Vortrag
"Out of the Camps: Hungarian Jewish Child Survivors in Postwar Sweden"

This talk is dedicated to the fate of Hungarian Jewish child survivors in the immediate post-WWII period, exploring it through letters of the children and about them. It explores a group of child survivors who were brought to Sweden in the spring and summer of 1945 for physical rehabilitation purposes and who stayed from a few weeks up to various months or even years. While most of them arrived in Sweden with the help of Falk Bernadotte’s ‘White Buses’ and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, once the children were in Sweden the transnational rescue action was managed by the “Raoul Wallenberg Aid Committee for Hungarian Deportees” (Magyar Deportáltak Raoul Wallenberg Segélyző Bizottsága). Although being often still young, many of the children tried to trace and reconnect with surviving family members back in Hungary and in emigration. Other child victims had survived the Holocaust and were back in Hungary, while their mothers had been brought to Sweden. Closely examining how letters were used to recreate ties between torn-apart and seriously harmed families, the talk aims at uncovering the transnational dimension of a postwar Jewish rescue action in one of the 20th century major transformation periods.

Further Information here.