This dissertation examines how Jewish and non-Jewish Polish survivors of Nazi persecution who came to Sweden in 1945 as ‘repatriates’ and were associated with the Polish Research Institute in Lund, Sweden (PIZ) were engaged in transnational social and political processes during the early postwar period, including documenting Nazi persecution and contributing to postwar humanitarian and justice efforts. PIZ, a transnational initiative that documented the experiences of Polish survivors of Nazi persecution for history and justice in 1945 and 1946, was one of the few such initiatives undertaken by survivors who were refugees in a country not directly involved in the Second World War. It is also noteworthy as one of the few survivor historical commissions of the early postwar period that involved and documented both Jewish and non-Jewish survivors and their experiences. The dissertation examines some of the specific ways the survivors contributed to social and political processes taking place in the postwar period; what role the survivors’ vulnerability, agency, and various forms of structural support had in their activities and efforts; and what part gender and other differences played in the actions of the survivors and continue to play in their discursive and historiographical interpretations and constructions. The findings demonstrate how the Polish survivors associated with PIZ, although living in Sweden in layered states of precarity and vulnerability, deployed their past activism and networks of resistance and support, and applied their knowledge, ethics, and practical strategies to improve their conditions and pursue justice. In doing so, this dissertation contributes new insight that begins to fill gaps in existing Swedish and international research on the Second World War and Holocaust, survivor historical commissions and documentation centers, displaced persons in the postwar era, post-conflict relations between Jewish and non-Jewish Poles, migrant knowledge, and postwar humanitarian and justice efforts. 

Survivors of Nazi persecution are often thought of as vessels of memory: witnesses to history, providers of testimony. While these are important roles, survivors’ ongoing survival during and after the Holocaust provide insight into, among others, agency and resistance and histories of the circulation of knowledge and of forced migration, all of which transverse geographical and historical borders and build transnational bridges across them. In this paper, I demonstrate this through the history of Holocaust survivor Luba Melchior (1912-2000). Having survived the Radom ghetto and forced labor camps in Radom and Lublin, as well as in the concentration camps Majdanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück, and Malchow, she arrived in Sweden in spring 1945 with the Red Cross White Buses. Soon after, she became part of the Polish Research Institute (PIZ) in Lund, Sweden, which gathered evidence and testimony from other Polish survivors of Nazi persecution in 1945 and 1946. It is through this work that we can begin to trace the ways she, like other repatriates in Sweden, was not merely a passive recipient of Swedish humanitarian relief but was also an active agent in transnational social and political processes taking place in the immediate postwar period.

Although many survivors of the Holocaust came to and remained in Sweden after the Second World War, Swedish historiography has never shown much interest in their lives and the roles that they played in Swedish political, cultural, and social life. More than twenty years after the Stockholm international forum conferences, this panel thinks it is time that survivors – as complex figures who continued to survive in their new country –receive the scholarly attention they deserve: as historical figures, discursive constructs and as archival subjects. Together, the three panellists are endeavouring to redefine what “Sweden and the Holocaust” means, arguing that victims and victimisation as well as survivors and survival constitute equally important phenomena compared to the much-explored subjects of bystanderism and rescue. 

Traces of the Holocaust in Sweden – including former refugee camps, cemeteries, schools, hospitals, etc. – can help to educate students and the wider public about the events of the Holocaust, its significance in Sweden in the past, and its relevance today. In my paper, I argue that ‘authentic sites’ of Nazi persecution – which are often regarded as the most pedagogically authoritative locations – are not only the places where the destruction and persecution were perpetrated (a conception that vests the power of authenticity with the perpetrators). Rather, I contend that ‘authenticity’ in relation to Nazi persecution (and the pedagogical potential carried with it) is conferred by the victims and survivors. ‘Authentic sites’ of Nazi persecution can thus be understood as sites of survival as well as destruction. As such, many ‘authentic sites’ of Nazi persecution exist in Sweden. Drawing on examples from my own and other scholars’ current research on places in Sweden where traces of the Holocaust may be found, as well as on grassroots efforts conducted by educators and activists, the paper explores, for example: theoretical and practical approaches to uncovering the significance of place and space; the potential of local history for teaching about broader, national and transnational histories of the Holocaust and Sweden’s complex connection with the Holocaust and its aftermath; and what can be or is already being done to enhance past and current efforts to educate the public about these important issues.   

