surrounding sexual violence during the Holocaust see for example, Katarzyna Person, ‘Sexual Violence during the Holocaust—The Case of Forced Prostitution in the Warsaw Ghetto’, in Shofar. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 33, no. 2 (2015): 105; Helene Sinnreich, ‘“And it was something we didn’t talk about”. Rape of Jewish Women during the Holocaust’, Holocaust Studies 14, no. 2 (2015): 4. 82. Svanberg and Tydén, Sverige och Förintelsen, 399; ‘Tortyr och Giljotin’, Dagens Nyheter, 5 May 1945. 83. Jerring, Vittnesbördet. 84. Thor Tureby, ‘Svenska änglar och hyenor’, 275. 85. Waxman, ‘Unheard Testimony’, 663; John Horne, ‘Masculinities in Politics and War in the age of Nation-States and World Wars, 1850–1950’, in Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History; Stefan Dudink, Karen Hageman and John Tosh, eds. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 22–40. 86. Waxman, ‘Unheard Testimony’, 663.

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87. See for example, Michael S.  Kimmel, ‘The Contemporary “Crisis” of Masculinity in a Historical Perspective’, in The Making of Masculinities. The New Men’s Studies, ed. Harry Brod (Boston, MA: Allen & Unwin, 1987), 121–153. 88. Maddy Carey, Jewish Masculinity in the Holocaust. Between Destruction and Construction (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 26. 89. Åberg & Gertten, Hoppets hamn, 203 90. See Carey’s discussion in ‘Jewish Masculinity in Theory and Practice’, Jewish Masculinity in the Holocaust, 25–26. 91. Carey, Jewish Masculinity in the Holocaust, 38. 92. Åberg & Gertten, Hoppets hamn, 222. 93. One of the first major historical works conducted in the Lodz ghetto came already in 1962, with the book entitled Lodz ghetto: A History authored by Isaiah Trunk (first published in Yiddish). Since then several works have been produced pertaining to conditions and resistance within, and the organisation of the ghetto. See for example, Lucjan Dobroszycki, The Chronicle of the Łodz Ghetto, 1941–1944 (London: Yale University Press, 1984). Gordon J.  Horwitz, Ghettostadt. Łodz and the making of a Nazi City (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2008). The example of the Lodz ghetto has also been thoroughly disseminated and explored in Swedish by the fictional writer Steve Sem Sandberg in his book De fattiga i Łodz (Stockholm: Bonnier förlag, 2009). 94. Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 95. See Wagrell, ‘Chorus of the Saved’, 173–183. 96. Ibid. 97. Wagrell, ‘Chorus of the Saved’.

CHAPTER 9

Dire Strait? When the Holocaust Came to Sweden—A Regional Perspective 1943–1945 Ulf Zander

Some say that Kurt Erich Suckert, one of modern Italian literature’s most controversial authors, and better known under his pen name, Curzio Malaparte, went from being an idealistic and right-wing revolutionary admirer of Benito Mussolini to a disappointed fascist. His reorientation became apparent in Kaputt, a semi-fictional and extremely critical account of the German-led ‘crusade’ against the Soviet Union, written in 1944. Malaparte’s book, that includes early reports of the ongoing Holocaust, revolves around a number of meetings that the author had with high- and low-standing individuals in the Axis Powers. He talked to, for instance, Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor General of Poland, and Galeazzo Ciano, the Fascist Minister of Foreign Affairs who forced young Jewish girls into prostitution in a brothel for German officials in Ukraine.1

U. Zander (*) Lund University, Lund, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Heuman, P. Rudberg (eds.), Early Holocaust Memory in Sweden, The Holocaust and its Contexts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55532-0_9

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The book begins in a serene manner that stands in sharp contrast to the subsequent descriptions of the horrors of war on the Eastern front. Malaparte describes vividly a meeting in Stockholm in 1943 with Prince Eugen, brother of the Swedish King Gustav V, as well as a famous painter. Malaparte highlights the ‘almost forgotten business of peaceful life’, and observes women who passed him by like ‘comets of blue gold’. He talks mostly about culture and art with the prince, but also reflects on what he had seen on and behind the frontlines. The conversation about the war intensifies when they are joined by Axel Munthe, a medical doctor and psychiatrist who served as an ambulance driver in the British army during the First World War and was a close friend of the Swedish Queen Victoria until her death in 1930. Munthe asks Malaparte if the rumours of German cruelties are true. The war correspondent can only confirm that They kill the defenceless; they hang Jews on the trees in the village square, burn them alive in their houses, like rats. They shoot peasants and workers in the yards of the kolkhoz—the collective farms—and the factories. I have seen them eating and sleeping in the shades of corpses swinging from the branches of the trees.2

Munthe describes the Germans as a Krankes Volk, a sick people who would not even hesitate to wipe out the birdlife. That is not the case, because they ‘have no time to bother with birds’, replies the Italian guest.3 In many ways, Malaparte’s description of Stockholm as an almost surreal reminder of what Europe used to be, as well as Prince Eugen’s and Munthe’s questions and their difficulties grasping the magnitude of his testimonies, reflects a common understanding of Sweden as one of few peaceful exceptions in a war-torn world. Its citizens were, according to this description, somewhat detached from the catastrophes around them. For sure, there were many examples both during the war and in popular post-war stories about a Northern Utopia. As such, it was a place in splendid isolation. The inhabitants may have problems of their own, but these were largely related to the inconveniences of war rather than the dramatic consequences of military confrontations and genocide.4 Of course, such a narrative is only one part of a complex history. Indeed, the Swedish self-image as an isolated Utopia did not exclude several rescue operations during the war, executed in faraway Greece and Hungary to nearby Denmark. In 1943, the same year as Malaparte visited Stockholm, for the first time during the Holocaust Swedes in the most southern part

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of the country had direct contact with some of the victims of Nazi racial policies. Because of a secret cooperation between the resistance movement and high-ranking Germans who administrated occupied-Denmark, in October 1943 many of the Danish Jews were warned of upcoming arrests and deportations to concentration and death camps and managed to flee to safety across Öresund—the strait between Eastern Denmark and Scania—the southernmost province of Sweden. Some one-and-a-half years later, survivors from German concentration and death camps came to Sweden, notably to the southern parts. Some of the same buildings and institutions that housed the Danish Jews in 1943 also accommodated the new wave of refugees in 1945, many of whom were in extremely bad mental and physical condition. The British historian Tony Kushner has stated that the Holocaust ‘was truly an international event, yet it took place and was observed by a vast array of nation states’.5 In Black Earth. The Holocaust as History and Warning, the American historian Timothy Snyder illustrates this conclusion by comparing the impact of the Holocaust in Denmark and in Estonia. Both countries had a great deal in common at the time of the Second World War. They were small states in northern Europe with long coastlines to the Baltic Sea. Moreover, the Jews were only a small part of the population when Denmark and Estonia came under German rule in 1940 and 1941, respectively. Yet, the fate of the Danish and the Estonian Jews could not differ more. While all but a single percent of the Jews in Estonia were killed by the Germans and their sympathisers, 99  percent of Jews who had Danish citizenship survived. ‘The Jews of Denmark were marked for Auschwitz; the Jews of Estonia met their fate before Auschwitz became a death facility’, he wrote.6 Denmark and Estonia are markedly different examples, but they illustrate the many aspects of the Nazi genocide that are parts of the history of the Holocaust. As the German literary scholar Andreas Huyssen has underlined, it is important to bear in mind that cataclysmic histories like the Holocaust are ‘prismatic and heterogeneous rather than holistic and universal’.7 Some of the prismatic and heterogeneous aspects are to be found in local and regional variations. This chapter therefore principally examines the arrival in the south of Sweden of Jewish refugees in October 1943 and during the spring of 1945 from a regional point of view, in combination with a transnational Danish-Swedish approach. Regional aspects of the Nazi genocide have been highlighted in recent years, not least because of the ‘pervasive diversity’ that is recognisable beyond the homogeneity

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that the singular concept of ‘the Holocaust’ implies. Local, regional, and/ or transnational aspects of the Holocaust are today relatively common fields of research, more often than not in connection to the implementation of the genocide in different parts of Europe. For instance, Holocaust historians have studied the relation between central intentions and regional implementations, local collaborations and interethnic relations in borderlands as important but previously often overlooked aspects of the mass killings.8 There have generally been few attempts to supplement the many analyses of the nationalisation, Europeanisation, or globalisation of the Holocaust with local or regional perspectives. This is particularly true when it comes to studying reactions to the disclosure of the genocide of European Jews or attempts to get a grip on the catastrophe and its implications for post-war societies. The purpose of this chapter, then, is to contribute to local and regional aspects of the Holocaust in the Danish-Swedish borderland, particularly as they were discussed, analysed, and presented in local newspapers and by regional authorities. At the time of the rescue of the Danish Jews during the autumn of 1943 and the reception of survivors from concentration and death camps during the spring of 1945, it was already obvious that these were important aspects of Second World War history in the south of Sweden. It is beyond all doubt that concrete meetings with those who survived the Nazi German terror were very important for the emergence of an early Holocaust memory in Scania and the rest of Sweden.

Öresund—Moat and Bridging Point The events that took place in eastern Denmark and the south of Sweden in 1943 and 1945 necessitate a long-term perspective, since the part of present-day Sweden called Scania has a long history as a contested area. Öresund, a strait that today is synonymous with the border between Denmark and Sweden, was for centuries a means of transportation within the Danish kingdom. The deep forests north of Scania functioned as a dividing line between Denmark and Sweden. Ever since Denmark and Sweden were created as kingdoms during the Middle Ages, they have been at war with one another on several occasions. The hostilities were particularly pronounced during the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Between 1521 and 1814, for instance, no less than eleven wars were fought between Denmark and Sweden.

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While Denmark was victorious in many of the early encounters, the tide of war shifted over the course of the seventeenth century. One significant result was that several parts of Denmark became Swedish after the peace agreement in 1658. Former Danes in what now was a part of Sweden soon became loyal to the new regime. Although there was also Danish-Swedish antagonism during the following century, the old archenemies began to slowly settle long-standing enmities and became good neighbours, partly because Germany and Russia took over the role as their principal opponents. Already by the eighteenth century, intellectuals stressed the friendship and a potential national kinship between the Danes, the Norwegians, and the Swedes. Inspired by liberal influences, Scandinavianism as a political and intellectual movement increasingly gained supporters, not least among university students, after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The war between Denmark on one side and Prussia and Austria on the other over Schleswig-­ Holstein in 1864 proved to be a significant test, mainly due to a broken promise of military support from the Swedish king to his Danish compatriot. As a political project, Scandinavianism never fully recovered from the events of 1864. Still, some academics talked about Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes as one people who ought to be inspired by the recent Italian and German unification projects. In addition, measures were implemented to further improve cross-strait relations. Nationalism concurrently grew in strength in both countries, but competition and discordance between the two Scandinavian countries was downplayed with the spectre of increasing threats in other parts of Europe. Thus, the mutual friendship was reinforced before and during the First World War when the three Scandinavian countries successfully strived to maintain their positions of neutrality. Good relations continued between the wars, and there was significant shock in Sweden when German forces attacked Denmark and Norway on 9 April 1940. One example of the general pro-Danish sentiment in wartime Sweden was the criticism received by Fredrik Böök, one of Sweden’s leading intellectuals of the time, when he published articles in several newspaper during the spring and summer of 1940 that defended the presence of German occupiers in Denmark. There was no mistaking the enthusiasm on the Swedish side of the strait as the Danish resistance against the Germans intensified from the summer of 1943, resulting in the end of the cooperation policy in late August the same year.

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The importance of maintaining a ferry line between Denmark and Sweden—which was in use except for the period from August 1943 to the end of the war in Europe in 1945—cannot be overestimated. A common imagery was the contrast between the dark western shore of Öresund and the light, still peaceful eastern one. To be able to still cross the strait to ‘the light [of] Malmö’, and for a moment escape the occupation, was appreciated by many Danes. In addition, famous Swedish musicians such as Jussi Björling gave concerts in Danish cities during the early war years. Among Danes living in exile in Malmö, cultural manifestations of Nordic unity were frequent during the war years in organisations like the Swedish-­ Danish Society and the Danish Club, reaching a peak in October 1943.9 Many Swedish journalists saw Danish pro-German collaborators such as Fritz Clausen, Paul Sommer, and the members of the so-called Schalburg corps as traitors since they acted against their fellow countrymen in the manner of Judas Iscariot and Vidkun Quisling. Accordingly, the same Swedish journalists paid tribute to Danish priests and bishops who declared that there ought to be no distinction between Christian and Jewish Danes. They also noted the many Danish police officers who refused to assist the Gestapo arrest Jews, and the Danish king who was reported to have threatened to abdicate if the Germans started to take Danish hostages in order to stop saboteurs.10 As we shall see, the majority of Swedes expressed sympathy and solidarity with Danes, both Christians and Jews, in October 1943 and beyond.

The ‘Jewish Question’ in Denmark and the End of the ‘Model Protectorate’ The German occupation of Denmark, which began on 9 April 1940, the same day as the invasion, did not resemble any other European counterpart. The official German line was that the so-called Friedensbesetzung (‘peace occupation’) was to protect Denmark from Allied aggression. For sure, the presence of foreign troops on Danish soil had a profound effect on Danish society, but on the surface, little changed from pre-war conditions during the first three years of occupation. The ambition behind the so-called negotiation policy was to maintain, as far as possible, the fundaments of political and juridical independence, which the Germans approved of as long as there was little resistance and few acts of sabotage. Some practical aspects of the negotiation policy were that Christian X remained

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king of Denmark and the Danish government, parliament, and national courts still functioned. Furthermore, Danish authorities administrated the censorship of press and radio. As a result, the German propaganda called Denmark the ‘model protectorate’—a part of occupied Europe that came to be of great importance for food supplies. It was not for nothing that German soldiers nicknamed Denmark Schlagsahnefront (the whipped cream front). They were surprised by the comfortable lives of many Danes—far better than in other occupied countries. The German soldiers who served in Denmark were seen as the lucky ones by most of their comrades.11 The relatively calm political situation in Denmark, combined with the importance of Danish agricultural products for the German war effort, resulted in both Danish and German officials in Denmark trying to take the ‘Jewish problem’ or the ‘Jewish question’, as the Nazi leadership termed it, off the table. The reason was that both Danish and German officials in Denmark feared that actions taken against the Danish Jews could undermine the relatively steady political conditions that so far characterised the German occupation of Denmark. Between 1940 and 1943, the Danish Government threatened to resign on several occasions in response to actual or proposed Nazi German repressions of Jews in Denmark. German officials in Denmark tried to convince the leadership in Berlin that there was a lot to lose and little to gain if the ‘Jewish question’, that only concerned 7000 Danish Jews, was to become a reality. Werner Best, who from 1942 was Plenipotentiary (Reichsbevollmächtigter) in charge of civilian affairs in Denmark, on the one hand carried out the Führer’s command to ‘solve’ the ‘Jewish question’ in Denmark, but on the other hand tried to sabotage the planned action by warning Danes of what was in the making. Another German who played an important part was the diplomat G. F. Duckwitz. Like Best, he acted to prevent Endlösung in Denmark through negotiations with Swedish officials and by warning Danes in advance.12 The Danish historian Hans Kirchhoff, author of several books and articles about October 1943, also underlines the importance of the relative homogeneity of Danish society, characterised by few domestic Nazis and less radical antisemitism and xenophobia compared to many other countries. Furthermore, the demands from the Nazi leadership in Berlin to act came at a late stage of the war when the Danish resistance organisations were established and had the means and organisation to support the flight. Another important aspect was the change in Swedish foreign politics from

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a neutral standpoint, based on a will not to challenge Germany, to a more pro-Allied position and increasingly pronounced political will to assist neighbouring Nordic countries.13

October 1943—Reactions and Response in the South of Sweden Around the same time as Curzio Malaparte visited Prince Eugen and Axel Munthe in Stockholm, a change in attitude had taken place in Sweden. Indeed, there were robust reactions in Sweden to the deportation of Norwegian Jews in 1942.14 The willingness to help refugees was, however, generally higher if they were also Christian as well as neighbours from the Nordic countries. This preference remained strong for the duration of the war. The shift in attitude was particularly evident when it came to the number of refugees that Sweden should accept. This mirrored official politics, which went from extremely restrictive—there was, for instance, no public aid for refugees until the summer of 1939, and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs still denied Jewish refugees visas in February 1942—to an increasingly welcoming approach towards fugitives from Nazi rule. The result was finally an unconditional refugee policy.15 It is likely that for decision-makers, the worsening situation for the once-victorious German armies in 1942 and 1943 influenced the more generous quotas. Even before the switch in attitude took place, women in particular had taken charge of local initiatives to help those who fled from Nazi oppression. Moreover, the members of the Jewish communities in Stockholm, Gothenburg, Norrköping, and Malmö were active in raising money, collecting clothes, and organising other forms of aid. Especially in Malmö, the efforts by the Jewish community to provide refugees with support more than doubled after October 1943.16 The example of the Jewish community in Malmö is one of many that illustrate the winds of change in Swedish official refugee policy. At least to some extent, this is related to what happened in Swedish landscapes bordering occupied Norway and Denmark during the first years of German occupation. For instance, there were rising levels of discontent in Sweden during the period from 1940 to 1942—impacted by the many Norwegians on the run, as well as deserters from the German army who were rejected by Swedish border guards and thereby indirectly sent back to German authorities.17 Swedish policemen were still asking refugees about their

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religion as late as 1943. It is, however, most likely that the steady stream of Danish Jews who arrived in the south of Sweden in October 1943 both contributed to cement the changes both in attitudes and in official refugee policies.18 Against this backdrop, we can examine the course of events during the latter half of 1943 from a local and regional perspective. There was greater contact between Denmark and Sweden after the resignation of the Danish Government on 29 August 1943. Bureaucratic obstacles and other more formal difficulties prevailed, and the Swedish Government initially acted very carefully so as not to provoke the Germans. However, military education of Danish refugees in Sweden and other forms of military and political Danish-Swedish joint ventures became relatively common in 1944 and the spring of 1945.19 Nevertheless, wartime contacts over Öresund had a longer history. They began soon after the occupation was a fact, often with Danes living in Sweden acting as interlocutors. One illustrative example is Einar Hansen, a newspaper and book publisher as well as a ship owner who moved from Copenhagen to Malmö in the early 1920s. He was engaged in sustaining the Danish-Swedish contacts during the war years through illegal means if necessary. As a man with a double identity, both Dane and Swede, he could, as many other Second World War heroes, act on both sides in the manner of Leslie Howard’s film hero Pimpernel Smith. This became especially clear before and during the escape of the Danish Jews during the last months of 1943, when he played a key role as a Danish-­ Swedish mediator. Hansen also assisted both the Swedish police and the newly arrived refugees with many of the practical problems that occurred after most of the Danish Jews had escaped to Scania.20 In addition, Swedish officials had quickly established contacts with Danish colleagues. In his recollections from the war years, police officer Göte Friberg who worked in Helsingborg on the west coast of Scania, confirmed that after an initially challenging period, things settled down in Denmark. During the years of relative calmness, from the summer of 1940 to the summer of 1943, Friberg and other police officers in the south of Sweden established contacts with Danes in authority. Because of the regular contacts over the strait, Friberg and many of his colleagues had a good knowledge of what happened in Denmark, including the increasingly active resistance movement, not least because some of the first Danes who sought refuge in Sweden belonged to the countermovement.21

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Friberg also emphasised the changes that occurred in the wake of 29 August. Hundreds of refugees, many of them freedom fighters, fled from Denmark to Sweden, mostly by boat. Although they came in relatively small numbers, there were many challenges when it came to housing and feeding the refugees, who most of the time had arrived with nothing but the clothes on their backs. In late September, there were rumours that the Germans had decided to act against the Jews. These reports were confirmed in Danish newspapers and radio transmissions in the beginning of October.22 During the final war years, British and American authorities put pressure on the Swedish Government to assist refugees, particularly since Swedish diplomats were nonaligned representatives who could make a significant difference in Hungary during 1944. In a similar manner, Swedish authorities were ‘encouraged’ by American authorities to accept Danish Jews. This resulted in an official offer to all Danish Jews to seek shelter in Sweden.23 On local and regional levels, Friberg and many others took steps to prepare for the arrival of the Danish Jews. When the first refugees landed in Sweden on the last day of September, hotels and factories were filled with beds. This critical situation placed local disagreements into a wider perspective. The question of the necessity of replacing the tramline with buses to and from Ramlösa, a small community outside Helsingborg, had been going on since 1939, but came to a halt when all resources were concentrated to prepare the famous spa and hospital to receive more Danish Jews.24 Fishermen and sailors were well-aware of the great risks connected with journeys across the strait. For instance, German warships attacked and sunk two Swedish fishing boats in late August 1943 when they sailed through a German ‘warning area’ in Skagerrak.25 Similar ‘incidents’ occurred on a regular basis in Öresund and escalated in October 1943 when several boats either capsized during bad weather or came under fire from German navy ships. Since the Germans started to arrest fishermen who they suspected of helping Danish Jews to escape, more and more of the fishermen fled to Sweden. Other fishermen continued to assist Danish Jews until they eventually escaped to Sweden in 1944 and 1945.26 By early October, refugees from Denmark came by the dozens, including during some of the first nights in October 1943 that were marked by harsh weather conditions. Bad weather was in fact an advantage for the refugees and their rescuers. When the weather conditions became better and the nights brighter, the risks became even higher for those who wanted

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to cross Öresund due to intensified policing by the German navy. A few desperate refugees succumbed when they tried and failed to swim from the Danish to the Swedish coast.27 Altogether, around 50 refugees were killed, but the tragedies in Denmark were many more.28

October 1943—Press Coverage from a Regional Perspective As in many other countries, there has been fierce debate in Sweden around the extent of what was known about the persecution of Jews in German-­ occupied Europe. As many researchers have argued, it is one thing that information was available, another to transform it into knowledge. In 1933, Swedish newspapers had reported on the existence of concentration camps in Nazi Germany, but the worsening conditions in these and the existence of extermination camps was not in the public domain. There was detailed and concrete information in the Swedish media about the extermination of Europe’s Jews from the autumn of 1942. However, while people with insight into what was going on wrote repeatedly about the persecution of the Jews in broadsheets and journals, in the especially conservative provincial newspapers, there was little reporting on the topic until April 1945.29 Such diversity in the press coverage is also to be found in the south of Sweden during the autumn of 1943. Of course, many journalists highlighted that besides the numerous dangers and obstacles, the rescue activities of October 1943 were a great success. One important reason was the secret information that was passed on from the German side to different branches of the Danish resistance movement as well as the Danish-Swedish co-ordination. The Danish Jews were at the time around 7800. More than 7000 of them managed to escape over the strait to the south of Sweden, along with more than 600 of their non-Jewish spouses. Although the local authorities on the Swedish side of the strait had time to prepare, the steady stream of Danish fishing boats and other small vessels that carried Danish Jews crossing Öresund under the cover of darkness were a surprise for many who lived in the south of Sweden. Journalists from newspapers both in Stockholm and in Scania wrote dozens of reports about what was going on. In the confusion, many rumours slipped through. According to one false claim, Heinrich Himmler was in Copenhagen to oversee the Gestapo’s action against the Danish Jews. It

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was also stated that arrested Jews had been sent to Germany or, perhaps, were on their way to Poland. Other hearsay was around cloak and dagger aspects of the escape, as the ferries crossing Öresund and the refugee camps were supposed to be crawling with Nazi spies.30 It is hardly surprising that the main focus of the local newspapers during October and November 1943 was the rescue mission and the many hardships and difficulties that it created. Those who lived directly across from occupied Denmark came to know ‘the cold winds of war’ better than other Swedes, according to one local newspaper.31 Another recurrent theme was the multitude of successful solutions and acts of solidarity from people living in the south of Sweden, from their willingness to let strangers live in their homes to responses to fundraising and cultural events, organised to show support for and solidarity with the Danish Jews. Several of those who spoke out against Nazism underlined its un-Christian character. It was pure barbarism to persecute a people because of their faith and ethnicity, was the message of more than one tribune.32 The persecution of the Danish Jews also impacted those who until that point had been positive towards the southern neighbour. In two editorials in the otherwise pro-German newspaper Aftonbladet, the writers declared that in Denmark, according to a Nordic tradition, every citizen had equal value regardless of ethnicity or religion. That German officials had turned against the Danish Jews meant that they had turned against humanitarian values and had therefore lost their legitimacy among the majority of Danes. Some flatly rejected the statement from Berlin that the Jews had poisoned the atmosphere. With such a declaration, the German leaders exposed their ignorance of the ‘Nordic character’, which among other things had resulted in a successful assimilation of the Danish Jews.33 Even Karl Olivecrona, professor of procedural law and legal philosophy at Lund University known for his pro-German opinions, reacted in the same newspaper against the harsh treatment of the Jews in Denmark. ‘Also a friend of Germany must firmly reject this way to treat human beings’, he wrote, and added that no person in his right mind could be persuaded to think that it was necessary for the German war effort to remove the Danish Jews.34 There was thus little criticism of the welcoming of Danish Jews, and when it did surface, it was mostly from Swedish Nazi sympathisers who enjoyed most support in the south of Sweden than in any other part of the country. In Folkets Dagblad Politiken—the once Communist newspaper that became a Nazi paper as the party leader Nils Flyg changed from red to brown—there were complaints raised against the termination of the

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handball series that resulted from the fact that the stadium had been turned into a refugee centre.35 In other newspapers, stories of another kind dominated, like the Danish-Jewish shoemaker who came to Malmö in the afternoon, gained employment before the evening, and started working the morning after. The reporter admitted that the man seemed to be exceptional, but his efforts were symptomatic of ‘the energy and the hastiness’ that characterised the Danish refugees’ willingness to find work.36 There are several examples from the local newspapers that demonstrate how the events in October 1943 spurred reflections on what was going on both nearby and further afield. In an editorial in Nordvästra Skånes Tidningar, it was stressed that the action taken against the Danish Jews was entirely unconnected with Danish behaviour—then and now. There had never been a ‘Jewish question’ in Denmark, since the Jews were seen as good citizens and they had never been seen as different from other Danes. The conclusion was that Danish antisemitism was unknown, in sharp contrast to many other countries. The editorial referred to reports from different parts of Europe under Nazi rule. These ‘poor creatures’ had their homes wrecked before they were taken from their native countries to concentration camps where ‘they to a large extent head for disaster’.37 A few days later, another article in the same newspaper had the development in Denmark as the point of departure for an external outlook that included the fates of the Norwegian, Dutch, and French Jews the previous year, completed with historical references. Nazi ‘bestiality’ and ‘precision’ against the Jews was akin to the biblical massacre of the innocents initiated by Herod the Great in Bethlehem. And what had happened to the Jews of Paris when they were rounded up and deported in the middle of June 1942, was nothing less than a new version of the dreadful St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572 when a Catholic mob murdered thousands of Huguenots (French Calvinist Protestants). The journalist underlined the horror of later events by claiming that even hardened French antisemites changed their minds when they witnessed the inhuman behaviour towards the Jews.38 The international perspectives presented in the local press were mostly concentrated on the praise that Sweden received from foreign countries and institutions. Comments were made on the congratulations from British Jews to those who lived in the south of Sweden who generously and altruistically helped Danish Jews, as well as Finnish newspapers that condemned Nazi persecutions.39 In the reports, substantial attention was

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paid to the concrete efforts that were made to house, feed, and nourish the refugees. Largely, international, national, and local interest intertwined in the many articles on how these exposed and vulnerable people had arrived in a modern Utopia. A recurrent theme was the high standard of the doctors and others in the nursing staff, as well as the modern equipment in the hospitals, that were excellent by international standards. The successful mobilisation of the resources in the south of Sweden also proved the capacity of the nation as a whole. Such interpretations were particularly common when it came to reports from the well-known refugee centre, Ramlösa spa and hospital. An article in the weekly magazine Vecko-Journalen was particularly influential. Accompanied by photographs taken by Olle Lindberg—who also took most of the pictures of Danish Jews escaping to Sweden—the journalist Margit Tigram Strömberg, also known as Margit Siwertz, passionately wrote about sorely tried people, pale and tired. They were united by relief and, not least, gratitude to their Swedish rescuers.40

Danish Jews in Exile During the later years of the war, the reception of Danish and Norwegian Jewish refugees was in line with the Nordic ideal, but some commentators stressed that they were not fully ‘our brothers and sisters’, because they were of Jewish and not Christian descent. Seemingly disregarding the significant support that the rescue of the Danish Jews had in Swedish politics and large parts of the local communities in southern Sweden, some camp directors accordingly spoke disparagingly of Jews.41 Such reactions generally became less common after October 1943, not least in the south of Sweden where the first and most frequent contacts between Danes and Swedes took place. It soon became obvious, for instance, that the collected clothes were not enough. Swedish authorities decided that the refugees should receive clothing for work and leisure as well as toiletries without any obligation to repay. Relief organisations assisted refugees who had work but no money until their first salary. In November 1943, guidelines regulated those who lived on support from the Swedish Government. If a refugee did not accept a position of work, they had to manage on her own. All Danish refugees were also assigned a Danish contact, and from January 1944, the administration of the Danish Jews in Sweden was a matter for Danish refugee organisations in Sweden. In addition, Swedish officials agreed that Orthodox Jews who did not

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want to stay in camps or in a private home had the right to a place in a special home for Orthodox Jews.42 Most of the Danish Jews seem to have had a sound and dignified existence in Sweden, although some suffered from the effects of what became known as ‘refugee psychosis’.43 Many of the adults gained work or continued to study—a special Danish student union with an outspoken anti-Nazi agenda was active at Lund University from 1943 to 1945—and the children went to school, in some cases with only Danish pupils. As the archaeologist Olof Olsen remembered some sixty years after his arrival in Sweden, ‘life was good for Danes’ in the south of Sweden since they were safe, did not want for food or housing, and, most of all, they were still free people.44

Memories of the Danish Jews—Meetings with Holocaust Survivors In more than one way, the reminiscences of October 1943 soon became apparent during April and May 1945, when refugees came to Sweden by the thousands, often directly from German concentration camps. It did not take long before the authorities received letters from some of the Danish Jews who had lived for around one-and-a-half years in Sweden. Not least because of the massive flow of refugees, they offered to house newly arrived relatives in order to free room for others in need.45 As the war in Europe came to an end, a steady stream of reports of German setbacks, Hitler’s death, and the liberation of neighbouring countries competed with news of the fate of refugees and survivors of the Nazi genocide. At times there seemed to be competition between the news of the war in general and reports about the Holocaust. For sure, horrifying stories of what happened in Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and Neuengamme appeared in the newspapers. When reporting about the local news, however, journalists turned most of their attention to the fact that the Danes, whose heroic resistance, according to one article, had caused Himmler his greatest trouble, were again free and could therefore join people in Helsingborg celebrating the death of Adolf Hitler and the end of the German occupation.46 More often than not, the steady stream of refugees and survivors received significant attention in the local newspapers of Scania. Although many refugees arrived in Sweden by railway or by boat—this time considerably larger vessels than those that crossed Öresund in October

