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.

At the end of the twentieth century, Michael Frisch coined the term shared authority. Frisch focused primarily on the shared authority during the interview and constructing the interview narrative when he wrote about how oral history can be practiced and used. Frisch underlined the importance of protecting and preserving the interviewee’s authority to interpret as well as describe the past. He argued that the working class, migrants, ethnic minorities, and other marginalized groups are often limited in the extent to which they are allowed to interpret the past or their experience, while researchers or people in other different positions of power are allowed to comment on or interpret the meaning of their experience. With the archived collection Migration Finland-Sweden at the Nordiska Museet in Sweden as an example, this keynote, will delve into the possibilities to hear or practice shared authority when collecting and working with (archived) oral history interviews and interview narratives in the future. 

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.