In 1945 and 1946, a group of Polish survivors of Nazi persecution who were refugees in Sweden collected evidence and testimonies from other Polish survivors about their experiences in Nazi ghettos, concentration and labor camps. Driven by a moral duty to document the Nazis’ crimes for history and justice, they provided evidence and testimonies to early war crimes trials, including the Nuremberg and Subsequent Nuremberg trials. They thus contributed to retributive justice and human rights through ‘top-down’ processes. However, I argue that an overlooked aspect of the significance of their work is that they were also contributing to justice and human rights ‘from below,’ in part by taking a relational, restorative justice approach. While such a view of victims’ involvement in justice and rights processes is not uncommon today, placing victims of Nazi persecution in this context sheds new light on the entanglements of war, the Holocaust, and human rights.

In July 2020, two Holocaust memorials disappeared from a Jewish cemetery in Stockholm where Holocaust survivors who died soon after coming to Sweden for medical treatment in 1945 are buried. Though it occurred in the midst of both the global #TakeItDown movement and the Swedish government’s plans to establish a Holocaust museum in Sweden, this removal garnered no media attention or public outcry. Moreover, it was not, as might be expected, a case of antisemitic vandalism but a planned removal by the Jewish Community in Stockholm. This chapter takes this unexpected example of contested spaces of memory and heritage as a point of departure to consider and reflect on how ‘dead survivors’ of Nazism buried in Sweden have been commemorated. The analysis considers three Swedish cemeteries by delving into the sites’ past and present, the presence and absence of monuments and other forms of memorialization and contextualization, and how these aspects relate to the discursive and historiographical treatment of victims of Nazi persecution who came to Sweden in both historical and contemporary contexts, particularly in relation to issues of gender, place, and identity and belonging. 

Objects smuggled out of Nazi concentration camps and brought to Sweden by liberated prisoners have been valued museum objects in Sweden for almost 60 years. They and the written testimonies given by survivors represent not only the suffering experienced by the Nazis’ victims and their resistance against dehumanization 44 but also how these aspects of the Second World War and the Holocaust were culturally transferred from the epicenter of Nazi atrocities to a nominally neutral country in the immediate postwar period. What has been overlooked is that the former prisoners who came to Sweden as ‘repatriates’ brought with them more than just objects and stories. They also brought knowledge. Like the objects, they carried their knowledge to Sweden, where it was culturally translated in new contexts and contributed to social and political processes taking place during the postwar period. Unlike the objects, however, little consideration has been given to the knowledges carried to Sweden by survivors of Nazi persecution and their significance. My paper begins to rectify this by arguing that many of the survivors whose objects and testimonies are now in Swedish museum collections and archives were not merely passive contributors to knowledge of Nazi atrocities but were knowledge actors who carried and culturally translated knowledge that helped to make the collection of this material possible. My focus is on the Polish survivors of Nazi persecution who were involved with the Polish Research Institute in Lund, Sweden (PIZ), which was funded by the Swedish government in 1945 and 1946 to collect written testimonies from other Polish survivors. Driven by a dedication to gathering evidence and testimonies from other survivors for history and justice, I argue that the survivors brought to the PIZ initiative not only knowledge of persecution and suffering under the Nazis but also knowledge of scholarly and popular methods developed in eastern Europe prior to and during the Second World War. I demonstrate how these knowledges contributed to shaping the method used by PIZ, which is historically significant at least in part due to the cultural translation of knowledge that took place. 

In the Holocaust’s immediate aftermath (1945–1946), a small gallery in Lund, Sweden exhibited the paintings and drawings of Polish artist Jadwiga Simon-Pietkiewicz, which depicted her former fellow inmates in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. This exhibit and subsequent exhibitions elsewhere in Sweden marked rare instances of early postwar Holocaust art displayed in a country that had been relatively unaffected by the Holocaust. By analyzing the response of the Swedish public and press to the artwork in these exhibits, as well as Swedish and international responses to “atrocity photos” of the liberation, the author broadens our understanding of Holocaust art, early testimonies, and agency and resistance during and after the Holocaust.

