Many documentation initiatives and collections of testimonies were initiated in the immediate postwar period. This article delves into one such initiative. It focuses on the practice of early recounting and active listening at boarding school for young Holocaust survivors in Sweden. The article explores, by a close reading of an article authored by one of the teachers and eight full-length essays from the students, both the teacher's perspectives on the young survivors' need for certain education and emotional assistance and the survivors' early reflections on the experiences of recounting, education, survival and life the first years after the Holocaust.

Jewish life in Sweden went on much as usual during the Second World War and the Holocaust. Swedish Jews were not rounded up and massacred or sent to death camps. In the aftermath, there were no mass graves, no decimated communities, no surviving remnant to locate. Nonetheless, the destruction of European Jewry became embedded in Swedish soil in the immediate aftermath and several monuments to the Nazis’ Jewish victims were erected in the decade following the end of the Second World War.This paper builds on our respective and collaborative research on Swedish cemeteries where victims of Nazi persecution are buried, highlighting how the victims and their graves were identified and memorialized in the first ten years after the Holocaust. Our research provides a novel perspective since most existing studies focus on how nations, communities, organizations, and individuals commemorated their own victims. Sweden could make no such claims to Jewish losses, and so the context offers new insight into how Jewish life and death at the hands of the Nazis were memorialized by Jewish diaspora communities in the aftermath. Our findings indicate that the geographies and politics of memory were evident in how the Swedish Jewish diaspora, which suffered no victimization due to Sweden’s non-belligerent status during the Second World War, commemorated Jewish victims of many nationalities who happened to die in Sweden in the immediate aftermath.In the spring and summer of 1945, approximately 30,000 surviving victims of the Nazis, including around 10,000 Jews, were transported to Sweden for medical care and recovery. Referred to as “The Rescued of 1945” (“1945 års räddade”), many did not long survive that rescue, dying en route or soon after arrival. With no connections to and in the host country, the victims were buried in Sweden’s cemeteries. The first commemorations of the Jewish victims were the small, flat gravestones commissioned and paid for by the Swedish Jewish communities, which described them as “monuments,” that were placed over each victim’s grave. These were sometimes engraved with incorrect information about the victims, including their name, country of origin, and/or birthdate. As the victims’ loved ones and survivors sought to personally commemorate the dead, however, they found their requests denied.During the next decade, more substantial monuments were erected near the victims’ graves in a handful of cemeteries. But some of these also proved to be sites of contested memory, with at least one instance of a Swedish-Jewish group rebuffing survivors’ involvement in the establishment of a monument to the victims. In other cemeteries, no monuments to Jewish victims were erected at all, even while monuments to non-Jewish victims were. Thus, although efforts to memorialize Jewish victims of the Holocaust began early in Sweden, these were inconsistent and tended to be dominated by the Swedish-Jewish minority rather than the surviving remnant in Sweden.

The purpose of this article is to explore moments of shared authority when working with archived interviews and to suggest how the use and understanding of shared authority as an analyticalconcept might be advanced and elaborated in conjunction with the concept of intersectionality,borrowed from another research field (in this case, gender studies). We aim to hear and acknowledgethe different voices, dialogues and silences of those who documented and those who aredocumented. We listen to their archived voices and dialogues to find moments of shared authority andanalyse how the shared authority plays out during the interviews through intersectional analyses of the archived interview narratives.

In this chapter we reflect upon our experiences and visions for engaging with memory institutions’  archival and digital practices. Our current  research project focuses on two memory institutions’ perspectives on the digitization  of Holocaust collections in their archives, and we suggest that the different ways in which they have approached  digitization raises central questions about the ethics of accessibility in digital archival realms. Following from this we consider the development of new ethical approaches to digital archiving and reflect upon how Holocaust scholar Todd Presner’s (2016) ideas on the “ethics of the algorithm” as well as “distant listening” could inform debate and praxis with archival studies as well as the processes of memory institutions.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Malin Thor Tureby interviews Henry ‘Hank’ Greenspan aboutseveral of his projects involving ‘sharing authority’, what Greenspan calls ‘collaboration’. Collaboration has taken many forms in his work, most centrally his practice of interviewing the same Holocaust survivors multiple times over months, years, and with some survivors, decades. Unlike conventional testimony, which concerns declaration, that is, ‘this I witnessed’, Greenspan’s approach emphasises exploration, what one survivor called ‘learning together’. Thus, in the context of deepening conversations,survivors reflected on the impact of their wartime experiences throughout the years that followed; theirvarying choices about what to share and not share at different times and circumstances; and theirperceptions of their listeners, and popular ‘Holocaust memory’, in general. Greenspan also discusses a memoir he co-authored with a survivor, and a play, REMNANTS, which is based on his decades of conversations with survivors. He reflects on the process of co-authorship, the role of personal chemistryin interviews, the claims of the verbatim, writing in the service of conversation and the relationshipsbetween artistic and scholarly ways of knowing.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, Sweden saw an upsurge in state-sponsored memory projects pertaining to the country’s controversial and largely unspoken relationship with the Holocaust. However, the collections that were created in the 1990s, containing hundreds of ego-documents—interviews, letters and pictures—have not been made accessible to the public. Instead, they are hidden away, protected by institutions who deem the archival subjects too vulnerable for public exposure. In these cases, “vulnerability” is often used as the main argument for why Holocaust collections should not be digitized. In this presentation I will discuss the current gap that exists between cultural heritage practice and government policy on digitization, accessibility, and research ethics. By discussing Swedish examples of Holocaust collections that have or have not been digitized, I attempt to demonstrate how discourses about vulnerability affect the use and non-use of archived life stories from survivors of the Holocaust in public history settings in Sweden.