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.