Stories of survivors

Five destinies from persecution to Sweden.

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A Mother’s Day card, a small suitcase, two identity cards stamped with the letter J, a striped prison jacket and an icon have all been donated or lent to the Swedish Holocaust Museum.

These objects offer us an insight into the stories of survivors who, under various circumstances, arrived in Sweden due to the Holocaust and genocide of Roma. There are several connections between these artefacts and testimonies that offer us a picture of the Holocaust and genocide of Roma, and how these events affected people’s lives.

This is an initial selection from the museum’s collection, but there are also borrowed artefacts. Among other things, they encompass the love between parents and children and the responsibility forced on a 10-year-old girl for her little sister. But they also bear witness to the results of discrimination – acts of violence perpetrated by the Nazis as they persecuted, starved, assaulted and murdered people.

These are the fates that befell the Jewish survivors Lieselotte Jacks, Tobias Rawet, Lilli and Walter Brünn, Kiwa Zyto and the Roma survivor Hanna Dimitri (née Brezinska).

Lieselotte Jacks

Hanna Dimitri (Brezinska)

Lilli and Walter Brünn

Tobias Rawet

Header photo: Refugees on board a ferry in 1945. They came to Sweden on Folke Bernadotte’s White Buses. Photo: K. W. Gullers, Nordiska museet (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).