The graves in question — whose markers are sunken into the soil and located in a separate plot of the Jewish section of Stockholm’s Northern Cemetery — are those of about 100 people who were ill when liberated at Bergen-Belsen in 1945 and who died soon after being evacuated to Sweden for medical treatment.
The project is spearheaded by Roman Wroblewski, the Polish-born son of Holocaust survivors who emigrated to Sweden in 1967. Wroblewski, an emeritus medical school professor, also conceived the main Holocaust memorial in Stockholm, dedicated at the city’s synagogue in 1998. That memorial lists around 8,500 names of Holocaust victims who were relatives of survivors who settled in Sweden after the war.
On the new memorial project, Wroblewski is working with city authorities and with the Stockholm Jewish community.
He presented a detailed plan for the project to city authorities at the end of 2018, and also contacted the director of the city museum earlier in the fall. Funds are now being sought for what he told JHE would be an approximately €145,000 undertaking.
Almost all of the burials in the plot are of women and girls who had been among survivors who were found at or brought to Bergen-Belsen after its liberation by British forces in April 1945. (Tens of thousands of prisoners were found starving or suffering from typhus and other diseases when Bergen-Belsen was liberated — Anne Frank had succumbed not long before liberation.)
They received immediate treatment at a British field hospital set up in former SS barracks nearby, and then at a Swedish field hospital in the Baltic Sea port of Lübeck staffed by British, Swedish and German doctors. Some died, but thousands were transported to Sweden on UNRRAs “White Boats” for medical attention. Wroblewski is a chairman of Swedish Holocaust Memorial Association..
