Abstract
Vittnesbördet [the Testimony] is a short film produced by Svensk Filmindustri (SF) that shows camp survivors arriving and recuperating in Sweden in the spring and summer of 1945. Although Vittnesbördet is most likely unknown to most Swedes in its entirety, clips from the film have been used and repurposed for more current documentary projects, thus reacquainting audiences with the bodies and faces first shown in cinemas in 1945. The aim of this chapter is to examine the portrayal of camp survivors, both in the film Vittnesbördet, but also in the later documentary Hoppets hamn (2011) and the book Hoppets hamn: när överlevarna kom till Sverige (2011). In this text, I wish to reflect upon the ways in which camp survivors have been used to tell the story about Sweden and the Holocaust. Rather than being an analysis that pushes theoretical or methodological boundaries, the chapter signifies a first step in trying to tease out ways of interrogating common-sense notions of victims and victimization that continue to inform Swedish histories on rescue at the end of the Second World War. Based on Carolyn Dean’s suggestion that we pay attention to the ‘ideological investments’ involved in representations and debates on the Holocaust as well as previous research on gender and victimhood, this text attempts to open up new avenues to think about and consider Swedish humanitarian aid and rescue from a victim perspective.
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Notes
- 1.
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York and London: Penguin Books, 2013), 3.
- 2.
See, Johan Östling, ‘The Rise and Fall of Small-State Realism’, in Nordic Narratives of the Second World War. National Historiographies Revisited, eds. Henrik Stenius, Mirja Österberg and Johan Östling (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2011), 127–148.
- 3.
See Magnus Gertten, Hoppets Hamn (Malmö: Auto Images 2011); Lars Åberg and Magnus Gertten, Hoppets hamn. När överlevarna kom till Sverige (Stockholm: Roos och Tegnér förlag, 2011); ‘Ideological investments’ is a term used by American historian Carolyn Dean in her book Aversion and Erasure. The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2010), 29.
- 4.
For Swedish refugee policy during the Second World War, see for example: Karin Kvist Geverts, Ett Främmande Element i Nationen. Svensk Flyktingpolitik och de Judiska Flyktingarna (PhD Diss., Uppsala University, 2008); Paul A. Levine, From Indifference to Activism Swedish Diplomacy and the Holocaust, 1938–1944 (PhD Diss., Uppsala University, 1996); Lars M. Andersson and Karin Kvist Geverts eds. En problematisk relation? Flyktingpolitik och judiska flyktingar i Sverige 1920–1950 (Uppsala: Opuscula Historica Upsaliensia 36, 2008). For research on early representations of Holocaust Survivors see for example Antero Holmila, Reporting the Holocaust in the British, Swedish and Finnish Press, 1945–1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Ingvar Svanberg and Mattias Tydén, Sverige och Förintelsen: Debatt och dokumentation om Europas judar, 1933–1945 (Stockholm: Dialogos, 1997). Mikael Byström, En broder, gäst och parasit. Uppfattningar och föreställningar om utlänningar, flyktingar och flyktingpolitik i svensk offentlig debatt 1942–1947 (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 2006); Pontus Rudberg, The Swedish Jews and the victims of Nazi terror, 1933–1945 (PhD Diss., Uppsala University, 2015); Malin Thor Tureby, ‘Svenska änglar och hyenor möter tacksamma flyktingar. Mottagningen av befriade koncentrationslägerfångar i skånsk press under året 1945’, Historisk Tidsskrift 135, no. 2: 266–300; Malin Thor Tureby, ‘Swedish Jews and the Jewish survivors. The first public narratives about the Survivors in Swedish-Jewish Press’ in, Reaching a State of Hope—Refugees, Immigrants and the Swedish Welfare State, 1930–2000, eds. Mikael Byström and Pär Frohnert (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2013).
- 5.
See, for example, Åsa Bergström & Mats Jönsson, ‘Screening War and Peace: Newsreel Pragmatism in Neutral Sweden, September 1939 and May 1945’, in Researching Newsreels: Global Cinema, eds. Ciara Chambers, Mats Jönsson & Roel Vande Winkel, (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). See also Marie Cronqvist & Lina Sturfelt, War Remains: Mediations of Suffering and Death in the Era of the World Wars, (Lund: Nordic Aacademic Press, 2018).
- 6.
Mats Jönsson, ‘Non-Fiction Film Culture in Sweden circa 1920–1960: Pragmatic Governance and Consensual Solidarity in a Welfare State’, in A Companion to Nordic Cinema, eds. Mette Hjort & Ursula Lindqvist (Malden, MA: John Wiley and Sons, 2016), 125.
- 7.
Jönsson, ‘Non-Fiction Film Culture in Sweden’, 125.
