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Survivor-Refugee Humanitarianism: A New Perspective of Second World War Humanitarianism in Sweden
Linköping University, Department of Culture and Society, Division of Culture, Society, Design and Media. Linköping University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-4491-5520
2021 (English)Conference paper, Oral presentation only (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

In narratives of Sweden’s humanitarian actions during and immediately following the Second World War, the recipients of these efforts have existed primarily as part of an anonymous, passive and grateful collective. In particular, women who came to Sweden after being evacuated from Nazi concentration camps have typically been portrayed as little more than objects of Swedish care. Aside from disregarding the agency these women had and exercised before, during and after they became recipients of Swedish humanitarian aid, it has also glossed over the fact that some of them were also actively providing humanitarian aid to other survivors, both in official and unofficial capacities, in Sweden. One example is the group of Polish survivors of Nazi concentration camps who, soon after arriving in Sweden, aided and supported other Polish survivors in Sweden and worked to collect evidence and testimony which was later used in war crimes trials. Seven of the nine concentration camp survivors who conducted this work under the auspices of the Swedish government within the Institute of Foreign Affair’s Polish Workgroup in Lund beginning in 1945 were women. Though previous research exists on survivor historical commissions and documentation centers established internationally during and after the war, and the work of PIZ has been placed in the context of both national and international efforts to collect survivor stories, little if any scholarship exists which examines these women and their agentic role in Sweden humanitarian actions following the Second World War or conceptualizes the work they conducted as humanitarianism. In this paper, I depart from previous research on Sweden and the Second World War, a field which has been dominated by political histories and narratives focused on Swedish actors, by placing the survivors at the center of an analysis which seeks to understand them as agential participants in Second World War humanitarian efforts in Sweden. My major aims are: 1) to propose a theoretical framework by which the agency, experiences and actions of the survivor-refugees of PIZ may be understood in the social process of history as humanitarian on their own terms and in their own right; 2) to argue that they were providing a distinct form of humanitarianism; and 3) to contribute this as a new perspective to narrative constructions of Second World War humanitarianism in Sweden and elsewhere, and a contribution to histories of PIZ and other survivor historical commissions and documentation centers.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2021.
Keywords [en]
humanitarian aid, Second World War, Sweden, refugees, concentration camp survivors, survivor historical commissions, Polish Research Institute
National Category
History
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-180446OAI: oai:DiVA.org:liu-180446DiVA, id: diva2:1604720
Conference
Women and humanitarian aid – a historisizing perspective, October 13-15, 2021
Projects
Women and humanitarian aid - a historisizing perspectiveAvailable from: 2021-10-21 Created: 2021-10-21 Last updated: 2021-10-27Bibliographically approved

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https://www.oru.se/english/schools/humanities-education-and-social-sciences/conferences/women-and-humanitarian-aid--a-historisizing-perspective/

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Martinez, Victoria Van Orden

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