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1943—the arrival of a new wave of refugees to Sweden in the spring and summer of 1945 became largely associated with buses. The so-called White Buses, in which most of the refugees were transported, almost instantly became a symbol of the importance Sweden’s contributions— not least those made for Danes and Norwegians who were among the first to be transported from the German concentration camp Neuengamme, situated outside Hamburg, to Swedish refugee camps. In Danish newspapers, the White Buses were named ‘transportation of compassion’, and Folke Bernadotte received significant attention: he was a count and member of the Swedish royal family who had a prominent role in the activities to rescue concentration camp prisoners. His successful negotiations with no less than the SS-leader Heinrich Himmler, resulting in the rescue activities launched in March 1945, rendered him Danish accolades as a ‘messenger of compassion’. They echoed similar tributes in Swedish newspapers and weekly magazines as ‘Folke the Peace Promotor’, ‘A man of destiny’, and ‘Sweden’s man in world history’. He was nothing less than a modern version of the medieval dragon killer St. George. The count was a hero who deserved his place in the annals of European history.47 That Scandinavian neighbours arrived first was of great importance for maintaining the connection between the actions of October 1943 those at the end of the war. Just as during the autumn of 1943, it was once more underlined that the Jews were ‘quite proper Danes’.48 The local and regional perspectives remained important. In local newspapers, journalists emphasised that many of the drivers of the White Buses were from the Western parts of Scania.49 The south of Sweden again became a window into the Second World War through which journalists from all parts of Sweden peered. What happened in Scania, both in October 1943 and in the spring of 1945, was an example of what to expect later in the rest of Sweden. Indeed, many of the refugees back then were bruised and torn, but they were generally in good physical condition. The Danish police officers, who the Germans detained in September 1944, had been treated better than most other prisoners because of the Nazi-race policies, and were therefore in relatively good shape. The enthusiasm was also often mutual, as when liberated Norwegians declared that Sweden was indeed a fairy-tale nation or perhaps even heaven on Earth.50 Of course, there were exceptions. Scandinavian former prisoners who were marked for life because of torture soon became a common feature in interviews and photographs in daily papers and weekly magazines.51 In addition, a steady flow of refugees who had generally been treated much

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worse than the Danes and Norwegians amplified such an impression. The sight of people, starved and tortured, dressed in rags, with inmate numbers tattooed on their skin or large crosses painted on their clothes, made an indelible impression on people in the south of Sweden. Slowly but surely, the bystanders in the towns of Scania began to grasp the magnitude of the genocide that would become known as the Holocaust. Many of those who had survived the extermination camps testified to the horrors ‘at the doorstep to the gas chamber’.52 A nine-year-old Hungarian boy, who had been in a concentration camp for five years, left an unforgettable mark in the minds of many reporters. He had miraculously survived, mainly because the older prisoners managed to hide him—most other children had died. A Chinese woman, detained for five years, testified to the atrocious conditions in the concentration camps that affected everyone, regardless of age. Of the approximately 1000 children born during her time as a prisoner, only six had survived.53 If the Swedes did not fully understand what had occurred in Nazi Germany, the fact that Nazi racial policies had included children ought to set an alarm ringing, read the message of one story. In early June 1945, Ernst Fischer, head of Malmö Museum in the south of Sweden and an engaged member of the anti-Nazi so-called Tuesday Club, wrote an article in a local newspaper about the many refugees he had met. Since there were so many personifications of ‘human wreckage’, there was overcrowding in all the facilities intended provide health care and food to the survivors. He and his colleague Karin Landergren Blomqvist had therefore decided to transform the museum into a refugee centre. As a result, since late April the museum was filled with battered refugees who quartered surrounded by art. He stressed that not all who had arrived were victims: some perpetrators tried to blend in among their former victims, but the vast majority had genuine reasons for being there. Their presence benefitted the museum, he stated—never before had it been more alive.54 This statement made a significant impression on one of the most prominent artists of the time. Without ever setting foot in the museum, but inspired by Fischer’s article, the well-known and prominent anti-fascist artist Sven X-et Erixson began to work on a large oil painting, depicting nurses taking care of emaciated former concentration camp prisoners. In retrospect, it has been characterised as ‘almost clumsy in his benevolence’. The museum itself is portrayed as a symbol for life while the prisoners are

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reproduced as stencils, apparently based on the first photographs from concentration camps.55 In the 1930s, refugees were already arriving with the notion that Sweden was a paradise on earth. In a cutting remark, the writer and anti-­ Nazi pacifist Mia Leche Löfgren, who was looking back on the 1930s just after the end of the war, concluded that contact with Swedish Government officials often resulted in a revision to a refugee’s positive attitude.56 The opposite view was often heard in 1945, when many of those who came to Sweden spoke positively of their reception in Sweden—although there were obvious flaws. Both during the period when refugees were being received and in retrospect, shortcomings were highlighted in how they were cared for as well as nationalistic and racist responses from Swedes, who sometimes suspected refugees of either being spies or carriers of communicable diseases. The general view was the same as in Erixon’s painting: skilful and helpful Swedes who had one of the world’s best care facilities at their disposal on the one hand, and grateful refugees on the other. Many articles with such a point of departure gave strength to an image of Swedes as peace-loving Samaritans who for at least a decade had been taught this tradition through the virtues of folkhemmet, the People’s Home. As the end of the war came closer, the war-spared Swedish nation wanted to help the less fortunate, especially if they came from Scandinavian countries. The reception of the refugees was seldom unconditional. For instance, both the inhabitants of Lund and newly arrived refugees celebrated the end of the war in Europe on 7 May 1945. However, this togetherness had its limitations, with different visible lines of demarcation, although often subtle in nature. The joyful event could, as the film historian Mats Jönsson highlighted, be described as local banality, a provincial version of banal nationalism as described by Michael Billig.57 A common theme was therefore empathy for the refugees and survivors, as well as ethnic and national generalisations.58 An even more frequent and generally much more inviting narrative was the emphasis on the generally positive reception. As one of the most modern countries in the world, refugees were lucky to come to Sweden and receive high quality care. Not without pride, a journalist noted that refugees out of joy and relief sung both their own national anthems and the Swedish national anthem as the ferries approached Swedish harbours.59 Moreover, Swedish male and female medical personnel were progressive and modern since they worked together without any problems or obvious prejudices.60 Such remarks fit into a pattern, charted in several analyses of the press coverage

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of the Holocaust in both Sweden and other countries as in the south Swedish newspapers. One conclusion is that the Jews were often highlighted because (some of) their sufferings fitted into local as well as regional and national narratives. Many of the Jews portrayed came from neighbouring Scandinavian countries to which Sweden already had a strong emotional connection. Moreover, it was emphasised that aid parcels originating from Sweden ‘had played a crucial role in relieving the misery of fellow Scandinavians’.61 In the weekly magazine Se (‛Look’), the distinction between the horrors of Europe outside Sweden, and the welfare within the nation, was highlighted in articles on the persecutions of Jews and the Holocaust. During 1945, the magazine had parallel stories about the Holocaust on one hand and Swedish modernity, scientific novelty, and hygienic standard on the other.62

Holocaust Reception, the People’s Home, and Nazism Although Sweden did not take an active part in the Second World War, it played an important role while it lasted and this had a major impact on national identity in Sweden after the war: despite the fact that the importance of the war was seldom articulated during the Cold War. The importance of the period is not least a result of political and ideological development in Sweden before and during the war—with profound consequences for how to think about ethnicity, ‘us’ and ‘them’, refugee policy, and rescue operations. The dominant Social Democratic ideological statements of the late 1920s and 1930s came on the one hand to reinforce the image of Swedes as modern Samaritans, always willing to help the victims of war and genocide, who on the other hand often are portrayed in Swedish historiography as having a modest role.63 The relief efforts in the south of Sweden therefore ought to be analysed in the light of the political concepts connected with the establishment of the Swedish welfare state. The Swedish Social Democrat and Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson, born and bred in Scania, had, since the late 1920s, declared that the concepts of democracy and folkgemenskap, the togetherness of the people, were not opposites, but had similar meaning. Hansson presented a Gemeinschaftsideologie, which had some affinity with the Nazi version. Indeed, the people were the foundation of an organic society in both the

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Swedish and the German tradition of ideas. As Hansson saw it, the People’s Home was synonymous with the construction of the modern welfare society with the state as a guarantor for the well-being of citizens. At the same time, the concept conveyed a natural continuation of a former community, based on tradition and history, as well as new forms of security and material improvements in the midst of modernity. A belief in a strong state and a community of people was also strong in German Völkish ideology. Both within the Social Democratic Party and the Nazi Party, the socialist content became less important in relation to the nation during the 1920s. The differences, however, are much more important than the similarities. In Weimar Germany, the Social Democrats distanced themselves from the concept of das Volk. It left the field free for the Nazis to use it and link the people’s concept to racial nationalism, where the Jews and other ‘undesirable’ groups filled the function of ‘the Other’, the negation of the pure-­ bred German people. While Volksgemeinschaft became a key concept in Nazism, Hansson went in another direction when he connected ‘people’ to ‘equality’ and to Swedish traditions of freedom and democracy.64 The British historian John Gilmour argues in a similar way when he emphasises that race became an important theme in Sweden during the interwar period. Nevertheless, for Gilmour, it is premature to classify the Swedish State Institute for Race Biology, initiated in the early 1920s, as an indicator of racism and antisemitism in Sweden at the time. ‘It did not’, he continues, ‘point a path to Auschwitz but rather towards an abhorrent form of social control practiced globally at the time, namely sterilisation’.65 The development during the period from autumn 1943 to summer 1945 contributed to a further downplaying of the similarities between German and Swedish concepts of people and Volk. As an effect, Nazi racist policies and their extreme consequences, the un-Christian and seemingly irrational Holocaust, were the opposite of the rational, modern, and equal Swedish society. The conclusion, drawn by among others Curzio Malaparte, was that Nazi Germany and Sweden seemed to be at opposite ends of the ideological and political spectrum. Such an interpretation dominated for decades to come.66 In 1943 and 1945, one of few national points of reference to the recent catastrophe was to be found in the south of Sweden. The many professionals and volunteers in Scania who offered living quarters in both castles and cottages, hospitals and art museums, personified local, regional, and national efforts to help survivors. In other words, it was hard to imagine a

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sharper contrast than that between Auschwitz and Ramlösa.67 The first soon became synonymous with mass murder, misery, and barbarism, while the latter remained a symbol of humanity and peacefulness, once more a haven for the sick and fatigued. Although the interest for the dramatic histories of October 1943 and the spring of 1945 faded somewhat during the following decades, monuments were erected and exhibitions inaugurated in Scania at the same time as books and articles were written and published in Sweden. Substantially, the dominating interpretation remained the same. It also survived the heated debates of the 1990s, when Folke Bernadotte’s role in the White Buses action came under attack. The latest challenge came in 2015, when the continuation of the history of refugee politics, highlighted in the temporary exhibition of the White Buses, ‘Välkommen till Sverige’ (Welcome to Sweden), soon became outdated as the flow of immigrants to present-­ day Sweden came to a drastic halt.68 The endurance of the willingness to talk about the cities along the Swedish coastline as harbours of hope is a result of long-term local and regional identities in Scania as well as a positive national self-image in Sweden. The memory of what happened along the shores of Öresund during the last years of the war was—and still is— invoked in a narrative that tells of peaceful Swedes helping the less fortunate, at the precise moment when the world outside the Northern Utopia was going up in flames.

Notes 1. Cf. Franco Baldasso, ‘Curzio Malaparte and the Tragic Understanding of Modern History’, Annali d’italianistica 35 (2017), 279–290. 2. Curzio Malaporte, Kaputt (London: Alan Redman Limited, 1948), 18. 3. Malaporte, Kaputt, 20. 4. Max Liljefors and Ulf Zander, ‘Schweden. Der Zweite Weltkrieg und die schwedische Utopie’, in Mythen der Nationen. 1945—Arena der Erinnerungen 2, ed. Monika Flacke (Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum, 2004), 569–572. 5. Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination. A Social and Cultural History (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1994), 20. 6. Timothy Snyder, Black Earth. The Holocaust as History and Warning (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015), 212. 7. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts. Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 26.

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8. See, for instance, Peter Black, ‘Central Intent or Regional Inspiration? Recent German Approaches to the Holocaust’, Central European History 33, no. 4 (2000), 533–549; Henri Zukier, ‘Diversity and Design. The “Twisted Road” and the Regional Turn in Holocaust History’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 27, no. 3 (2013), 387–388. 9. Kjell Å. Modéer, Patriot i gränsland. Einar Hansen—entreprenör och mecenat (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2002), 165, 175–189; Anders Carlberg, Hitlers lojala musiker. Hur musiken blev ett vapen i Tredje rikets propaganda (Stockholm: Santérus Förlag, 2016), 213–214. About the Danish unions in Scania and other parts of Sweden 1943–1945, see Per Møller and Knud Secher, De danske flygtninge i Sverige (Stockholm: Gyldendalske Boghandel & Nordisk Forlag, 1945), 220–228. 10. See, for instance: ’Danska poliser vägrar medverka vid juderazziorna’, Skånska Socialdemokraten, 4 October 1943; ‘Hitler gav personligen order om judeförföljelsen i Danmark’, Nordvästra Skånes Tidningar, 5 October 1943; ‘Danskarna se rött då judiska kvinnor häktas’, Aftonbladet, 5 October 1943; ‘Danmarks kristna skall kämpa för judiska bröder’, Landskrona Posten, 8 October 1943; ‘Kung Christian sökte rädda danska judarna’, Aftonbladet, 10 October 1943; Viator Dancius, ‘Då Danmark exploderade’, Vecko-­Journalen, no. 36, 1943. 11. Mona Jensen, ‘Wehrmacht and Danish Police Authorities in Esbjerg during the Occupation of Denmark’, in War and Society in Scandinavia 1914–1950, eds. Henrik Lundtofte, Mona Jensen and Flemming Just (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2009), 115–117. 12. Hans Kirchhoff, Den gode tysker. Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz. De danske jøders redningsmand (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2013a), 154–177. 13. Hans Kirchhoff, ‘Broen over Øresund. Redningen af de danske jøder i oktober 1943’, in Grændse som skiller ej! Kontakter över Öresund under 1900-talet, ed. Kjell Å. Modeer (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanums Forlag), 94–95; Hans Kirchhoff, Holocaust i Danmark (Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 2013b), 99–165. 14. See, for instance, Pontus Rudberg, The Swedish Jews and the Holocaust (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 201–203. 15. Mikael Byström, En broder, gäst och parasit. Uppfattningar och föreställningar om utlänningar, flyktingar och flyktingpolitik i svensk offentlig debatt 1942–1947 (Stockholm: Stockholm University, 2006), 78, 253–254. 16. Rudberg, The Swedish Jews, 212–216, 219–220. 17. Lars Hansson, Vid gränsen. Mottagningen av flyktingar från Norge 1940–1945 (Gothenburg: Department of Historical Studies, University of Gothenburg, 2019), 55–68, 188–190.

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18. Karin Kvist Geverts, Ett främmande element i nationen. Svensk flyktingpolitik och de judiska flyktingarna 1938–1944 (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2008), 19–27. 19. Ulf Torell, Hjälp till Danmark. Militära och politiska förbindelser 1943–1945 (Stockholm: Allmänna Förlaget, 1973), passim. 20. Modéer, Patriot i gränsland, 25–29, 191–205. For a detailed analysis of Pimpernel Smith and the recurrent preference both during and after the Second World War to call by this name those who opposed the Nazi regime as well as helping Jews escape from the horrors of the Holocaust, see Ulf Zander, Förintelsens röda nejlika. Raoul Wallenberg som historiekulturell symbol (Stockholm: Forum för levande historia, 2012), 48–59. 21. Göte Friberg, Stormcentrum Öresund. Krigsåren 1940–45 (Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 1977), 73–80. 22. Friberg, Stormcentrum Öresund, 106–115. 23. Henry L.  Feingold, The Politics of Rescue. The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938–1945 (New York: Holocaust Library, 1970), 225. For an in-depth analysis of the discussions about the Danish Jews within the Swedish Foreign Office in September and October 1943, see Paul A.  Levine, From Indifference to Activism. Swedish Diplomacy and the Holocaust, 1938–1944 (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 1996), 229–245. 24. ‘Spårvägstrafiken till Ramlösa ännu en gång’, Nordvästra Skånes Tidningar, 6 October 1943; ‘Ramlösaborna skriver till fullmäktige i spårvagnsfrågan’, Öresunds-Posten, 15 October 1943; ‘Ramlösabornas attack i spårvägsfrågan ledde till ingen åtgärd’, Öresunds-Posten, 20 October 1943. See also Alf Åberg, Ramlösa. En hälsobrunns historia under 250 år (Ramlösa: Ramlösa hälsobrunn AB, 1957), 163–164. 25. ‘Orimliga tyska beskyllningar mot de svenska fiskefartygen’, Skånska Socialdemokraten, 30 August 1943. 26. Gunnar Nilsson, ‘Flyktingströmmen över Öresund 1943’, in Orostid, ofredsår, eds. Maria Larsson and Eva Sjögren (Lund: Skånes arkivförbund, 1996), 145. 27. ‘Två danskar omkomna vid flykten. Sundstragedier’, Landskrona Posten, 2 October 1943; ‘Båt med flyktingar kapsejsad i Öresund utanför Helsingborg i natt’, Skånska Socialdemokraten, 6 October 1943; ‘Många flyktingar ha fått sätta livet till’, Nordvästra Skånes Tidningar, 6 October 1943; ‘Gestapo söker stoppa flyktingtrafiken’, Helsingborgs Dagblad, 7 October 1943; ‘Flyktingströmmen’, Nordvästra Skånes Tidningar, 8 October 1943; ‘Flyktingbåten skars mitt itu av vedettbåten’, Skånska Socialdemokraten, 11 October 1943; ‘De ljusa nätterna och sträng bevakning stoppa flyktingarna’, Helsingborgs Dagblad, 13 October 1943; ‘Flykten över Sundet kräver även dödsoffer’, Skånska Socialdemokraten, 4 October 1943; ‘Flyktingen fick sätta livet till’, Nordvästra Skånes Tidningar, 7 October

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1943; ‘Åter ett flyktingslik funnet i Hälsingborg’, Helsingborgs Dagblad, 10 October 1943. See also Rudberg, The Swedish Jews, 215. 28. Friberg, Stormcentrum Öresund, 116–119. 29. See, for instance, Ulf Zander, ‘Dans l’œil de la tempête. La Suède et la Shoah’, Revue d’historie de la Shoah, no. 203 (2015), 286–288. 30. ‘Judeförföljelserna ha börjat i Danmark’, Skånska Socialdemokraten, 1 October 1943; ‘Judeförföljelserna’, Nordvästra Skånes Tidningar, 5 October 1943; ‘Deporteringsfartyg med judar ha redan lämnat Köpenhamn’, Svenska Dagbladet, 6 October 1943; ‘Spioner i flyktinglägret i Hälsingborg?’, Helsingborgs Dagblad, 8 October 1943. 31. ‘Tjänsten i vår svenska beredskap har ett allvarligt och bistert drag’, Öresunds-Posten, 18 October 1943. 32. ‘Insamlingen till de danska flyktingarna i Landskrona’, Landskrona Posten, 6 October 1943; ‘Vi tro att humanitet, vett och sans, kultur och frihet skall segra’, Öresunds-Posten, 15 October 1943; ‘Humaniteten kan ej leva där religionen dör,” Öresunds-Posten, 18 October 1943. See also ‘Danska flyktingar få hjälp på “löpande band”’, Svenska Dagbladet, 6 October 1943 and ‘Ljungande strafftal mot judeförföljelsen’, Svenska Dagbladet, 8 October 1943. 33. ‘Järnhälen över Danmark’, Aftonbladet, 3 October 1945; ‘Utanför det mänskliga’, Aftonbladet, 5 October 1943. 34. Karl Olivecrona, ‘Judeförföljelserna i Danmark’, Aftonbladet, 8 October 1943. 35. ‘Flyktingimporten stoppar handbollen!’, Folkets Dagblad Politiken, 12 October 1943. 36. ‘Driftig flykting lyckas omedelbart få arbete’, Svenska Dagbladet, 7 October 1943. 37. ‘Aktionen mot de danska judarna’, Nordvästra Skånes Tidningar, 4 October 1943. 38. ‘Parisjudarnas bartolomeinatt 15–16 juni 1942’, Nordvästra Skånes Tidningar, 7 October 1943. For a similar comparison between the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572 and the ongoing persecutions of the Jews, see W(illy) Kleen, ‘Den tioåriga bartolomeinatten’, Vecko-Journalen, no. 10, 1943. 39. ‘Finska röster mot judeförföljelsen’, Landskrona Posten, 7 October 1943. 40. Tigram, ‘Med i flyktingströmmen’, Vecko-Journalen, no. 42, 1943. See also Åberg, Ramlösa, 172–179. 41. Byström, En broder, gäst och parasit, 112–115. 42. ‘Cirkulär nr 323 från Socialstyrelsen’, 14 October 1943; ‘Instruktioner från Socialstyrelsen’, 2 November 1943, both in Knut av Klintebergs arkiv (National Archives in Lund, Sweden). See also Mikael Byström,

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Utmaningen. Den svenska välfärdsstatens möte med flyktingar i andra världskrigets tid (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2014), 152–154. 43. Møller and Secher, De danske flygtninge i Sverige, 229–237. 44. Olaf Olsen, ‘Dansk flygting i Lund 1943–1945’, in Grændse som skiller ej! Kontakter över Öresund under 1900-talet, ed. Kjell Å. Modéer (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanums Forlag, 2007), 120. 45. See, for instance, the following letters, Kai Hansen to Socialstyrelsen, 30 April 1945; Inger Adams to Statens utlänningskommission, 10 May 1945; Rosa Schwarz to Statens utlänningskommission, 12 May 1945, all in Passbyrån, E 10: 1, Statens utlänningskommission, Riksarkivet Marieberg (National Archives in Marieberg, Sweden). 46. ‘Pianolägrens verklighet överträffar all fantasi’, Skånska Socialdemokraten, 20 April 1945; ‘Danmark åter fritt’, Nordvästra Skånes Tidningar, 2 May 1945; ‘Danska brigaden över Sundet idag’, ‘Ett nytt danskt folk har danats av kriget’ and ‘Gripande tal av den danske kungen’, Skånska Socialdemokraten, 5 May 1945, ‘Köpenhamn i glädjerus’, Nordvästra Skånes Tidningar, 5 May 1945; ‘15.000 hälsingborgare hyllade Danmark vid flammande frihetsbål’, Skånska Socialdemokraten, 6 May 1945; ‘Danmarks frihetsdag firades storslaget i Hälsingborg’, Öresunds-Posten, 7 May 1945; ‘Det underjordiska Danmark ett levande hån mot Gestapo’, Nordvästra Skånes Tidningar, 7 May 1945; ‘Sång och jubel i Hälsingborg på fredens och Norges frigetsdag’, Öresunds-Posten, 8 May 1945; ‘Danska flyktingar beundrade brandmännen i Landskrona’, Nordvästra Skånes Tidningar, 8 May 1945; ‘Ståtlig demonstration för fred och frihet’, Skånska Socialdemokraten, 9 May 1945. 47. ‘Grev Folke Bernadotte—Næstekærlighedens Sendemand’, Aftenbladet, 30 April 1945; ‘Barmhjertighedens Transportmidler’, Berlingske Tidende, 2 May 1945; ‘Hur Himmler sökte upp Bernadotte i Friedrichsruh’, Expressen, 29 April 1945; ‘Namn och nytt’, Dagens Nyheter, 1 May 1945; Hugo Björk, ‘Folke Bernadotte ödets man, har båda parters förtroende’, Stockholms-­Tidningen, 2 May 1945; ‘Folke fredsfrämjaren’ and ‘Sveriges man i världshistorien’, Se, no. 19 (1945). 48. ‘De infödda danska judarna är “helt riktiga danskar”’, Öresunds-Posten, 4 May 1945. 49. ‘Bussar och förare från Hälsingborg till Danmark’, Helsingborgs Dagblad, 1 May 1945. 50. ‘Koncentrationslägrens folk fört till Skåne’, Arbetet, 2 May 1945; ‘Lyckliga norrmän till “Sagolandet Sverige”’, Stockholms-Tidningen, 2 May 1945; ‘Sverige det är himlen’, Landskrona Posten, 3 May 1945; ‘Gripande tacksamhet bland de befriade interna’, Skånska Socialdemokraten, 3 May 1945.

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51. ‘Ohyggliga lidanden för fångarna i Tyskland’, Skånska Socialdemokraten, 4 May 1945; ‘Bland överlevande offer för nazibödlarnas misshandel’, Nordvästra Skånes Tidningar, 5 May 1945. 52. Ingvar Axelsson, ‘På tröskeln till gaskammaren. Tatuerade fången 177258 om livet i förintelselägret’, Expressen, 4 May 1945; ‘Märg sögs ur benpiporna. Levande låg i likhögarna’, Dagens Nyheter, 5 May 1945. 53. ‘1.000 barn föddes i läger—nu är blott sex i livet’, Stockholms-Tidningen, 1 May 1945; ‘Koncentrationslägrens folk fört till Skåne’, Arbetet, 2 May 1945. 54. Ernst Fischer, ‘Glimtar från ett levande museum’, Sydsvenska Dagbladet Snällposten, 8 June 1945. 55. Thomas Millroth, ‘Hågkomstens dilemma’, Sydsvenska Dagbladet Snällposten, 12 May 2015. 56. Mia Leche Löfgren, Hård tid (Stockholm: Hökerbergs Förlag, 1946), 21, 78–79. 57. Mats Jönsson, Visuell fostran. Film- och bildverksamheten i Sverige under andra världskriget (Lund: Sekel Bokförlag, 2011), 153–160. 58. Malin Thor Tureby, ‘Svenska änglar och hyenor möter tacksamma flyktingar. Mottagandet av befriade koncentrationslägerfångar i skånsk press under året 1945’, Historisk tidskrift 135, no. 2 (2015), 274–275. 59. ‘Du gamla du fria—ett visslat tack. Svensk räddningsbragd i koncentrationslägren’, Dagens Nyheter, 2 May 1945; ‘4,000 av de internerade från koncentrationslägren ha kommit till Hälsingborg’, Helsingborgs Dagblad, 3 May 1945. 60. ‘Frivilliga organisationer i Hälsingborg har gjort ett enastående arbete’, Helsingborgs Dagblad, 5 May 1945. 61. Antero Holmila, Reporting the Holocaust in the British, Swedish and Finnish Press, 1945–50 (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 54. See also Max Liljefors, Bilder av Förintelsen. Mening, minne, kompromettering (Lund: Argos/Palmkrons Förlag, 2002), 17–33; Liljefors and Zander, ‘Schweden’, 569–584; Ulf Zander, ‘Efterskrift’, in Ben Shephard, Befrielsen av Bergen-Belsen (Lund: Historiska Media, 2005), 219–233; Ulf Zander, ‘To Rescue or be Rescued. The Liberation of Bergen-­Belsen and the White Buses in British and Swedish Historical Cultures’, in The Holocaust—Post-War Battlefields. Genocide as Historical Culture, Klas-­ Göran Karlsson and Ulf Zander, eds. (Malmö: Sekel Bokförlag, 2006), 363–383; Malin Thor Tureby, ‘Svenska änglar’, 266–300. 62. Tobias Lindberg, Ett nytt sätt att se. Om bildtidningen Se 1938–1945 (Göteborg: Nordicom, 2004), 311–314. 63. Ulf Zander, ‘Swedish Rescue Operations during the Second World War. Accomplishments and Aftermath’, in The Holocaust as Active Memory. The

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Past in the Present, eds. Marie Louise Seeberg, Irene Levin and Claudia Lenz (London & Burlington: Ashgate, 2013), 165–185. 64. Alf W.  Johansson, Den nazistiska utmaningen. Aspekter på andra världskriget (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2014 [1983]), 128–129. 65. John Gilmour, Sweden, the Swastika and Stalin. The Swedish Experience in the Second World War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012 [2010]), 189. 66. Johan Östling, Sweden after Nazism Politics and Culture in the Wake of the Second World War (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016 [2008]), 116–124, 151–156. 67. ‘Från lidandets Auschwitz till humanitetens Ramlösa’, Helsingborgs Dagblad, 5 May 1945. 68. Ulf Zander, ‘To Rescue or be Rescued’, 365–368; Björn Magnusson Staaf, ‘The White Buses. Creating Remembrance of the Second World War in Sweden’, in The Europeanization of Heritage and Memories in Poland and Sweden, edited by Krzystof Kowalski and Barbara Törnquist Plewa (Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2016), 169–172, 177–179.

CHAPTER 10

The Holocaust and the Jewish Survivors in the Swedish-Jewish Press, 1945–1955 Malin Thor Tureby

The interviewer: I was thinking about that for many years, not only here in Sweden but in the entire world, it was very silent. Not until sometime in the early 1980s, one almost never talked about the Holocaust. Interviewee 1: Well, but we talked about it [the Holocaust] in Stockholm. We had so many acquaintances [who were survivors], didn’t we? Interviewee 2: Yes [we did], and in [19]45, after the war, there were news reels, the SF-journals [were screened] at Old Allé [a movie theatre in Stockholm]. Many people went there [and outside the movie theatre] there were always three or four men or women from the Red Cross, and an ambulance [that] stood outside, so already [in 1945] people got to know [about the Holocaust].

This chapter is written within the project Jewish and woman: Intersectional and historical perspectives on Jewish women’s lives in Sweden during the 20th and 21st centuries. Funded by the Swedish Research Council. Dnr. 2016-03983. Wahlgrenska Stiftelsen provided a scholarship that made a pre-study for this chapter possible. M. Thor Tureby (*) Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Heuman, P. Rudberg (eds.), Early Holocaust Memory in Sweden, The Holocaust and its Contexts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55532-0_10

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Interviewer: But [it was not until] suddenly [… in the 1980s that] many movies, radio shows and testimonies were produced. Interviewee 1: […] very many, yes! Interviewee 2: Yes, in the early 1980s; there was nothing in the 1950s […].1

This quote is from an interview with a Swedish-Jewish couple from the collection ‘Jewish memories’, at the archive of the Nordic Museum in Sweden. It is a thought-provoking quote since it illustrates how the interviewer—in the middle of the 1990s, when the interview was conducted— is strongly influenced by the prevailing discourse about silence regarding the Holocaust. The interviewer is so biased by the discourse that she does not hear what the interviewees say. Namely, that they do not think there was a silence about the Holocaust in Stockholm, where they lived during the first decades after the war. Instead, they try to talk about how they became friends or acquaintances with many survivors. One of the interviewees also indicates that there was both public knowledge of and conversations about the Holocaust. This was displayed, for example, in films and manifested by an ambulance, which had been used while the survivors were transported to Sweden from the liberated camps, which was placed outside the cinema. This indicates that there was not ‘silence’ about the Holocaust or the survivors in Sweden. When speaking of silences regarding the Holocaust, does that imply silences from survivors or silences in public discourse? Silences in the private or public spheres, or silences from certain groups of survivors, or silences about certain experiences? As Eric J Sundquist has concluded, it is now incontestable that there was no silence about the Holocaust in the first decades of its aftermath. And yet Sundquist argues that there was silence. He therefore both acclaims the previous works of Hasia R. Diner and others, and at the same time he requests a thorough investigation of Holocaust silence, as well as the mythology surrounding it, where silence would be understood from multiple angles and investigated in many different settings, languages, and historical moments.2 The study presented in this chapter may be regarded as a small contribution to the detailed and manifold investigation requested by Sundquist. It examines the extent to which the Holocaust, with a focus on the female survivors, was narrated in Swedish-Jewish press during the first decade after the Holocaust. The particular focus of the study on how Jewish women survivors and their experiences are narrated in the Swedish-Jewish

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press is motivated by: (1) the ongoing debate about the importance of a gender perspective in Holocaust research; (2) claims that women were publicly silent and that there has been a silence regarding women’s experiences,3 and (3) the fact that most survivors who came to Sweden were women. One hypothesis is that they should be noted and heard as women in the Swedish-Jewish press. In a Swedish context, it has been claimed, without any empirical evidence, that the survivors were met by a ‘compact silence’ when they arrived in Sweden, or that ‘nobody asked them what they had experienced’ and that ‘they themselves did not have the strength to talk about it’.4 I have previously investigated whether there are any empirical grounds for such statements in a Swedish context, by exploring Swedish and Swedish-Jewish press reports about the survivors in 1945. I could conclude, like Hasia R. Diner regarding the American-Jewish context,5 that the Jewish survivors immediately after arrival in Sweden were visible in both the Swedish-Jewish and Swedish public discourse and that the Swedish Jews instantly related to the survivors.6 The Swedish-Jewish press in this study is represented by two periodicals: Judisk krönika (JK) and Judisk tidskrift (JT). JT and JK are chosen, since both were the most widespread Jewish journals in Sweden during the 1940s and 1950s. Both journals were published in Stockholm, but their distribution reached far beyond the Swedish capital and the Jewish community.7 They can thus be understood as national platforms, where different subjects related to the Jewish minority were debated and explained both for Jewish and gentile readers throughout Sweden. For example, the Jewish communities in Gothenburg and Malmö subscribed to JK and distributed it to members.8 A reader could be sensibly informed on national and international Jewish issues by reading either of the journals and could read both journals without encountering extensive repetition. Both journals covered to some extent major Jewish events in Sweden (but with a specific focus on Stockholm) and abroad, but first and foremost they published contributions on cultural, political, and, sometimes, religious questions. JT wrote more about intellectual debates than about specific events in the Swedish-Jewish community or in the Jewish world, while JK had a section with the heading ‘From different countries’. Among the contributors, especially to JT, were international Jewish intellectuals (e.g., Erwin Leiser, Ernst Benedikt, and Peter Patera, who came to Sweden as refugees in the 1930s, and Martin Buber and others who lived in Palestine/Israel or elsewhere), as well as members of what could

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be described as the younger Swedish-Jewish intellectual elite. Texts from non-Jewish thinkers, theologians, and intellectuals were also regularly published in JT. The journal was distributed free to many of Sweden’s municipal public libraries, as well as to numerous leading non-Jewish opinion-makers.9 JK was founded in 1932 by Simon and Daniel Brick, with the latter as editor. Their ambition for the journal was to mould a Swedish-Jewish identity and to mobilise opinion for Zionism and, later, the state of Israel. The first issue of JT, meanwhile, was published in January 1928. The Chief Rabbi of the Jewish congregation of Stockholm, Marcus Ehrenpreis, was the founding editor. JT was the primary forum for Ehrenpreis’ ambition to be an educator about Judaism for both Jews and gentiles.10 From the year 1949, the historian Hugo Valentin co-edited JT with Ehrenpreis, and during 1951, Valentin stepped up, due to Ehrenpreis health, as sole editor. Valentin also wrote for JK, especially in the early 1940s.

