Sweden - Lund University launches 500 Survivors' Testimonies from Women Interned at Ravensbruck

[Jan Meisels Allen janmallen@att.net]

X-No-archive: yes
This week, Lund University in Sweden will launch a digital archive of 514
women and children survivor's testimonies who were interned in the
Ravensbruck Nazi concentration camp located in Northern Germany. There are
about 10,000 pages that have been digitized. Access to the archive is free.

The archive includes interviews with the internees as well as documents
belonging to survivors and Nazi officials. The interviews were all taken
within 18 months of the camp's liberation and reveal details of slave labor,
medical experiments, torture, and killing. As some of the internees were in
other camps before Ravensbruck their testimonies also include information on
other camps. The archive also includes survivors items brought with them
such as diaries, letters and photographs.

To read the interviews go to:
http://www.ub.lu.se/en/voices-from-ravensbruck-3

Interviews are in Polish with English and Swedish translations available on
the website.

Ravensbruck interned 132,000 people of whom 92,000 died. After the Russians
liberated the camp in April 1945 the Swedish government brought over 20,000
survivors from that camp and others to both Denmark and Sweden.

To read more about the digital archive go to: http://tinyurl.com/ybw9btvk
Original url:

https://www.thelocal.se/20171018/swedish-university-lund-digital-archive-of-testimonies-of-nazi-concentration-camp-survivors-voices-from-ravensbrck

A video of the survivors after the camps' liberation is available on the
link provided above. Narrative is in English.

There is another article about 1,000 Polish survivors of Nazi concentration
camps who ended up in the woods of Oreryd, Smaland County, Sweden. The
survivors were part of the Swedish Red Cross's "white Buses operation the
largest rescue operation to take place within Nazi Germany during World War
ll. Of the 31,000 people liberated through this effort approximately 40
percent were Polish and one-third or more were Jewish. Forty-three percent
of the 10,000 survivors were Polish. The roughly 1,000 Jewish and non-Jewish
Poles who made their way to the Oreryd refugee camp in 1945 were part of
this group of survivors. The survivors were very ill and broken and many did
not survive long after their rescue and are buried in cemeteries in Lund.
The experiences of the Polish refugees in Oreryd was not good due to
cultural differences, and the locals not comprehending what tortures the
refugees underwent while imprisoned. Jewish survivors, were often confronted
with anti-Semitism from their non-Jewish countrymen within the camp.

To read more about Oreryd, see: http://tinyurl.com/ya24vok4
Original url:
https://www.thelocal.se/20170704/history-dies-deep-in-the-woods-the-forgotten-nazi-concentration-camp-survivors-in-the-forests-of-smaland-sweden

Jan Meisels Allen
Chairperson, IAJGS Public Records Access Monitoring Committee
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