- 8.
Jönsson, ‘Non-Fiction Film Culture in Sweden’, 125.
- 9.
For an introduction into this field see, Marion Kaplan, ‘Did Gender Matter during the Holocaust? Jewish Social Studies 24, no. 2 (2019): 37–56. Zoë Waxman also explores gender in relation post-Holocaust representations of survivors in ‘Unheard Testimony, Untold Stories. The Representation of Women’s Holocaust Experiences’, Women’s History Review 12, no. 4 (2003): 661–667. For further readings on gender and representation in the context of memorialisation and the camps see, for example, Janet Jacobs, ‘Gender and Collective Memory: Women and Representation at Auschwitz’, Memory Studies 1, no. 2 (2008): 211–225; Janet Jacobs, ‘Remembering Genocide: Gender Representation and the Objectification of Jewish Women at Majdanek’, iRne ligion, Violence, Memory and Place eds. Oren Baruch Stier & J. Shawn Landres, (Indianapolis & Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 163–173.
- 10.
See chapter 4 ‘Erasures’ in Dean, Aversion and Erasure, 143–177.
- 11.
Dean, Aversion and Erasure, 29.
- 12.
On the 22 of May 1945 it was notably advertised in the daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet that the cinema Röda Kvarn in central Stockholm would be showing a number of newsreels pertaining to the liberation of Oslo as well as Swedish rescue work. The first two films on the schedule were Flyktingar finner en hamn (Refugees Find a Harbour) and De kom över fjällen (They Came Across the Mountains) as well as Då Norge blev fritt (When Norway Became Free). These were presented in smaller type, while a filmed speech by Folke Bernadotte and Vittnesbördet were presented in large, bold type. Vittnesbördet’s title was also accompanied by a description of the film’s content. As such, being the last film on the list, in significantly larger and bolder type (including a description), Vittnesbördet was presented as the film in a series depicting current events in a newly liberated Europe.
- 13.
Johnny Wijk, ‘“Censur och propagandaministeriet”, en översikt av Informationsstyrelsens verksamhet 1940–1945 utifrån dess efterlämnade arkiv’, Historisk Tidsskrift 1 (1990): 21.
- 14.
‘Verksamhetshistorik’, 219. Statens Informationsstyrelse (SIS), vol. 109, Riksarkivet Marieberg.
- 15.
Wijk, ‘“Censur och propagandaministeriet,”’ 34–40.
- 16.
SIS, vol. 109, 3–4.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Aaron Harris Kahn, ‘Creating a Safe Harbour. Depictions of Swedish Refugee Assistance Actions in Wartime Propaganda Film’, Journal of Scandinavian Cinema 2, no. 3 (2012): 223.
- 19.
Kahn, ‘Creating the Safe Harbour’, 219.
- 20.
Ibid., 220.
- 21.
See also Stig Hjavard’s characterisation of the film medium’s position in Swedish society between 1920–1980 in Stig Hjavard, ‘The Mediatization of Society. A theory of the Media as Agents of Social and Cultural Change’, Nordicom Review 2 (2008): 120.
- 22.
SIS, vol. 109, ‘Verksamhetshistorik’, 222.
- 23.
SS-officer Walter Schellenberg was also a significant actor in Bernadotte’s negotiations with Himmler. Felix Kersten, Himmler’s masseur claimed to have played a crucial role in these dealings as well but the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper questioned the validity of Kersten’s claims as early as the 1950s and he has therefore not been included as a credible witness to events in later historiography regarding the event. See Sune Persson, Vi åker till Sverige. De vita bussarna 1945 (Stockholm: Fischer & co, 2002). For literature on the ‘White Buses’ mission in Swedish collective memory and arguments regarding the missions’ treatment of Jews, see Ingrid Lomfors, Blind Fläck. Minne och glömska kring Svenska röda korsets hjälpinsats i Nazityskland 1945 (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2006).
- 24.
Svante Hansson, Flykt och överlevnad. flyktingverksamhet i mosaiska församlingen i Stockholm, 1933–1950 (Stockholm: Hillelförlaget, 2004), 279.
- 25.
SIS, 109, ‘Verksamhetshistorik’, 222.
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
Ibid., 224.
- 28.
SIS did suggest that nothing be written until the 4th of May as some rescuees were still being transported which meant that most dailies held off until 5 May 1945.
- 29.
Holmila, Reporting the Holocaust, 42.
- 30.
Ibid., 38. A reportage showing images of Auschwitz was also published in the weekly magazine Se in late April 1945. Se, no. 16, 19–24 April 1945.
- 31.
Holmila, Reporting the Holocaust, 38.
- 32.
