Jewish life in Sweden went on much as usual during the Second World War and the Holocaust. Swedish Jews were not rounded up and massacred or sent to death camps. In the aftermath, there were no mass graves, no decimated communities, no surviving remnant to locate. Nonetheless, the destruction of European Jewry became embedded in Swedish soil in the immediate aftermath and several monuments to the Nazis’ Jewish victims were erected in the decade following the end of the Second World War.

This paper builds on our respective and collaborative research on Swedish cemeteries where victims of Nazi persecution are buried, highlighting how the victims and their graves were identified and memorialized in the first ten years after the Holocaust. Our research provides a novel perspective since most existing studies focus on how nations, communities, organizations, and individuals commemorated their own victims. Sweden could make no such claims to Jewish losses, and so the context offers new insight into how Jewish life and death at the hands of the Nazis were memorialized by Jewish diaspora communities in the aftermath. Our findings indicate that the geographies and politics of memory were evident in how the Swedish Jewish diaspora, which suffered no victimization due to Sweden’s non-belligerent status during the Second World War, commemorated Jewish victims of many nationalities who happened to die in Sweden in the immediate aftermath. 

In the spring and summer of 1945, approximately 30,000 surviving victims of the Nazis, including around 10,000 Jews, were transported to Sweden for medical care and recovery. Referred to as “The Rescued of 1945” (“1945 års räddade”), many did not long survive that rescue, dying en route or soon after arrival. With no connections to and in the host country, the victims were buried in Sweden’s cemeteries. The first commemorations of the Jewish victims were the small, flat gravestones commissioned and paid for by the Swedish Jewish communities, which described them as “monuments,” that were placed over each victim’s grave. These were sometimes engraved with incorrect information about the victims, including their name, country of origin, and/or birthdate. As the victims’ loved ones and survivors sought to personally commemorate the dead, however, they found their requests denied. 

During the next decade, more substantial monuments were erected near the victims’ graves in a handful of cemeteries. But some of these also proved to be sites of contested memory, with at least one instance of a Swedish-Jewish group rebuffing survivors’ involvement in the establishment of a monument to the victims. In other cemeteries, no monuments to Jewish victims were erected at all, even while monuments to non-Jewish victims were. Thus, although efforts to memorialize Jewish victims of the Holocaust began early in Sweden, these were inconsistent and tended to be dominated by the Swedish-Jewish minority rather than the surviving remnant in Sweden.