The Situation for ‘Displaced Persons’ Immediately after the end of the war and during the rest of 1945, the survivors were discussed as a collective in the Swedish-Jewish press. The journals regularly published articles about the situation of Jewish survivors in Europe during the second half of the 1940s. Sometimes the texts are multi-page articles, sometimes short notices. These texts describe or refer to international debates and conferences with or about survivors in Europe; the DP-camps; the work of the relief agencies; antisemitic outbreaks, riots, and the murder of Jews; growing antisemitism among the occupation forces and locals in different parts in Europe; the growing indignation of Germans and the survivors’ reluctance to regain citizenship in their former homelands; the destruction of Jewish societies and families; and the survivors’ (commonly referred to as ‘the Jews of Europe’, ‘the homeless’, ‘the 100,000’, or the ‘displaced persons’) collective will to move to Palestine.11 By reporting on these themes, a point was made in the public Swedish-Jewish discourse: the Holocaust (although not named ‘Holocaust’ at the time, but referred to as ‘the Jewish tragedy’, ‘the catastrophe’, ‘the murder of the six million’, or ‘the Nazi terror’, etc.) continued to affect world Jewry, and for every reader of the journals—Jewish or non-Jewish—the Holocaust featured prominently.12 The survivors are discussed in articles about men, written by men, who primarily describe the situation in Europe and the Zionist political

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struggle for the Jewish homeland in Palestine. Many of the texts, especially in JK, are translated articles or speeches of leading Zionists and other Jewish leaders in Palestine/Israel, the United Kingdom, or the United States. To the extent that women appear as protagonists, or as authors of these texts, it is usually as grieving mothers, but also as help-workers from different Jewish organisations or female journalists working in or visiting different DP camps. It is also often the question of another kind of text, originally a personal document, in the form of a private letter written to relatives made public by publishing it in the journal. In March 1947, for example, JK published a letter from a nurse working in the camps in Europe, to her family in Palestine. The letter describes the situation of the surviving Jews in Germany, the JDC’s and UNRRA’s work for the survivors, the lack of food, the feeling of hopelessness, prevailing antisemitism, the German’s denial of being Nazis, that is, the same themes addressed in the reports from international debates, investigations, and conferences that were published in the JK, but with a personal reflection from the everyday lives of the survivors.13 Another letter was published in JK under the heading ‘Letter from a mother’ with the information that it was a letter written by a woman called Ester Sachs, who lived in a small town in Poland, and that the letter was originally addressed to her only surviving child, a son who managed to get to Palestine and was living in Haifa. The letter communicates what happened to named family members, when and how they were murdered and tells of the different ways that the survivors from their village commemorated the victims. The letter can be regarded as an individual testimony of what happened to different members of Ester Sachs’ family, although her own individual experiences as a Jewish woman during the Holocaust is not mentioned. Her fate is connected with the post-Holocaust period, to survive to testify about those who have been murdered. Nevertheless, the letter, despite its personal form and content, is a narrative about the Holocaust framed by the Zionist struggle: ‘At the first bloodbath your father said, may he rest in peace: “‘I’m not afraid of Hitler. He cannot destroy me, for I have a son in the land of Israel.”’14 Her emphasis on Israel as a safe haven aligns with the general tendency of placing the Holocaust in relation to the Zionist endeavour. The published letter is thus another example of how the Swedish-Jewish press, especially the JK, continually placed the fate of the murdered and surviving Jews into the context of the Zionist political struggle.

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The predominant content in JK, as an outspoken Zionistic periodical, was obviously about Palestine/Israel.15 But JT, which did not intend to serve as platform for any movement within Jewry, also published articles that related the past and future destiny of the survivors to Palestine.16 In JT, however, there were also articles, mainly written by professor Eli F Heckscher, which questioned Palestine as the solution to the problems of the homeless and persecuted Jews of Europe.17 During the first three years after the war, before the state of Israel was established, several of the articles discussed what was perceived as an unfair immigration policy and oppressive regime of the British mandate government. Sometimes, the restrictive post-war immigration policies were related to the immigration policy during the war and the Holocaust, implying that the British were partly guilty for the Holocaust because of the ban on Jewish immigration to Palestine during the war years.18 An event that was given considerable attention in the Swedish-Jewish press, as in other Swedish and international newspapers, was the fate of the ship Exodus 1947 that had left France for Palestine in July 1947.19 The majority of the passengers on board were survivors without entry visas to Palestine. When the British boarded the ship, three passengers were killed and the rest were deported back to Europe, where many of them were interned in camps in Cyprus. In one article published in July 1947, when it was still uncertain what would happen to the survivors on board the Exodus, JK writes that the survivors risked being returned to Germany: […] the country responsible for the murder of 6,000,000 Jews, who murdered all relatives of the passengers of the Exodus and who is just waiting for the opportunity to eliminate the Jews still in this country. Out of the 1,600 men and 1,300 women, that the British want to send back to the land of death, there are also a thousand youths and about 700 children and babies.20

In this and comparable articles on Jewish immigration to Palestine or the restrictive British immigration policy, the British administration is referred to in relation to Nazi-Germany and the Holocaust.21 The survivors are depicted both as victims of the British immigration policy and of Nazi persecution. But, first and foremost, they are described as strong-­ willed, resolute, and proactive men and women who demand the right to decide on their own lives, their own homeland, and their own future. Further, it is often stressed that they managed to survive the Holocaust because of their courage, inner strengths, and their Zionist convictions.

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Thus, the survivors are not primarily described as weak, fragile, ill, or helpless victims, but as active political subjects.22 It is not only the survivors’ past experiences in Europe and during the Holocaust that are emphasised in the late 1940s, but also their potential future lives in Palestine. Accordingly, the Holocaust is present in these texts, but the narratives are not primarily survivors’ stories about what happened to them as individuals during the years of the Holocaust. As Holocaust historian Rachel Deblinger has discussed, the constraints of post-war life framed early survivor narratives. Survivors in DP camps often narrated the rebuilding of their lives in spaces that were no longer part of the war but were still remnants of the German war effort. In later accounts of the Holocaust, there is a sharp break between the war-time and post-­ war period. This kind of chronological delineation was not present in the early articles in the Swedish-Jewish press examined here. As Deblinger underlines, the first years after the war was a period of transition from the events of the Holocaust and the moment Holocaust memory became cemented into a well-known narrative.23 In the Swedish-Jewish press, it is not primarily individual testimonies that dominate in the early post-war years, but reports and articles about international commissions that examined the difficulties of the Jewish DPs, or the question of Palestine, or the fight by the Jewish DPs and the Zionist movement for immigration to Palestine. In this context, the political struggle waged for Palestine between 1945 and 1948 resulted in the constant publishing of materials about the experience of the European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s. In these texts and debates about Zionism, the link between the destruction of Jewish life in Europe and the demand for a Jewish state was constantly being made.24

From Trials to Restitution Negotiations Between 1945 and 1948, the survivors and developments in Europe were regularly mentioned in several reports and articles about the DP camps and the Zionist struggle for the Jewish homeland. Thus, in this respect there was no silence regarding the Holocaust in the Swedish-Jewish press. The murder of Europe’s Jews was politically linked to the contemporary and future struggle for the rebirth of the Jewish people in the Jewish homeland. Similarly, together with the texts about the reports from the DP camps in Europe and from Palestine, there were articles and reports from the trials of the Nazi perpetrators.

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In these reports, there were occasionally detailed descriptions of the sadistic actions against, and killings of, Jews during the Holocaust. In November 1945, for example, JK reported from the trial in Lüneburg against Josef Kramer and other guards from Bergen-Belsen. The statement from the trial emphasises that women were forced to strip naked in front of camp staff who also used to investigate them in a brutal way. Furthermore, the female guard Irma Grese is singled out as an exceptionally evil person, who plagued and shot young Jewish women. The female camp guard is noticeable in the narrative from the Belsen trial, partly because she is a woman, but above all because she abused and killed other women. The article also criticises the defence advocates of the Nazi perpetrators for taking advantage of the psychological condition of the Jewish witnesses who were severely traumatised by their recent experiences.25 Thus, in the reports from the trials, a construction of the survivors appears that is different from the one in the narratives from the DP camps. Here, in the position as witnesses to and victims of the Nazis’ crimes, they are presented as fragile, physically wounded, and mentally weak and suffering victims, not as the powerful political subjects who are on their way to Palestine to build a Jewish homeland. The vulnerability of women is explicitly highlighted in the descriptions of how they were forced to be naked in front of the camp guards. They are also implicitly positioned as victims of sexual violence, in the descriptions of how they were forced to be naked and were examined in brutal ways. Sexual violence began to be mentioned in some memoirs, documentary films, literature, and reports following the Holocaust.26 Besides the discussion about the Belsen trial, I have only found two other texts that explicitly mention the sexual abuse of Jewish women. Ernst Benedikt wrote in his review of Curzio Malaparte’s book Kaputt that he was ‘particularly shaken by the fate of Jewish girls who were forced to prostitution’.27 Otherwise, in regard to the female survivors in Sweden, the non-Jewish Swedish journalist Tora Nordström-­ Bonnier claimed in an article that the Jewish women were less traumatised (compared to Catholic women), because they had not been raped, ‘protected by their race’ from the ‘SS sadists’. A few ‘pretty Jewish girls’ might have been molested by female guards with ‘homosexual tendencies’, but the adult Jewish women were often ‘untouched’, it was claimed in the only article in the Swedish-Jewish press that overtly discussed sexual abuse in relation to the women who were rescued and brought to Sweden.28 Nordström-Bonnier is not alone in her assumption. Although not completely absent from the early public discourse around the Holocaust, based

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on Rassenschande laws alone, it was believed by many journalists and later researchers—and thus communicated by newspapers and later memorial institutions and literature—that rape and sexual violence against Jewish women must have been rare.29 Nevertheless, as current research has shown, Jewish women were also raped by non-German allies, collaborators, civilians, and fellow prisoners, and were victims of forced prostitution, public nakedness, forced sterilisation, and forced abortions.30 Zoe Waxman argues further that it was not only the misinterpretations of the Rassenschande laws that led to this wrong conclusion, but also that rape and sexual abuse has remained an untold chapter in the history of the Holocaust because of cultural taboos, and because such experiences are not considered to be a part of the narrative of the Holocaust.31 However, in the late 1940s, a coherent narrative of the Holocaust did not yet exist. The mentioning of sexual abuse in the Swedish-Jewish press illustrates that such experiences were considered part of the Jewish and female experiences of the Holocaust. It was nevertheless mentioned in passing, and without any named individuals testifying to the abuse, as was the case with many other experiences. The sexual abuse and the gendered experience of persecution was thus vaguely present in the same subtle way as other difficult Holocaust stories in JK and JT, mentioned in passing in book reviews, or in reports from different events during the first decade following the Holocaust.32 Through articles about the trials of the Nazis, the Holocaust and the survivors’ experiences were narrated in the JK and JT. It was primarily the first trials, and especially the first so-called Belsen trial in 1945, that were described in detail in JK. The Nuremberg trials (1945–1949) and later regional trials received relatively little attention in the Swedish-Jewish press.33 If texts about the Nazis, or the trials of the late 1940s and early 1950s, were published, it was primarily in the context of a growing anxiety around the perceived increase of antisemitism in Germany (and other European countries); the perception that the Allied authorities were decreasingly interested in the denazification process and in bringing the Nazi war criminals to justice; and a sense of a rising resistance among Germans to accepting their guilt for the murder of six million Jews.34 Further, during the first years of the 1950s, there were articles about Israel’s negotiations with Germany and Austria around the restitutions, as well as discussion articles about Germany’s rights to rearmament. In these articles, reference is often made to the crematories, murders, and the Holocaust.35 The reports from the trials, the articles on the increasingly

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demanding situation for displaced persons in Europe, the Zionist debate articles, and texts about the denazification of Germany and, later, the restitution claims and negotiations with Germany and Austria, meant that the Holocaust and the near past was constantly present in pages of JK and JT in the first decade after the war. In this respect, there existed no silence in relation to the Holocaust, although the survivors as individuals were given little space and their voices were seldom heard. Nonetheless, one category of survivor—the Jewish child survivor—was quite often portrayed. Less than ten percent of Jewish children survived in Nazi-occupied Europe. The future of surviving children was a key question in post-Holocaust Jewish society. This was also manifested in the Swedish-Jewish press, particularly in pictures on the front cover of the JK, but also inside the journal.36 During the first years after the war, articles about child survivors were published, mainly in JK. In these articles it was emphasised that since only a small group of Jewish children had survived in Europe, they must be transferred to and taken care of in Palestine, for their own sake as well as for the future of the Jewish people.37 There were also short stories with children as protagonists. In these stories, the children, against all odds and sometimes with the help or guidance from a Zionistic parent or acquaintance, managed to survive the Holocaust, but lost all their family members. The stories end with the child being brought to Palestine where he or she finds a new home and community.38 These were fictional short stories. JK and JT did not contain any survivor stories from children, as was the case in many other countries.39 In the Swedish-Jewish press examined here, the survivors are portrayed as a nameless and faceless collective (except for the pictures of the children), whether they are put in the position of strong political subjects or weak victims/witnesses. To some extent, the experiences of men and women are narrated differently, the brutality and evilness of the Nazis are underlined by highlighting their treatment of Jewish women. Further, Jewish women as subjects are often referred to as mothers or nurses. Homosexuality is only mentioned in relation to the perpetrators as an account for how ‘pretty Jewish women’ might have been molested by other women, not as a reason for being victims of the Nazi regime. The silences from or about homosexual victims are not surprising given the period in question—the decade after the Holocaust—since few homosexual survivors came forward to tell their stories, from a homosexual position, in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. Hence, age, gender,

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and sexuality intersected in diverse ways in Swedish-Jewish public discourse and silences on the Holocaust and survivors during the first decade after the war.

The Survivors and the Swedish-Jewish Community The articles in the Swedish-Jewish press mainly depicted the situation for the survivors outside of Sweden. One reason for this was that both journals translated and published texts from foreign journals. As mentioned, few articles about or from Jewish refugees in Sweden were published in JK and JT in the 1930s and 1940s. One exception is the escape of the Danish Jews to Sweden in 1943, which received a great deal of attention in the Swedish-Jewish press, although the texts mainly focused on what had happened in Denmark, not on the refugees’ arrival in Sweden.40 But, one of the few published pictures of Jewish refugees in Sweden was on the front cover of JK in 1943. This was a sketch of a sad little girl wrapped in a blanket. The caption read: ‘Ib Thaning has drawn this Danish-Jewish refugee child—one of the few Jewish children of Europe who has managed to escape the German executioners’.41 Thus, it related the Swedish and Danish Jews to the persecution and murder of the European Jews. The first camp survivors arrived in Sweden as early as April 1945, but the majority arrived during the following months. Both JK and JT published their first articles about ‘the liberated of 1945’42 in July that same year and devoted most of their July issues to reporting on the survivors who had arrived in Sweden. Except for the unique numbers in July 1945, the journals ran very few articles about the survivors in Sweden. Instead, the texts that were published focused on what Swedish Jews did, could do, or had done for the refugees and later survivors.43 The Swedish Jews are primarily related to the Holocaust and the survivors in their capacity as contributors or fundraisers.44 In general, there are few articles reporting on the different initiatives on behalf of the survivors by different Jewish communities and associations in Sweden. When reading all texts in the journals, one does find information about the Swedish-Jewish engagements in other contexts. In published birthday greetings or obituaries, for example, the person’s work with or for refugees and survivors in Sweden is often mentioned.45 There were also many appeals and advertisements for various fundraising events. In one appeal, it is underlined that most of the newly arrived survivors are Jewish women:

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Thousands of Jewish women (men) liberated from German concentration camps have recently arrived in Sweden. It is unnecessary to tell you about their inexhaustible suffering. We who have lived in peaceful Sweden during all these years of oppression, persecution and destruction we all want, to the extent we can, help our sisters (brothers) to become free people again, to feel equal and respected.46

In the appeal above, Jewish women in Sweden were asked not only to donate something to the new arrivals, but also to visit and try to befriend at least one of them. In mid-1947, the Swedish Jews were asked to help Jewish survivors in Norway if, ‘despite all the collections that have already occurred, [they] still had something to donate’—indicating the many previous fundraising events on behalf of the refugees and survivors.47 There were also, like the reporting of the early 1940s, articles about the activities of various relief committees in other countries, specifically in JT in 1945.48 These articles, as well as the fundraising appeals, relate the Swedish Jews to the fate of the Jewish people and connect them to a Jewish community and solidarity that transcended national borders. In advertisements for different fundraising activities for the survivors in Sweden, displaced persons in Europe, and those who managed to make their way to Palestine, the moral duty of the Swedish Jews and co-­ responsibility for the future destiny of the Jewish people is often emphasised. This is not least in the light of the fact that Swedish Jews were spared during the war and the Holocaust.49 Diner writes that much American-Jewish political action for survivors and the rhetoric it depended on between 1945 and 1948 focused on Palestine as the solution to the desperate conditions for the remaining Jews of Europe. Diner argues that whenever American Jews were talking, raising funds, or writing about the Jewish homeland in Palestine, they did so by invoking the death camps, the gas chambers, and the six million that were murdered.50 The same pattern exists in the Swedish-Jewish press. The Jewish homeland is further presented as the (only) solution to the precarious situation of the survivors, their homelessness, and lack of security, community, and family.51 To the extent that refugees and survivors in Sweden are visible as a group—except in the fundraising advertisements—it is in notices or articles about Hechaluz, Youth Aliyah, and Bachad.52 These organisations and movements were established by refugees in Sweden during the 1930s, but had a huge membership by 1945, when many of the camp survivors who

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came to Sweden joined these organisations.53 The few articles about Jewish refugees in Sweden that were published during the 1930s and early 1940s also often concerned the children and youth of these movements: although they were never called refugees in these texts, but pioneers on their way to their homeland.54 In an equivalent way, the survivors, rather than being presented as potential future Swedish citizens or members of the Swedish-­ Jewish community/ies, were depicted as temporary guests or repatriandi. This way of discussing Jewish refugees—as refugees transiting Sweden— was common during the 1930s and early 1940s, both in the Swedish and the Swedish-Jewish public discourses on Jewish refugees. It also continued when the first public narratives of the Jewish survivors in Sweden were published in 1945.55 For example, the front cover of the October 1945 edition of JK has a photo from a conference held by Hechaluz in Sweden. According to the text, the delegation of the conference represented the 2500 ‘refugees’ who arrived in Sweden in 1945 and then joined the Hechaluz. The picture shows a dozen people with the Zionist, as well as the Hechaluz, flag. A woman stands and talks to the congregation, and several other women are shown in the picture. However, the journal does not contain any reports from the conference and what was discussed, nor any interviews with the delegates. Rather than articles in which the survivors themselves were heard, the Swedish-Jewish press more commonly published articles and minutes from conferences in which Swedish, American, or European Zionists and other Jewish representatives of different organisations discussed the survivors. Furthermore, relatively few articles were published about the survivors leaving Sweden.56 This was otherwise a common theme in the Swedish daily press during 1945.57 It was even more rare that survivors in Sweden were heard from their position as survivors. The few survivor stories that were published during the first decade following the Holocaust were all in the same issue of JK in 1945.58Another example of what could be defined as a survivor story appeared in 1945, when the Danish chief rabbi and survivor Max Friediger’s account of life in Theresienstadt was published.59 Friediger’s text is a detailed description of how life was organised in the camp. He puts the community at the centre, not his own experiences. As mentioned above, most texts in the Swedish-Jewish press focused on the survivors as a collective. This way of narrating differs from how Holocaust experiences are nowadays narrated, where the focus is often on the survivors’ individual stories and experiences. As Israeli historian Dalia Ofer argues, the research and the

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narratives of the Holocaust have changed from the focus on the community to the individual.60 Except for the published survivor stories in 1945, there was a silence—or absence—in JK and JT regarding personal stories from survivors who had been rescued and brought to Sweden. Even though we can find a silence or rather absence of narratives from the survivors in the decade after the Holocaust, there are texts that mention the survivors in passing and reveal that they were part of everyday and recurring conversations within the Swedish-Jewish communities.61 Further small notices or announcements about different activities illustrate that the readers of JK and/or JT were constantly informed of diverse ways that Swedish Jews were encouraged to help or did help the survivors.62 The few articles by or about the survivors in the late 1940s is probably due to survivors being perceived as temporary guests. During the 1950s, a few articles about the situation of the remaining female Jewish survivors were published by Bengt Halden. He addressed the problems of the failure of Jewish women to integrate in Sweden, as well as their sense of community and belonging within the group of survivors: ‘They meet in the evenings in a friend’s room. Most of them admit that not a single night or day have passed, without that the conversation ended with what happened to them and their relatives.’63 It is often stated that the survivors themselves did not have the strength to talk about what happened to them and their loved ones during the Holocaust. American historian Beth Cohen, among others, argues that the survivors spoke, but within their own circle. Halden’s text implies the same pattern, as Cohen highlights, that survivors did indeed talk to and lead social lives with other survivors. They sought one another out and formed many types of groups.64 In these groups, they were not silent, but rather talked about their individual experiences as illustrated by the quote above. In Halden’s texts, it is emphasised that most of the survivors were women. He underlined the women’s unwillingness to forget and their desperate need to remember the past and their lost relatives, but also their need for a new community and relationships in their new country. The problem, according to Halden, was that they were only accepted as ‘shadows in the psychiatry’s waiting room in Swedish daily life’, but outside that waiting room they were expected to adapt to the Swedish way of life that demanded them to forget the past and move on. The message in all three of Halden’s texts is a plea for an understanding of the (female) survivors’ deep need to live with their memories and to talk with one another

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about their shared experiences and losses, as well as the total failure of wider society to understand that the women did not want to let go of the past and their memories.65 Thus, a male Swede in the early 1950s is trying to give voice to the remaining (female) survivors in Sweden. However, the women themselves and their voices are completely absent from the texts. Maybe it is because of the language barrier that the women were not writing articles themselves in the Swedish-Jewish press. They might possibly have had other journals or forums where they published or expressed their thoughts and texts. It can also be interpreted as a question of power since, as Norwegian Holocaust historian Irene Levin has stated, in our culture, men are heard and listened to more than women.66 In this case, it is a question not only about gender, but also about gender intersecting with refugee status. However, Bengt Halden also co-wrote a text with his wife Mira Halden,67 a Jewish survivor from Lódz. The text is a review of Ilona Karmel’s book Den polska flickan (The Polish Girl), which was originally published in 1953 in the United States under the title Stephania. The protagonist of Stephania is a young Polish-Jewish woman seeking treatment in a Swedish hospital for her spinal curvature, worsened by Nazi abuses. By the novel’s end, she understands her blamelessness in the death of her parents and realises that she can have a meaningful life despite her loss. American reviewers praised Karmel’s perceptiveness and skilful prose, but few directly addressed her Jewishness or the extent of her persecution by the Nazis.68 In Mira and Bengt Halden’s review, however, the Jewishness of Stephania is addressed and related to the destiny, death, and annihilation of Eastern European Jewry. Though her individual experiences during the Nazi persecution are not mentioned, the emphasis in the review is on the protagonist’s struggle with living on as a Jewish survivor and what the Swedish-Jewish society can learn from reading the book about the situation of Jewish refugees in Sweden.69 David Köpniwsky, a leading official of the Jewish community of Stockholm, replied to Halden’s first text in 1952, emphasising that the Jewish communities in Sweden had been, from the very beginning, and still were, engaged in helping the ‘survivors of 1945’. However, Köpniwsky argues, life must go on, and the Swedish Jews also have everyday responsibilities and jobs that demand attention. Further, he writes that the disintegration is sometimes chosen by the survivors themselves, who are keeping a life apart from the Swedish communities, united by their past experiences. However, he also admits that he understands the anger occasionally articulated by the survivors in relation

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to the better-off Swedish Jews. Nevertheless, he also underlines the incapability of the Swedish-Jewish experience in relation to the survivors, since it is not in their power to heal them or bring back their loved ones.70 Besides the above-mentioned articles, there are some additional texts that debate perceived accusations from several different angles about a restrictive Swedish-Jewish community opposed to aiding the victims, primarily during, but also after, the Holocaust.71 A discourse about the alleged indifference of the Swedish Jews is thus present from the early post-Holocaust years,72 which might be explained to some extent by the silence (or the non-existence of a coherent narrative) about and from the many Swedish-Jewish actions on behalf of the persecuted Jews during and after the Holocaust. This will be discussed further below, when discussing what, how, and who was memorialised in Sweden in relation to the Holocaust.73

Memorialisation Writing and reporting about the survivors and the Holocaust differed from memorialising and honouring the six million who were murdered. In May 1945, a memorial service in honour of the dead was conducted in the synagogue in Stockholm. The ceremony was simultaneously broadcasted on Swedish radio, demonstrating a wider public interest beyond the Swedish-Jewish community. Rabbi Emil Kronheim’s sermon was also published in JT.74 Except for the memorial ceremony in May 1945, however, the Swedish-Jewish journals investigated here were not reporting on any annual ceremonies in Sweden to honour the six million murdered. Ceremonies in honour of the victims might have taken place, even if nothing was written about them in JK or JT. But there are texts about how the Holocaust was commemorated in other ways. When reading the SwedishJewish periodicals, one gets the impression that the memorialisation of the Holocaust and the six million murder victims were repeatedly present and part of daily conversations in Sweden. In reports of published minutes from the meetings of Jewish associations, it is shown that many assemblies started with a speech or a poem in honour of the victims. For example, when the first Women’s International Zionist Organisation congress took place in Stockholm in November 1947, JK wrote about how the congress was opened by the poet Rakel Korn, who gave a memorial speech in Yiddish, to commemorate the ‘killed six million’.75

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JK and JT also reported about and from different inauguration ceremonies of monuments in honour of the dead at various places in Sweden:76 but they not only wrote about monuments and ceremonies in Sweden. In April 1946, JT published a report by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) representative Inga Gottfarb from her visit to Belsen. The report describes JDCs ongoing work with the 6000–7000 Jews who, one year after the liberation, still lived in the camp. However, the article does not contain any photographs of these survivors but is instead illustrated with four photographs that memorialise the murdered victims of the Holocaust, as well as the entrance to the concentration camp, the crematorium, and two photographs of the mass graves in Belsen. Gottfarb herself appears in three of the four photographs.77 Thus, a Swedish-Jewish woman communicated about—and was related to—the work with the survivors in Europe, as well as the memorialisation of the murdered Jewish victims. In October 1947, JK reported from Trondheim in Norway, where a memorial stone was unveiled with the names of the 130 deported Jews from Trondheim who had not returned from the camps. In the article, you can read about the ceremony, which was directed by rabbi A.I. Jacobson from Stockholm, who had previously served the Trondheim Jewish community. The article also reveals that representatives of the Swedish-Jewish communities attended and committed themselves to the memory of the murdered Norwegian Jews.78 Furthermore, JK published a photo of the monument in Oslo when it was established in 1949, and reported on a monument in Florence in 1951, and the memorial site in Belsen in 1953.79 Similarly, in 1948, Sweden and the Swedish Jews were directly related to the ghetto monument in Warsaw in a published report from the World Jewish Congress, which mentions that Sweden should contribute with Swedish granite to the construction of the monument in Warsaw.80 JK also published a notice that a delegation of the Swedish Section of the WJC was among 10,000 Jews from Poland and twenty other countries, at the fifth anniversary of Ghetto uprising on 19 April 1948, when the monument ‘over the heroic ghetto fighting’ was unveiled.81 JT also published an article and pictures of the unveiling of the monument in Warsaw in 1948.82 Furthermore, Hugo Valentin, from the Swedish delegation, published an article about his impressions of the ceremony.83 In the articles about the Warsaw monument and other articles about the Ghetto uprising, the commemorations of active fighting Jews hold central place. This was also true regarding the coverage of the memorial ceremony for two British-Jewish aviators at the Jewish cemetery in Malmö in 1948.84 But it is not only the

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importance of remembering the fighting heroes that is mentioned in the Swedish-Jewish press. Jossie Granditsky, for instance, wrote after a visit to the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine that the institution was ‘the most important monument’, and that every Jew who was travelling to Paris should visit because there worked a small group of people engaged in preserving the memory of the murdered Jews: We must not forget, we must not say, bygone is bygone, the lives of 6,000,000 Jews have been destroyed. Six million people have succumbed in gas chambers, concentration camps, ghettos. We must not be indifferent to dead people. We must continue to tell the world what has really happened.85

Correspondingly, articles commemorating different anniversaries of the deportation of Jews from a specific city or region were published as well as notices about memorial ceremonies across Europe.86 In the context of the tenth anniversary of the Danish Jews’ escape to Sweden, an article about their reception in southern Sweden was published in JT. The text was authored by a local historian and is more a story about the receiving community than about the refugees who came to the village.87 This way of narrating the refugee reception, as a narrative about the well-organised refugee reception and democratic Sweden, was common in the Swedish press during the 1940s.88 In 1955, the tenth anniversary of the reception of the survivors in 1945 was remembered in JK and JT. Only one of the articles, however, was about the survivors.89 Instead, in most of the texts Swedish Jews were interviewed about their memories of the arrival of ‘The rescued of 1945’.90 Previous research on the early memorialisation of the Holocaust, especially in Israel, has stated that public commemorations emphasised the centrality of active heroism, hence ceremonies often took place on 19 April, commemorating the outbreak of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. In a Zionist context, the Jewish fighters came to represent ‘the new Jew’. But annual private memorial ceremonies were also held by various survivor organisations. These were held on different dates and took various forms. In Israel, and in Europe in the DP camps, the establishment of a general Memorial Day was debated. Finally, the fourteenth of Iyar, the day of Liberation, was proclaimed as the official Day of Remembrance and Liberation and was celebrated throughout Germany in the DP camps. The insecurity and the uncertainty around which date to commemorate and what to honour on a Memorial Day—the liberation, the dead, the heroes,