Barbie Zelizer, ‘Gender and Atrocity: Women in Holocaust Photographs’, in Visual Culture and the Holocaust, ed. Barbie Zelizer (London: The Athlone Press, 2001), 2.
- 33.
See Rochelle Saidel, ‘The Jewish Victims of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp’, in Lessons and Legacies Volume VII. The Holocaust in International Perspective, ed. Dagmar Herzog (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2006).
- 34.
Gertten, Hoppets Hamn.
- 35.
Kahn, ‘Creating the Safe Harbour’, 225.
- 36.
Ibid., 225.
- 37.
Ibid., 225.
- 38.
Ibid., 226.
- 39.
Ibid., 222.
- 40.
Kristin Wagrell, ‘Chorus of the Saved’. Constructing the Holocaust Survivor in Swedish Public Discourse, 1943–1966 (PhD diss., Linköping University, 2020), 107–139.
- 41.
Kvist Geverts, Ett främmande element, Levine, From Indifference to Activism.
- 42.
Mikael Byström has explained this shift in policy as a ‘Nordic prerogative’ meaning that the Scandinavian identity of the rescues trumped that of ‘race’ ethnicity or religion. This, however, did not mean that xenophobic and antisemitic ideas and attitudes lessened or changed with regards to other immigration-related matters. See, Byström, En broder, gäst och parasit.
- 43.
Byström, En broder, gäst och parasit; Thor Tureby, ‘Svenska änglar och hyenor’.
- 44.
Byström hypothesises that the discrepancy in the reporting between the UNRRA mission and the ‘white buses’ mission was due to antisemitic attitudes but also because the UNRRA mission brought more female survivors. Thor Tureby, on the other hand, postulates that the media market had become saturated with survivor refugee stories at the beginning of June which is why little attention was paid to the UNRRA mission. UNNRA is the acronym used for the United Nations Relief and Rehabiliation Administration.
- 45.
Holmila, Reporting the Holocaust, 46.
- 46.
Kvist Geverts, Ett främmande element; 230. See also Byström, En broder, gäst och parasit, 114.
- 47.
Kvist Geverts, Ett främmande element, 221–222.
- 48.
See Gottfarb, Den Livsfarliga Glömskan, 276.
- 49.
See for example, Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination. A Social and Cultural History (Oxford: Paul Springer Publishing, 1994); Pieter Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation. Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000); Annette Wieviorka, Déportation et genocide. Entre la mémoire et l’oubli (Paris: Plon, 1992).
- 50.
SIS, 109, 213.
- 51.
SIS, 109, 214.
- 52.
SIS, 109, 213.
- 53.
SIS, 108; ‘Till Flyktingfilmen’, 1.
- 54.
Östling, ‘The rise and fall’, 128.
- 55.
Cf. Henrik Bachner, ‘Judefrågan’: Debatt om antisemitism i 1930-talets Sverige, (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2009); Henrik Bachner, Återkomsten: Antisemitism i Sverige efter 1945 (Stockholm: Natur & Kultur, 2004).
- 56.
Byström, ‘En broder gäst och parasit’, 119.
- 57.
See Persson, Vi åker till Sverige, 432–438. Persson does not divide the categories of rescuees into men and women, but goes through the different archives that he has explored in search for the most accurate total figure of rescuees, discussing different parts of the mission etc. However, since many of the rescued were of Scandinavian descent, with the exception of the rescued from Ravensbrück women’s camp, it can be concluded that this latter group was more nationally diverse than the men who were rescued from other camps.
- 58.
Nils Jerring, Vittnesbördet (Stockholm: Svensk Filmindustri AB, 1945).
- 59.
Yvonne Hirdman, Att lägga livet tillrätta (Stockholm: Carlsson, 2000), 126.
- 60.
Zelizer, ‘Gender and atrocity’, 256.
- 61.
Ibid, 256.
- 62.
Rochelle G. Saidel, The Jewish Women of Ravensbruck Concentration Camp (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 210.
- 63.
See Patrick Steorn, Nakna Män. Maskulinitet och kreativitet i svensk bildkultur 1900–1915 (Stockholm: Norstedts akademiska förlag, 2006).
- 64.
Aaron Kerner, Film and the Holocaust: New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries, and Experimental Films (New York: Continuum, 2011), 7.
- 65.
Anna Reading, ‘Scarlet Lips in Belsen. Culture, Gender and Ethnicity in the Policies of the Holocaust’, Media, Culture and Society 21 (1999): 481.
- 66.
Ibid., 497.
- 67.
Gertten, Hoppets Hamn.
- 68.
Åberg, Hoppets Hamn, 101.
- 69.
See for example: Thor Tureby, Svenska änglar och hyenor, 295.
- 70.
Gertten, Hoppets Hamn.