Women contributed in significant ways to documenting the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities during and after the Second World War. But these contributions have been relatively obscure until recently, overshadowed by other narratives about the Holocaust and Second World War and the contributions of male historians. Luba Melchior was a Polish-Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who was liberated to Sweden in 1945. There, as a refugee, she contributed to an effort to collect material evidence and witness testimonies from other Polish survivors, both Jewish and non-Jewish, also in Sweden as refugees. While the fact that she did this work is known, little has been written about her as a person, as a survivor, as a refugee, as a Jewish victim of Nazism gathering evidence of the Nazis' crimes against humanity, and how she lived out the rest of her life without her husband and son who had been murdered by the Nazis. In this blog post I contributed to the EHRI (European Holocaust Research Infrastructure) Document Blog, I begin to place Luba Melchior into these and other historical contexts by piecing together fragmented archival material and other evidence of her life, experiences, and work.

Introduction to “Indigenous Collections: Belongings, Decolonization, Contextualization,” a focus issue of Collections: A Journal of Museum and Archives Professionals. The Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars who have contributed to the volume offer unique and important perspectives on topics such as The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), decolonizing practices in relation to specific collections and contexts, and archival material and practices. The physical collections they work with range in location from Turtle Island (North America) to France to Zimbabwe.

Locating and Analyzing Ethics of Care in Early Survivor Testimonies

Like other historical commissions and documentation centers established during and after the Holocaust and Second World War, the main objective of the Polish Research Institute (PIZ), established in Lund, Sweden, in 1940, was to document and record evidence of the Nazis’ crimes for justice and history.¹ In spring 1945, when tens of thousands of survivors of Nazi persecution arrived in Sweden as displaced persons, this objective was met in part by gathering 512 complete and 76 incomplete or ‘unfiled’ witness testimonies from Jewish and non-Jewish Polish survivors in just over one year. These important written records, which were primarily the result of in-person interviews conducted by survivor-interviewers with survivor-witnesses, then directly served the objective when some of the material was used in the Ravensbrück war crimes trials in Hamburg in 1946 and 1947, the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial in 1947, and the Gross Rosen tribunal in 1948. Since the 1990s, they have also increasingly served researchers.

In this paper, I contend that the PIZ efforts to document the experiences of both Jewish and non-Jewish survivors of Nazi persecution served justice (and history) in other ways as well.

In the spirit of reexamining ‘old’ collections of survivor testimonies in new ways, my research involves analyzing evidence of the relational encounters taking place when the PIZ witness testimonies were being created. Scholars including Boaz Cohen and Rita Horváth have argued for the importance and benefits of examining the specific contexts in which testimonies were given through a close reading of the testimonies. Cohen and Horváth argue that “analysing testimonies together with the contemporaneous circumstances of their rendition not only deepens our understanding of the testimonies but teaches us about post-war survivor communities and their sensibilities.”² What I have found in taking this approach is that the survivors engaged with the PIZ initiative to collect and record evidence from other survivors were doing so in ways that demonstrate an ethics of care involving listening and communication. I argue, for instance, that they were providing a unique form of refugee-led humanitarian aid to other survivors that enabled them to begin the process of coping with the trauma and reconstructing their lives.³ In addition, they were mediating difficult and conflicting memories of trauma and persecution through empathy and compassion.⁴ In these and other ways that I am exploring, the survivors of PIZ were serving not retributive justice, but restorative justice, which involves not only justice, but justice with care.⁵ This paper will explore these and other findings of my ongoing research.

¹ See, for example: Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).² Boaz Cohen and Rita Horváth, "Young witnesses in the DP camps: Children's Holocaust testimony in context," Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 11, no. 1 (2012): 209.³ Victoria Van Orden Martínez, “Survivor-Refugee Humanitarianism: A New Perspective of Second World War Humanitarianism in Sweden.” Presented at Women and humanitarian aid – a historisizing perspective, Örebro, Sweden, October 15, 2021. Paper pending publication in edited volume.⁴ Victoria Van Orden Martínez, "Witnessing against a divide? An analysis of early Holocaust testimonies constructed in interviews between Jewish and non-Jewish Poles," Holocaust Studies (2021), https://doi.org/10.1080/17504902.2021.1981627.⁵ Elizabeth S. Parks, The Ethics of Listening: Creating Space for Sustainable Dialogue (Lanham,Maryland: Lexington Books, 2019), 109.

