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

Referentin: PD Dr. Friederike Kind-Kovács
28.03.2025 - 08:30 Uhr
Leiden

Beschreibung der Veranstaltung

The lecture will take place in the panel ‘Healing after the Holocaust: The Rehabilitation of Jewish Survivors in Postwar Sweden’ organised by PD Dr. Friederike Kind-Kovács.

The panel explores the rehabilitation of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in postwar Sweden. Between the spring and summer of 1945 around 12,000 Holocaust survivors were brought to Sweden from German concentration camps and allied DP-camps within the frames of the Swedish Red Cross’ so-called 'White Buses'-operation and an agreement between the Swedish government and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). In Sweden, both the state and various Swedish and international organizations provided the survivors with different forms of aid. Proposing a comparative and transnational approach, with talks on various groups of survivors from different countries in Central and Eastern Europe, the panel tackles the transnational institutional dimension of this endeavor as well as the survivors’ individual experiences in Sweden. Contrasting case studies on Jewish survivors from Romania, Hungary and Poland, the panel seeks to engage with the question of how the survivors’ national background, their distinct experiences in the concentration camps, their age and their gender shaped and affected their reception and stay in Sweden. Through the lens of institutional and administrative sources, letters and life-story interviews, the papers will address the survivors’ physical and psychological rehabilitation, their everyday lives in temporary migration, their search for surviving family members and their preparation for a life after the Holocaust.

Out of the Camps: Hungarian Jewish Child Survivors in postwar Sweden by PD Dr. Friederike Kind-Kovács

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.

More Information.

A letter from Sweden, August 1945, (image was distorted by author)

The National Archives of Hungary