- 71.
Åberg & Gertten, Hoppets Hamn, 101.
- 72.
Åberg, Hoppets Hamn, 102.
- 73.
Malin Thor Tureby, ‘På tröskeln till Kalmar. Kommittén för flyktinghjälp, den mosaiska församlingen och flyktingarna i Kalmar 1945–1946’, in Samhällshistoria i fokus. En festskrift till Lars Olsson om arbete, migration och kultur, ed. Lars Berggren (Malmö: Malmö University, 2010).
- 74.
Ibid., 198–200.
- 75.
Susan Rubin Suleiman, ‘The 1.5 Generation: Thinking About Child Survivors and the Holocaust’, American Imago 59, no. 3 (2002): 277–295.
- 76.
Dori Laub, (1992): ‘An Event Without a Witness. Truth, Testimony and Survival’, in Testimony. Crises of Witnessing in Psychoanalysis, Literature and History, eds. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (Abingdon and New York: Routledge), 75.
- 77.
See Rubin Suleiman’s discussion on this in ‘The 1.5 Generation’, 286.
- 78.
Rubin Suleiman, ‘The 1.5 Generation’, 283.
- 79.
Henry Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors. Beyond Testimony (St Paul, MN: Praeger Publishers, 2010), 11
- 80.
See for example, Marianne Hirsch, ‘The Generation of Post-Memory’, Poetics Today 29, no. 1 (2008): 103–128; Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Post-Memory. Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
- 81.
See for example, Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage. Women, Men and the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 14–17; ‘Unheard Testimony, Untold Stories. The Representation of Women’s Holocaust Experiences’, Women’s History Review 12, no. 4 (2003): 661–667. For a discussion on silences surrounding sexual violence during the Holocaust see for example, Katarzyna Person, ‘Sexual Violence during the Holocaust—The Case of Forced Prostitution in the Warsaw Ghetto’, in Shofar. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 33, no. 2 (2015): 105; Helene Sinnreich, ‘“And it was something we didn’t talk about”. Rape of Jewish Women during the Holocaust’, Holocaust Studies 14, no. 2 (2015): 4.
- 82.
Svanberg and Tydén, Sverige och Förintelsen, 399; ‘Tortyr och Giljotin’, Dagens Nyheter, 5 May 1945.
- 83.
Jerring, Vittnesbördet.
- 84.
Thor Tureby, ‘Svenska änglar och hyenor’, 275.
- 85.
Waxman, ‘Unheard Testimony’, 663; John Horne, ‘Masculinities in Politics and War in the age of Nation-States and World Wars, 1850–1950’, in Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History; Stefan Dudink, Karen Hageman and John Tosh, eds. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 22–40.
- 86.
Waxman, ‘Unheard Testimony’, 663.
- 87.
See for example, Michael S. Kimmel, ‘The Contemporary “Crisis” of Masculinity in a Historical Perspective’, in The Making of Masculinities. The New Men’s Studies, ed. Harry Brod (Boston, MA: Allen & Unwin, 1987), 121–153.
- 88.
Maddy Carey, Jewish Masculinity in the Holocaust. Between Destruction and Construction (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 26.
- 89.
Åberg & Gertten, Hoppets hamn, 203
- 90.
See Carey’s discussion in ‘Jewish Masculinity in Theory and Practice’, Jewish Masculinity in the Holocaust, 25–26.
- 91.
Carey, Jewish Masculinity in the Holocaust, 38.
- 92.
Åberg & Gertten, Hoppets hamn, 222.
- 93.
One of the first major historical works conducted in the Lodz ghetto came already in 1962, with the book entitled Lodz ghetto: A History authored by Isaiah Trunk (first published in Yiddish). Since then several works have been produced pertaining to conditions and resistance within, and the organisation of the ghetto. See for example, Lucjan Dobroszycki, The Chronicle of the Łodz Ghetto, 1941–1944 (London: Yale University Press, 1984). Gordon J. Horwitz, Ghettostadt. Łodz and the making of a Nazi City (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2008). The example of the Lodz ghetto has also been thoroughly disseminated and explored in Swedish by the fictional writer Steve Sem Sandberg in his book De fattiga i Łodz (Stockholm: Bonnier förlag, 2009).
- 94.
Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).
- 95.
See Wagrell, ‘Chorus of the Saved’, 173–183.
- 96.
Ibid.
- 97.
Wagrell, ‘Chorus of the Saved’.
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Wagrell, K. (2021). Jews, Gender, and the Scandinavian Subject: Understanding the Context and Content of the Film Vittnesbördet [The Testimony]. In: Heuman, J., Rudberg, P. (eds) Early Holocaust Memory in Sweden. The Holocaust and its Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55532-0_8
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