Witnessing for the future. Holocaust, Sweden and Forgotten Early Testimonies

The project duration will be three years. The research will be carried out in three case studies:

Case 1: "We live forever". Narratives about Sweden and the Holocaust in the early Yiddish language ”ecology” (Simo Muir)

This case study investigates previously unknown and unexplored Yiddish language literary sources that discuss the Holocaust, and the survivors’ encounter with Sweden, written in Sweden and beyond. Jewish intellectuals had started to document the khurbn, the Holocaust unfolding around them already during the Holocaust, and after the genocide launched projects urging professionals and lay-persons alike to collect and record their own and other survivors' experiences. This phenomenon influenced survivors also in Sweden, and one of the members of the 1944-founded Central Jewish Historical Committee in Poland, Dr Nelly Rost, settled in Sweden founding the Historical Committee under the Swedish Section of the World Jewish Congress. Among the survivors in Sweden there were several Yiddish authors and cultural figures, like poets Rokhl Korn, Rachmil Bryks and Moyshe Gurin, and authors Yisroel Tabaksblat, Ludwig Winograd and Yoysef Rubinshteyn, who continued to write during their time in Sweden and reflected on Sweden later on in their lives elsewhere. Korn became one of the most esteemed Yiddish poets of her time and Tabaksblat wrote the first account of the history of Lodz ghetto, which was published in Buenos Aires in 1946. There were also some members of the Swedish Jewish establishment, who occasionally published in Yiddish, like Norbert Masur who played a key role in the White Buses operation and was the Swedish representative to the World Jewish Congress. These examples show the transnational dimensions of the Holocaust and post-Holocaust history and how closely Sweden is interlinked with them. Muir will examine Yiddish literary sources written in Sweden or about Sweden abroad, in the light of the transnational, post-Holocaust "ecology" of Yiddish literature documenting and commemorating the Holocaust. He will also study poetic and dramatic works created by the "surviving remnant" in Sweden. Muir's aim is also to follow individual trails, migration through various countries and how the authors' narratives may change during their lifespan. Muir will examine previously unexplored Yiddish literary sources from archives and libraries in Sweden, Denmark, Israel and the US but also from private persons still in possession of various manuscripts.

Case 2: The voices that we miss: Early Romani encounters and narratives in Sweden on the Genocide of the Roma (Andrej Kotljarchuk)

The second case study investigates previously unknown and unexplored early testimonies of Roma genocide survivors in Sweden. Oral testimonies are a principal source for the study of the Romani genocide. However, the Nazi genocide of European Roma was left undocumented many years after 1945 despite the presence of survivors. There is a significant field of research regarding the history of Romani and Travellers communities in Sweden as well as on how different forms of anti-Gypsyism affected their lives, but how the Roma genocide survivors and their experiences are seen in a Swedish context is still understudied. International scholars have described the early process of documentation on the Romani genocide as a process of exclusion from the major narrative of the Nazi crimes. However, our preliminary study of early testimonies from Sweden on the Nazi crimes shows that these stories often include both Jews and Roma who suffered and were murdered at the same sites of persecution. For example, in 1946 the Norwegian lawyer Hans Cappelen told the Swedish press about the medical experiments on Roma and Jews provided by SS doctor August Hirt in the concentration camp of Natzweiler-Struthof . Dozens of Jews and Roma were murdered there in 1943 by order from Dr. Hirt. The skeletons of the victims were supposed to be used as specimens in the racial-biological collection at the University of Strasbourg. However in present-day academic and popular publications when the medical experiments of Dr Hirt is discussed, the Romani victims are usually not mentioned. As Ari Joskowicz has pointed out: "Jews and Roma died side by side in the Holocaust, yet the world did not recognize their destruction equally. In the years and decades following the war, the Jewish experience of genocide increasingly occupied the attention of legal experts, scholars, educators, curators, and politicians, while the genocide of Europe's Roma went largely ignored." (Joskowicz, 2023). This project will develop Joskowicz¨s approach looking on both the testimonies of Jewish and Romani survivors who came after 1944 to Sweden.

Case 3: Constructing the narrative(-s) of the Holocaust and the Genocide of the Roma in the majority ecology in Sweden (Karin Kvist Geverts)

The third case study will explore if, how and when the narratives in the Yiddish and the Romani ecology surfaced into the majority ecology and how they were acknowledged, understood, ignored and/or misunderstood in the public debate in Sweden. Kvist Geverts sources will be the digitized daily newspapers archives at the National Library, complemented with the micro filmed local newspapers which are missing in the database, as well as books, memoirs etc published in Swedish by the Jewish and Roma survivors in order to understand how the ecology(-ies) of witnessing was being constructed in Sweden compared to other transnational ecologies. Previous research points to the importance of the nationalistic discourse in both Sweden and Great Britain, but where the British focused on the perpetrators, the Swedes focused on the victims, and argues that survivors have been both used and abused in the political setting in Sweden. In our own preliminary studies, we have found examples of when the Yiddish and the Romani ecologies surfaced into the majority ecology. For example in a long interview from 1946 in a Swedish newspaper, a Norwegian lawyer told his story which also included references to Roma victims, as well as in the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter on December 10, 1947, in a review of a Holocaust themed concert in Yiddish where the reviewer, although not understanding the Yiddish, still reported about concert to the majority public. It may come as a surprise to contemporary Swedes that the Holocaust was a topic lively discussed and processed already in the 1940s, and not only in the Yiddish speaking community but also in the Swedish public debate. By following some of these Yiddish speaking survivors witnessing on the Holocaust our project aims to deepen our knowledge of the Holocaust as a Swedish and transnational history. By adding the witnessing of the genocide of the Roma, we intend to increase our knowledge of a much less researched area and group, in order to find out what role language and context played in early Swedish encounters and narratives about the Holocaust and the genocide of the Roma. As Hasia Diner (2009) has pointed out, it is likely that if we search for "the grand narrative" of the Holocaust as constructed today, we will only find silence in the early post-war years. Thus, this case study will use the findings in the other case studies and employ the names of individuals, commemorative occasions, concerts held in Yiddish, etc and search not only on a national level but also in local newspapers in order to find out if and how these narratives surfaced.