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| When the survivors arrived in Örebro, all of them came to be called the "Polish girls". Most of them were, however, Jewish. Many of them received medical care since the concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen, was liberated in mid-April 1945. |
Most of the hospitals in Malmö, Gothenburg, Stockholm, Kalmar, and Norrköping were overcrowded after the URRA White boat mission started in late June 1945. Therefore, numerous other emergency hospitals in the Swedish inland were prepared. Many of them were school buildings like Engelbrektskolan in Örebro and Herhagsskolan in Karlstad.
In Örebro, 239 women were cared for at the emergency hospital in Engelbrektskolan, coming from various parts of the world. The majority of the women were from Poland. When the survivors arrived in Örebro, all of them came to be called the "Polish girls". Most of them were, however, Jewish. Many of them received medical care since the concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen, was liberated in mid-April 1945. Therefore, many of them stayed at Örebro emergency hospital between 3 weeks and 4.5 months. When healthy, they wanted to work. Above is one of the lists concerning them made in December 1945, 5 months after arrival with UNRRA White Boats to Sweden. All of them on this particular list worked. Using today's Swedish criteria, they were "highly integrated" concerning the work. Most of them are at Örebro shoe factories, the textile industry, and the paper mill.
In the 3rd row of this protocol, named "Signs of abuse" (Tecken på misshandel), we can read that numerous of them had an Auschwitz serial number on their forearm. The tattoos of the survivors have come to symbolize the utter brutality of the concentration camps and the attempt of the Nazis to dehumanize their victims. In Auschwitz in May 1945, "A" series started, and the last woman had the number A-25378.
Most of the women wanted to leave Sweden for Palestine or the USA. Some wanted to travel to their home countries. Often, when making trips to homecountires they asked about a return visa to Sweden.
During the summer of 1946, most of the Holocaust survivors, also children (12 years old), already worked.
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| Reichman Zahawa and Lusia Rozenblatt from Piotrków Trybunalski, born in 1934, worked during the Summer of 1946. They were inmates in the concentration camps Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen. |