I det här kapitlet komplicerar vi bilden av ”den överlevande” och överlevandetsom sådant. Syftet med kapitlet är att skapa en flerdimensionell förståelse för de olika roller som överlevande personer spelat i det svenskasamhället. Det första avsnittet avhandlar olika begrepp som använtsinom den svenska offentligheten för att beskriva och tala om Förintelsensöverlevande. Därefter kommer en problematiserande redogörelse av huröverlevande har figurerat i svensk Förintelsehistoriografi följt av en diskussion kring överlevande personers plats i den svenska offentligheten. Föratt avrunda kapitlet anläggs ett framåtblickande perspektiv genom vilket överlevande personers så kallade minnesaktivism diskuteras. Här formulerasäven tankar och reflektioner om pågående och framtida forskning ombarn och barnbarn till överlevande personer och det minnesarbete som detagit över från sina släktingar.

Forced Migrants in Nordic Histories sheds light on the often-overlooked histories of forced migrants in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden during the 20th and 21st centuries. It offers the first comparative, region-wide volume focused specifically on the histories of refugees and other groups of forced migrants across the Nordic countries.

 Nordic historiographies have long tended to marginalise or omit the presence of these migrants, producing a perception of forced migration as something ‘new’ or ‘exceptional’. This volume challenges that notion by uncovering the long and varied histories of forced migration within, between, to, and from the Nordic region. In doing so, it repositions forced migrants as integral to the shaping of Nordic societies.

The volume includes contributions from and about all the five Nordic countries. It examines both national specificities and shared regional patterns, offering insights into how forced migration has been regulated, remembered, and represented in public discourses across borders.

The chapters engage with a wide range of forced migrant groups, such as wartime evacuees, refugees, deportees, Holocaust survivors, and more recent asylum-seekers. Central to the volume is the recognition of forced migrants as historical actors. Drawing on oral histories, personal testimonies, and archival research, the book foregrounds the agency of forced migrants themselves, countering their frequent portrayal as passive or voiceless.

By tracing historiographical trends and shifting discourses, regulatory frameworks, and memory practices, Forced Migrants in Nordic Histories contributes a vital historical dimension to contemporary debates on forced migration.

The chapter provides the first comparative analysis of forced migrants in the Nordic historiographical traditions. Research outside the Nordic context has pointed to silences and blind spots regarding forced migrants, who have appeared as anomalies in nation-state-centric historiography. To what extent does a hypothesis of silences hold in the case of the Nordic countries? The chapter analyses relevant research in history and related fields in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden that covers the period from early modern times to the present. While highlighting the scale and complexity of histories of forced migration in the Nordic region, the overview finds highly patchy national research fields well into the 1990s, with forced migrants rarely in the focus and often subsumed into general migration or labor history. After the Second World War, specific groups such as Jewish refugees or Karelian “evacuees” received some scholarly attention, with critical research questioning self-celebratory national narratives particularly from 1970s onward. Yet major publications appeared as exceptions to an overall rule of silence and were often written outside the profession of history. Only from the 1990s onward has there been a sustained historical interest, reflecting contemporary debates on immigration and human rights. Expansion of research has been accompanied with diversifying methodological and theoretical approaches and a shift of focus towards the perspectives, agency, and specific experiences of forced migrants.

This paper will present and discuss the methods used and the results from a study ofhow Jewish women in Sweden narrate and interpret their experiences of antisemitism.The interviews were conducted within the research project „Jewish and Woman” thatfocuses on various ways to live as a woman and a Jew in Sweden during the 20th and21st Century. The study has also investigated if and how women from different generations talk about the ways in which antisemitism or fear of antisemitism has affectedtheir lives and life choices. Most of the interviews were conducted during the fall andwinter of 2023 2024 with women from different generations living in the three largestcities in Sweden. Working with a life history approach, a dialogical epistemology ofintersectionality (Yuval Davies 2023) and shared authority (Frisch 1998) which emphasizes the importance of giving space to both what the interviewees tell about their experiences, and how they interpret their experiences, we have listened to what and howthe women talk about their experiences of antisemitism. Although the interviews havenot primarily focused on experiences of antisemitism, negative attitudes and beliefsas well as hostility towards Jews are recurring themes in the women’s narratives. Formany women, antisemitism seems to be an integral part of their biography, not onlythrough their own experiences, but through the experiences of family members andother people throughout the Jewish history. Therefore, the paper will also discuss howwe apply historical perspectives in our analysis, and how the women themselves useand relate to history in different ways when they narrate, interpret and make sense oftheir experiences of antisemitism.

