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| The Polish Research Institute in Lund (Polski Instytut Źródłowy). Top row from left: Bożysław Kurowski, Ludwika Broel Plater, Carola Łakocinska, Jerzy Nowaczyk, Zygmunt Łakocinski, at the bottom from left: Helena Dziedzicka, Luba Melhior, Halina Strzelecka. Helena Dziedzicka, a former prisoner at Ravensbrück testified later at the so-called Hamburg Ravensbrück trials in 1946-1947. |
Ph. D. thesis Afterlives: Jewish and Non-Jewish Polish Survivors of Nazi Persecution in Sweden Documenting Nazi Atrocities, 1945-1946 by Victoria Van Orden Martínez, is one of the most important books (thesis) about PIZ (PIŹ) and Dr. Zygmunt Lakocinski (Łakociński), his team and the material collected by them at the end of WWII. Zygmunt (Otto Roman) Łakociński was a lecturer in Polish at Lund University. In 1974 he left two collections to the university library in Lund.
PIŹ - The Polish Research Institute in Lund (Polski Instytut Źródłowy) was founded to conduct in-depth interviews with the former prisoners of the concentration camps and collect material that the survivors had brought with them from the camps. Although personal belongings were forbidden in the concentration camps, many Polish survivors managed to keep small objects hidden and bring them with them to Sweden. Among the personal belongings donated to the working group were letters, photographs, personal notebooks, drawings, food recipes, prayer books, teaching materials, as well as work journals used at camps (so-called Blockbücher). In addition to this material, which is now part of the archive, the working group also collected a large number of physical artifacts, such as crucifixes, dolls, and pieces of cloth.
The most important part of PIŹ collected materials are, however, the testimonies. The witness testimonies are numbered 1-514. Sixteen testimonies were considered to contain particularly sensitive information by the working group and were classified until 2004; those are numbered T1-T16. Some testimonies were never completed and given a number. A majority of the interviewees were Catholic women who had been imprisoned at the Ravensbrück concentration camp and arrived in Sweden with the very last transport to Sweden by White buses that arrived in Sweden on May 28, 1945.
The testimonies are not just simple testimonies, they are in-depth interviews, checked and cross-checked by PIZ workers. Here "cross-checked" means that the testimony from one former prisoner of the concentration camp was checked with others from the same camp.
Another important factor was that testimonies were collected starting in October 1945. e. The interviews were made within 18 months of the ex-prisoners arrival in Sweden. What makes these interviews significant is partly that the documentation was made just months after the respondents were released and partly that the methods of conducting the interviews were very reliable. The last group of the former inmates of the Bergen-Belsen camp arrived in Sweden on July 26, 1945, with the UNRRA White Boat Mission. The time aspect of interviews as I mentioned above is very important as numerous Jewish survivors who arrived in Sweden with the UNRRA White Boat Mission claimed 50 years later that they arrived with the "Count Bernadotte" mission. The reason for that was that the Count was almost "Royal" and that the UNRRA mission used to be officially read governmentally and by historians, neglected.
Many of them were survivors and one of them, Luba Melchior was a Holocaust survivor. I directly compared their dedication to the work at PIZ with my mother, a Holocaust survivor who escaped in 1942 from the Warszawa Ghetto. When part of Poland was liberated in the January Offensive 1945 she started directly her work as a teacher in the school.
Victoria Van Orden Martínez's thesis is heavy, not just in the volume of monography (278 pages) but also in the enclosed documentation which easily be divided into three theses. It is therefore most likely that Victoria will be very soon nominated to be an Associate Professor.