Among the hundreds of sites that housed survivors of Nazi persecution who came to Sweden in the spring and summer of 1945, one of the largest was at the small village of Öreryd. Between June 1945 and September 1946, around a thousand Jewish and non-Jewish Polish survivors came to this site, where they were expected to stay only until they were well enough to return to their home countries or migrate elsewhere. This article contributes to filling a gap in refugee history in Sweden, dealing with how survivors experienced Swedish refugee camps and shaped the refugee camp environment on their own terms. Thinking with Peter Gatrell’s framework of ‘refugeedom’, a wide range of sources have been examined for insight into how Polish survivors in the Öreryd refugee camp navigated the precarity and uncertainty of their existence as survivors and refugees in Sweden and endeavoured to shape their immediate and future lives.

In this joint paper, we compare our respective research into two distinct collections of earlypost-war survivor testimonies gathered through interviews: The Wiener Library’s Eyewitness Accounts Collection in London, England, gathered in the mid-1950s, and the collection of The Polish Research Institute (PIZ) in Lund, Sweden, gathered in 1945 and 1946. Both initiatives grew out of work begun by their respective institutions before and during the Second World War by male scholars in exile – one a German-Jewish refugee-survivor (Dr Alfred Wiener), the other a Polish émigré (Dr Zygmunt Lakociński) – then living in other countries – England and Sweden respectively – who focused on collecting documentation of Nazi crimes. At different times following the war, the initiatives turned to collecting eyewitness accounts from Jewish and non-Jewish survivors through interviews. These efforts were led predominantly by female survivor interviewers from intellectual backgrounds, and in the case of the WienerLibrary’s collection, the project was also led by a woman, Eva Reichmann. In these ways, the two survivor historical commissions we examine are not unlike many others documentingthe Holocaust in the first decade after the end of the Second World War. What makes both our respective research and our collaboration in this paper distinctive is that we analyse not only the testimonies produced, but also the archival traces left behindby the interviewers from which we will draw our central argument. In their commentary about the testimonies, in correspondence with others involved in both projects, in minutes from organisational meetings, etc., we find evidence of how survivor-interviewers balanced academic objectivity and ‘fact extraction’ with empathy, and subjectivity with rationality. Key to our approach is how gender shaped the practices and methodology used in the interviewsand the dynamics between the survivor interviewers and witnesses. Finally, the initiatives atboth the PIZ and the Wiener Library demonstrate the intellectual, cultural and social network sand constellations in which the survivor scholars and interviewers operated. We will argue that these two corpora offer opportunities to explore emerging notions of survivorship and trauma among those who co-created these early accounts, as well as the role of women inpost-war archives creation.

In Sweden in 1945 and 1946, a small group of Jewish and non-Jewish Polish survivors of Nazi persecution interviewed one another about their experiences for the sake of justice and history. It was an unusual dynamic, perhaps even singular, among the many historical commissions and documentation centers that gathered evidence and testimony of the Nazi atrocities during and after the Second World War. This was due, in part, to the fact that the approximately 13,000 Polish survivors who came to Sweden in 1945, of whom between 4,000 and 7,000 were Jewish, had to contend with the tensions and conflicts that had existed before and during the Holocaust, including antisemitism, complicity, national identity, and experiences of persecution. 

This proposed paper would present and discuss the findings of my analysis of 43 Polish Research Institute in Lund (Polska Källinstitutet i Lund, ‘PIZ’) witness testimonies that were constructed in interviews between Jewish and non-Jewish Polish survivors of Nazi persecution, which took place in Sweden in 1945 and 1946. These findings were recently published in Holocaust Studies journal: Witnessing against a divide? An analysis of early Holocaust testimonies constructed in interviews between Jewish and non-Jewish Poles (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17504902.2021.1981627), and provide insight into how Jewish and non-Jewish survivors were together negotiating both the traumatic memories of Nazi persecution and their own conflicted history, which included antisemitism, collaboration and bystanderism, and competing claims to trauma and persecution, in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust.