In this presentation, we explore historical perspectives on Jewish women’s life stories in Sweden during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Thereby, we will address oral history as a creative space for making visible women as ‘active agents and makers of history’ (Guberman ed. 2005). This approach also contributes to the historiography on Jewish women and their everyday lives, which has been largely absent in the historiography on the Jewish minority in Sweden (Thor Tureby 2019).

The empirical foundation is part of a larger research project and consists of oral history interviews with approximately thirty women born in the 1950s, 1970s, or 1990s, all of whom self-identify as Jewish and women. The interviews took place during the years 2023- 2024. Employing a dialogical epistemology rooted in intersectionality (Yuval Davies 2023) and shared authority (Frisch 1992), the presentation emphasises both the content of the women’s life stories and the ways they interpret and articulate their experiences during the interviews.

The presentation also includes written excerpts from the interviews, conducted in Swedish, to illustrate the historical perspectives both in the women’s narratives and our analysis, highlighting the ways these interact – and sometimes diverge. Overall, the narratives emphasise historical continuity, with several women actively engaging with history. For instance, one young woman turned to history to reconnect with an alternative Jewish history, one that has not been destroyed by the Holocaust explaining: ‘I want a different story’ (Thor Tureby & Hall 2024).

The presentation will highlight some of the key findings of the study, including the observation that Jewish women’s life stories resemble a tapestry woven from experiences of the present and the past, intertwining their own experience with those of their families and the Jewish community.

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.

This article adopts a historical perspective to explore Jewish women’s experiences of anti­ semitism in Sweden. The empirical foundation of the study comprises interviews with approximately thirty women born in the 1950s, 1970s or 1990s, all of whom self­identify as Jewish. Employing a dialogical epistemology rooted in intersectionality and shared authority, the study emphasises both the content of the women’s life­stories and the ways they interpret and articulate their experiences. A key finding of this study is that the fear of antisemitism is a persistent presence in the lives of most participants. A notable continuity over time is the school, which emerges as a recurring site where Jewish women have experienced a sense of being different. However, there is a generational shift in how these experiences are interpreted. Women born in the 1990s are more likely to identify such experiences explicitly as antisemitism, compared to those born in the 1950s or 1970s. Another significant conclusion is that understanding Jewish women’s stories about antisemitism requires these accounts to be situated within broader relational contexts, encompassing both their own and others’ experiences as well as both contemporary and historical processes. Past experiences are often reactivated by current events, such as the attack of 7 October 2023. There is also a before and after 7 October. After 7 October, the fear of antisemitism increased, and some women describe the fear as constant or existential.

A general conclusion in the article is that the fear of antisemitism is present in most of the women's lives. A continuity over time is that the school is a place where Jewish women have experienced that they are different. Women born in the 1990s interpret these experiences to a greater extent, than the women born in the 1950’s and the 19970’s, as an experience of antisemitism. In this respect, our results differ from previous international research showing that older people in particular experience and regard society as antisemitic, while younger people do not do so to the same extent.

A further conclusion is that to understand women's narratives about experiences of antisemitism, these should also be understood in relation to the experiences of others both in the present and in the past, since these form layer upon layer of experiences that are actualized by current events such as October 7. There is also a before and after October 7.  After 7 October, the feeling of insecurity has increased, and some women describe the fear as constant or existential.

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.