Annual Report HAIT

Out of the Camps

Hungarian Jewish Child Survivors in Postwar SwedenSweden

Friederike Kind-Kovács

Hannah-Arendt-Institut für Totalitarismusforschung e.V. an der TU Dresden

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7487-3240

Keywords: Transformation Research, Age and Care, Holocaust, Survivor, Minors

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Abstract

This project investigates the fate of Hungarian-Jewish minors who were brought to Sweden from concentration as well as displaced persons’ camps in the spring and summer of 1945. Most arrived with the help of Folke Bernadotte’s ‘White Buses’ and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA); once the minors were in Sweden, the transnational rescue operation was led by the Raoul Wallenberg Aid Committee for Hungarian Deportees. The project draws on a newly discovered collection of fragmented letters written by or addressed to the survivors. Drawing on these personal accounts, the project examines how letters helped both the surviving minors and their relatives to cope with trauma and suffering in the post-war period, whilst also enabling them to re-establish social ties with members of their severely harmed and fragmented families. Beyond that, the project investigates the physical, psychological and social rehabilitation of the survivors in Sweden.

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Author Biography

Friederike Kind-Kovács, Hannah-Arendt-Institut für Totalitarismusforschung e.V. an der TU Dresden

• Since 08/2018 Senior Researcher at Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies e.V. at TU Dresden
• Since 2023 Coordinator of Internationalisation at HAIT, Dresden
• 2023–2027: Chair of the Working Group ‘Healthcare Patients’ within the COST Action CA22159 “National, International and Transnational Histories of Healthcare, 1850–2000”
• 02/2009–07/2018 Assistant Professor of Southeast and East European History, Regensburg