Vortrag
Out of the Camps: Hungarian Jewish Child Survivors between their postwar Swedish transit and their final destination

“Please help me. I am very lonely here, far away in a foreign land. It would be nice to belong to someone.” With these words a 20-year old Hungarian Jewish girl addressed a letter to Hungarians in New, searching for survivors of her Jewish family. She was one of approximately 200 Jewish children and youngsters who, in spring 1945, had been liberated from the German concentration camps and had been brought to Sweden. Around 2000 Hungarian Jewish survivors reached Sweden in spring 1945. Once in Sweden the childrenwere to be physically rehabilitated and educated for a future life, that was doomed to be without parental protection and thus required special preparation. While Hungarian Jewish holocaust survivors arrived to Sweden with the help of the so-called 'White Buses' and theUNNRA, the  transnational rescue action was managed in Sweden by the "Raoul Wallenberg Aid Committee for Hungarian Deportees". The network of Swedish hospitals, sanatoria and health care facilities, that hosted the children, represented one of Europe’s postwar transit spaces, as they served as temporary homes for the rescued child victims. They were spaces where the children were encouraged to speak about their Holocaust experiences, recover from suffering and trauma and prepare for their future lives. This paper proposes to explore the children’s transit experiences in Sweden as well as their own agency in seeking with personal letters survivors from their families in Palestine, Southamerica, the US and beyond. Based on a recent discovery of handwritten children’s letters in Hungarian archives, the paper seeks to engage with the children’s personal path to Sweden and their permanent migration after. Here it will be central to tackle the question about the role surviving relatives played in shaping the children’s subsequent permanent migration. Centering the paper’s attention on the children’sindividual and collective experiences in transit, the paper aims at uncovering the role of Sweden in paving the children’s path towards their future lives in migration.