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

The proposed talk centers its attention on the experiences of Hungarian Jewish child victims in Sweden after 1945. While several thousand Hungarian adult Holocaust survivors arrived in Sweden, only a few hundred Hungarian children and youngsters below the age of 18 reached Swedish safety. As the Raoul Wallenberg Relief Committee for Hungarian Deportees administered the deportees’ relief, many of the child survivors wrote letters to this institution in search of possible family survivors. Relying on these child letters the talk engages with the question whether and how the Holocaust forced the children at a very early age to become agents of their own lives. As the children were deprived of their parents’ protection and suffered from various forms of trauma, the paper seeks to understand how the children formulated and navigated their own emotional and material needs. Furthermore, the talk explores the particularities of children’s treatment in Sweden. While the stay in Swedish sanatoria, hospitals and other care facilities primarily aimed at the physical recovery of the Holocaust survivors, it will be valuable to understand how the engagement for children’s physical recovery was intertwined with strategies towards their education and training. Having been deprived of a future within their familial environment, it appeared essential to prepare the children in Sweden for their own future lives. Here the talk also seeks to explore if and how the relief providers responded to children’s psychological challenges and met their emotional needs.