During the spring and summer of 1945, approximately 31,000 survivors of Nazi persecution came to Sweden for medical treatment and rehabilitation. They arrived in the White Buses of the Red Cross and the White Ships of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). Around 40 percent of them were Poles and at least a third were Jews. All of them were physically and mentally broken down to varying degrees when they came to Sweden. Swedish media were filled with descriptions of the refugees' shocking appearance. A Swedish commentator described them as having been "degraded to animals." For some it was even worse than that. Although the Poles who came to the refugee camp in Öreryd were healthy enough to be moved from quarantine and hospitals, they were far from "recovered." In fact, they had just begun their long journey – physically, emotionally and psychologically – away from the atrocities they, their families and their homeland had been subjected to. Öreryd, like the other Swedish refugee camps, was only a short stop on the survivors' journeys from a life under Nazi oppression to something new and as yet unknown.

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.

In Solna, there is a place which is said not to exist in Sweden: an “authentic site” of Nazi persecution. Until recently, the site of the graves of around 100 Holocaust victims (mostly young women) had been an almost entirely forgotten and overlooked part not only of Stockholm’s Northern Cemetery, but also of Stockholm’s – and, indeed, Sweden’s – history and cultural heritage. Now, the small amount of light being shed on the site is blotched with tension and controversy which reflect issues of custodianship and responsibility for the memory and memorialization of these victims of the Holocaust in Sweden. This paper focuses not on this friction, but rather on problematizing the issues surrounding it as they pertain to the entanglements of history, memory, and cultural heritage inherent in this urban site.

I argue that this part of Stockholm’s landscape is not only an authentic site of Holocaust history in Sweden, but also one which “belongs” not just to the Swedish Jewish community, but to the urban community of Stockholm and to Swedish society, as well as to diverse international and transnational communities. Recognizing and encouraging multiple claimants of the intertwined history and cultural heritage ingrained in this site to engage in shared responsibility and custodianship would, I contend, "activate" the site; locating it as a tangible and important part of the history of Nazi persecution and guiding researchers and scholars to the wealth of significant archival material related to it. In so doing, the Holocaust need no longer exist in Sweden only as a physically and temporally remote “event,” but rather a continuum which played out – and continues to play out – in Sweden, where tangible evidence and traces are embedded in the topography. These arguments are particularly relevant considering the plans for establishing a Holocaust museum in Sweden.

This article makes visible and analyzes survivor testimonies gathered in interviews between Jewish and non-Jewish Polish survivors of Nazi persecution in Sweden in 1945-1946. By examining the content of the testimonies in relation to the distinct context, it contributes to research about early documentation efforts and their role in shaping Polish memory of the Holocaust as well as post-conflict relations between Jewish and non-Jewish Poles. The analysis explores whether or to what extent the acts of witnessing took place across an insurmountable divide of identity and experience or on a more common ground where such differences were respected and appreciated.

This 7-minute presentation was given at the Holocaust Research in Challenging Times online conference, organized by Western Galilee College, on May 11, 2020, in the Gender and Sexuality panel. It provides an overview of my doctoral dissertation (in progress) on women survivors of Nazi persecution who came to Sweden as refugees following the Second World War and became central and significant figures in Swedish society, culture and, ultimately, history.

On February 12-13, 2020, the International Research Conference on Holocaust Remembrance and Representation was held in Stockholm, Sweden, arranged by the Inquiry on a Museum abou the Holocaust (Ku 2019:01). There, researchers from around the world met and discussed how to establish a museum about the Holocaust in Sweden, per the Swedish government's mandate in January 2019. This paper is an abstract of the second of two panel discussions held during the conference: "Creating a Swedish Holocaust Museum." As the panelists discussed the importance of education, research and creating conversation, it was clear that survivors must be at the very heart of the new museum.

On February 12-13, 2020, the International Research Conference on Holocaust Remembrance and Representation was held in Stockholm, Sweden, arranged by the Inquiry on a Museum abou the Holocaust (Ku 2019:01). There, researchers from around the world met and discussed how to establish a museum about the Holocaust in Sweden, per the Swedish government's mandate in January 2019. This paper is an abstract of the first of two panel discussions held during the conference: "What is a Holocaust Museum?" As the title of the paper indicates, an overwhelming theme of this panel discussion was that a Holocaust museum should not only be a site of conservation, but also of conversation.