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| British Field Medical Card from Bergen-Belsen hospital with the medical history and the outlines of the lungs. |
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| Medical Card from the Swedish emergency hospital in Sigtuna. |
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| Swedish Medical Card from July 1945 |
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| Medical card from Swedish emergency hospital |
Numerous Holocaust survivors came to Sweden at the end of WWII. Therefore, there are piles of documents and archival collections here. In addition, the graves of Holocaust survivors who died in Sweden shortly after arrival are important for the world wide documentation of Holocaust.
Swedish Holocaust Memorial Association started in 1995 to build bridges between the collections. To start, we were showing documents such as DP-1 and DP-2 cards and Field Medical Cards issued in Europe by Allied forces and connecting them with the Swedish entry card documents and the Medical cards from the Swedish emergency hospitals. Link was also made with the Swedish detention camps where many of the survivors who did not require hospitalization were placed.
Linking the documents issued by the Allied forces and the Swedish documents was and still is of central importance in the work of SHMA. It is not only the fate of the survivor and the family that was documented on DP-2 cards during April-July 1945 and later in Sweden during June-July that are of importance. Of great importance are the medical records from these two significant periods of time. In the Field Medical Cards there are hand drawings of the patient lungs with marked places where pathological spots were recorded by X-ray. Similar drawings were made to start with in Sweden. As the changes in the lungs were found in most the hospitalized patients the drawings are found in numerous medical cards.
"Swedish documents" are also private letters and telegrams sent from Sweden after WWI to the families that survived. In addition, there are archives of several Jewish organizations in Sweden and the Swedish Red Cross that were making these types of searches.
Swedish Holocaust Memorial Association started early to investigate the fate of Holocaust survivors buried in Sweden during 1945-1948 as a result of the diseases acquired during the Holocaust. And, after the single search request to SHMA from the Holocaust survivor in Israel in 1994, we widened our work to connect the Swedish data and the Allied forces data with the archives in other countries such as Poland and France. From these archives, we could obtain early data about the Holocaust survivors and the Holocaust victims such as data from the ghettos and the deportation lists like French convoys to Auschwitz and from some ghettos in Poland.
Personal items that survive the Holocaust were also of special interest for the Swedish Holocaust Memorial Association to build the bridges between the collections. Here we collected numerous "Aryan papers" - documents that were necessary for Jews that were pretending they were Christian.
At SHMA we feel it is essential to show and document the fate of a single person - from birth to death, and both for the Holocaust survivors and the victims. This is important both for the reasons of documentation but also to fight the growing antisemitism. SHMA did documentation of this type. As a member of the Second Generation talking about the Holocaust in Swedish schools, I was using "stories" about my family in France and about my family in Poland. I always started with the happy family pictures prior to WWII and ending telling about their fate. As my family in Paris and in Warsaw were transported in a very similar way, by cattle cars from Drancy station in Paris or from Umschlagplatz in Warsaw to Auschwitz and Treblinka, I was telling a lot about the inhuman logistics of the Holocaust including the Holocaust trains and the Death Factories (where I also mentioned what happened to my grandma's hair). Again, an entire story that I could document. Timetables of the train departures and arrivals to the death camps are a very important part of the documentation, education.
In two books edited by the Swedish Holocaust Memorial Association, 1995 and 2020 we build the links between the documents from different sources and collections. Now, I feel strongly that such documents should be digitally gathered in the Arolsen Archives with links to the USHMM and Yad Vashem. Single documents are important but showing the entire chain of documents and histories is the strongest way we can act now. Now!
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| Books edited by Swedish Holocaust Memorial Association - SHMA - 2020. |
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| Books edited by Swedish Holocaust Memorial Association - SHMA - 1995. |