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or the survivors—is demonstrated by the many and different ceremonies in Europe and in Palestine/Israel. In Israel, the day was finally named ‘Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day’.91 The indecisiveness of which date to commemorate and the exaltation of Jewish armed resistance not only occurred in Israel, but also in Sweden, in the first decade after the Holocaust. Different days were suggested as memorial days.92 The heroes of the Warsaw uprising were also commemorated in Sweden, both by published texts and at different annual ceremonies, while ceremonies (or at least reports from annual ceremonies in honour of the murdered six million, such as the above-mentioned one in May 1945, in the Great Synagogue of Stockholm), are absent in JK and JT.93 This indicates that the memorial culture in Sweden was heavily influenced and connected to the memorialisation process in Palestine/Israel and elsewhere in Europe. This connection is also noticeable in articles about, and calls for donations to, the Martyr’s Forest, which was planted by the Keren Kajemet Leirsael (KKL) in Israel in 1951. The forest was planted in memory of the victims of the Holocaust, with each tree a memorial to an individual who perished.94 Nevertheless, in a Swedish context, an alternative type of hero, besides the Jewish heroes of the Warsaw uprising, is also commemorated: the Swedish (male) heroes who rescued Jews. This was mainly manifested through articles about the Swedish king, Folke Bernadotte, and Raoul Wallenberg.95 These three Swedish non-Jewish men were portrayed in one of the first articles about Swedish heroism in relation to the Holocaust and the effort to help the persecuted Jews. Not one article was published in JK or JT that highlighted the effort or heroism of an individual Swedish Jew, such as Emil Glück (who helped initiate the chaluz-quota, and thus helped rescue 500 Jewish youths from Nazi Europe). Nor are there any articles about or photos of Gilel Storch or Norbert Masur, who belonged to the Swedish section of WJC and negotiated with Heinrich Himmler for the release of women from Ravensbrück. Masur’s efforts were, however, widely noted in the non-Jewish Swedish press. Dagens Nyheter, for example, published a front-page article in May 1945, illustrated with a photo of Masur, stating that his efforts contributed to saving the women that were brought to Sweden from Ravensbrück. Svenska Dagbladet also published an article about Masur’s negotiations with Himmler, together with a photo of him.96 But in JK and JT, there were no such articles or photos. Masur’s book, En jude talar med Himmler [A Jew speaks with Himmler]

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was, however, reviewed in JT, but together with two other books in a collective review with the heading ‘Rescue from the Concentration Camps’.97 Otherwise Masur, Storch, or other Jewish individuals were not the subjects for articles or singled out for praise in JK or JT, while other non-­ Jewish Swedish heroes were: as, for example, Folke Bernadotte, who is referred to as the ‘great son of the Swedish nation who saved thousands of Jewish human lives away from the Nazi extermination system’.98 As previously mentioned, the efforts of individual Swedish Jews were sometimes mentioned in birthday greetings and comparable texts. These texts were, however, of a different genre than the above-mentioned articles about Wallenberg and Bernadotte, since they were written to honour the individuals on their birthday, not for their work for or with the refugees. In one notice from 1945, where the main news is that Eva Warburg has emigrated to Palestine, it is, for example, mentioned that she helped to rescue hundreds of Jewish children from Germany through her work with the Youth Aliyah. It is also stated that she helped Jewish children to escape from Denmark and Lithuania to Sweden.99 Except for this text, which is not written to highlight her work for Youth Aliyah, but because of her aliyah, Eva Warburg is not commemorated as a heroine: despite Swedish heroes who rescued Jews being mentioned in JK or JT for years. Nor were there any articles addressing the Jewish communities’ challenging work in the past or present on behalf of the refugees or the survivors. Swedish Jews were thus, neither as individuals nor as a collective, described as ‘heroes’ or ‘heroines’ in articles about rescue operations in JK or JT. In general, there is an absence of reports and articles about Swedish-Jewish relief work. Rather, it is the Swedish-Jewish (and especially the Jewish community in Stockholm) alleged reluctance to help that is debated in published articles. However, when one is reading every page of the journals, a different narrative is discernible—one about the Swedish Jews, and especially the Jewish women’s (sometimes in co-operation with the Jewish community in Stockholm, and sometimes together with non-Jewish women’s organisations or female activists) work raising public awareness of the situation for persecuted Jews in Europe—and, later, for the rescued and liberated women in Sweden. There are no articles in JK or JT commemorating these women or their work. Nevertheless, through the publication of meeting minutes and the annual reports from the Jewish women’s club (JKK)—as well as their different fundraising activities, mainly published in JT—their work for and with the refugees during and after the Holocaust is made visible, although not as a coherent narrative. JKK also

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commemorated a Swedish heroine, Asta Nilsson, who worked for the Red Cross in Budapest directly after the war. In 1945, Olga Raphael Hallencreutz (the chair of JKK) wrote a poem in honour of her and her efforts for the Jewish children of Budapest that was published in JT.100 From the outset, the Swedish women’s work in Budapest (there was also Nina Langlet) was given less attention than the men’s work. As the historian Klas Åmark concluded, Raoul Wallenberg was indeed constructed as the sole [male] hero of the Swedish delegation in Budapest.101 Accordingly, not only does the close reading of JK and JT show that the memorialisation of the Holocaust and honouring of the dead was present from the early post-Holocaust years in the Swedish-Jewish press, but also that the Swedish Jews already from 1945 actively participated in commemorating the Holocaust and the six million dead. In this way, the Holocaust is commemorated in a Swedish-Jewish context at the same time as reports on how it was memorialised in the rest of the Nordic countries and across Europe. The Swedish Jews were thus, by the memorialisation of the Holocaust, related to a transnational Jewish community. However, one could also argue that there existed silences in JK and JT. First, there were, for example, no articles about Swedish-Jewish heroes or heroines, although many Swedish Jews dedicated all their time to helping and rescuing as many Jews as possible from the Nazis. The silence is not complete, though, as previously stated, many people’s efforts are mentioned in passing in different texts. The actions of Swedish-Jewish women are, for example, visible in different advertisements for meetings and fundraising events. Moreover, Swedish Jews wrote about or were mentioned as members of delegations that went to Trondheim and Warsaw to commemorate the memory of the dead. But it does appear to be the case that no survivor who lived in Sweden attended these early ceremonies, or at least JK and JT hardly mentioned their presence at these occasions. However, there is an indication that this changed over time. In texts about commemoration ceremonies from 1954 and 1955, it is mentioned that several survivors participated and that not only the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto were honoured, but also the six million by the lighting of six candles. This does not prove that survivors were not present at earlier ceremonies, only that their presence was not reported in the journals in the late 1940s. The survivors’ voices and presence found other expressions in the early post-Holocaust years, when several books were written by and about survivors, and these were also reviewed in the Swedish-Jewish press.

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The Holocaust, the Survivors, and Swedish-Jewish Culture JK and JT also presented the Holocaust and the survivors by reviewing, writing about, and publishing excerpts from new literature, music, and movies. Depending on how survivors are defined, literature and poetry from or about survivors began to be published during and immediately after the Holocaust,102 as well as movies about the Jewish experience during the war. For example, the movie Jag gifte mig med en judinna [I married a Jewess], that is considered to be one of the most viewed post-war films, seen by more than 12 million people, was twice reviewed in JT.103 Wanda Jakubowska’s film The Last Stage (1948), based on her experiences as a prisoner in Auschwitz, was also reviewed. The movie was in part shot on location at Auschwitz’s concentration camps. The reviewer, Ernst Benedikt, was not content with it since he considered it to be a propaganda movie. He argued that the Poles did not differ from the Germans in their hate and their persecutions of the Jewish people, and that Jewish suffering was not shown in the movie.104 Benedict argued that Jakubowska’s movie was not an accurate depiction of the Jewish tragedy. A theme that he returned to in a review of Elsa Björkman-Goldschmidt’s book Wien vaknar [Vienna awakens], where he argued that too little space was dedicated ‘to the countless Jews who died in Theresienstadt, Dachau, Bergen-­ Belsen and Buchenwald’.105 During the first decade after the war, most of the books reviewed in JK and JT were actually in some way related to Jewish experiences of the war years, Nazism, deportations, ghettos, concentration camps, death camps, killings, and refugees or survivors.106 Poetry touching on the Holocaust, and especially the Jewish suffering, also appeared.107 When the Chilean author Gabriela Mistral was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945, her poem ‘To the Jews’ was published in both JK and JT.108 The publication of the poem ‘Finally, he spoke with me …’ by the Israeli poet David Schimoni is another example of how the specific Jewish experience of the Holocaust was highlighted through poetry. Next to the poem it states that it was translated into Swedish by a refugee in Sweden, Meir Rosenberg, who had ‘experienced with his body and soul, the content of the translated poem’.109 Through poems, novels, and reviews of books and movies, different perspectives on the Holocaust, the collective destiny of the Jewish people, as well as individual experiences were mediated in JK and JT. Several

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reviews reveal a perception that the survivors and their horrific stories about the camps were given a lot of space, may be too much space, at the time. The discourse about Holocaust fatigue seems to have been present from the very beginning in the reports and discussions about the Holocaust in JK and JT.110 However, although there are arguments that the readership had heard enough of the horror stories, books dealing with the Holocaust were nevertheless continuously promoted in advertisements and reviewed in the journals. For example, when Erich Maria Remarque’s book Der Funke Leben [Spark of life] was translated into Swedish in 1952 (by which time there was already a plethora of Holocaust-literature), it was labelled a ‘powerful and moving book from the German concentration camps—a depiction of humiliation and hope’.111 Paul Patera, himself a refugee from Nazi-Germany, highlights that many movies were produced that touched upon the Jewish experience during the war and the Holocaust. A problem with most of these movies, according to Patera, was that ‘the Jew’ was always portrayed as a defenceless victim: ‘He is always unarmed, he can’t speak up, he is condemned to be a member of a hopelessly inferior minority, thrown to the mercy to the majority’s preferences’.112 In Patera’s criticism of how the Jewish experience was narrated in movies, it is a Jewish male that is in focus. The poet Nelly Sachs, one of the female refugees and survivors (depending on how survivors are defined) represented the survivors—or rather those who had not survived the Holocaust—in the Swedish-Jewish press. Sachs escaped to Sweden from Nazi Germany together with her mother in 1940. Much of her poetry was about the suffering of the Jewish people and the Holocaust. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966 (together with the Israeli poet Samuel Agnon). It is sometimes stated that Nelly Sachs was not recognised until the 1960s,113 but, from the 1940s, in the Swedish-Jewish press she was published, and her work was discussed, by non-Jewish and Jewish Swedes.114 In the 1940s, the male authors in the Swedish-Jewish press constructed Sachs as a survivor or representative of survivors. For example, in early 1948, non-Jewish Swedish author Johannes Edfelt, who later translated and interpreted several of her works to Swedish, wrote with reference to Der wohnungen des Todes: ‘Nelly Sachs has the artist’s courage: she follows her people [stamförvanter] to the death camps and corpse factories; she sees the egregious truth boldly in the eyes’.115 The Holocaust was thus present early in the Swedish-Jewish cultural discourse represented by Nelly Sachs’ poetry, but also in the music of the composer Moses Pergament. In November 1947, Pergament’s

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‘The Jewish Song’ was performed at the Concert Hall in Stockholm. The Prelude to the Jewish song was titled, ‘An elegy for the six million Jews who fell victim to the cruelty of the Third Reich’. Not only did JK review the composition, but it also polemicised against the reviewers in the Swedish daily press, who in their reviews had argued that the piece was too loud: ‘However, it must be objected, because the subject itself demands this. The composer has completely identified himself with his suffering Jewish brothers, the work is written with his own heart blood’.116 The reviews of Sachs and Pergament disclose that the Holocaust (and specifically the Jewish suffering) was almost instantly incorporated in both Swedish and Swedish-Jewish culture. Their work was reviewed and discussed not only in the Swedish-Jewish press, but also in the Swedish daily press. This indicates that there was an interest in this kind of artistic expression and its content even beyond the culture of the Jewish minority in Sweden. The connection between Jewish and Swedish culture is also present in relation to the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Swedish Nobel laureate in literature Verner von Heidenstam’s poem ‘Bön vid lågorna’ [A Prayer before the Flames] was recited in the synagogue in Stockholm at the first memorial service for the murdered six million in 1945. Gabriela Mistral was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945, and her poems about the Jewish people were published in JK and JT. Nelly Sachs’ authorship was appreciated and interpreted in the Swedish-Jewish press long before she was honoured with the Nobel Prize. Furthermore, the many reviews of published literature, poems, films, and pieces of music, indicate both a great interest and a wide variety of literature and other cultural interpretations about and from Jewish survivors and the Holocaust, as well as demonstrate an early and continuous Swedish-Jewish cultural interest in the Holocaust.

Concluding Remarks The Swedish-Jewish press, here represented by JK and JT, was a public arena where the Holocaust and the survivors were presented and discussed in several ways to a Jewish and gentile audience. However, it also exposed and mediated the discourses of other public arenas such as trials, conferences, international and Swedish press, memorial monuments, literature, art, meetings of the Jewish women’s club, and other associations. By reading each issue and every single page of JK and JT published during the first decade after the Holocaust, it can be established that the Holocaust

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was continuously present in numerous and varied ways: the murdered six million, the survivors, or the perpetrators are mentioned in every published edition of JK and JT, sometimes in all texts published in an issue of each journal. This appeared initially with reference to the DPs and Palestine, and later in debates about restitution, the failed denazification of Germany, and Germany’s rearmament, and to some extent also in relation to the trials and diverse ways of commemorating the Holocaust. Further, the many reviews of published literature, poems, films, and pieces of music indicate both a great interest and a wide variety of literature and other cultural interpretations about the Holocaust. This demonstrates an early and continuous public Swedish and Swedish-Jewish cultural interest in the Holocaust and especially the Jewish tragedy. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, JK and JT also published articles about the participation of representatives of the Swedish Jews in the memorialisation of the Holocaust in different Swedish, Nordic, and European contexts. There were also articles about memorial ceremonies and monuments that were to be established in memory of the Jewish victims at various places in Sweden and Europe. The first decade can be understood as an intermediate period between the events of the Holocaust and a time when Holocaust memory became shaped into a recognised narrative or shared cultural memory. There was therefore no silence about the Holocaust in the Swedish-Jewish press, even though it is possible to talk about specific silences and, of course, the absence of a coherent Holocaust narrative since such a narrative did not yet exist in a Swedish-Jewish context.117 First, there is, for example, a silence concerning—and no explicit articles about—Swedish-Jewish heroes or heroines, or the many actions organised by Swedish-Jewish communities or associations to rescue or support refugees and survivors. There is not a complete silence about these activities since they are mentioned in birthday greetings, and in advertisements and meeting protocols about or from these activities, though there are no articles dedicated to describing what was going on or what had been done. Narratives about the Jewish relief work in Sweden were typically published in the community bulletin, Församlingsblad för Mosaiska församlingen, which was primarily directed to a Jewish audience. Hence, in comparison there is a silence, or a not-yet-articulated narrative, about the Swedish Jews, the Holocaust, and the survivors in the Swedish-Jewish press (with a both Jewish and gentile readership). Cultural or collective memory is always mediated in, for example, the press. As Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith

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write, ‘cultural memory is the product of fragmentary personal and collective experiences articulated through technologies and media that shape even as they transmit memory’. Acts of memory are thus acts of performance, representation, and interpretation. They require agents and specific contexts.118 In this case, it was a few agents and authors—mainly Swedish Jews, but also German and Austrian Jews that escaped to Sweden in the 1930s, such as Ernst Benedict, Erwin Leiser, and Paul Patera—who wrote about the Holocaust and the survivors in this specific context in JK and JT during the first decade following the Holocaust. Accordingly, it is not female Eastern European Jewish survivors that are heard in the journals, but a male intellectual Western European elite, some of whom had been established in the academic and cultural world before the catastrophe. One conclusion is that female Jewish survivors in Sweden were absent, and their voices, perspectives, and experiences were not heard, visible, or represented in JK and JT during the first decade after the Holocaust. Although most of the survivors who came to Sweden were women, they are not generally noted as female or survivors but were primarily referred to as ‘the rescued or liberated of 1945’. Their experiences as women were not emphasised, transmitted, or narrated. This silence persisted through the 1940s, but in the middle of the 1950s, articles about (the failed) integration appeared, as well as mentions of the survivors as participants at memorial ceremonies within the Swedish-Jewish community. This indicates a changed perception of the survivors, earlier depicted as temporary guests, but from the middle of the 1950s presented as potential members of the Swedish-Jewish community.

Notes 1. Jewish memories, D375:192, Archive of the Nordic Museum. My translation of the archived transcript from the interview in Swedish to English. 2. Eric J.  Sundquist, ‘Silence Reconsidered. An Afterword’ in After the Holocaust. Challenging the Myth of Silence, eds. David Cesarani and Eric J.  Sundquist (Abingdon and New  York: Routledge, 2012), 202–203; Hasia R. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love. American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust (New York: New York University Press, 2009). Silence is, indeed, a complicated empirical and theoretical concept, which has been widely researched and discussed in, for example, oral history and memory studies. See for example Alexandre Dessingué

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and Jay Winter, Beyond Memory. Silence and the Aesthetics of Remembrance (Abingdon and New  York: Routledge, 2016); Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith, ‘Feminism and Cultural Memory: An Introduction’, in Signs. Gender and Cultural Memory Special Issue 28, no. 1 (2002): 1–19; Henry Greenspan, ‘The Unsaid, the Incommunicable, the Unbearable, and the Irretrievable’ Oral History Review 41, no. 2 (2014): 229–243. 3. See, for example, Judy Tydor Baumel, Double Jeopardy. Gender and the Holocaust (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1998); Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair. Jewish Women in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, [1998] 1999); Dalia Ofer and Lenore J.  Weizman, Women in the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Anna Reading, The social inheritance of the Holocaust. Gender, culture and memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Joan Ringelheim, ‘Women and the Holocaust. A Reconsideration of Research’, Signs 10, no. 4 (1985): 741–761; Carol Rittner and John Roth eds, Different Voices. Women in the Holocaust (New York: Paragon House, 1993); Zoe Waxman, Women in the Holocaust. A Feminist History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 4. Ingrid Lomfors, ‘Inledning’, in Judiska minnen. Berättelser från Förintelsen, ed. Britta Johansson (Stockholm: Nordiska museet, 2000), 8; Anders Ohlsson, ‘Men ändå måste jag berätta.’ Studier i skandinavisk förintelselitteratur (Nora: Nya Doxa, 2002), 7–42; Ulf Zander, ‘Efterskrift’ in Befrielsen av Bergen-Belsen, Ben Shephard (Lund: Historiska media, 2005), 233. 5. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love. 6. Malin Thor Tureby, ‘Swedish Jews and Jewish survivors. The first public narratives about the survivors in the Swedish-Jewish press’ in Reaching a State of Hope. Refugees, Immigrants and the Swedish Welfare State, 1930–2000, eds. Mikael Byström and Pär Frohnert (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2013), 145–164. Malin Thor Tureby, ‘Svenska änglar och hyenor möter tacksamma flyktingar. Mottagningen av befriade koncentrationslägerfångar i skånsk press under året 1945’, Historisk ­ Tidskrift 135, no. 2 (2015): 266–300. 7. There also existed other publications, for example, Församlingsblad för Mosaiska församlingen i Stockholm, which was distributed to the members of the Jewish Community of Stockholm from 1940; Vår Röst [Our Voice], published during the years 1949 to 1953 by the Swedish Section of World Jewish Congress; and Unser Blatt [Our Paper] (1947–1949) for Jewish refugees and survivors. JK and JT were geared primarily to a Jewish audience, although not to a specific group, but to all Jews in Sweden. They also aimed to address and explain different Jewish subjects for a Swedish gentile public.

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8. Judiska församlingen i Göteborg, Judiska Hjälpfonden, Protokoll 1933–1942, AI: 1, Protokoll fört vid sammanträde den 11 maj 1938, §4. 9. Stephen Fruitman, Creating a New Heart. Marcus Ehrenpreis on Jewry and Judaism (Umeå: Umeå Universitet, 2001), 89–91. 10. Fruitman Creating a New Heart, 11; Thor Tureby, ‘Swedish Jews and Jewish survivors’, 145–146. 11. See for example Daniel Brick, ‘Det demokratiska England och de överlevande på den europeiska kontinenten’, JK, no. 7 (1945): 118–120; Elihau Dobkin, ‘De överlevande judarnas öde. En historia om skam och förödmjukelse’, JK, no. 7 (1945): 122–125; Alfred Michaelis, ‘Förskräckelse utan slut. Till den europeiska judefrågan’, JT, no. 3 (1946): 77–79; ‘Judarnas ställning i Europa’, JK, no. 5 (1946): 121–123; ‘Judiska Världskongressens konferens’, JK, no. 4 (1948): 46; ‘Den europeiska judenhetens läge i olika länder’, JT, no. 5. (1946): 138–147; Schlomo Katz, ‘De 100.000 tvångsförflyttade judarna’, JK, no. 6 (1946): 131–134; Gunhild Bergh, ‘Lägerliv i Italien’, JT no. 3 (1947): 83–86; James G. McDonald, ‘Vart kan flyktingarna ta vägen?’, JK, no. 4 (1947): 73; ‘Judarna i Europa’ JK, no. 4 (1947): 75–76; ‘Med en FN-delegation hos de tvångsförflyttade’ JK, no. 7 (1947): 121–125; ‘En amerikanare om displaced persons’, JK, no. 9 (1947): 161–162; ‘Ingen tysk ångrar, vad som hänt judarna’, JK, no. 3 (1948): 36; Max Nussbaum, ‘En amerikans intryck från Europa och Palestina’, JK, no. 9, 1948: 105–106; ‘Värnplikt för “displaced persons”’, JK, no. 11 (1948): 131; Marie Syrkin, ‘Skolorna för displaced persons’, JK, no. 13 (1948): 148–149. 12. Cf. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love, 109–119 for a similar conclusion about the American-Jewish press. See also Lawrence Baron, ‘The Holocaust and American Public Memory, 1945–1960’ in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17, no. 1 (2003): 62–88. 13. ‘Från de tvångsförflyttades värld’, JK, no. 3 (1947): 54–57. 14. ‘Brev från en moder’, JK, no. 3 (1945): 37. 15. See also Karin Sjögren, Judar i det svenska folkhemmet. Minne och identitet i Judisk krönika 1948–1958 (Eslöv: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 2001). 16. See, for example, Ernst Benedikt, ‘Förnuftets bankrutt?’, JT, no. 5 (1946): 148–152; Hugo Valentin, ‘Araber, judar och engelsmän’, JT, no. 2 (1947): 44–46; Marika Stiernstedt, ‘Hur ska vår tid ordna för judarna’, JT, no. 5 (1947): 137–144; I. R. Werfel, ‘Staten Israel och de skingrades hemkomst’, JT, no. 7 (1949): 189–191. 17. ‘Brevväxling mellan professorerna Heckscher och Ehrenpreis’, JT, no. 8 (1947): 241–248; Eli Heckscher, ‘De hemlösa judarnas framtid’, JT, no. 10 (1947): 319–322; Hugo Valentin; ‘Zionismen och verkligheten. Slutreplik till professor Heckscher’, JT, no. 20 (1947): 370–371.

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18. Hugo Valentin, ‘Den brittiska antizionismen’, JT no. 10 (1947): 305–309; ‘Englands del av skulden’, JK, no. 1–2 (1947): 32–34; ‘Englands problem i Mellersta Östern’, JK, no. 4 (1947): 69. 19. ‘Exodus 1947’, JK, no. 7 (1947): 125; ‘Den skamliga tvångslandsättningen i Hamburg’, JK, no. 8 (1947): 147; Léon Blum, ‘Flyktingbåten “Exodus” drama’, JT, no. 8 (1947): 249–250; ‘Flyktingarna från Exodus 1947’, JK, no. 3 (1948): 37. For a discussion about Exodus in Swedish and international press, see Antero Holmila, Reporting the Holocaust in the British, Swedish and Finnish Press, 1945–50 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 139–147. 20. ‘Exodus 1947’, JK, no. 7 (1947): 125. 21. Daniel Brick, ‘Det demokratiska England och de överlevande på den europeiska kontinenten’, JK, no. 7 (1945): 118–120; Claire Neikind, ‘Den engelska flottan kämpar mot hemlösa människor’, JK (1947): 1–2, 26. 22. See for example: ‘Englands del av skulden’, JK, no. 1–2 (1947): 32–34; ‘Från de tvångsförflyttades värld’, JK, no. 3 (1947): 54–57; Arthur Koestler, ‘Brev till fadern till en brittisk soldat’, JK, no. 7 (1947): 118–121; ‘Engelska flottan överfaller ett obeväpnat flyktingfartyg’, JK, no. 7 (1947): 126; ‘Creech Jones förr och nu’, JK, no. 6 (1948): 67; ‘Brittisk smädeskampanj mot flyktingar’, JK, no. 2 (1948): 20–22; ‘Den brittiska förtalskampanjen mot judiska flyktingar’, JK, no. 3 (1948): 35–36. 23. Rachel Deblinger, ‘David P.  Boder. Holocaust Memory in Displaced Persons Camps’ in After the Holocaust, eds. Cesarani and Sundquist, 115–126. 24. Cf. David Cesarani, “Challenging the ‘Myth of Silence’ in, After the Holocaust, eds. Ceserani and Sundquist, 25–27. For similar conclusions about the British and American contexts, see: Baron, ‘The Holocaust and American Public Memory’, 62–88. 25. Moshe Braver, ‘Belsenprocessen’, JK, no. 9 (1945): 161–162, quote 162. 26. Sonja M.  Hedgepleth and Rochelle G.  Saidel, Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust, 1–10. 27. Ernst Benedikt, ‘Kurzio Malaparte om det judiska ödet’, JT, no. 4 (1948): 104–108, quote 107. 28. Tora Nordström-Bonnier, ‘För oss är kriget inte vunnet’, JT, no. 7 (1945): 211. See also Thor Tureby, ‘Swedish Jews and Jewish survivors’. 29. Helene Sinnreich, ‘The Rape of Jewish Women during the Holocaust’ in Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust, eds. Sonia Hedgepeth and Rachel Saidel (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 108–123. 30. Stacey Branwell, ‘Rassenschande, Genocide and the Reproductive Jewish body. Examining the Use of Rape and Sexualised Violence against Jewish

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Women during the Holocaust?’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 15, no. 2 (2016): 208–227; Myrna Goldenberg, ‘Sex-based Violence and the Politics and Ethics of Survival’ in Different Horrors, Same Hell. Gender and the Holocaust, eds. Myrna Goldenberg and Amy Shapiro (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), 99–127; Hedgepeth and Saidel, Sexual Violence against Jewish Women. 31. Zoe Waxman, ‘Testimonies and Representations’, in The Historiography of the Holocaust, ed. Dan Stone (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 32. However, outside the Swedish context, there are early publications that focus on gendered experiences during the Holocaust. Marie Syrkin wrote in 1947 about forced prostitution and the specific sufferings and resistance of women in Blessed is the Match. The Story of Jewish Resistance (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1947), 133–185. 33. See for example ‘Från skilda länder’, JK, no. 6 (1947): 111; ‘Muftins blå ögon’, JK, no. 9 (1948): 105; Ernst Benedikt, ‘Amerikansk psykiater om de anklagade i Nürnberg’, JT, no. 4 (1949): 107–111; ‘Warszawagettots bödel dömd’, JK, no. 16 (1951): 116; ‘Nazistbefälhavare dödsdömd för mord på judar’, JK, no. 3 (1955): 62. 34. See for example: Ernst Benedikt, ‘Krigsförbrytare i frihet’, JT, no. 5 (1947): 145–150; ‘En krigsförbrytare vid konferensen om Marshallplanen’, JK, no. 8 (1948): 94; Willy Weismann, ‘Tyskarna beklagar sig’, JK, no. 10 (1948): 116; ‘Berlinhumor’, JK, no. 13 (1948): 159; ‘Antisemitismen i Tyskland’, JK, no. 5 (1949): 61; ‘Den mördade, inte mördaren skyldig’, JK, no. 8 (1952): 158; Frans Arnheim, ‘I Västtyskland intet nytt’, JT, no. 8 (1949): 224–225; Frans Arnheim och Emil Kronheim, ‘Tyskland och vi’, JT no. 11 (1949): 314–318; Frans Arnheim, ‘Schacht och antisemitismen’, JT, no. 11 (1949): 325–326; Ernst Benedikt, ‘Fallet Ludendorff’, JT, no. 1 (1950): 15–19; Ernst Benedikt, ‘På det att vi icke må glömma’, JT, no. 8 (1954): 198–202; Paul Patera, ‘Också en värld av igår’, JT, no. 9 (1954): 248–250; ‘Har tyskarna ändrat sig?’, JK, no. 2 (1955): 38; ‘Förutvarande nazister i östtyska parlamentet’, JK, no. 2 (1955): 47. 35. See for example, ‘Försoning med Tyskland’, JK, no. 2 (1952): 49; ‘Skadeståndsförhandlingar med Tyskland’, JK, no. 3 (1952): 83; ‘Västtyskland undertecknar skadeståndsöverenskommelsen med Israel’, JK, no. 8 (1952): 165–167; ‘Skadeståndet med Västtyskland i hamn’, JK, no. 4 (1953): 81; ‘Skadeståndsanbud från Österrike’, JK, no. 3 (1954): 60; ‘Det “fattiga” Österrike och de “rika” judarna’, JK, no. 1 (1955): 7; ‘Judiska världskongressen och den tyska återupprustningen’, JK, no. 2 (1955): 46.

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36. See for example: JK, no. 5–6 (1945): 103–104; Front cover, JK, no. 10 (1945); JK, no. 4 (1946) and JK no. 4 (1947). 37. ‘Räddningen av vår tids förföljda barn’, JK 1945: 5–6, 103–104; Julius Brutzkus, ‘De judiska barnen i Europa’, JK, no. 9 (1945): 154–155; ‘Krig mot barn’, JK, 1945:10, 175–176; Benno Hess, ‘Återresa PragParis-­Brüssel-Amsterdam-Stockholm’, JK, no. 10 (1945): 170; ‘Oneg sabbat i ett läger för tvångsförflyttade’, JK, no. 6 (1947): 104–105. 38. ‘Mitt namn är Chajim’, JK, no. 4 (1947): 76–77; ‘Berättelsen om en horra’, JK, no. 6 (1947). 39. Boaz Cohen, ‘Representing the Experiences of Children in the Holocaust. Children’s survivor testimonies published in Fun Letster Hurbn, Munich 1946–49’ in‘We are here’. New approaches to Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, eds. Avinoam J. Patt and Michela Berkowitz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press 2010), 74–97. 40. Thor Tureby, ‘Swedish Jews and Jewish survivors’, 147–149. 41. JK, no. 8 (1943): Front cover. 42. It was quite common to refer to the survivors as ‘The liberated of 1945’; ‘the Rescued of 1945’ or ‘the Rescued of 1945’. I use and quote the terminology used in the journals, while referencing the texts. 43. ‘Rabbinrådet i Sverige’, JT, no. 10 (1945): 295; Erwin Leiser, ‘Wir leben ewig’, JT, no. 9 (1945): 272–273; ‘Chanuka-hälsning till 1945 års räddade’, JT, no. 11 (1945): 342–343; ‘Ragnar Gottfarb om Joints arbete i Sverige’, JK, no. 2 (1955): 43. 44. See, for example, an ad for a bazaar in favor of the Jewish reconstruction work in Europe organised by the Jewish women’s club in Stockholm, JT, no. 2 (1945): 65; ‘För judiska barn på judisk mark’ (Soaré organised by KKL and WIZO), JK, no. 3 (1945): 41; ‘En vädjan från Judiska kvinnoklubben i Stockholm’, JT, no. 4 (1945): 126; ‘Mosaiska församlingens klädinsamling’, JT, no. 11 (1945): 327, no 12 (1945): 361; ‘Vår vädjan’, JK, no. 7 (1945): 130; ‘För de hemlösa judiska massorna’, JK, no. 8 (1947): 139; Ad from the Jewish community in Stockholm seeking Jewish foster homes for Jewish refugee children, JK, no. 11 (1948): 135; ‘Vi behöva sängar, stolar, små bord och skåp’, JT, no. 1 (1948): 16; ‘Judiska kvinnoklubben i Stockholm. Årsberättelser 1 april 1948–31 mars 1949’, JT, no. 6 (1949): 169. 45. See for example ‘Sara Mehr 60 år’, JK, no. 5 (1947): 94; ‘Hirsch Nissalowitz 60 år’, JK, no. 11 (1948): 133; ‘Stig Bendixon 60 år’, JK, no. 12 (1948): 142; ‘Julius Hüttner 70 år’, JK, no. 5 (1951): 63; ‘Marcus Kaplan är död’, JT, no. 8 (1953): 218–219; ‘Rabbin Jacobson död’, JK, no. 2 (1955): 48. 46. ‘Till alla judiska kvinnor (män) i Sverige’, JT, no. 6 (1945): 182; JT, no. 7 (1945): 201.

