“If my words and social work in exile contribute to the erection of a common front for the defense of Polish interests and a dignified representation of our country abroad, I will consider my soldier's oath kept.” When Polish survivor of Nazi persecution Ludwika Broel-Plater wrote these words in May 1957, she was nearing the end of her time as a forced migrant. Just a few months later, she became a Swedish citizen, after having lived in the country since her arrival there as a liberated concentration camp prisoner in the spring of 1945. But even after she became a Swedish citizen, she continued to dedicate her life to serving Polish causes in exile. This included commemorating the lives and deaths of other Polish victims of the Nazis, preserving for posterity a large collection of artifacts and evidence of the Nazis’ crimes that she helped to collect, and working to achieve poetic justice through her literary writings. As she wrote to a friend, “I’ve taken revenge on the Nazis in my Ravensbrück comedy.” 

It is thanks to the preservation of her personal documents that Ludwika Broel-Plater’s agency and activism as a forced migrant in Sweden can be reconstructed. And yet she remains an obscure figure in historical narratives of the Second World War, the postwar period, survivor historical commissions, and the Polish exile community in Sweden. One reason may be that her archive has been ‘hidden’ in the archive of a man whose name is much better known to history than hers. Another may be that because female survivors of Nazi persecution who came to Sweden as refugees have rarely been recognized for their agency, few have searched for evidence of that agency, especially not in the archive of a man. Broel-Plater’s archive, although it is not recognized as such, thus contains not only her knowledge but also provides insight into how she claimed agency and empowerment as a migrant and how these intertwining forms of knowledge became ‘lost’ in plain sight.

My workshop paper will discuss Ludwika Broel-Plater’s archival material as ‘lost knowledge’ that reveals how she reconstructed her life as an educator, a social reformer, a political activist, and a playwright almost as soon as she arrived in Sweden as a Polish refugee and survivor of Nazi persecution in 1945, and how she lived life as a Polish exile-activist until her death as a Swedish citizen in 1972.