Knowledge Hub

Learn more about the Holocaust and Sweden

Here you will find articles, testimonials and digital in-depth content. New material is published continuously.

Selected theme

The White Buses

Discover The Swedish Red Cross Rescue Operation 1945. Follow people’s stories through a timeline, personal accounts, and maps.

About The White Buses

Stories of survivors

Follow different life stories from persecution to Sweden.

Tobias Rawet

In May 1944, eight-year-old Tobias was living with his family in the Łódź ghetto in Nazi German-occupied Poland. On 7 May, he spent his first money on a Mother’s Day card for his mother Ester.

Lilli and Walter Brünn

When the National Socialists came to power in Germany in 1933, Lilli and Walter Brünn were busy running the Berlin department store they had taken over after Walter’s father. Eventually. Lilli and Walter were granted Swedish residence permits and entered the country with identity cards stamped with the letter J.

Lieselotte Jacks

Lieselotte Jacks was 15 years old in June 1939. Her parents, Gertrud and Alfred, had sent her to Sweden on the Kindertransport from Berlin to Gothenburg. They had no idea if they would ever meet again.

Kiwa Zyto

Kiwa was only seven years of age when Poland was engulfed by war and he had only been in school for one week. When the war finally ended in 1945, he was 12; he had no idea where his mother was nor whether any of his family had survived.

Hanna Dimitri

Hanna held on tightly to her little sister Anita’s hand. The sisters had been taken to the extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. Hanna was 10 years old, Anita three years younger, and she remembered clutching her sister's hand tightly throughout the ordeal, afraid they would be separated.

Eva Israel

When Eva was barely three years old, SS soldiers came into the family kitchen searching for her father Gottfried. The situation for German Jews was getting worse and the family tried to get an entry permit to the USA. Instead, Eva and her mother Elsbeth came to Sweden. Her father Gottfried never got the opportunity.

Czesław Aredzki

In August 1943, when Czesław was having his usual cigarette out in the street in Końskie in Poland, he was arrested by the Gestapo. Czesław didn't understand why he was being taken away. Nobody explained to him that he was being sent to Auschwitz.

Alice Grosz

Alice wears a disguise, but the veil of her widow's costume is turned up and her face can be seen when she meets someone she knows in the street. He recognises her and knows that Alice is Jewish. He exchanges a few words with her and wishes her good luck.

Stories from our collection

Discover objects and stories in the museum’s collection.

Last letter

The last letter from Anna Posner to her son Ludwig is preserved in the museum's collection. Here you can take part of the letter and read more about Ludwig, his mother Anna and father Sigfried.

The Rothschild's Coffee Set

Read the story of the Rothschild family coffee set and how the family got it back.

Lost Voices

The Northern Jewish Cemetery in Stockholm is home to row upon row of small, simple tombstones. These are the graves of the Jews who survived the Holocaust and came to Sweden after the end of the Second World War in 1945, but who died here shortly after their arrival. Who were they, and what can be told about their lives?

Choose a person you want to read about

Their voices have been lost, but their memory lives on. We are keeping their memory alive by telling their stories.

Sabina Krautwirt

Sabina was born shortly before the outbreak of World War I in Krakow, one of Poland's oldest cities and a lively cultural hub. It was also home to some of the oldest surviving synagogues in Europe and known for its long Jewish heritage.

Rywka Posladek

Rywka lived with her family in the city of Łódź in central Poland. Like Rywka's family, the Posladeks, over one third of the city's inhabitants were Jewish. Rywka, who was 14 years old when Łódź fell under the control of Nazi Germany in September 1939, only lived to be 20.

Rozsi Hirschl

Rozsi was born in 1915 as the youngest daughter of the Singer family and grew up in the town of Nagykanizsa in western Hungary. Her father Mikhai worked as a railway conductor while her mother Sidonia was a housewife.

Margit Polgar

Margit, or Margarita as she was also known, was born on Christmas Day in 1920. She grew up in what was then Czechoslovakia in the small town of Stará Ďala, now called Hurbanovo.

Lia Stark

Lia Stark was born and raised in the beautiful town of Sighet, also known by its Hungarian name Máramarossziget, in what is now northern Romania.

Klara Schwarcz

Klara grew up in the picturesque town of Tokaj, known for its wines, in north-east Hungary near the Slovakian border. She lived with her big family on Görög Street, just a stone's throw away from the town's large synagogue.

Hertha Heyman

Hertha lived in the town of Stettin in what was then German Pomerania, now Szczecin in Poland, with her husband Wilhelm and their sons Eugen and Manfried. When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, Manfried was only four years old.

Herbert Pinkus

Herbert was the eldest son of Max and Johanna Pinkus and was born in Dresden, Germany, where he grew up with his parents and brother Günther who was just one year younger than him.

Gerte Lorie

Gerte grew up in Prague with her older brother Josef and her parents Moric and Luisa. She was 20 years old when the Nazis seized Prague on March 15, 1939.

Czarna Ber

Czarna grew up with her family in Łódź, Poland. She was 16 years old when Nazi troops invaded her home town in September 1939.

About the project Lost Voices

The project is led by Daniel Leviathan, a doctoral student in Jewish Studies, and the material is published in collaboration with the Swedish Holocaust Museum.

The Northern Jewish Cemetery

The survivors who died shortly after arriving in Stockholm were buried at the Northern Jewish Cemetery in Stockholm, directly next to the Swedish Jewish community.

Digital exhibition

Explore in‑depth content in the museum’s digital exhibitions.

In Black and in White

Between 1933 and 1946, the media reported extensively on Hitler, Nazi Germany, and the war. Radio and newsreels delivered daily updates, including reports on the Holocaust and the genocide of Europe's Jews.

Two men are sitting at a table reading newspapers.

Untold

Take part of the digital companion to the exhibition Untold and learn more about the genocide of Sinti and Roma.

Search the Collections

Search for images and objects from the museum’s collection in our digital database. We are continuously working to add more information and include additional images.

We share the database with the other museums that are part of the National Historical Museums. Therefore, you will find objects from the Economy Museum, the Hallwyl Museum, the Swedish History Museum, the Royal Armoury, Skokloster Castle, the Tumba Paper Mill Museum, and the Swedish Holocaust Museum in the database.

Start searching in our database

Ask questions to survivors (in Swedish)

In Swedish

Dimensions in Testimony

Dimensions in Testimony provides the opportunity to ask questions to survivors from the Holocaust.

To the Swedish-language version