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47. Marcus Levin, ‘“Displaced persons” till Norge’, JK, no. 6 (1947): 102. 48. Jack Diamond, ‘Judiska hjälporganisationer i Amerika’, JK, no. 8 (1945): 144–145; ‘Rabbinråd för räddade barns uppfostran’, JK, no. 8 (1945): 145; ‘Judiska Världskongressen’, JK, no. 8 (1945): 146; ‘Sveriges judiska skyddslingar i Budapest’, JT, no. 1 (1945): 23–24; Eva Reading, ‘Barnahjälp i befriade länder’, JT, no. 2 (1945): 49–53; ‘Ambulerade synagogor’, JT, no. 2 (1945): 64. 49. See for example ‘Har du gjort din plikt?’, JK, no. 10 (1948): 117; ‘Judiska kvinnor i Sverige’, Front cover JK, no. 4 (1948); ‘Förenade Israel-­ insamlingen’, Front cover JK, no. 1–2 (1949). 50. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love, 180–187. 51. ‘Flyktingar går i land i Erets Israel’, JK, no. 9 (1948): 103; ‘Judisk delegation hos Folke Bernadotte’, JK, no. 10 (1948): 118; ‘Keren Hajesod och den judiska staten’, JK, no. 13 (1948): 158; ‘Vem vill hjälpa Keren Kajemet’, JK, no. 16 (1948): 199. 52. Front cover, JK, no. 8 (1945): ‘“Hechaluz” hebreiska studievecka’, JK, no. 2 (1945): 30; ‘Från Bachads årskonferens’, JK, no. 6 (1947): 110; ‘Youth alijah in Sweden’, JK, no. 3 (1948): 38; Hans Wellisch, ‘Alijah från Sverige’, JK, no. 2 (1948): 240–241. 53. Hechaluz and Bachad had about 300 remaining members in Sweden in 1945 before the arrival of the camp survivors. In 1946, there were almost 4000 members registered. 54. See for example Hilda Andersson, ‘Kibbutz Svartingstorp i Skåne’, JT, no. 2 (1937): 56–58; The whole September issue of JK in 1944 was devoted to celebrating the tenth anniversary of the children and youth alijah. See JK, no. 7 (1944). 55. Thor Tureby, ‘Swedish Jews and Jewish survivors’; Thor Tureby, ‘Svenska änglar och hyenor möter tacksamma flyktingar’. 56. I have found only one such article, see ‘61 av “1945 års räddade” till USA’, JK, no. 1 (1953): 16. See also Front cover JK, no. 4 (1946). 57. Cf. Thor Tureby, ‘Svenska änglar och hyenor möter tacksamma flyktingar’. 58. ‘Tre till Sverige räddade flickor berättar’, JK, no. 7 (1945), 83–85; ‘Jag flydde från Oswiecim’, JK, no. 7 (1945): 85–88. 59. M. Friediger, ‘Som Fange i Theresienstadt’, JK, no. 8 (1945): 141–143. Friediger was also interviewed in the Swedish press, see Thor Tureby, ‘Svenska änglar och hyenor möter tacksamma flyktingar’. He published the book Theresienstadt in 1946. 60. Dalia Ofer, ‘The Community and the Individual. The Different Narratives of Early and Late Testimonies and Their Significance for Historians’ in Holocaust Historiography in Context. Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and

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Achievements, eds. David Bankier and Dan Michman (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2008), 519–535. 61. See for example ‘Från Stockholms mosaiska församlings fullmäktigesammanträde’, JK, no. 4 (1946): 101; Daniel Brick, ‘Fullmäktigevalet i Stockholms mosaiska församling’, no. 9 (1947): 155; Herman Seatiel, ‘Nya intryck från det gamla Sverige’, JK, no. 5 (1948): 51–52; ‘Möte i Blå Hallen’, JK, no. 6 (1948): 70; Hirsch Nissalowitz, ‘Traditionella gruppen’, JK, no. 7 (1948): 75. 62. See for example: ‘Meddelande’, JK, no. 9 (1947):166; ‘Judisk ungdom på konstnärlig frammarsch’, JK, no. 10 (1947): 189; ‘Samarbete erbjuds flykting’, JK, no. 2 (1948): 23. 63. Bengt Halden, ‘Att rädda en minoritet’, JT, no. 2 (1952): 47–49, quote on p. 47. 64. Beth Cohen, Case Closed. Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 155–172. 65. Bengt Halden, ‘Judisk flykting’, JT, no. 4 (1953): 105–107; Bengt Halden, ‘Resa med minnen’, JT, no. 3 (1954): 85–88. 66. Irene Levin, ‘Taushetens tale’, Nytt Norsk Tidskrift, no. 4 (2004): 380–381. 67. Mira Halden (born Teeman) was rescued to Sweden in 1945 from the Nazi concentration camps. Mira Teeman later published two books in Swedish Tre dagar innan (1956) and Lerbild av Rosa (1958) that relates to the Holocaust and being a survivor in Sweden. 68. Catherine Daligga, ‘Ilona Karmel 1925–2000’ in Jewish Women’s Archive: https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/karmel-ilona (accessed 2018-03-08). 69. Mira Halden and Bengt Halden, ‘Vägvisare genom Ingenmansland’, JT, no. 10 (1954): 276–278. 70. David Köpniwsky, ‘Att rädda en minoritet, JT, no. 2 (1952): 49–51. 71. See for example ‘Stockholms mosaiska församling och flyktingspolitiken’, JK, no. 2 (1945): 18; Marcus Ehrenpreis and Gunnar Josephson, ‘Stockholms mosaiska församlings flyktinghjälp’, JT, no. 20 (1947): 61–63; Frans Arnheim, ‘De mörka åren’, JT, no. 8 (1954): 211–214. 72. For further discussion on this subject, see Pontus Rudberg, ‘“A Record of Infamy.” The use and abuse of the Swedish Jewish response to the Holocaust’, in Scandinavian Journal of History, 36, no. 5 (2011), 536–554; Rudberg, Pontus. ‘The politics of Jewish refugee aid and relief work in Sweden’ in Reaching a State of Hope: Refugees, Immigrants and the Swedish Welfare State, 1930–2000, eds. Mikael Byström and Pär Frohnert (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2013), 80–101. 73. There was a silence about the extensive Swedish-Jewish relief work in the JK and JT, journals with both a Jewish and Gentile audience. However.

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Församlingsblad för Mosaiska församlingen i Stockholm, the member bulletin of the Jewish Community of Stockholm, gives a completely different picture. In Församlingsbladet there is a lot of information about different relief activities for and with the refugees during the 1940’s and 1950’s. See especially Församingsblad för Mosaiska församlingen i Stockholm, August 1947. This issue is devoted to reports about different relief works. The community journal was published in Swedish, but this number was also published in English, possibly as a response to articles published in Jewish Agency’s Digest, where the Swedish Jews were criticised for not doing enough to help the persecuted Jews of Europe during and after the war. 74. Emil Kronheim, ‘Till minnet av Israels döda’, JT, no. 5 (1945): 134–136. 75. ‘WIZO-kongress i Stockholm’, JK, no. 10 (1947): 187. See also ‘Möte i Blå Hallen’ no. 6 (1948): 71. Nusia Gold read a poem by Schalom Ash about the Warsaw ghetto uprising. 76. Herbert Friedländer, ‘Harald Isenstein. Med anledning av flyktingmonumentets avtäckning i Hälsingborg den 21 maj 1945’, JT, no. 5 (1945): 154–158; Harry Rubinstein, ‘Gravmonument i Malmö över nazismens offer’, JK, no. 1–2 (1950): 12; Erwin Leiser, ‘Willy Gordon’, JT, no. 5 (1950): 159–161. 77. Inga Gottfarb, ‘Besök i Belsen’, JT, no. 4 (1946): 105–108. 78. ‘Högtidsdagar i Trondheim’, JK, no. 10 (1947): 186–187. 79. ‘Judiskt gravmonument i Oslo’, JK, no. 1–2 (1949): 24; ‘Monument avtäckt’, JK, no. 18, (1951): 294; ‘Minnesmärke över koncentrationslägret i Belsen invigt’, JK, no. 1 (1953): 16. 80. ‘Judiska Världskongressen sammanträder’, JK, no. 4 (1948): 56. 81. ‘Ghettomonumentet i Warszawa’, JK, no. 8 (1948): 94. 82. Abraham Brody, ‘Monument över judiskt hjältemod’, JT, no. 4 (1948): 113–116. 83. Hugo Valentin, “Resa till Polen’, JT, no. 5 (1948): 135–137. 84. See for example ‘Warszawagettots kamp’ JK, no. 12–13 (1951): 163; Grete Berges, “Stjärnorna vittnar”, JK, no. 2 (1952): 45–46; ‘Judiska flygares minne hedrat i Malmö’ Frontcover JK, no. 18 (1948); ‘Tal över två stupade flygare’, JK, no. 20 (1948): 237. 85. Jossie Granditsky, ‘På det att I icke mån glömma’, JK, no. 6 (1951): 73–74, quote on p. 74. 86. See for example ‘Minnesmärke i Belsen avtäckt’, JK, no. 4 (1946): 99–101; Meir Teich, ‘Minne av Transnistrien. Bukovinajudarnas deporation’, JK no. 2 (1952): 41–42; Michael Zilberg, ‘Ett tragiskt tioårsminne. Utrotningen av 500,000 judar i Warszawa’, JK, no. 8 (1952): 155–156; ‘Den okände judiske martyrens grav”, JK, no. 6 (1953): 128; ‘Minnesmöte i Prag’, JK, no. 3 (1954): 66; ‘Ceremoni i Buchenwald’, JK, no. 4

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(1954): 91; ‘Warszawaghettots hjältar hedras’, JK, no. 4 (1946): 99–101; ‘Minneshögtid över Auschwitz’, JK, no. 2 (1955): 47. 87. Anders W. Mölleryd, ‘Hur de mottogs’, JT no. 9 (1953): 236–238. See also Hugo Valentin, ‘Minnesbok om en underbar räddning’, JT, no. 6–7 (1952): 158–159. 88. Thor Tureby, ‘Svenska änglar och hyenor möter tacksamma flyktingar’. 89. ‘1945 års räddade” bildar förbund’, JK, 4–5 (1955): 86. 90. Herman Löb, ‘Kring ett tioårsminne’, JK, 4–5 (1955): 79; ‘Ivar Philipson om ankomsten av “1945 års räddade”‘, JK, 4–5 (1955): 80–81; ‘Varifrån “1945 års räddade kom”‘, JK, no. 4–5 (1955): 81–83, ‘Första tiden i Sverige’, JK, 4–5 (1955): 85–86. 91. Orna Kenan, Between Memory and History. The Evolution of Israeli Historiography of the Holocaust, 1945–1961 (New York: Peter Lang, 2003); Mikael Tossavainen, Heroes and victims. The Holocaust in Israeli historical consciousness (Lund: Historiska institutionen, 2006). 92. Ernst Benedikt, ‘En martyrernas dag’, JT, no. 4 (1945), 120–122; Ernst Benedikt, ‘På Novemberpogromens årsdag’, JT no. 10 (1945): 302–307. 93. Nella Rost, ‘De kämpade fastän kampen var utsiktslös’, JK, no. 10 (1949): 103–104; ‘Sexårsdagen av uppropet i Warszawa’, JK, no. 10 (1949): 108; Seweryn Rozenberg, ‘Till sexårsdagen av upproret i Warszawas ghetto’, JT, no. 5 (1949): 136–138; ‘Kisijnev och Warsawa’, JK, no. 4 (1953): 77–78; Hugo Valentin, ‘Tio-årsdagen av Warszawa ghettots resning’, JT, no. 4 (1953): 95–96; Carl Villhelm Jacobowsky, ‘Judar som krigare’, JT no. 4 (1953): 97–104; ‘Elvaårsminnet av Warszawaghettots uppror’, JK, no. 5 (1954): 118; ‘Warszawa-upproret firat med sorgehögtid’, JK, no. 4–5 (1955): 103. 94. ‘Martyrernas skog’, JK, no. 5 (1951): 59; ‘Martyrernas skog’, JK, no. 6 (1951): 77; ‘Martyrernas skog’, JK, no 11 (1951): 138–139; ‘Aktionen för planteringen av martyrernas skog’, advert in JK, no. 15 (1951): 206; no. 2 (1952): 15. 95. ‘Sveriges stora insats vid räddningen av judar’, JK no. 5–6 (1945): 96–97, quote on p.  97. See also ‘Raoul Wallenberg’, JK no. 2 (1945); Ragna Abertén-Schiratzki, ‘I människokärlekens tjänst’, JT, no. 8 (1945): 240–243; ‘Raoul Wallenberg. Ett brev’, JT no. 1, (1948): 1–2; Hugo Valentin, ‘En partisan i mänsklighetens tjänst’, JT, no. 1, (1948): 3–6; ‘En skog till Folke Bernadottes minne’, JK no. 2 (1952): 35; ‘Raoul Wallenberg’, JK no. 2 (1955): 44. Similar ‘articles of gratitude’ addressed to the Swedish king were also published in 1942 and 1943 in the SwedishJewish press in context of the rescue of the Danish and Norwegian Jews to Sweden, see Thor Tureby, ‘Swedish Jews and Jewish survivors’. 96. ‘Judisk kontakt med hr Himmler räddade kvinnor’, Dagens Nyheter, 16 May, 1945; ‘Svensk jude underhandlade med hr Himmler om hjälpak-

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tion’, Svenska Dagbladet, 16 May, 1945. Thank you, Kristin Wagrell, for providing me with copies of these articles. 97. Ragna Abersten-Schiratzki, ‘Räddning från koncentrationslägren’, JT, no. 10 (1945): 319–321. 98. ‘En skog till Folke Bernadottes minne’, JK no. 2 (1952): 35. 99. ‘Eva Warburg har utvandrat till Eretz Israel’, JK no. 10 (1945): 178. 100. Olga Raphael Hallencreutz, ‘Till en Röda kors delegat’, JT no. 5 (1945): 148–149. The poem was recited at a JKK meeting, when Asta Nilsson was invited to speak about her work for the Red Cross in Budapest. 101. Klas Åmark, Förövarna bestämmer villkoren. Raoul Wallenberg och de internationella hjälpaktionerna i Budapest (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag 2016), 306–309. 102. See for example ‘Flykt från Hitlers Berlin’, JK, no. 1 (1945):14; Lia Gottfarb, ‘På de anklagades bänk’, JT no. 1 (1945): 29–30; Ragna Aberstén-­ Schiratzki, ‘Noveller och romaner om nazismen’, JT no. 9 (1945): 277–283; Gösta Carlberg, ‘Det får aldrig glömmas!’, JK, no. 10 (1945): 172–178; Ragna Aberstën-Schiratzki, ‘Motgift mot antisemitismen’, JT no. 5 (1946): 153–155; Herbert Friedländer, ‘Exil-deportationräddning’, JT, no. 12 (1946): 383–387; Joseph Heller, ‘Fasa och hjältemod’, JK, no. 5 (1947): 90–91; Ernst Benedikt, ‘Ett verk om koncentrationslägren’, JT, no. 10 (1947): 323–327; Ernst Benedikt, ‘Det judiska ödet under kriget’, JT, no. 7 (1948): 212–216; Paul Patera, ‘De dödsdömdas brödraskap’, JT, no. 6, (1949): 196–201. 103. Ernst Benedikt, ‘Dokument om nazismen’, JT, no. 11 1948, 327–330; Annmari Lindh, ‘Skuggor på vita duken’, JT, no. 12(1948), 360–362. For reviews of other movies touching on the Jewish experience of the war/Holocaust see for example: Ernst Benedikt, ‘Farligt vittne  – skakande film’, JT, no. 8 (1949): 234–235; Ernst Benedikt, ‘Samtal om en Auschwitzfilm’, JT, no. 9 (1949): 268–269; Paul Pantera, ‘Vändpunkten’, JT, no. 12 (1949): 368–370. 104. Ernst Benedikt, ‘Samtal om en Auschwitzfilm’, JT, no. 9 (1949): 268–269. 105. Ernst Benedikt, ‘Två böcker om människokärlek’, JT, no. 2 (1950), 60–64, quote 61–62. 106. Se for example A. Brody, ‘En judisk polyhistor och hans tragiska slutöde’, JT, no. 7 (1948): 208–211; Ernst Benedikt, ‘Öppet brev till Hannah Arendt’, JT, no. 1 (1952), 20–24; Frans Arnheim, ‘Spender som ungdomsalijahns gäst’, JT, no. 1 (1953): 29–30; Paul Patera, ‘Ps. till fallet Gheorghiu’, JT, no. 1 (1953): 31; Walter Klein, ‘Antisemitismen i Lund’, JT, no. 6 (1954): 179–180; Paul Patera, ‘Halvjude i tredje riket’, JT, no. 6 (1954): 181–183.

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107. See for example Irma Nordvang, ‘Dikter för Israel’, JK, no. 11 (1948): 128; Elin Hök, ‘Tung var din hand’, JT, no. 3 (1945): 93; Verner von Heidenstam, ‘Bön vid lågorna’, JT, no. 5 (1945): 136. 108. Gabriela Mistral, ‘Till Judafolket’, JK, no. 10 (1945): 176; ‘Till Judafolket’, JT, no. 12 (1945): 365–366. 109. David Schimoni, ‘Till sist talade han ändå med mig’, JT, no. 1 (1953): 14–16. 110. See for example C. Vilh. Jacobovsky, ‘En judisk socialists memoarer’, JK, no. 4 (1946): 98; Ernst Benedikt, ‘Ett verk om koncentrationslägren’, JT, no. 10 (1947): 323–327; Ragna Abersten-Schiratzki, ‘Räddningen från koncentrationslägren’, JT, no. 11 (1945): 321; Ernst Benedikt, ‘Kurzio Malaparte om det Judiska ödet’, JT, no. 4 (1948): 104–108, Paul Patera, ‘Livsgnistan’, JT, no. 4 (1953): 112. 111. JT, no. 1 (1953): 25. 112. Paul Patera, ‘Vändpunkten’, JT no. 12 (1949): 368–370, quote on p. 369. 113. Elaine Martin, Nelly Sachs. The Poetics of Silence and the Limits of Representation, (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2011). 114. Johannes Edfelt ‘Några ord om en skaldinna’, JK, no. 2 (1948); Erwin Leiser, ‘Judisk tragik’, JT, no. 11 (1947): 364–368; Nelly Sachs, ‘Abraham’, JT, no. 11 (1947): 343; Erwin Leiser, ‘Judisk klagan’, JT, no. 3 (1948): 89; ‘Nelly Sachs’, JK, no. 1–2 (1949): 16–17; ‘Nelly Sachs’, JK, no. 3 (1949): 36; ‘Nelly Sachs hittills otryckta dramatiska dikt’, ‘Eli, ett mysteriespel om Israels lidande’, JT, no. 6 (1949): 145; Erwin Leiser, ‘Stjärnor i mörkret’, JT, no. 6 (1949): 162–165; Emilia Fogelklou, ‘Nelly Sachs mysteriespel’, JT, no. 10 (1951): 256–258; ‘Brev till Professor Berendsohn från Anna Söderblom’, JT, no. 10 (1951): 258; Stig Bendixon, ‘Nelly Sachs diktdrama “Eli”‘, JK, no. 1 (1951): 17, 242; ‘Judisk litteraturafton’, JK, no. 18 (1951): 278; Moses Pergament, ‘Nelly Sachs  – Israels gråterska’, JK, no 10 (1952): 208–209; Walter A. Berendsohn, ‘Nelly Sachs utveckling’, JT, no. 2 (1954): 54–55. 115. Johannes Edfelt, ‘Några ord om en skaldinna’, JK, no. 2 (1948): 20. 116. ‘Den judiska sången’, JK, no. 3, (1948): 32; ‘Göteborgspressen om Moses Pergaments senaste tonskapelse’, JK, no. 10 (1952): 215. 117. There has, however, never been one narrative about the Holocaust. The meaning of the Holocaust and the shaping of its memory is a pluralistic and ongoing discourse. See for example Dalia Ofer, ‘The Past That Does Not Pass: Israelis and Holocaust Memory’ in Israel Studies, 14, no. 1 (2009): 1–35. 118. Hirsch and Smith, ‘Feminism and Cultural Memory’, 1–19; quote on p. 6.

CHAPTER 11

Recognition, Justice, and Memory: Swedish-­Jewish Reactions to the Holocaust and the Major Trials Julia Sahlström

The first post-war Holocaust discussion among Jews in Sweden concerned not only the traumatic past itself, but also questions about justice in the shadow of different kinds of legal processes and a desire for retribution. Unfortunately, memory studies and research on transitional justice have largely been studied as two independent fields of research. This could be explained by the fact that memory studies have been predominantly linked to scholarly fields such as history, anthropology, and sociology, while transitional justice has been linked to scholarly fields such as political science, law, and peace and conflict studies. The present chapter, however, stresses both the importance that memory plays in transitional justice processes and, equally, how these processes impact memory by investigating how the Swedish-Jewish memory of the Holocaust, in its various forms, was shaped in relation to justice during the Nuremberg trials that took place

J. Sahlström (*) Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Heuman, P. Rudberg (eds.), Early Holocaust Memory in Sweden, The Holocaust and its Contexts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55532-0_11

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between 1945 and 1949, and the Eichmann trial of 1961. The purpose is to investigate how the memory of the Holocaust was shaped in general around the time of these trials and to explore what kind of justice the Jews in Sweden requested in relation to their traumatic past. The study is consequently both an attempt to generate an understanding of the extent to which the Jewish discussion of the Holocaust in the late 1940s and the beginning of the 1960s was related to these trials and, furthermore, to enlighten the relationship between the memory of the Holocaust and various demands for justice. The impacts of the Nuremberg trials and the Eichmann trial on Jewish perceptions and memories of the Holocaust have been debated in the scholarly community, and these trials thus typify two alleged critical junctures of this memory.1 While the Nuremberg trials were the first international courts that tried individuals responsible for crimes against humanity in relation to Nazi persecution of Jews and other groups (it has been criticised for not giving the Jewish trauma appropriate attention), the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem focused on particular Jewish experiences and involved many Jewish witness accounts. Both trials were largely covered in the media and had a significant impact on the perceptions of Nazi crimes in the Western World.2 On a more general level, sociologists Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and political scientist Daniel Levy argue that to achieve restitution, justice and different kinds of identity politics are central aspects of memory and that it is ‘clear that since the Second World War we have moved to new ways of contemplating historical justice, reparations, and the “ethics of memory”’.3 In a similar way, Donald Bloxham, a professor in Modern history, argues that it is imperative to investigate how legal milieus have helped to form the understanding of the Holocaust.4 Some studies of post-war Swedish Jewry have shown an ongoing discussion on the Holocaust among Jews by looking at the role of the survivors in Swedish-Jewish journals immediately after the war and attitudes towards Israel between 1948 and 1958.5 The present chapter will further develop this approach by looking at the relationship between justice and memory: both how the processes of justice shaped Holocaust memory and also how this memory contributed to various demands for justice among Jews in Sweden. The following questions have been used for this purpose. In what way was the Holocaust represented among Jews in Sweden around the time of the Nuremberg trials and the Eichmann trial? To what extent was Holocaust memory related to the trials? In what way

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did the memory of the Holocaust influence various demands for justice among Jews in Sweden? The analysis will concentrate on the discussion in the main Swedish-­ Jewish journals Judisk Krönika and Judisk Tidskrift. These journals commented extensively on events that took place outside Sweden and they were read throughout the whole country. The historian Malin Thor Tureby has argued that the two journals can ‘be seen as forums where Swedish Jews presented themselves to Swedish society at large (…)’,6 although this was clearly not the primary aim of either of the two journals. In order to capture how Holocaust memory was related to justice, I have investigated all articles related to both trials and the Holocaust in general. The time period of 1945–1949 is included,7 covering both the main Nuremberg trial and the subsequent smaller trials, and 1960–1962,8 which covers the capture of Eichmann in Argentina and his execution. My aim has not been to compare the two journals, but rather the idea is to include as many voices as possible from the Swedish-Jewish public arena. This focus also includes translated articles from well-known personalities within the Jewish community. In order to analyse Holocaust memory during the trials, the analysis focuses on the depiction of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders in the journals, to assess the extent to which these related to the trials. These categories are useful to examine reactions and attitudes to this event and it is common within Holocaust research in general. As long as the fluidity and complexity of these roles are acknowledged, they can also be used as social categorisations to understand how a minority, like the Jews in Sweden, remember a past trauma like the Holocaust.9 The categories are also relevant to justice since they illuminate justice on various levels. Transitional justice can be embodied in many different forms such as trials, truth commissions, reparations, or memorials, and more research is needed that focuses on how memories of past human rights violations of minority groups can trigger demands for justice and how this requested justice is envisioned at different times. The analysis will demonstrate how various forms of justice were articulated in relation to discussions around the Holocaust.

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Representation of the Holocaust During the Nuremberg Trials The Nuremberg trials were a series of thirteen trials carried out by the International Military Tribunal between the years 1945 and 1949 against high-ranking leaders of the Nazi regime. These trials took place at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany, and were the first attempt by the four major Allied powers (the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union) to prosecute those who had committed war crimes during the Second World War.10 The best known set of trials in the Nuremberg process were those that took place between 20 November 1945 and 1 October 1946, commonly referred to as the main trial. In these trials, the International Military Tribunal was tasked with trying twenty-four of the highest-ranking Nazis.11 The subsequent trials in Nuremberg, between December 1946 and April 1949, included among others, the Doctors trial, the Judges trial or the so-called Justice trial, and the Einsatzgrupppen trials. The Nuremberg trials represented the first time that war crimes and crimes against humanity were officially recognised as crimes in international law and that the leaders of a defeated country in war were held accountable for their actions in an international court.12 While the Nuremberg trials played an important role for discussions on the Holocaust in the Swedish press in general,13 the situation was rather different within the Swedish-Jewish press. Although this is not a statistical analysis based on numbers of articles, it is important to stress that the Nuremberg trials were only mentioned in five articles out of close to 800 articles in Judisk Krönika during the time period 1945–1949.14 In Judisk Tidskrift, the Nuremberg trials were mentioned in nine articles out of close to 500 articles during the same time-period. Each of these articles explored the subject of the Holocaust. However, the Holocaust in general, both within the framework of the trials and outside, was the topic of focus in 82 articles out of close to 800 articles in Judisk Krönika during the same period, and in 136 articles out of close to 500 articles in Judisk Tidskrift. Most articles were published in 1945, with the following years marked by an emerging interest in Zionism, which led to declining interest in the genocide. In light of this, it is clear that the Nuremberg trials did not prompt discussions in the journals around victims, perpetrators, bystanders or justice in a significant way, but this does not mean that the journals did not

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discuss aspects of the Holocaust independently of the trials, or that the readers of the journals did not examine the trials among themselves. The Holocaust was featured in both journals, even though the memory of this trauma did not merge with the Nuremberg trials to a particularly large extent. Claims of justice were formulated, but, as will be shown below, in most cases this was independent of the trials. From a Jewish perspective, this might indicate that the Nuremberg trials were not considered as an important judicial framework for coming to terms with the persecution and genocide of the Jews at a time when Jewish refugees were still looking for shelter and a home in Europe. Indeed, while the Nuremberg trials were taking place, the existence of the camps of displaced persons became an increasingly pressing concern for Jewish communities in Europe. These camps were important references during early discussions of the Holocaust. The journals framed the Jews as the main victim group. This is in line with the established understanding of the Holocaust today as the genocide of six million Jews.15 The authors simply referred to other victims without discussing them, such as Poles, Czechs, French, Dutch, Serbs, Norwegians, and Danes.16 There were also no discussions in the articles regarding the persecution or killings of other victim groups such as Roma, homosexuals, ethnic Poles, Ukrainian Slavs, Soviet POWs, Belarusian Slavs, Serbs, disabled, Freemasons, Slovenes, leftists, Jehovah’s Witnesses or Spanish Republicans. Even though the focus was on Jews as victims, the journals mainly portrayed the Jewish survivors as collective entities. The journals moreover did not depict the experiences of newly arrived survivors in Sweden, but rather focused on the situation and hardships of displaced Jews in Europe. This is most likely explained by the fact that the journals displayed a tendency to regard the Jewish survivors in Sweden as temporary guests that planned to emigrate to Palestine: a fact that has been pointed out by Thor Tureby.17 The perspective of the survivors was present to a greater degree in other publications, such as the bulletin of the Jewish community of Stockholm (Församlingsblad för Mosaiska församlingen i Stockholm), which published several issues that solely dealt with Jewish refugees and survivors in Sweden. As both Judisk Krönika and Judisk Tidskrift were more or less engaged in the Zionist cause after the war, however, emphasis was also placed on the notion that all Jews should unite as a people to support this ideology.18 The journals described Nazi persecution of Jews across a longer historical continuity—with the Holocaust being the zenith of Jewish persecution in Europe.19 In terms of Jewish victimhood, Polish Jews were depicted as

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having experienced the most severe persecution during the Holocaust.20 As Thor Tureby argued, there was also an inclination in the journals to highlight the distinctive manners of Eastern European Jews in contrast to the Western manners of Swedish Jews.21 Nevertheless, despite the fact that the victim group was predominantly framed as Jews, the emphasis of the discussions between 1945 and 1949 was not on the experiences of Jewish victims during the Holocaust, but rather on the current situation of Jewish refugees, on the importance of Zionism, and the creation of Israel.22 It should also be highlighted that these were fragmented discussions of the Holocaust in Judisk Krönika and Judisk Tidskrift, since various aspects of the genocide were described rather than the whole picture. The issue of perpetrators was commented on but in general the journals lacked longer in-depth analyses concerning the topic and more emphasis was instead placed on the issue of Jewish victimhood. The focus of the published articles in regard to perpetrators was predominantly placed on the National Socialist German Worker’s Party, commonly referred to as the ‘Nazi Party’.23 This tendency is in line with the understanding of scholars, such as the historian Tony Kushner, who argue that in the years following the Holocaust the crimes committed were chiefly blamed on the Nazi regime. This led to other nations failing to evaluate their own roles during these dark years.24 The roles of ordinary German citizens were also considered, and the authors concurred that a majority of the German citizens supported the growth of the Third Reich and voluntarily voted for Hitler in free elections. These citizens were also represented in the articles as having been aware of the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime. The German state was conspicuously demonised in the articles and was depicted as having committed terrible atrocities throughout history for which no apology, legal-punishment or compensation could atone.25 In this regard, Germany was portrayed as a nation that had fostered antisemitic sentiments, even long before the Second World War. As a result, after the war, authors in the journals turned their attention to the unsuccessful denazification of Germany.26 Yet, even though emphasis was placed on the Nazi regime and the German nation in terms of responsibility and guilt, the articles did not portray a clear-cut image of the perpetrators during this period of time. Guilt was specifically ascribed to ‘England’, due to its restrictive immigration policies both during and after the war.27 The journals highlighted that if the United Kingdom had let more Jews emigrate to Palestine during the war, more Jews would have survived.28 The persecution and murder of

