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| Arrival of the ambulansbuses from Frihamnen port to Sigtuna, July 1945. |
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| The list of patients from Sandvreten, a building within Sigtuna Läroverket (now SSHL, a boarding school in Sigtuna)that was used as a part of the emergency hospital during summer 1945. On left side där are annotations which patiens should be moved to Sigtuna Foundations building. Several of the patients listed here died within the days or weeks after arrival from Bergen-Belsen. |
Some documentary filmmakers use an established trick of juxtaposing old pictures or film clips with the current ones. And it seems that my own brain might be working like that as well.When we visited the Sigtuna Foundation (Sigtunastiftelsen) and went up to the famous Klipparkivet, I passed a stone staircase. The sun was shining, the sky was blue but suddenly in a blink of an eye everything turned black and white, and a barbed-wire fence appeared right in front of my eyes. I almost lost my breath because, suddenly, I saw a number of Holocaust survivor women who came on UNRRA's White Boats to the Sigtuna Foundation that was a part of Emergency Hospital in July 1945. Most of them came directly from Frihamnen port. I blinked again but the women in hospital garb were still staring at me.
Isabel Larruy Bergqvist, the Archivist of the Sigtuna Foundation opened the door to the Klipparkivet and took me and Helena R. Brus (Secretary-General of the Swedish Holocaust Memorial Association SHMA) down to the library. I told her about the image "the stairs" evoked in me. Later we were joined by Anders Claesson, the Librarian at Sigtunastiftelsen who knows everything about the Foundation. We went up the stairs again and could only confirm that the black and white image that I have had for years stored in my brain had found a home. The juxtaposition of the photograph taken in 1945 matches exactly the place as it is now. The same experience of reconciling the black and white pictures of the events from over 75 years ago with the color-filled spaces of today's Sigtuna was repeated a number of times and several places at the Foundation came alive as if a scenario from the Summer of 1945.
Many thanks to the Sigtuna Foundation. We will return soon with a team of filmmakers that will digitize, record, and bring to life the scenes from the past on location.
The Swedish Holocaust Memorial Association (Föreningen Förintelsens Minne) was founded in 1995 by among others, Halina Neujahr, a professor at Royal Technical Highschool, KTH who came to Sweden on the White Boat HMS Prince Carl. She weighed just over 20 kg. Föreningen Förintelsens Minne, or Swedish Holocaust Memorial Association, SHMA can be sound found on Facebook