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Jews were also seen as the fault of, what was in vague terms referred to, as Christian nations and ‘humanity’. It was asserted in both journals that the annihilation of European Jewry was the ultimate low point for humanity and that all peoples in Europe shouldered blame for the murder of the Jews since Europe had collectively failed to prevent it from happening. But the focus was not solely on victims and perpetrators. Early discussions about the Holocaust at the end of the 1940s also touched upon bystanders. The general tendency in this regard was on ascribing guilt to those nations that failed to impede the terror of the Nazi regime, and more specifically the terror directed against European Jews. Guilt was ascribed in several articles to all the populations of Europe, as the authors alleged that the majority of European people stood idly by while atrocities were being committed against the Jews.29 For example, in 1946 in Judisk Tidskrift, the German-Jewish refugee and future film director Erwin Leiser argued that the Nuremberg trials had too narrow a focus with regard to guilt: In Nuremberg, the issue of guilt is discussed with a few prominent Nazi leaders, but not only Hitler, Himmler, Göring, Streicher and their conspirators are guilty, but also the entire civilised world, who continued living their tranquil lives in peace and, as they thought, without being disturbed by the calls for immediate help from the persecuted. Are not all those peoples guilty who refused to lift a finger in our defence? The punishment has often become terrible, many have shared our destiny—but that does not change the issue at hand. You can also become guilty by choosing not to act.30

Leiser was thus concerned that the issue of guilt over the Holocaust was not dealt with in its entirety by only prosecuting a few leaders from the Nazi bureaucracy. In an article published in Judisk Tidskrift in 1949, Frans Arnheim, a Swedish-Jewish editor and CEO,31 similarly argued that as the Nuremberg trials only focused on top Nazi-leaders, the German masses, who had largely supported the regime, after the trials could retain a false sense of security and lack of guilt.32 However, neither of the journals explored the role of bystanders in any greater depth, as no specific nation was discussed in relation to this social category. On the other hand, concerns were expressed in both journals that Jews could not feel safe moving back into their old neighbourhoods, living next to those who had betrayed them by choosing not to participate in the efforts to rescue Jews. Jews were, therefore, encouraged not to return to their old homes, and instead

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to resettle in Israel.33 Daniel Brick, chief editor of Judisk Krönika and one of the leaders of the Zionist Federation of Sweden (Zionit),34 argued that in order to ‘aid the Jewish survivors in achieving reconciliation, the democratic world should meet the demands from them—to let them return home [i.e. to Israel], but not to the countries, where everything they hold dear has vanished from earth, where they will always feel abandoned, unwanted and not safe (…)’.35 Consequently, even though the Nazi regime bore the main responsibility for the persecution of the Jews, it was not solely the Nazis that were accused of contributing to the continued discrimination and persecution of Jews. In the late 1940s, the Scandinavian nations were both praised and criticised for their actions during the Holocaust. Denmark, in particular, was portrayed as a nation defined by its rescue efforts, since the Danes managed to save the majority of Danish Jews by helping them flee to Sweden. Sweden was also commended for taking in Danish Jews as well as other Jewish refugees and for providing them with food and shelter.36 In that sense, the attitudes to the past that existed in the Jewish journals confirmed the positive self-image and the emerging myth of neutrality that developed in Sweden after the war.37 But there also existed an embryo of critique of Sweden’s actions and of antisemitic currents in the country during the war. The translator and editor Herbert Friedländer argued, for example, that even distinguished and intellectual Swedes chose not to believe that the Jews were being severely mistreated by Nazi Germany. He also pointed out that not all Danish Jews were saved, and that those who were captured were sent to Theresienstadt where they experienced inhumane treatment.38 The lawyer Stig Bendixon discussed how the Swedish press expressed antisemitic sentiments both before and during the war years.39 The author and refugee activist Mia Leche Löfgren criticised Sweden’s stern immigration policies during the war, and the fact that Sweden allowed the Nazi Regime to use Swedish railways.40 As Sweden was mainly unaffected by the war, some authors alleged that the Swedish nation should feel obligated to assist with humanitarian aid and to attempt to counter existing antisemitism. For example, in 1945 in Judisk Tidskrift, Leche Löfgren argued: While other small countries have fought almost to their deaths for their peace and freedom, we have been able to keep ours with very few victims. Should we not, with the humanitarian tasks that make out our contribution

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to reconstruction work, be able to incorporate the fight against the most dangerous of mental illnesses?41

Despite this, the discussions revolving around the roles played by Scandinavian countries during the Holocaust were marginalised and not at the forefront of discussions. In all, the discussion on various aspects of the Holocaust was rather extensive, especially during 1945, and at the same time fragmentary with emphasis placed on Jewish victimhood.

Demands for Justice During the Nuremberg Trials We have already found that the Nuremburg trials did not impact the discussion within the Swedish-Jewish public in a significant way. In general, the punishment of perpetrators was not an important area of discussion in the Swedish-Jewish community in the late 1940s. This means that ideas of what can be described as retributive justice—which appeals to the notion that justice cannot be achieved until the offender’s crime has been identified and punished accordingly—did not play an important role in the journals during this time. This distinguishes Sweden from other countries that had been occupied where legal proceedings were an important part of moving forward after the war and in punishing those who collaborated with the Nazis—this also created discussions within Jewish congregations after the war.42 There were, of course, exceptions. For example, the legal history scholar Kurt Stillschweig43 argued in Judisk Krönika in 1945, without specifically referring to the Nuremberg trials, that ‘punishment is a prerequisite for dealing with the Jewish question. Only through the punishment of the mass murderers can it be reaffirmed in Western jurisprudence that even the killing of a Jew is murder, that robbery remains robbery even when committed towards a Jew’.44 But the memory of the Holocaust during this time also gave rise to demands for justice independent of legal proceedings. In transitional justice processes, restorative justice puts less emphasis on the punishment of the offender and legal retribution, and instead emphasises repairing ‘broken relationships and to heal the wounds of victims and offenders alike’.45 In general, the journals highlighted that the Jews did not desire reconciliation with the perpetrators of the Holocaust and that no authentic apologies by the perpetrators would be sufficient to atone for their crimes. Neither the Nazis nor the German people were considered as showing any signs of remorse for the crimes they had committed during the Holocaust.46 On the other hand,

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the demands of justice were still characterised by this perspective when it came to the Jewish people as a whole, as the founding of Israel was regarded as rightful compensation following the Holocaust. As mentioned above, discussions about Israel and Zionism were often associated with the Holocaust and the great refugee problem in Europe after the war. The creation of Israel was seen as pivotal for the future survival of the Jewish people. Discussions during this time were therefore characterised by a desire to look towards a brighter future for the Jewish people in Israel in which they would no longer be victims. Authors in both journals often encouraged the Jewish community in Sweden to embrace Zionist ideals, especially Judisk Krönika, as Israel was perceived as a state in which the Jewish people could unite and move beyond the epithet of ‘victim’.47 The focal point in regard to restorative justice was thus the foundation of the nation state of Israel. For example, in 1945, Judisk Tidskrift published a translated article by the Romanian born American-Jewish author and Zionist activist Maurice Samuel, who indirectly criticised politics of assimilation and connected Israel to a new quest of justice after the Holocaust: Jews should demand to be treated equally. But freedom does not only mean freedom from persecution and oppression, but also equals a positive attitude of the other peoples; they must hold a kind and benevolent interest to the Jews as Jews, not just as individuals. Unless this kind of freedom is established for the Jews, they can once again, in endless harm to themselves, fall victim to a future explosion. The first symbol of justice in the new system that will now be established will be its attitude to the idea of a Jewish national home in Palestine, not just as a place to send the homeless and impoverished, but as a true centre of all Jewish life.48

Israel was regularly portrayed as the major compensation for the Holocaust and articles in the journals often called for Jews to unite in order to support the cause of Zionism or Israel. However, there were some articles posted in Judisk Tidskrift—which was not an outspoken Zionist journal—by Eli F. Heckscher, professor in economic history and political economy, who was well known for his opposition to Zionism. Heckscher questioned the creation of the state of Israel as the sole answer to end the persecution of Jews.49 Yet, it is still clear that there was significant interest and sympathy for Israel in the late 1940s, and this was closely linked to questions about the future of Judaism after the Holocaust. This form of restorative justice should also be seen as the backdrop to another

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important theme in both journals, namely the critique that the Allies did not act earnestly in their attempts to bring about justice for European Jewry after the Holocaust. On the one hand, the Allies claimed to sympathise with the Jewish victims as they asserted that those Nazis who committed human rights abuses during the war would be brought to justice in, for example, the courtrooms at Nuremberg. On the other hand, outside of the Nuremberg courtrooms, they found that the Allies displayed indifference to Jewish refugees and to Jewish efforts to establish the state of Israel. This inconsistency in their attitude towards the Jewish people led the authors to question whether the Allies genuinely cared about achieving justice for the Jewish people. As a result, this meant that even if the Nazis received legal punishments, these punishments would not have reflected the crimes they had committed specifically towards Jews.50 In other words, the journals presented restorative justice rather than retributive justice as the most equitable approach regarding to the Holocaust in the late 1940s.

Representation of the Holocaust During the Eichmann Trial Adolf Eichmann was a lieutenant colonel (Oberstrumbanführer) in the German SS during the war and is known as one of the main administrators of the Holocaust. His first main task was to organise forced emigration of Jews in Hungary, and he later also became responsible for the deportation and expulsion of Jews to concentration camps and ghettos in Eastern Europe. In 1942, after the Nazi regime had decided to exterminate all Jews, Eichmann was tasked with the logistics. Despite this, he had little to do with the actual concentration camps. Adolf Eichmann was relatively unknown to the public, although evidence against him was slowly compiled after the war, until he was found and arrested by Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, on 11 May 1960. He was brought to Israel to face trial for the crimes he had committed against the Jews during the Holocaust. The Eichmann trial commenced on 11 April 1961 and lasted for 56 days— where he was found guilty and sentenced to death. After an unsuccessful attempt to appeal his verdict, he was executed on 1 June 1962.51 The Eichmann trial was an important media event. For many people, the trial was the first time that the Holocaust was presented in a detailed and comprehensive way.52 In contrast to the Nuremberg trials, the

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Eichmann trial was extensively featured in both Judisk Krönika and Judisk Tidskrift, especially throughout 1961, and was the impetus for various perspectives on the Holocaust. The trial inspired discussions on both the Holocaust in general, and regarding how justice could be achieved in light of the persecution and murder of European Jews. Several figures illustrate this trend. The Eichmann trial was discussed in 51 articles out of close to 700 articles in Judisk Krönika during the period 1960–1962,53 and in 18 articles out of close to 200 in Judisk Tidskrift. Each of these articles dealt with various aspects of the genocide. However, the Holocaust in general, both within the framework of the trials and outside, was either mentioned in or was the topic of 150 articles in Judisk Krönika and 73 articles in Judiskt Tidskrift during the same period. Despite the fact that the Eichmann trial appeared as a subject during a shorter period (around 1960–1962) compared to the various trials at Nuremberg, it was an important event for Jews in Sweden. The articles also focused on the actual trial and did not solely mention the trial in passing, as with the case of the Nuremberg trials. The statistics also show that around a third of the articles that dealt with various aspects of the Holocaust concerned the Eichmann trial. This indicates that the trial had an important impact on the memory of the genocide. Discussions during the Eichmann trial largely revolved around Jewish victims, but also the issue of Jewish resistance. Yet, despite the focus on Jewish victims, there were few original testimonies published in the journals. Rather, the journals tended to re-state segments of survivors’ testimonies and of Eichmann’s statements during the trial. Nonetheless, this dual role of both the victims and the heroes that fought against Nazism became more important for the memory of the Holocaust among Jews in Sweden in the early 1960s than it had in the late 1940s. The Danish-­ Jewish writer Welner Pinches, for example, posed the following question in an article in Judisk Tidskrift: ‘How was it possible to annihilate six million Jews, without them resisting, without them punishing their enemies? The Eichmann-process inaugurates this entire chapter once more with all its terrible horror’.54 The Nazi Regime’s effectiveness in exporting Jews to ghettos and concentration camps, as exposed during the trial, was perplexing to those who dealt with this issue and who were struggling to dismantle the notion of European Jewry being passively led to slaughter. There were a variety of opinions expressed on the dilemma of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, even opinions that held Jews more or less responsible for refusing to accept that they were in danger.55 The later

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well-known sociologist Joachim Israel, who came to Sweden in 1938 as a German-Jewish refugee, argued against this claim and asserted that as the Jewish people consisted of many different kinds of groups, their behaviour could not be explained by adhering to solely one theory. Israel maintained that the behaviour of a German middle-class Jew could not be understood similarly to the behaviour of a Polish middle-class Jew. Those who actually revolted were from Zionist and socialist backgrounds and it was their pre-­ existing ideological mindset that made them more likely to resist, according to Israel.56 Such reactions echoed the well-known debate initiated at the Eichmann trial by German-Jewish political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt. Hannah Arendt had been employed by the New Yorker to witness and report on the trial and was baffled by the ‘normalcy’ of the behaviour and appearance of Eichmann. She later wrote the famous work called Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil in which she claimed that Jews had gone to their deaths like ‘sheep to the slaughter’. She also argued that Jewish leaders, especially those in the Jewish councils, had cooperated with the Nazi Regime, thus leading to a higher Jewish death toll.57 Bruno Bettelheim, a famous psychologist and defender of Hannah Arendt’s hypotheses, argued in Judisk Tidskrift that the Jewish people had refused to accept the gravity of the danger, and that it was their defiance to accept the reality of their situation that led to their downfall.58 The various positions on this issue indicate that the memory of the Holocaust during this period began to evolve into both existential and ideological matters about the behaviours of the victims and their relationship to Jewish identity, beyond the tragedy of the Holocaust. Acts of resistance, were in any case, brought forth in both journals, which included the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943, the revolt of Sonderkommando 7 in the Auschwitz concentration camp, and the incident of a female dancer in Auschwitz who managed to shoot and kill a guard before she was gassed, but also less-well-known events such as the uprisings in the ghetto of Bialystok and the concentration camp of Treblinka.59 Indeed, including acts of resistance and revolts into the discourse made the roles of the Jewish victims more multifaceted, as these shed light on another side of the Holocaust beyond death and defeat. This proved important for both the nation-building process in Israel and for the identity of the Jewish Diaspora after the war. The understanding of the role of the typical Holocaust perpetrator also differed slightly during the 1960s compared to the 1940s. The early historiography focused primarily on the absolute top layer of the Nazi

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party, in other words on Hitler and those convicted during the Nuremberg trials. The journals, however, lacked in-depth analyses concerning this topic and instead dealt more with the issue of Jews as victims. Even though the Eichmann trial highlighted the experiences of the Jews during the Holocaust, especially in comparison to the Nuremberg trials, it also initiated more critical discussions concerning the role of the perpetrators and the issue of guilt. Eichmann represented a more anonymous type of leadership than those convicted at the main trial in Nuremberg. From barely being mentioned before in the journals, Eichmann took a central role in Holocaust memory among Jews in Sweden in the early 1960s. During the trial, he was framed as a symbol for the typical Nazi perpetrator, and this led to a shift in the understanding of the perpetrator role. The understanding of the perpetrator role now came to focus indirectly or directly on bureaucracy and the individual bureaucrats who had administered the genocide. Eichmann was nevertheless described in the journals as an antisemite who found pleasure in persecuting and killing Jews. He was portrayed as an average man who had committed terrible deeds as a result of living in a dictatorship that normalised human rights abuses.60 When the image of the perpetrator expanded and came to include bureaucrats like Eichmann, it led to scrutiny of the passivity at all levels of German society, and this in turn led to new perspectives. In terms of bystanders, the clusters of themes identifiable in the journals in the 1960s also demonstrate that during the period of the Eichmann trial, the actions of different European nations tended to be examined in a more critical light. Compared to the late 1940s, the attitude was also more critical towards countries that witnessed the Holocaust but did not act accordingly. This further underlined that the issue of guilt was ascribed a more complex meaning during this time and that it became an important part of the memory of the Holocaust. The European countries that aligned with this description included Austria, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands (also referred to as Holland).61 These nations were perceived as guilty for not refusing orders from the Third Reich and more specifically for deporting Jews. The United Kingdom’s actions during the Holocaust were generally still viewed with a degree of scepticism. Even though it was commonly acknowledged that the United Kingdom largely contributed to the downfall of the Nazi regime, some actions were not well regarded. Just as in the late 1940s, the United Kingdom was criticised for not fully supporting Jewish emigration to Palestine, especially in the spring of 1939. Moreover,

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in Judisk Krönika in 1961, an anonymous author highlighted the United Kingdom’s inaction during the war years by highlighting the decision to not bomb the gas chambers of Auschwitz, the decision not to drop Jewish parachute jumpers into occupied Europe, to not allow all Jews in Europe to be declared under British or Anglo-American protection, and lastly, not to issue a warning to railway workers that anyone who contributed to the deportations of Jews would be regarded as war criminals.62 The roles of the Scandinavian nations were not discussed with any greater depth or in relation to the Eichmann trial and, when referred to, were also still mainly portrayed as nations that contributed to the rescuing of Jews and who maintained amicable ties with Israel. Denmark was specifically mentioned as a heroic nation, as its population helped rescue a large proportion of its Jewry.63 In the 1960s, the more critical attitude towards Sweden had not yet become part of Jews’ memory of the Holocaust. Indeed, the Eichmann trial did not directly raise questions about Swedish guilt: it became foremost an occasion to further reflect upon Jewish experiences during the Holocaust and the bureaucratic side of the genocide.

Demands for Justice During the Eichmann Trial The demands for justice during the period of the Eichmann trial appeared fundamentally different to those during the Nuremberg trials. Instead of primarily focusing on the creation of Israel as the main compensation for the Holocaust, and largely ignoring current Nazi trials, the trial was depicted in the journals as an event that had great significance in terms of achieving justice for the Jews after the Holocaust. Eichmann was put on trial for the crimes he had committed against the Jewish people during the Holocaust, and it was obvious to those who reflected on the trial in the journals that he lacked the ability to feel sympathy for his victims and to understand the magnitude of his crimes. He pleaded not-guilty stating that he was simply following orders and that he did not issue any orders himself. This excuse was obviously rejected by the journals, since following orders cannot justify persecution and mass murder.64 The authors in the journals that followed the trial also concluded that Eichmann demonstrated no signs of remorse or sympathy for the suffering of the Jewish people. For example, in Judisk Krönika in 1961, an anonymous author argued:

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One could have expected that, at least sixteen years after the defeat of Nazism, he would have expressed at least some form of conscience. But instead, he began his testimony by, in a well-known Nazi style, distorting facts and claiming that the war was imposed on Germany. His cynicism reached its pinnacle when he declared that the war against the Jews was also imposed on the German people. He does not believe in remorse. He believes that remorse is childish and meaningless because the dead still cannot be brought back to life. But what does he believe in then? Yes, that the loyalty he swore to Hitler justifies his deeds and frees him from all responsibility. He denies facts and seeks excuses, all to hide and smooth over the blasphemous crimes and his own hideous share in them.65

At the same time, the outwardly ordinariness of the Nazi perpetrators, and how these seemingly average individuals could turn into killers taking part in a genocide, perplexed the authors in the Swedish-Jewish journals— along with the complete lack of remorse that impacted discussions of justice in relation to these crimes. Hannah Arendt also discussed the ‘ordinariness’ of the Nazi perpetrators and the lack of guilt displayed by Eichmann. She argued that he was not a sociopath, but rather a normal, unintelligent man who functioned in a reality in which committing terrible crimes was ordinary. His inability to think for himself, therefore, led to him assisting in the murder of millions of Jews.66 Even though this debate mainly took place after both trials, the opinions expressed by the authors in Judisk Krönika and Judisk Tidskrift aligned with Arendt’s opinions. They commonly agreed that the Nazi perpetrators, and specifically Eichmann, lived in a totalitarian regime that normalised atrocities in various ways.67 The authors also found that Eichmann’s seemingly outwardly ordinariness in conjunction with his ability to take part in genocide demonstrated the notion that Nazi ideology permeated the entire German population. The Danish-Jewish author Pinches Welner argued, for example, that the ‘tragedy of the Germans was that the mentality of the mob completely dominated, from the top of the hierarchy to the bottom. Scientists, thinkers, philosophers, artists, yes, even a few Nobel-prize winners were transformed into gangsters’.68 Before the trial event began, Eichmann was, obviously, already guilty in the eyes of Jews in Sweden and elsewhere. In the two Swedish-Jewish journals, the authors did not consider if the aim of the trial was to assess whether Eichmann should receive punishment or not.69 The punishment of Eichmann was rather represented as a verdict not only on Eichmann,

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but also on Nazi anti-Jewish persecution at large. In general, there were therefore few comments upon the death penalty itself during 1960 and 1961. Yet, in 1962 an article appeared in Judisk Krönika, which has general interest since it consisted of two rather long comments by the chief editor Daniel Brick together with the famous non-Jewish Swedish author Moa Martinson that discussed the issue of Eichmann’s punishment. Martinson argued that Eichmann’s crime was too severe for him to be executed by the death penalty. Instead, she proposed that he should be kept in an isolation cell until he died of natural causes. This type of punishment would allow Eichmann to be studied for a longer period, which would help create a better understanding of his malevolent and unremorseful behaviour. Brick agreed with Martinson, and similarly wrote that Eichmann should not receive the death penalty as this punishment was too generic in relation to the severity of the crimes he had committed. Brick also invoked a religious argumentative framework and stated that all men should have the ability to repent before their final days and that it is up to God to decide when an individual should die.70 These comments, however, were an exception, and the actual punishment was not considered the most pressing issue. Eichmann not only was an important administrator of the genocide, but also represented the Nazi’s anonymous bureaucracy. In Israel, this trial played a formative role in teaching new generations of Israelis about the Holocaust in terms of transitional justice, and this was also an important feature of discussion in Sweden. Indeed, Jewish testimonies presented at the Eichmann trial—that were then discussed in the journals—were seen as key aspects of restorative justice, as it was through these testimonies that the Jewish people were given a chance to heal. The testimonies aided the survivors to process their traumatic experiences. Nonetheless, the testimonies did not mitigate any sentiments of anger among the survivors towards Eichmann or other perpetrators.71 The lack of Jewish witnesses at the Nuremberg trials were also mentioned once in an article that featured a speech by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion published in Judisk Krönika on the 13th anniversary of the creation of the state of Israel: Certainly, the Nazi war criminals have already been brought to justice in Nuremberg—and there was also mention of the six million murdered Jews. But the voice of the Jewish people themselves was not heard at this trial.72

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Indeed, the Eichmann trial was the first major public judicial process that focused on the genocide against the Jews and heard Jewish witnesses to the catastrophe. It was also, as stated, widely televised, which meant that millions of people were able to follow the trial. For this reason, the trial and the controversies it caused had a profound impact on the shaping of the memory of what has become known as the Holocaust.73 Needless to say, the journals presented the crimes committed by the Nazi regime against the Jews as so atrocious that restoration through forgiveness via a judicial process was not an option. Rather than being an opportunity for reconciliation and forgiveness through punishing the perpetrator with a verdict, the trial was mainly seen as an opportunity for the story of Jewish trauma to be told to the world. The Eichmann trial thus represented an opportunity for future generations to learn about the era of the Nazi regime and the crimes committed against the Jewish people. It was understood as a unique event in which it was possible to conduct a systematic and detailed review of the Holocaust and the Nazi regime’s attempt to annihilate the Jewish people. In line with Ben-Gurion’s intention, the main aim of the trial was to spread knowledge about the Holocaust to current and future generations in order to prevent any further persecution of Jews and other minority groups.74 Knowledge and testimonies are often viewed as a kind of side effect of judicial processes, rather than as main components of transitional justice. But legal processes of this kind also have an important educational function for nations and/or groups of people. This is evident during the Eichmann trial, where punishment and reconciliation were of minor importance in the Swedish-Jewish press. Restitution was rather gained by providing the world with a more detailed understanding of the Nazi Regime’s crimes against the Jewish people.

Conclusion This study has examined how the Swedish-Jewish memory of the Holocaust was shaped in relation to justice during the Nuremberg trials and the Eichmann trial. The purpose has been on the one hand to investigate how the memory of the Holocaust has been shaped in general around the time of these trials and on the other to see what kind of justice the Jews in Sweden requested in relation to the persecution and murder of Jews during the same time in Judisk Krönika and Judisk Tidskrift. The results of the study demonstrate that the Nuremberg trials and the Eichmann trial had contrasting effects on the memory of the Holocaust

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among Jews in Sweden. While the Nuremberg trials were, according to the historian Antero Holmila, rather extensively featured in the Swedish press,75 the results here demonstrate that this was not the case in Judisk Krönika and Judisk Tidskrift, as the trials were predominantly mentioned in passing without being thoroughly discussed. Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge that a significant discussion on the Holocaust was ongoing among Jews immediately after the Second World War—a fact that is often disregarded by scholars who focus on national memories.76 Various aspects of the Holocaust were discussed throughout 1945: but, from 1946, articles that directly addressed the Holocaust became less frequent, while there was an increase in articles that dealt with the new Jewish homeland in Israel.77 There was a weak relationship between Holocaust memory and the Nuremberg trials among Jews in Sweden, at least on the basis of the otherwise important discussions concerning aspects of the genocide in the Swedish-Jewish journals. The Nuremberg trials—in particular, the main trial in 1945 and 1946—was more important among non-Jews to remind them of the crimes committed against the Jews and other groups, or against humanity in general. Although the Nuremberg trials at the end of the 1940s did not have any significant impact on the discussions in these two Swedish-Jewish journals, the Jews in Sweden still underwent a form of transitional justice while confronting the past. This involved both those Jews who had come to Sweden as refugees and others who in different ways identified with Jews around the world after the Holocaust. It became a time to reflect on their Jewish identity with regard to the Holocaust and debates took place around how to best obtain justice and reconciliation. However, the focus was not on the judicial process that was taking place in Nuremberg, but rather on the importance of creating a Jewish national home in Palestine. Even if Judisk Krönika had a more pronounced Zionist stance, there was also, with few exceptions, strong sympathy in Judisk Tidskrift for the ongoing nation-building process in the Middle East. During the Eichmann trial, however, there was a much stronger relationship in the two journals between Swedish-Jewish discussions of the Holocaust and the judicial process. The trial appears to have impacted to a greater degree how the memory of the Holocaust was constructed in the Swedish-Jewish public sphere. While the discussions concerning the Holocaust in the latter part of the 1940s dealt both with contemporary problems like the situation of Jewish displaced persons in Europe and the future of Jewish life in Israel, the attention during the Eichmann trial

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tended to contribute to a comprehensive and more detailed picture of the genocide. The journals in the early 1960s dealt, for example, more with the psychological behaviour of the perpetrators compared to the 1940s. In the early 1960s, there was also a more critical attitude towards nations that did not act when faced with the persecution of Jews, although there was no discernible debate concerning Sweden’s role at this time. Despite the importance of the trial in Israel, the quest for justice was not associated with the actual judicial process and the punishment of the perpetrator. Rather, the trial contributed to an increased awareness of the Holocaust and to an acknowledgement of the suffering of the victims. This form of retaliation played an important role in the setting up of the trial itself in Israel, and in the Swedish-Jewish journals such an approach towards justice also played an important part.

Notes 1. See, for example, Hilary Earl, ‘Prosecuting Genocide before the Genocide Convention. Raphael Lemkin and the Nuremberg Trials 1945–1949’, Journal of Genocide Research, 15, no. 3 (2013): 317–337; Donald Bloxham, Annette Weinke, Devin Pendas, Leora Blisky, and Lawrence Douglas, ‘The Eichmann Trial Fifty Years On’, German History 29, no. 2 (2011): 265–282. 2. See, for example, Otto Kirchheimer, Political Justice. The use of Legal Procedure for Political Ends, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 332; Hanna Yablonka, ‘The Eichmann Trial. Was it the Jewish Nuremberg?’ Loyola of Los Angeles International & Comparative Law Review 34, no. 3 (2012): 301–313; Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial. War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 221–228. 3. Jeffrey K.  Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy, ‘Part V.  Memory, Justice, and the Contemporary Epoch’, in The Collective Memory Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011): 399. 4. Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, 221–228. 5. Malin Thor Tureby, ‘Swedish Jews and the Jewish Survivors. The first public narratives about the survivorsin the Swedish-Jewish press’, in Reaching a State of Hope—Refugees, Immigrants and the Swedish Welfare State, 1930–2000, eds. Mikael Byström and Pär Frohnert (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2013), 145–164; Karin Sjögren, Judar i det svenska folkhemmet. Minne och identitet i Judisk Krönika 1948–1958 (Stockholm: Brutus Östlings bokförlag, 2001). See also Svante Hansson, Flykt och överlevnad. Flyktingverksamhet i Mosaiska församlingen i Stockholm 1933–1950

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(Stockholm: Hillelförlaget, 2004). For research on reactions to the Holocaust during the War, see Pontus Rudberg, The Swedish Jews and the Holocaust (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017). 6. Thor Tureby, ‘Swedish Jews and the Jewish Survivors’, 145. 7. This includes all the issues published in the time-period 1945 to 1949, both before and after the trials. 8. This includes all the issues published in the time-period 1960 to 1962 9. Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders. The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945 (New York: Aaron Asher Books, 1992), ix. See also: Johanna Ray Vollhardt and Michal Bilewicz, ‘After the Genocide. Psychological Perspectives on Victim, Bystander, and Perpetrator Groups’, Journal of Social Issues 69, no. 1 (2013): 3. 10. Herbert R. Reignbogin, Christoph J.M. Saffering, and Walter R. Hippel, ‘Introduction—Lessons of Nuremberg. Returning to Courtroom 600 on the 60th Anniversary of the Nuremberg Trial against the Major German War Criminals’, in The Nuremberg Trials. International criminal law since 1945. 60th anniversary international conference, ed. Herbert R. Reignbogin (Munchen: K.G. Saur Verlag, 2006), 11. 11. Daniel Margolies, ‘The Legacies of Nuremberg in International Law and American Policy’, in A Companion to Harry S. Truman (Oxford: Wiley-­ Blackwell, 2012), 454–456. 12. Andrew Walker, The Nazi War Trials (Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2006), 13–24; Horst H. Freyhofer, Nuremberg Medical Trial (New York: Peter Land Publishing, 2004). 13. Holmila, Antero, Reporting the Holocaust in the British, Swedish and Finnish Press, 1945–50 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 14. I have counted the total amount of articles in Judisk Tidskrift and Judisk Krönika for the time-period 1945–1949, however, Judisk Krönika features some themed spreads with short notices. I have counted each spread as one article. 15. See, for example, Erwin Leiser, ‘De återvände aldrig’, Judisk Tidskrift 18, no. 11 (1945): 351–253; Ernst Benedikt, ‘Förnuftets bankrutt’, Judisk Tidskrift 19, no. 5 (1946): 148–152; Felix Weltsch, Ett tröstens budskap i vår tid’, Judisk Tidskrift 20, no. 8 (1947): 262–263; Joseph Weller, ‘Fasa och hjältemod’, Judisk Krönika 16, no. 5 (1947): 90; ‘Ingen tysk ångrar, vad som hänt judarna’, Judisk Krönika 17, no. 3 (1948): 36–37. 16. See, for example: Marcus Ehrenpreis, ‘Israels martyrer’, Judisk Tidskrift 18, no. 5 (1945): 130–131; Hugo Valentin, ‘Kring Palestinakrisen’, Judisk Tidskrift 19, no. 7 (1946): 200–204. 17. Thor Tureby, ‘The Swedish Jews and the Jewish survivors’, 145–164. 18. Gerda Luft, ‘Brev från Palestina’, Judisk Tidskrift 19, no. 1: 7–10; Seweryn Rozenberg, ‘Till sexårsdagen av upproret i Warszawas ghetto’, Judisk

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Tidskrift 22, no. 5 (1949): 136–138; Ernst Benedikt, ‘Ett år av ­befrielse och besvikelse’, Judisk Tidskrift 18, no. 12 (1945): 367–369; Jacob Lestschinsky, ‘Judarna efter kriget’, Judisk Krönika 18, no. 1 (1949): 3–4. 19. See, for example: Alfred Michaels, ‘Förskräckelsen utan slut—Till den Europeiska judefrågan’, Judisk Tidskrift 19, no. 3 (1946): 77–79; Erwin Leiser, ‘Två världar’, Judisk Tidskrift 19, no. 3 (1946): 83–86; Benedikt, ‘Förnuftets bankrutt’, 148–152; Ragna Aberstén-Schiratzki, ‘Jean Paul Sartres porträtt av antisemiten’, Judisk Tidskrift 19, no. 6 (1946): 164–171; I. Maybaum, ‘Lidande och straff’, Judisk Tidskriftt 20, no. 6 (1947): 189; Mia Leche, ‘Vår gemensamma skam’, Judisk Tidskrift 20, no. 10 (1947): 276; Ernst Benedikt, ‘Tankar om antisemitismen’, Judisk Tidskrift 20, no. 11 (1947): 263; Hugo Valentin, ‘Nazi-Åberg’, Judisk Tidskrift 21, no. 3 (1948): 77–83; Erwin Leiser, ‘Förföljare och förföljd’, Judisk Tidskrift 21, no. 7 (1948): 217–219; ‘Kristendomens skuld’, Judisk Krönika 15, no. 4 (1946): 98–99; Weller, ‘Fasa och hjältemod’, 90. 20. See, for example, Zorach Wahrberg, ‘Polska intryck’, Judisk Tidskrift 19, no. 4 (1946): 120; Ernst Benedikt, ‘Sabbatai zewi—etthundraårsminne’, Judisk Tidskrift 21, no. 2 (1948): 48–49; Hugo Valentin, ‘Resa till Polen’, Judisk Tidskrift 21, no. 5 (1948): 135; Ragnar Gottfarb, ‘En världsomfattande hjälporganisation’, Judisk Krönika 15, no. 5–6 (1945): 105. 21. Thor Tureby, ‘Swedish Jews and the Jewish Survivors’, 145–164. 22. See, for example: Michales, ‘Förskräckelsen utan slut—Till den Europeiska judefrågan’, 77–79; Valentin, ‘Kring Palestinakrisen’, 200–204; Marcus Ehrenpreis, ‘Varthän bär vägen?’, Judisk Tidskrift 20, no. 1 (1947): 1; Erwin Leiser, ‘Judisk ungdom vid skiljovägen’, Judisk Tidskrift 20, no. 5 (1947): 164; James G. McDonald, ‘Vart kan flyktingarna ta vägen?’ Judisk Krönika 20, no. 4 (1947): 73; ‘Vad skall ske med de judiska flyktingarna?’, Judisk Krönika 1, no. 8 (1947): 140; ‘Majoriteten av Europas judar önskar utvandra till Palestina’, Judisk Krönika 15, no. 3 (1946): 75–78. 23. See, for example, Ragna Aberstén-Schiratzki, ‘Så härskade herrefolket’, Judisk Tidskrift 18, no. 6 (1945): 189–191; Michaels, ‘Förskräckelsen utan slut—Till den Europeiska judefrågan’, 77–79; Marcus Ehrenpreis, ‘Vad vänta vi av pennans män?’ Judisk Tidskrift 19, no. 6 (1946): 160–161. 24. See, for example: Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1994). 25. See, for example: Michales, ‘Förskräckelsen utan slut—Till den Europeiska judefrågan’, 77–79; Lena Kaplan, ‘Utrotningen av Europas judar—en översikt’, Judisk Krönika 15, no. 6 (1946): 73; ‘Doktor Raschers illdåd avslöjas’, Judisk Krönika 15, no. 1 (1946): 200; Lestschinsky, ‘Judarna efter kriget’, 3–4; Leiser, ‘Två världar’, 83–86; Ernst Benedikt, ‘Ett verk om koncentrationslägren’, Judisk Tidskrift 20, no. 10 (1947): 324–327; Aberstén-Schiratzki, ‘Så härskade herrefolket’, 189–191; Wahrberg,

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‘Polska intryck’, 120; Peter Blachstein, ‘Tyskar och judar’, Judisk Tidskrift 21, no. 6 (1948): 180–182; Frans Arnheim and Emil Kronheim, ‘Tyskland och vi’, Judisk Tidskrift 22, no. 11 (1949): 314–318. 26. See, for example, Stillschweig, Kurt, ‘Judiska efterkrigsproblem’, Judisk Tidskrift 18, no. 1 (1945): 13–19; Ehrenpreis, ‘Israels martyrer’, 130–131; Michaels, ‘Förskräckelsen utan slut—Till den Europeiska judefrågan’, 77–79; Erwin Leiser, ‘Tidens spegel’, Judiskt Tidskrift 19, no. 4 (1946): 121–125. 27. The Swedish Jewish Communities had also in 1938 and 1939 jointly protested against the ‘White Paper of 1939’, a policy paper that the British Parliament had issued as a response to the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt. See Rudberg, Swedish Jews and the Holocaust, 112–113. 28. See, for example, ‘Englands del av skulden’, Judisk Krönika 16, no. 19 (1947): 32–34; Henry Morgenthau, ‘De indirekt ansvariga för utrotningen av 6.000.000 judar’, Judisk Krönika 16, no. 10 (1947): 181–186; Hugo Valentin, ‘Den brittiska antizionismen’, Judisk Tidskrift 20, no. 10 (1947): 305–309; Eliahu Dobkin, ‘De överlevande judarnas öde—En historia om skam och förödmjukelse’, Judisk Krönika 14, no. 7 (1945): 122–125; ‘Engelskt polisvälde i Palestina’, Judisk Krönika 15, no. 5 (1946): 112–113. 29. See, for example: Weltsch, ‘Ett tröstens budskap i vår tid’, 261–263; Ehrenpreis, ‘Israels martyrer’, 130–133; Leiser, ‘Två världar’, 83–86; Marcus Ehrenpreis, ‘Palestinas tragedi’, Judisk Tidskrift 19, no. 7 (1946): 195–199; A. Drewsen Christensen, ‘Kyrkan och judarna’, Judisk Tidskrift 19. no. 3 (1947): 72–76; Ernst Benedikt, ‘Krigsförbrytare i frihet’, Judisk Tidskrift 20, no. 6 (1947): 150; Erwin Leiser, ‘Obehagliga minnen’, Judisk Tidskrift 20, no. 9 (1947): 299; Benedikt, ‘Tankar om antisemitismen’, 263; Valentin, ‘Nazi-Åberg’, 77–83; ‘Kristendomens skuld’, Judisk Krönika 15, no. 4 (1946): 98–99; Lestschinsky, ‘Judarna efter kriget’, 3–4. 30. Leiser, ‘Två världar’, 83; All quotes have been translated from Swedish to English by me. 31. Frans Arnheim was the CEO of several companies during his lifetime, including Swedish Magazine Service AB and Swedish Design AB. He was also the secretary of the Refugee-section of the Jewish community of Stockholm and was active in aiding Jewish refugees from Nazi-Germany. 32. Arnheim and Kronheim, ‘Tyskland och vi’, 314–318. 33. See, for example, ‘Weizmann inför undersöknings-kommissionen’, Judisk Krönika 15, no. 3 (1946): 71–73; Hugo Valentin, ‘Det judiska folkets hemlöshet’, Judisk Krönika 15, no. 7 (1946): 145–146; Hugo Valentin, ‘Den judiska terrorismen och det s.k. världssamvetet’, Judisk Krönika 16, no. 1 (1947): 10–11; Leiser, ‘Förföljare och förföljd’, 217–219. 34. The Swedish subdivision of the (later World) Zionist Organization

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35. Daniel Brick, ‘Inför Freden’, Judisk Krönika 14, no. 5–6 (1945): 71. 36. See, for example: Maurice Perlzweig, ‘Honnör för Sverige’, Judisk Tidskrift 19, no. 8 (1946): 247–250; Herbert Friedländer, Herbert, ‘Exil— Deportation—Räddning’, Judisk Tidskrift 19, no. 12 (1946): 383–387; ‘Raoul Wallenbergs Gärning’, Judisk Tidskrift 19, no. 7 (1946): 216; ‘En konung har gått bort’, Judisk Krönika 16, no. 5 (1947): 91. 37. Johan Östling, Sweden after Nazism: politics and culture in the wake of the Second World War (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016). 38. Herbert Friedländer, ‘På livets botten’, Judisk Tidskrift 19, no. 3 (1946): 87–91. 39. Stig Bendixson, ‘Är den svenska nyhetsförmedlingen antisemitisk?’ Judisk Krönika 14, no. 9 (1945): 157. 40. Mia Leche Löfgren, ‘Inför freden’, Judisk Tidskrift 18, no. 5 (1945): 140–142. See also, Erik Vendelfelt, ‘Om att inte tro på grymheter’, Judisk Krönika 15, no. 1 (1946): 7–8. 41. Leche Löfgren, ‘Inför freden’, 142. 42. Laura Jockusch, ‘Justice at Nuremberg? Jewish Responses to Nazi War-­ Crime Trials in Allied-Occupied Germany’, Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society, 19, no. 1: 107–147. 43. Kurt Stillschweig was a Jewish refugee from Germany and had as a scholar written extensively on legal history. He came to Sweden in 1939 and became an expert on emigration aid within the Jewish community in Stockholm. Rudberg, The Swedish Jews and the Holocaust, 29. 44. Stillschweig, ‘Judiska efterkrigsproblem’, 14. 45. Mark. R. Amstutz, The healing of nations: the promise and limits of political forgiveness (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2005), 110. 46. See, for example, Michales, ‘Förskräckelsen utan slut—Till den Europeiska judefrågan’, 77–79; Benedikt, ‘Ett verk om koncentrationslägren’, 327; ‘Med en FN-delegation hos de tvångsförflyttade’, Judisk Krönika 16, no. 7 (1947): 121–124; ‘Vad tvingas vi till?’ Judisk Krönika 17, no. 1 (1948): 7–8; ‘Ingen tysk ångrar vad som har hänt judarna’, Judisk Krönika 17, no. 3 (1948): 36. 47. See, for example: ‘Ingen tysk ångrar, vad som hänt judarna’, Judisk Krönika 17, no. 3 (1948): 36–37; Michaels, ‘Förskräckelsen utan slut—Till den Europeiska judefrågan’, 77–79; Benedikt, ‘Förnuftets bankrutt’, 148–152; Leiser, ‘Judisk ungdom vid skiljovägen’, 164; Leiser, ‘Obehagliga minnen’, 299; Hugo Valentin, ‘Den judiska försvarsmakten’, Judisk Tidskrift 21, no. 4 (1948): 97–102; ‘Palestinakommissionens undersökning av den judiska situationen’, Judisk Krönika 15, no. 2 (1946): 54–60; McDonald, ‘Vart kan flyktingarna ta vägen?’ 73; ‘Vad skall ske med de judiska flyktingarna?’ Judisk Krönika 20, no. 8 (1947): 140; Lestschinsky, ‘Judarna efter kriget’, 3–4.

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48. Maurice Samuel, ‘Världens nationer och det judiska problemet’, Judisk Tidskrift 18, no. 6 (1945), 181. 49. See, for example: Eli Heckscher, ‘De hemlösa judarnas framtid’, Judisk Tidskrift 20, no. 9 (1947), 161–162; Eli Heckscher, ‘Brevväxling mellan professorerna Heckscher och Ehrenpreis’, Judisk Tidskrift 20, no. 8 (1947): 241–248. 50. See, for example: Benedikt, ‘Förnuftets bankrutt’, 148–152; Kaplan, ‘Utrotningen av Europas judar—en översikt’, 73; Dobkin, ‘De överlevande judarnas öde—En historia om skam och förödmjukelse’, 122–125; Moshe Braver, ‘Belsenprocessen’, Judisk Krönika 14, no. 9 (1945): 161–162; ‘Engelskt polisvälde i Palestina’, Judisk Krönika 15, no. 5 (1946): 112–113; Claire Neikind, ‘Den engelska flottan kämpar mot hemlösa människor’, Judisk Krönika 16, no. 1 (1947): 22–26; Hugo Valentin, ‘Medeltidens största judiska tragedi’, Judisk Tidskrift 21, no. 8 (1948): 229; Lestschinsky, ‘Judarna efter kriget’, 3–4; Arnheim and Kronheim, ‘Tyskland och vi’, 314–318. 51. David Cesarani, Eichmann. His Life and Crimes (London: Heinemann, 2004). 52. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 96. 53. I have counted the total amount of articles in Judisk Tidskrift and Judisk Krönika for the time-period 1960–1962, however, Judisk Krönika features some themed spreads with short notices. I have counted each spread as one article. 54. Welner, Pinches. ‘Den räddhågade juden’, Judisk Tidskrift 34, no. 5 (1961): 153. 55. See, for example, Welner, ‘Den räddhågade juden’, 153; Bruno Bettelheim, ‘Har vi lärt oss något av Anne Franks läxa?’ Judisk Tidskrift 34, no. 4 (1961): 120–129; Cordelia Edvardson, ‘Anne Franks läxa en gång till’, Judisk Tidskrift 34, no. 5 (1961): 150–152; Joachim Israel, ‘Anne Franks läxa’, Judisk Tidskrift 34, no. 6–7 (1961): 182–184; ‘Ghettokämparnas by’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 6 (1961): 154; ‘Hyllning av ghettokämparna’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 6 (1961): 161; Lydia Frankenstein, ‘Aktivt motstånd’, Judisk Tidskrift 34, no. 6–7 (1961): 185–188. 56. Israel, ‘Anne Franks läxa’, 182–184. 57. Originally published in the New Yorker (February, March 1963) as a series of five reports, these were reissued as a book in May 1963. For footnote see: Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem. A report on the banality of evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963). See also Steven E. Aschheim, Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001). 58. Bettelheim, ‘Har vi lärt oss något av Anne Franks läxa’, 126.

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59. See, for example: Bettelheim, ‘Har vi lärt oss något av Anne Franks läxa’, 120–129; Edvardson, ‘Anne Franks läxa en gång till’, 150–152; ‘Upproret i Warszawa’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 4 (1961): 106; Welner, ‘Den räddhågade juden’, 155–157; Alex Esser, ‘Vittnesbörd om judiskt motstånd’, Judisk Tidskrift 35, no. 4 (1962): 97–100. 60. See, for example, Hugo Valentin, ‘Situationen’, Judisk Tidskrift 34, no. 3 (1961): 107–116; ‘När Eichmann kom’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 2 (1961): 35–36; ‘Eichmann och tyskarna’, Judisk Krönika 31, no. 1 (1962): 1; ‘Anklagelseakten mot Eichmann’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 2 (1961): 36; ‘Ett folks mördare’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 4 (1961): 88–89; ‘Eichmann— dödens agent’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 6 (1961): 146; ‘Försvar av folkmord’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 6 (1961): 151; ‘Åklagarens slutplädering om Eichmanns skuld’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 7 (1961): 174; ‘Domen över Eichmann’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 10 (1961): 269; Alexander Weiss, ‘Medansvarig process’, Judisk Tidskrift 34, no. 5 (1961): 163. 61. See, for example, ‘En fråga som inte kan besvaras’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 6 (1961): 144; ‘Två kristna vittnar i Eichmannprocessen’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 6 (1961): 146; ‘Mördarna är mitt ibland oss’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 3 (1961): 65; ‘När Eichmann kom’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 2 (1961): 35–36; ‘Ett folks mördare’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 4 (1961): 88; ‘Hur många kunde ha räddats?’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 6 (1961): 141; Golda Zimmerman, ‘En fråga som inte kan besvaras’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 6 (1961): 144. 62. ‘Hur många kunde ha räddats’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 6 (1961): 141. 63. See, for example, ‘Israels nordiska vänner’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 5 (1961): 115–116; ‘Hammarsköljd—mer än neutral’, Judisk Krönika, 30, no. 8 (1961): 201; Oskar Mendelsohn, ‘De norske jødenes martyrium’, Judisk Tidskrift 34, no. 2 (1961): 55–58; Hugo Valentin, ‘Situationen’, Judisk Tidskrift 34, no. 10: 275–283; ‘En fråga som inte kan besvaras’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 5 (1961): 144. 64. See, for example, Valentin, ‘Situationen’, 107–116; ‘När Eichmann kom’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 2 (1961): 35–36; ‘Eichmann och tyskarna’, Judisk Krönika 31, no. 1 (1962): 1; ‘Anklagelseakten mot Eichmann’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 2 (1961): 36; ‘Ett folks mördare’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 4 (1961): 88–89; ‘Eichmann—dödens agent’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 6 (1961): 146; ‘Försvar av folkmord’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 6 (1961): 151; ‘Domen över Eichmann’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 10 (1961): 269; Valentin, ‘Situationen’, 107–116; Weiss, ‘Medansvarig process’, 163. 65. ‘Åklagarens slutplädering om Eichmanns skuld’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 7 (1961):174. 66. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem.

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67. See, for example: ‘När Eichmann kom’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 2 (1961): 35; Weiss, ‘Medansvarig process’, 163; Leiser, Erwin. ‘Hitlers judeutrotningsteknik’, Judisk Tidskrift 34, no. 5 (1961): 161–162; ‘Ett folks mördare’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 4 (1961): 88–89; ‘Eichmann—dödens agent’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 6 (1961): 150. 68. Welner, ‘Den räddhågade juden’, 158. 69. See, for example, ‘Domen över Eichmann’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 10 (1961): 269; ‘Eichmann-rättegångens betydelse’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 3 (1961): 58; Welner, ‘Den räddhågade juden’. 153–160; ‘Försvar av folkmord’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 6 (1961): 151; Valentin, ‘Situationen’, 107–116; Alexander Weiss, ‘Den lidande juden’, Judisk Tidskrift 34, no. 8 (1961): 231–234. 70. Daniel Brick and Moa Martinson, ‘Eichmann bör ej avrättas’, Judisk Krönika 31, no. 2 (1962): 29. 71. See, for example, ‘Anklagelseakten mot Eichmann’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 2 (1961): 35–36; ‘Eichmann-rättegångens betydelse’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 3 (1961), 58; ‘Ett folks mördare’, Judisk Krönika 30, no, 4, 88–89; ‘Utrotningen av judar i Europa’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 5 (1961): 117–118; ‘En fråga som inte kan besvaras’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 6 (1961): 144; Valentin, ‘Situationen’, 107–116; Welner, ‘Den räddhågade juden’, 153–160, Weiss, ‘Medansvarig process’, 163. 72. David Ben-Gurion quoted in ‘Ben-Gurion om Eichmannrättegången’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 5 (1961): 116. 73. Kirchheimer, Political Justice, 332; Yablonka, ‘The Eichmann Trial’ 301; Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, 221–228. 74. See, for example, ‘Eichmann-rättegångens betydelse’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 3 (1961): 57; ‘Försvar av folkmord’, Judisk Krönika 30, no. 6 (1961): 151; Edvardson, ‘Anne Franks läxa en gång till’, 151; Welner, ‘Den räddhågade juden’, 153–160. 75. Holmila, Reporting the Holocaust. 76. See, for example, Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination; Annette Wieviorka, Déporation et genocide (Paris: Fayard Pluriel, 2013); David S.  Wayman and Charles H.  Rosenzveig, The World Reacts to the Holocaust (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996); Klas-Göran Karlsson and Ulf Zander, Echoes of the Holocaust. Historical Cultures in Contemporary Europe (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2003); Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory. The American Experience (London: Bloomsbury, 2000). 77. On this topic, see also, Sjögren, Judar i Det Svenska Folkhemmet, 175–184.

CHAPTER 12

Early Memorialisation of the Holocaust: American and Scandinavian Perspectives Hasia R. Diner

Towards the end of the academic year 1945, as the war in Europe came to an end, ceremonies took place at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul. These campus events organised by Jewish students through their respective chapters of Hillel, the national foundation for Jewish college life, presented plaques to campus Scandinavian student groups. Both universities had substantial student populations of Scandinavian background and through these ceremonies, the Jewish students sought to reach out to their classmates in a politically meaningful way. At the events, the young Jewish college students publicly praised the ‘courage and humaneness’, of the monarchs of Denmark and Sweden, Christian X and Gustav V, ‘who in the teeth of Nazi opposition had provided havens for refugees from Germany’. In staging these events, the Jewish students at the two Midwestern state universities acted very much like the vast majority of the Jews of the

H. R. Diner (*) New York University, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Heuman, P. Rudberg (eds.), Early Holocaust Memory in Sweden, The Holocaust and its Contexts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55532-0_12

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United States in the two decades following the end of the Second World War. They, like so many of their peers, as well as adults and even children, sought ways to incorporate the Holocaust—the catastrophic campaign of annihilation perpetrated against the Jewish people by the German Nazis and their allies—into their public culture. Like these young people in Minnesota and Wisconsin, American Jews across the political spectrum wove the memory of the six million of their kin, the victims of Nazi persecution, into their communal events. Using written words, art, music, drama, radio, fundraising, liturgy, political rhetoric, journalism, scholarship, and so much more, they considered it their obligation to recall the horrific events. They did so both out of the seemingly deeply instinctive human impulse, one present in nearly all societies at all times, to memorialise communal tragedies and also in order to further a set of concerns in the post-war period. Those concerns which they defined as their responsibility, thrust upon them as a result of the destruction of one third of the Jewish people and the emergence of the Jewish community of the United States as the powerhouse of world Jewry, involved a multitude of tasks. They needed, as they believed, to aid the survivors wherever they found themselves, expose the sins of Germany under the Hitler regime, and advance the liberal agenda in the United States, as well as to push for international agreements on human rights. In addition, American Jews understood that they, as shareholders in the largest, freest, and most privileged Jewish community in the world, needed to do what they could to enhance Jewish culture, learning, and religion. American Jewish memorialisation of the catastrophe, as many referred to it at the time, can be thought of as scattered, amorphous, experimental, and utterly grassroots. No national body directed the Jews of the United States as to how to do so, as in fact no such authoritative entity existed. Rather in thousands of local communities, made up of a plethora or synagogues, schools, clubs, charitable associations, culture centres, and ideologically based organisations, participants in the vast skein of voluntary associations that constituted American Jewish communal life, like the students at Wisconsin and Minnesota, came up with ideas on their own that they deemed to be appropriate memorial undertakings and executed them. This was furthermore an international trend and the present volume shows similar expressions of memorialisation in Sweden, not as least as the extensive discussion in the Jewish press reveals. Some initiatives such as the Swedish Section of the World Jewish Congress were also closely connected

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to the Jewish life on the other side of the Atlantic. In both Sweden and the United States, different forms of legal processes furthermore impacted on the memorialisation and inspired collection of testimonies. In the United States, the national bodies like the American Jewish Congress, the B’nai B’rith, the American Jewish Committee, Hadassah, the Jewish Labor Committee, the Labor Zionist Organisation of America, the Jewish War Veterans, the International Workers Order, and many more all operated within the limitations of their own memberships as did the various religious denominations: Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, and multiple separate Orthodox groupings. What they did, what they proposed as ways to memorialise, involved only those who belonged. In this anarchic environment, no one questioned the need to remember and the obligation to shoulder the tasks bequeathed to America’s Jews by virtue of the Holocaust. They sparred, at times bitterly, over how to do both, but no one doubted that they had to be done. Notably these organisations reflected deep ideological differences vis-à-­ vis politics, both Jewish and general. They offered radical alternatives about Judaism as a religion, matters of class, and the best ways to secure the Jewish future. Indeed, they could not agree what that future ought to be. Not surprising then, they differed profoundly over both the shape that the Holocaust memorial project ought to take and as to what lessons Jews and the world at large ought to derive from the tragedy. Whatever the range of answers they gave to the question of what constituted a fitting memorial to the Holocaust, they all concurred on several key points. They united in believing that it compelled them to recall the victims, to aid those who had managed to stay alive, and to prick the conscience of the world which they considered had done little to respond to the gravity of the danger. They also all understood that what they did within the confines of the Jewish world to hallow the memories of those who had been liquidated by the Nazis had real political significance. As such, they did not hesitate to share with the wider American public the details of what had happened to the Jews under the spectre of the Nazi menace and to remind their non-Jewish neighbours that the tragedy could have been averted. Whether inviting non-Jewish public officials to mournful evenings of remembrance, placing books about the Holocaust into public and school libraries, sending letters of protest to appropriate office holders about matters that derived from the Holocaust, or lobbying for liberal causes in

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the name of the legacy of the six million, American Jews across the board considered it important to let the world know what had happened. Much of what they said, did, and wrote could be read as delivering a very negative, as metaphorically pointing an accusing finger at the peoples of Europe. They decried in passionate language the evil deeds of the German regime of Adolf Hitler, the acquiescence of the German people, and their willing acceptance of what had happened. They also pointed out the avid collaboration of others who joined in the brutality unleashed against the Jews. They furthermore condemned the apathy of the by-­ standers, whether individuals or whole countries, who did little to defend the Jews in their hour of need. American Jews’ memorialisation of the Holocaust in the post-war years cannot be disassociated from their commitment to liberalism. They manifested this not only in their political behaviour, but also in the ways they defined and presented their religion and civic involvements. Not coincidentally, a belief in or at least a hope for progress in human relations underlay the way they performed the memory of the Holocaust. The majority among them, the most observant less likely to do so, used the Holocaust to justify support for the Genocide Convention, the United Nations, civil rights legislation, the end of the racially based immigration quota system, and other key elements in the liberal vision of this time. So, too, when they memorialised the Holocaust itself, they injected a theme of universalism and hope for a better future that served as a counterpoint to the horrors and tragedies. One document will have to suffice to demonstrate this. In 1952, the American Jewish Congress commissioned the writing of a short memorial text to be read at home and during public Passover commemorations. The Congress’s goal was to update the historic Seder, the annual and widely observed ceremony that celebrated the exodus of the Israelites from the slavery of Egypt by linking the ancient rite to the too recent catastrophe. The Congress, and the writers whom it called together to produce this text, expected to produce something for Jews to use in their homes, at their Jewish communal gatherings, and at interfaith events, to which they invited their non-Jewish neighbours to see and hear the performance of the Passover ritual. The committee produced a short text, titled A Seder of Remembrance, in Hebrew and English which began with the words, ‘We remember with reverence and love the six million of our brothers who died at the hands of a tyrant more wicked than the pharaoh who enslaved our fathers in the

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land of Egypt’. The words then described briefly how he, Hitler, ‘slew the blameless and the pure, men, women and children’. After paying homage to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of April 1943, on Passover in fact, in the second paragraph in a concluding section, it ended on a hopeful note, ‘the martyrs lifted their voices in a song of hope for a day when justice and brotherhood would reign among men’. This upbeat coda, which held out the possibility that the future could be better, that ‘justice and brotherhood’ might someday triumph, exemplified much of the Holocaust memorialisation of American Jews in the two decades after the end of the war. Intended both to stir up Jewish sentiments among Jews themselves and to share their rituals and their Holocaust worries with others, it blended quite effortlessly the particular and the universal. It can be seen as a liturgical companion to the actions of the Jewish students at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Minnesota as they brought their Scandinavian counterparts into Holocaust memorial projects. Both focused on the positive rather than the negative, although they did not shy away from the brutal details. Both envisioned a better and more humane future based on intergroup cooperation and both held up the possibility that women and men under duress could still act with principle and courage. Consistent with their nearly universal commitment to liberalism, a political ideology that asserted the possibility of progress, the existence of human rationality, and the expectation that people could cooperate across ethnic, racial, and religious lines, the shapers of Holocaust memorials also sought out and highlighted examples of good people who had risked their own comfort and even jeopardised their lives by stepping forward to assist the Jews. The present volume demonstrates similar patterns in Sweden, given the important role that the Swedish rescue operations played in the early memorialisation of the Holocaust, both among Jews and non-Jews. In this way, the commemoration of the Holocaust could in certain cases become a celebration of the Swedish missions to rescue survivors and by extension the brotherhood between Jews and non-Jews—although the catastrophe was also connected to Jewish history and identity in Sweden. Describing acts of courage undertaken in the face of Nazism fits perfectly with their post-war politics both in Sweden and in the United States, and it also puts into bolder relief the wickedness that the Nazis unleashed. Similarly, it put to shame those who just sat back and did nothing.

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This strategy, one that combined memorialisation of the victims, condemnation of the perpetrators, and celebration of rescuers, offered the people and governments of Denmark and Sweden a perfect opportunity to be the standard bearers of decency in the American Jewish public imagination. Where and when they had the opportunity, American Jews drew attention to the actions of the two Scandinavian countries. The Jews’ decisions to valorise the people, governments, and particularly the monarchs—the embodiments of the idea of their respective nations—of these two Scandinavian countries fit a common trope of Jewish communal actions in the post-war years. For example, in the spring of 1945, the American Jewish Committee issued a tribute to Gustav V and American Jewish newspapers, published in both English and Yiddish, reprinted two letters drafted by the World Jewish Congress and sent as statement of thanks to the Swedish government. Extensive and laudatory reviews of Aage Bertelsen’s book of 1954, October ’43, documented the rescue of Denmark’s Jews, undertaken by him and his wife Gerda. The reviews provided a way for American Jews to retell the Holocaust story, nearly a decade after its end, and to claim that human beings can be good. Rabbi Samuel Sandmel of the Hebrew Union College turned to the book and the Danish rescue effort for a sermon he delivered in a radio broadcast, ‘Radio Chapel on the Air’ on the Dumont Network. His sermon, titled Religion and Good Will, described how, ‘when Hitler marched into Denmark and its Jewish community was under the threat of extermination’, good triumphed over evil. He went on and detailed how, ‘the Danes rescued virtually the entire Jewish population…by carrying them into safety into Sweden and in Sweden the Jews were warmly and hospitably received’. Later that year, the Synagogue Council of America, a body made up of rabbis of all the American Jewish denominations, brought the Bertelsen couple to America and organised a lavish ceremony in their honour. This was covered by the national press. The Synagogue Council invited the ambassadors of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark to attend the event at which it presented the two heroes with a ‘Menorah [ritual candelabrum] retrieved from a Nazi concentration camp’. Not to ignore the diplomats, the Synagogue Council gave them plaques as well, handsomely engraved with words of praise for the ‘Scandinavian people for their gallantry and humanity’. The adulation heaped by the Jewish organisations on to the Scandinavian people continued after the book’s publication and review. In 1956, a delegation of American rabbis went to Europe bearing elaborate scrolls for

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the heads of the Danish and Swedish governments, declaiming ‘the valorous and generous conduct towards their Jewish populations during and since the Nazi terrorism’ exhibited by these good peoples. Two years after that, the popular radio show The Eternal Light, sponsored by the Jewish Theological Seminary, featured a drama about Gerda and Aage Berlesen. The House with the Blue Curtains retold the story to a large listening public, estimated at around twenty-million per episode. Throughout the mid and late 1950s, Swedish and Danish diplomats spoke at Jewish gatherings, held in synagogues and community centres. On several occasions they participated in Warsaw Ghetto memorial programmes, speaking to the assembled throngs made up of survivors and of American Jews. The Danes and Swedes who stood on the stages served as exemplars of liberal righteousness during the Holocaust. Their presence served multiple purposes for American Jews and it mattered little at the time that historians questioned some of the details of the heroic narrative as told on the scrolls and plaques, in the speeches and radio broadcasts. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the story performed important work for American Jews. The Denmark-Sweden story provided the Jews of the United States an opportunity to, once more, tell the tragic details and to memorialise the set of events that had so upended their lives and had brutally transformed the history of the Jewish people. It gave them yet another opportunity to chide the world for its complicity and apathy. After all, it raised the question, if the good people of Denmark and Sweden could act, then why had others not done so. And the episode provided them with a chance to reiterate the liberal ethos that guided them politically. It made it possible to believe that human progress could happen. In this, they, like the Jewish students who sought out their Scandinavian classmates in the American Midwest, needed to have non-Jewish heroes who had stood up to Nazism.

Index1

A Åberg, Einar, 52 Åberg, Zander, 145, 146, 157n37, 204 Aftonbladet, 41, 232 Alexander, Kurt, 97 Älmhult, 107 American Jewish Congress, 317, 318 American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), 7, 19, 253, 265 American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (Joint), 7, 265 American Jews, 5, 25, 260, 316, 318–321 Antisemitism, 4–6, 9, 13, 19, 22, 39, 47, 51, 57, 80, 86, 120, 121, 125, 128–133, 145, 153, 164, 165, 177, 197–199, 227, 233, 240, 252, 253, 257, 294 Arendt, Hannah, 299, 302

Arnheim, Frans (Franz), 148, 293, 309n31 Arnoldsson, Hans, 147, 160n101 Aronzon, Zalman, 39 Assimilation, 22, 56, 121, 128–132, 137n50, 232, 296 Auschwitz, 299, 301 Austria, 14, 68, 98, 99, 113, 225, 257, 258, 300 Azouvi, François, 6 B Baburger, Ernst, 99 Bachad, 260, 280n53 Bachner, Henrik, 157n37, 199 Baeck, Leo, 97 Bagge, Gösta, 13 Baron, Salo, 38, 128 Bauer, Fredy, 147 Belarus, 172

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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INDEX

Belarusian slavs, 291 Belgium, 68, 78, 98, 300 Bell, Allan, 163 Belzec, 37, 84, 146, 151 Bendixon, Stig, 294 Bendorf, 109 Benedikt, Ernst, 251, 256, 270 Ben-Gurion, David, 303, 304 Bentwich, Norman, 97, 129 Bergen-Belsen, 17, 52, 107, 109, 147, 158n62, 165, 168, 169, 180, 210, 235, 256, 270 Berlin, 36, 38, 52–55, 97, 98, 108, 125, 227, 232 Bernadotte, Count Folke, 17, 43, 67, 82, 101, 147, 168, 169, 193, 194, 196, 214n12, 215n23, 236, 241, 267, 268 Bertelsen, Aage, 150, 155n16, 320 Bertelsen, Gerda, 320, 321 Best, Werner, 46, 227 Bettelheim, Bruno, 299 Billig, Michael, 238 Bjerlöv, Herbert, 104 Björk, Hugo, 166 Björkman-Goldschmidt, Elsa, 270 Björling, Jussi, 226 Blattberg, Wolf, 44 Blomqvist, Karin Landergren, 237 Bloxham, Donald, 288 B’nai B’rith, 317 Böethius, Maria-Pia, 8 Bolin, Sture, 73, 74, 78 Böök, Fredrik, 225 Bortz, Olof, 22 Borwicz, Michel (Michał), 38 Bovensiepen, Otto, 46 Braunschweig, 104–106, 109 Breitman, Richard, 31n61 Brick, Daniel, 145, 146, 252, 294, 303 Brick, Simon, 252

Britain, 96, 164, 172, 179 Brody, Abraham, 148, 152 Bromölla, 93 Buber, Martin, 251 Buchenwald, 10, 11, 108, 151, 165, 166, 168, 169, 171, 172, 194, 235, 270 Budapest, 8, 269, 284n100 Bureau for Legal information, 96 Bureau for Reparations, 102 Bureau for Restitution Issues, 96, 102 Bystanders, 18, 22, 180, 237, 289, 290, 293, 300 Byström, Mikael, 152, 167, 216n42, 216n44 C Carey, Maddy, 209, 211 Carlsson, Carl Henrik, 58n5 Censorship (Sweden), 123, 126, 133, 135n22, 164, 227 Central Jewish Historical Commission (Poland), 20, 38, 49, 78, 79 Central Zionist Archive in Jerusalem, 54 Centre de documentation juive contemporaine, 53, 266 Cesarani, David, 140, 142–145, 150, 152, 156n28 Chelmno, 15, 82, 151 Children and Youth Aliyah, 260, 268 Christian X (of Denmark), 226, 315 Ciano, Galeazzo, 221 Cincinnati, 35, 52, 54, 58n5, 62n56 Clausen, Fritz, 226 Cohen, Beth, 262 Cohen, Elie, 150, 151, 160n101 Cold War, 2, 5, 10, 53, 156n30, 239 Commemoration, 5–7, 10, 48, 49, 53, 56, 121, 134, 140, 265, 266, 269, 319

 INDEX 

Communism (Communist Europe), 9 Concentration camps, 8, 11, 15, 17, 37, 43, 67–69, 73–79, 81, 85, 93, 103, 105, 107, 110, 112, 145, 147, 149, 151, 152, 163, 165–170, 176, 177, 180, 192–194, 196, 203, 231, 233, 235–238, 260, 265, 266, 270, 271, 281n67, 297–299, 320 Conference of Jewish Material Claims against Germany (Claims Conference), 93 Confino, Alon, 9 Congress Nyheter (publication), 7, 49 Copenhagen, 229, 231 Cyprus, 254 Czechoslovakia, 14, 103, 105 D Dachau, 151, 208, 270 Dagens Nyheter (DN), 41, 49, 123, 129, 166, 168, 169, 171, 172, 174, 175, 178, 194, 208, 267 Dagerman, Stig, 4, 7, 149 Dagsposten, 168, 184n26, 192 Dahl, Izabela A., 21 Daily Mail, 178 Danes, 167, 196, 225–227, 229, 232–237, 291, 294, 320, 321 Danish Government, 227, 229 Danish Jews, 8, 132, 140, 153, 155n16, 167, 181, 193, 197, 223, 224, 227, 229–239, 243n23, 259, 266, 294 Danish pro-German collaborators, 226 Danish refugees (in Sweden), 229, 233, 234 Dean, Carolyn, 191, 213n3 Deblinger, Rachel, 255 Denazification, 257, 258, 273, 292

325

Denmark, 14, 16, 43, 45, 46, 51, 54, 68, 71, 193, 195, 197, 209, 222–233, 259, 268, 294, 301, 315, 320, 321 Derrida, Jacques, 11, 33, 34, 41 Diaspora, 39, 56, 127, 128, 130, 132, 133 Diner, Hasia R., 5, 6, 25, 140, 152, 155n19, 250, 251, 260 Displaced persons (DPs), 23, 34, 36, 50, 67, 105, 113, 147, 165, 176–181, 204, 252–256, 258, 260, 266, 273, 291, 305 Doctors trial, 290 Drama, 142, 316, 321 Duckwitz, Georg Ferdinand, 227 Dziedzicka, Helena, 74, 76 E Easterman, Alexander, 178 Eastern Europe, 15, 17, 18, 49, 86, 100, 121–123, 167, 297 Edfelt, Johannes, 271 Ehrenpreis, Marcus, 13, 15, 36, 39, 40, 124, 130, 131, 134, 252 Eichmann, Adolf (Eichmann trial), 4, 24, 25, 175, 288, 289, 297–305 Einhorn, Jerzy, 53 Emigranten-Selbsthilfe, 44, 99 Enander, Bo, 148 Eppler, Elizabeth, 54 Erixson, Sven X-et, 237 Erlander, Tage, 53 Estonia, 223, 300 Eugen (Prince of Sweden), 222, 228 Europeanisation, 10, 24, 224 Exodus, 177–181, 254, 318 Expressen, 165, 169–171, 179, 180, 194 Extermination camps, 82, 84, 122, 147–149, 151, 152, 231, 237

326 

INDEX

F Falk, Knut-Olof, 69 Ferro, Noah, 58n5 Finland, 14, 164, 167 Finnish children, 167 First World War, 120, 222, 225 Fischer, Ernst, 237 Florence, 265 Flyg, Nils, 232 Folejewski, Zbigniew, 70 Folkets Dagblad Politiken, 232 Foreigner’s Commission (Statens utlänningskommission), 68 Församlingsblad för Mosaiska församlingen i Stockholm (publication), 7, 31n60, 273, 275n7, 282n73, 291 Foucault, Michel, 11 Fragebogen, 104, 108, 113 France, 6, 15, 68, 98, 122, 174, 179, 254, 290, 300 Frank, Hans, 221 Fredborg, Arvid, 146 Freemasons, 291 Friberg, Göte, 229, 230 Friediger, Max, 261, 280n59 Friedländer, Herbert, 294 Friedman, Filip (Philip), 38, 79 Friedman, Pawel, 96 Frykman, Sven, 147 G Gegerfelt, Carola von, 68, 87n4 Gender, 23, 87n2, 113, 164, 189–213, 251, 258, 263 Geneva, 39, 52, 54 German guilt, 4, 171 German navy, 230, 231 Germany, 4, 8, 13–17, 21, 38, 68, 71, 93, 94, 96–101, 105, 107, 109, 111, 113, 114n2, 121, 122, 124–126, 132, 147, 149, 152,

164, 165, 170, 171, 176–180, 183n13, 193, 225, 228, 232, 253, 254, 257, 258, 266, 268, 273, 290, 292, 302, 310n43, 315, 316 Gertten, Magnus, 195, 204, 205 Gestapo, 208, 226, 231 Gilmour, John, 240 Glück, Emil, 267 Goldbaum Tarabini Fracapane, Silvia, 54, 58n5 Göring, Hermann, 173, 176, 293 Gorny, Josef Gothenburg, 164 Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning (GHT), 15, 123, 124, 141, 174, 178–180 Gottfarb, Inga, 80, 265 Granditsky, Jossie, 266 Greece, 222 Grese, Irma, 172, 256 Gross-Rosen concentration camp, 77 Gunnarsson, Gunnar, 69, 169, 170, 184n33 Gustav V (King of Sweden), 222, 315, 320 H Hadassah, 317 Haganah, 179 Haifa, 253 Halbwachs, Maurice, 10 Halden, Bengt, 262, 263 Halden, Mira, 263 Hallencreutz, Olga Raphael, 269 Hamburg, 76, 104, 109, 177, 180, 236 Hannover, 210 Hansen, Einar, 229 Hansson, Per-Albin, 199, 239, 240 Hansson, Svante, 7, 57n3, 194 Harrison, Earl G., 177, 178 Harrison report, 177, 178, 181

 INDEX 

Hebrew Union College, 320 Hechaluz, 30n47, 134n7, 260, 261, 280n53 Heckscher, Eli F., 254, 296 Hedin, Sven, 52, 124, 136n30 Heidelberg, 35, 52–55, 58n5 Heidenstam, Verner von, 272 Hellner, Kerstin, 150 Helsingborg, 229, 230, 235 Hepner, Julius, 99 Herzl, Theodor, 127, 130 Heuman, Johannes, 20, 21 Hilberg, Raul, 122, 133 Hillel, 315 Himmler, Heinrich, 17, 39, 67, 123, 174, 194, 215n23, 231, 235, 236, 267, 293 Hirdman, Yvonne, 201 Hirsch, Assar, 166 Hirsch, Marianne, 207, 273 Hitler, Adolf, 47, 94, 121, 123, 125, 131, 148, 164, 165, 171, 173, 176, 235, 253, 292, 293, 300, 302, 316, 318–320 Hollander, Fritz, 17, 39 Holmila, Antero, 23, 24, 140, 144, 147, 150, 153, 155n19, 156n30, 159n77, 182n2, 194, 197, 305 Honour courts, 11, 46, 56 Hoppets hamn (film), 190, 195, 203–205, 207, 210–213 Höss, Rudolf, 173, 175, 181 Howard, Leslie, 229 Huang, Nadine, 208 Hungary, 16, 107, 222, 230, 297 Huyssen, Andreas, 223 I Immigration, 3, 13, 21, 34, 40, 57, 127, 178, 179, 197, 198, 212, 254, 255, 292, 294, 318 The Institute of Jewish Affairs, 45, 54

327

Inter-Governmental Committee on Refugees (IGCR), 177 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), 1 The International Law Association, 95 International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg (Nuremberg Trials, IMT), 172–176, 181, 290 International Workers Order, 317 Israel, 6, 9, 23, 24, 34, 49, 50, 52, 53, 93, 94, 97, 114, 145, 156n30, 178, 251–254, 266, 267, 288, 292, 294, 296, 297, 299, 301, 303, 305, 306 Israel, Joachim, 299 J Jackson, Charlotte, 208 Jackson, Robert, 173 Jacobson, A. I., 265 Jäderlund, Christer, 165, 170 Jagiellonian University, 36, 37, 58n7, 68, 70 Jakubowicz, Leon, 78 Jakubowska, Wanda, 270 Janowski, Samuel, 46 Jaworowicz, Irena, 74 Jedioth (or Yedies), 39, 46, 49–51, 61n44 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 291 Jensen, Bjarne Henning, 193 Jerring, Nils, 192 Jerring, Sven, 17 Jerusalem, 4, 13, 35, 43, 179, 288 Jewish Agency for Palestine, 19 Jewish college students, 315 Jewish community of Gothenburg, 19, 93, 228, 251 Jewish community of Malmö, 228, 251 Jewish community of Norrköping, 228

328 

INDEX

Jewish community of Stockholm, 19, 93, 228 Jewish Historical Commission in Stockholm (Historiska kommissionen), 20, 33–57 Jewish Labor Committee, 317 Jewish refugees, 14, 20, 21, 24, 40, 46, 47, 49, 50, 96, 99, 101, 113, 114, 120, 126, 127, 152, 197, 198, 223, 228, 234, 259, 261, 263, 275n7, 279n44, 291, 292, 294, 297, 309n31, 310n43 Jewish schoolbook committee (in Sweden), 47 Jewish survivors, 6, 9, 17–19, 21, 23, 24, 31n60, 72, 77, 79, 80, 85, 98, 104, 147, 164–170, 180, 197, 210, 249–274, 291, 294 Jewish victimisation (debate on), 191 Jewish War Veterans, 317 Jewish women (Sweden), 44, 50, 256, 260, 262, 268 Jewish women’s club (JKK), 44, 268, 272 Johansson, Alf W., 3, 167 Jönsson, Mats, 191, 238 Judaism, 47, 50, 252, 296, 317 Judiska hem, 7 Judisk Krönika (JK), 7, 15, 49, 50, 119, 143, 145, 158n46, 251–254, 256–259, 261, 262, 264–274, 275n7, 289–292, 294–296, 298, 301–305, 307n14, 311n53 Judisk Tidskrift (JT), 251, 252, 254, 257–260, 262, 264–274, 275n7 Judt, Tony, 4 K Kahn, Aaron Seth, 192, 193, 196 Kalmar, 198, 204

Karier, Krystyna, 74 Karlsson, Klas-Göran, 10 Karmel, Ilona, 263 Katz, Frida, 81 Kerner, Aaron, 202 Kersten, Felix, 17, 39, 147, 215n23 Kielce pogrom (1946), 18, 38 Kindertransport, 14 Kinder-und Jugendalijah, 120 Kinnhagen, Stig, 210 Kirchhoff, Hans, 227 Koblik, Steven, 8, 165 Koestler, Arthur, 16, 126 Kogon, Eugen, 10, 149, 151, 160n96 Köpniwsky, David, 100, 263 Korn, Rakel, 264 Kraków, 20, 36–40, 52–56, 58n7, 68, 70, 78 Kramer, Josef, 172, 256 Krausz-Feinman, Irene, 195, 205 Kristianstad, 93 Kronheim, Emil, 264 Kurowski, Boěysław, 74, 76 Kushner, Tony, 164, 223, 292 Kvist Geverts, Karin, 22, 197, 199 L Labor Zionist Organisation of America, 317 Łakociński, Zygmunt, 21, 34, 68–71, 73–81, 85, 86 Landskrona, 103, 105 Landsmanshaftn, 50, 51 Lang, Berel, 141, 142 Langlet, Nina, 269 Latvia, 300 Laub, Dori, 206 Lawson, Tom, 140 Leche Löfgren, Mia, 149, 158n54, 238, 294 Leff, Laurel, 163

 INDEX 

Leiser, Erwin, 251, 274, 293 Lemberg (Lviv), 36 Lemkin, Raphael, 149, 151 Levi, Primo, 169 Levine, Paul A., 15, 16, 152, 166, 197 Levinson, Margit, 147, 158n54, 158n62 Levy, Daniel, 288 Liberal imagination, 164 Liberalism, 25, 129, 318, 319 Liebenthal, Gerhard, 149 Liebenthal, Ruth, 99, 110 Lipstadt, Deborah, 168 Lithuania, 146, 268, 300 Lódz, 46, 78, 79, 81, 82, 211, 219n93, 263 Lübeck, 17 Ludwika Broel-Plater, 74, 78, 85 Lund, 21, 35, 43, 67–86 Lund University, 68, 69, 71, 73, 75, 85, 87n6, 232, 235 Lüneburg, 178, 256 M Majdanek (Maidanek), 151 Malaparte, Curzio (Kurt Erich Suckert), 221, 222, 228, 240 Malmö, 7, 17, 19, 71, 73, 83, 205, 206, 209, 226, 228, 229, 233, 251, 265 Malmö Museum, 237 Manchester Guardian, 180 Marrus, Michael R., 174 Martinson, Moa, 303 Masur, Norbert, 17, 39, 147, 158n46, 193, 267, 268 Mauthausen, 151 Melchior, Luba, 74, 77–79, 83, 85 Memorialisation, 2, 7, 25, 35, 140, 264–269, 273, 315–321

329

Memorials, 7, 48, 49, 53, 257, 264–267, 272–274, 316–319, 321 Memory studies, 9, 12, 21, 33, 35, 55, 274n2, 287 Meyring, Elsa, 44 Michaeli, Wilhelm, 18, 94, 99–101, 108, 110–112, 115n23 Microhistory, 35 Midwest, American, 321 Miklaszewska, Helena, 74 Ministry for Foreign Affairs (Sweden), 14, 15, 122, 150, 194, 228 Mistral, Gabriela, 270, 272 Molde, 166 Montevideo, 35, 52–56 Moses, Siegfried, 97 Mossad, 297 Mossberg, Eije, 44 Muir, Simo, 46, 58n5 Munthe, Axel, 222, 228 Music, 49, 69, 196, 270–273, 316 Myrdal, Alva, 201 Myrdal, Gunnar, 201 Myth of silence, 6, 140 N Nansen, Odd, 149 National Board of Health and Welfare, 197 National Foreigners Commission, 18, 20 National Labour Market Commission, 74 National narrative, 5, 10, 22, 140, 147, 153, 239 The National Youth League of Sweden (Sveriges Nationella Ungdomsförbund), 74 Nazi-Germany, 9, 254, 271, 309n31

330 

INDEX

Nazism, 5, 8–10, 13, 43, 52, 53, 121, 124–126, 129–131, 133, 139, 142, 145, 147, 149, 152, 153, 184n26, 232, 239–241, 270, 298, 302, 319, 321 Nerman, Ture, 49, 144, 156n34 Netherlands, 14, 122, 151, 300 Neuengamme, 17, 147, 193, 235, 236 Neutrality, 2–4, 8–10, 23, 52, 70, 126, 147, 190, 192, 193, 196, 198, 199, 225, 294 Newman, Ivan, 210 Newman, Paul, 179 New York, 19–20, 38, 40, 44, 45, 94, 97, 179 Nilsson, Asta, 269, 284n100 Nordic brotherhood, 166, 167, 181 Nordic Museum, 58n3, 250, 274n1 Nordic prerogative, 152, 216n42 Nordström-Bonnier, Tora, 256 Nordvästra Skånes Tidningar, 233 Norrköping, 13, 228 Norway, 8, 14, 16, 43, 45, 51, 68, 71, 149, 164, 167, 168, 192, 198, 199, 209, 214n12, 225, 228, 260, 265, 320 Norwegian, 51, 140, 149, 156n27, 166, 168, 169, 193–196, 198, 200, 208, 225, 228, 233, 236, 237, 291 Norwegian Jews, 16, 124, 153, 166–169, 181, 195, 197, 228, 265, 283n95 Nowaczyk, Józef, 74 Nuremberg trials, 8, 23–25, 149, 150, 164, 172–174, 176, 257, 287–298, 300, 301, 303–305

O Ohlendorf, Otto, 173–175, 181 Ohlsson, Anders, 141 Olick, Jeffrey K., 288 Olivecrona, Karl, 232 Olsen, Olof, 235 Oranienburg, 151 Öresund, 223–226, 229–232, 235, 241 Orthodox Jews, 234, 235 Oslo, monument in, 265 Östling, Johan, 139, 146, 153, 155n22, 199 Oswiecim, 166, 169 Överland, Arnulf, 169, 171 P Palestine, 14, 97, 120, 122, 126, 127, 129, 130, 134, 164, 165, 177–179, 181, 251–256, 258, 260, 267, 268, 273, 291, 292, 296, 300, 305 Paris, 10, 35, 38, 41, 43, 45, 51, 53, 174, 266 Passover commemoration (of the Holocaust), 318 Patera, Paul, 251, 271, 274 People’s Home (Folkhemmet), 238–241 Pergament, Moses, 271, 272 Perpetrators, 23, 48, 151, 164, 170–173, 180, 181, 237, 255, 256, 258, 273, 289, 290, 292, 293, 295, 299, 300, 302–304, 306, 320 Pinches, Welner, 298, 302 Poetry, 142, 270, 271 Poland, 14–16, 18, 21, 36–41, 44, 46, 47, 49, 50, 55, 69, 70, 72, 73, 76, 78–80, 83, 85, 86, 96,

 INDEX 

97, 105, 144, 146, 148, 149, 152, 156n32, 211, 232, 253, 265, 300 Polish government-in-exile, 70–72 Polish Jews, 18, 40, 44, 79, 80, 84–86, 145, 167, 169, 291 The Polish Source Institute (Polski Instytut Źródłowy, PIŹ), 21, 34, 43, 67–86, 87n6, 114 Political rhetoric, 316 Preminger, Otto, 179 Pross, Christian, 112 Prussia, 225 Q Quisling, Vidkun, 226 R Ramlösa, 24, 198, 230, 234, 241 Ravensbrück, 17, 52, 76, 85, 194, 195, 205, 206, 210, 217n57, 267 Ravensbrück Archive, 68 Reading, Anna, 203 Recognition, 2, 11, 25, 48, 55, 177, 203, 287–306 Red Cross (Swedish), 17, 39, 52, 67, 87n2, 104, 109, 147, 148, 166, 168, 169, 181, 192–194, 196, 201–203, 205, 206, 249, 269, 284n100 Reder, Rudolf, 37 Refugee policy, 8, 19, 167, 190, 213n4, 228, 229, 239 Reichmann, Eva G., 131, 132, 134 Reichmann, Hans, 97, 98 Remarque, Erich Maria, 271 Rescued Jews in Sweden (Räddade judar i Sverige), 50

331

Rescue operations (Swedish), 22, 67, 68, 148, 194, 222, 239, 268, 319 Ribbingslund, 107 Robinson, Nehemiah, 45 Ronen, Shoshana, 58n5 Rosenberg, Göran, 112, 176 Rosenberg, Meir, 270 Rost, Bronislaw, 37 Rost, Gabriel Yosef, 37 Rost, Nella, 20, 21, 33–57, 78 Rothberg, Michael, 11 Rousset, David, 11 Rozenberg, Jozef ‘Joe, 210 Rudberg, Pontus, 21, 22, 31n65, 58n5, 156n25, 158n46 Rumkowski, Chaim, 46, 81 Rundberg, Gerhard, 147, 160n101 Russell, Edward (Lord), 150 Russia, 175, 225 S Sachs, Ester, 253 Sachs, Nelly, 271, 272 Sahlström, Julia, 24, 25, 58n5 Saidel, Rochelle, 201 Salonika, 175 Samuel, Maurice, 296 Sandmel, Samuel, 320 Scandinavia, 49, 51, 141, 199 Scandinavianism, 225 Scandinavians, 16, 22, 41, 51, 67, 87n2, 147, 152, 166–168, 181, 189–213, 225, 236, 238, 239, 294, 295, 301, 315–321 Scania, 223, 224, 229, 231, 235–237, 239–241, 242n9 Schimoni, David, 270 Schleswig-Holstein, 225 Schneersohn, Isaac, 53 Schwartz, Philip, 58n5

332 

INDEX

Schwarz, Herman, 108 Schwarzbart, Ignacy, 44, 45 Se (publication), 198, 216n30, 239 Second World War, 1–5, 8, 22, 23, 34, 36–38, 40, 48, 53–55, 57, 58n3, 67, 79, 80, 119, 122, 125, 139, 142, 153, 167, 190, 191, 211, 213, 213n4, 223, 224, 229, 236, 239, 243n20, 288, 290, 292, 305, 316 Segerstedt, Torgny, 123, 124 Self-image (Swedish), 8, 24, 52, 169, 202, 222, 241, 294 Seyss-Inquart, Arthur, 176 Shawcross, Sir Hartley, 172 Sigtuna, 107 Silbersztein-Salomonowicz, Franka, 82, 86 Skagerrak, 230 Small state realistic narrative, 190 Smith, Valerie, 273 Snyder, Timothy, 223 Sobibor, 146, 151 Södertälje, 104 Sokulska, Zofia, 76 Sommer, Paul, 226 Sontag, Susan, 189 Soviet Union (USSR), 14, 175, 221, 290 Spielberg, Steven, 202 Statens Informationsstyrelse (SIS), 192–194, 196–198, 215n28 Steinmann, Samuel, 166 Sterner Carlberg, Mirjam, 109 Stillschweig, Kurt, 96, 148, 295, 310n43 Stockholm, 7, 34, 69, 93, 120, 194, 222, 249, 291 Stockholms-Tidningen (StT), 165–167, 170, 171, 173–176, 178

Storch, Gilel, 17, 39, 40, 49, 53, 54, 64n85, 267, 268 Streicher, Julius, 176, 293 Strzelecka, Halina, 74 SUAV-project (Sweden During the Second World War), 53 Suez crisis, 9 Suleiman, Rubin, 205, 206 Sundberg, Ellen, 150 Sundquist, Eric J., 250 The Supreme Restitution Court in Berlin, 98 Süsskind, Izaak, 39 Svenska Dagbladet (SvD), 123, 171, 174–176, 179, 214n12, 267 Svensson, Åke, 147 Swedish Government, 16, 20, 43, 44, 51, 69, 72, 123, 166, 190, 192, 199, 201, 205, 229, 230, 234, 238, 320, 321 Swedish Institute of International Affairs, 72, 122 Swedish-Jewish community, 24, 123, 130, 251, 259–265, 273, 274, 295 Swedish Social Democracy, 201 Swedish State Institute for Race Biology, 240 Swedish welfare state, 3, 239 Switzerland, 95, 98 Synagogue Council of America, 320 Szende, Stefan, 145, 146 Szewczykowa, Stanisława, 76 Szulc, Artur, 79 T Tartakower, Aryeh, 40 Tegen, Einar, 34, 114, 148 Tegen Gunhild, 34, 114, 148

 INDEX 

Testimonies, 2, 34, 68, 94, 140, 172, 206, 222, 250, 298, 317 Theresienstadt, 54, 195, 261, 270, 294 Thon, Ozjasz (Yehoshua), 36 Thor Tureby, Malin, 24, 204, 208, 289, 291, 292 Th:son Pihl, Gunnar, 146 Tingsten, Herbert, 9, 129, 131, 132, 134, 137n51 Tisch, Eliasz (Eliyohu), 50 Transitional justice, 287, 289, 295, 303–305 Transnational, 10, 19, 34, 46, 49, 56, 223, 224, 269 Treblinka, 122, 146, 151, 299 Trondheim, 166, 265, 269 Truman, Harry S., 178 Trypućko, Józef, 70 Tuesday Club, 237 U Ukraine, 15, 172, 221 United Kingdom, 95, 97, 98, 164, 167, 170, 253, 290, 292, 300, 301 United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), 17, 67, 200, 210, 253 United Restitution Organisation (URO), 21, 93–114 United States, 6, 14, 34, 35, 48, 49, 52, 54, 58n5, 83, 85, 95, 114, 140, 164, 177, 253, 263, 290, 316, 317, 319, 321 Universalisation, 10, 11, 149 University of Minnesota, 315, 319 University of Wisconsin, 315, 319 Unser Blatt, 7, 275n7 Uppsala, 70, 108, 120, 124

333

Uris, Leon, 179 Uruguay, 21, 39, 52, 55–57 US Military Government, 95 V Valentin, Hugo, 7, 16, 22, 39, 47, 119–134, 145, 152, 252, 265 Vansittart, Gilbert, 145 Vår Röst (publication), 7, 39, 46, 49, 51 Värnamo, 105, 109 Vecko-Journalen, 208, 234 Verdandi, 143 Verständig Axelius, Natalie, 46 Victimhood, 22, 23, 140, 197, 200, 291, 292, 295 Victoria (Queen of Sweden), 222 Vinde, Victor, 148, 149, 174, 176, 185n57 Vinitzky-Seroussi, Vered, 288 Vittnesbördet (film), 23, 189–213 W Wagrell, Kristin, 23, 284n96 Warhaftig, Zorach, 177 Wajdling, Izrael, 83, 91n68 Wallenberg, Raoul, 8, 16, 267–269 Walsh, William, 174 Warburg, Eva, 268 Warsaw ghetto, 122, 123, 133, 173, 174, 319, 321 Warsaw Ghetto, 48, 56, 266, 269, 299 Waxman, Zoë, 208, 214n9, 257 Weizmann, Chaim, 129 Westerbork, 205, 206 White Buses, 8, 17, 23, 39, 67, 147, 150, 152, 153, 165, 168, 193, 195, 197, 198, 200, 205, 210, 213, 215n23, 216n44, 236, 241

334 

INDEX

Wiedergutmachung, 95, 97, 98, 107, 111, 117n46 The Wiener Library, 53 Wiklund, Daniel, 166 Winter War, Russo-Finnish, 14, 167 Wise, Stephen, 129 Wisliceny, Dieter, 173–175, 181 Wolodarski, Anna, 71 Women’s International Zionist Organisation (WIZO), 37, 44, 50, 63n67, 264 World Jewish Congress (WJC), 7, 17, 19, 20, 34, 36, 39–41, 43–57, 57–58n3, 61n44, 78, 83, 96, 129, 147, 166, 193, 265, 267, 275n7, 316, 320 Wulf, Joseph, 38, 55

Y Yad Vashem, 43, 53, 54, 64n88 Yahil, Leni, 54, 64n88 Yiddish, 21, 35, 39, 46, 49–51, 56, 58n5, 219n93, 264, 320 Z Zander, Ulf, 23, 24, 148, 152 Zelizer, Barbie, 194, 201 Zertal, Idith, 179 Zetterberg, Herman, 44 Zionism (Zionist-s), 37, 121, 126–131, 252, 255, 290, 292, 296 Zionist Federation of Sweden (Zionit), 294