Passage To Sweden

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World War II, 1939 through 1945

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Caught in the middle of the war were the three Scandinavian countries Sweden, Norway, and Denmark Each with their own story to tell The Jewish population in each of these countries had very different experiences

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I was brought up in Sweden in a very Jewish home My father was the Chief Rabbi of the Orthodox community in Stockholm Though we lived in a very secularized country We had a very Jewish home

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When discussions come up as to Were you born in this country? And I say no I came from Sweden The next answer is or the next question Where were you during the Holocaust? Were you hidden? And I say no I didn't have to be hidden There was no reason for me to be hidden Well, what happened to you?

I said nothing happened that was different from what happened to American children I went to school I played games summertime we went to the beautiful islands in the Archipelago And they look at me and say but the war was on And I'm always amazed that people do not realize That Sweden was a neutral country and we were spared the horrors of the war Sweden was able to avoid German attack and occupation during the war because of its rich natural resources particularly iron ore The Germans needed a steady supply of iron ore to produce weapons and sustain its war machine Sweden sold the precious commodity to Germany Which made some question Sweden's neutrality They also needed Sweden's access to the sea for trading with neutral countries It was in Germany's self-interest to have good relations with Sweden And not alienate one of its few trading partners Jews in most European countries suffered great tragedy They were rounded up Stripped of their belongings And sent to concentration camps Families were separated Young and old were tortured Starved And murdered Known as the Holocaust Six million Jews perished in these atrocities I was astounded that we have been living in the midst of hell In the midst of destruction in the midst of torment Our brethren had to live through in the European countries And our lives went on as normal and that's all of us in Stockholm and can you imagine that this is when the war was on in Europe and there we are looking perfectly relaxed, comfortable, and happy

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I was a tour guide to Scandinavia for 25 years I loved every minute of it I became a tour guide because I wanted to go back to the visit the countries where I've grown up I love the area and most of all I was very proud of the fact that Sweden opened its doors for the survivors of the Holocaust

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On April 9th, 1940 The Germans invade Norway and Denmark In Norway they rounded up the Jews just like they did in the other European countries Some Norwegian Jews fled the capital city of Oslo during the German bombardment of Norway on April 9, 1940 They traveled over the border to Sweden Meanwhile the Norwegian army put up a valiant fight against overwhelming forces but were defeated in only two months

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Jews came back Even Jews who had fled to Sweden moved back to Norway and they thought it couldn't be so bad The legal Norwegian government fled the country after the German invasion Norwegian civilian authorities following German orders Instituted increasingly oppressive policies towards the Jews Synagogues in Oslo and Trondheim were forced to produce full rosters of their members as well as identify other Jews in the community And then for instance my father he was a lawyer He got a note that he was no longer allowed to practice as a lawyer because he was Jewish and things like that happened and it hardened All Norwegian Jews were ordered to have their identification papers stamped with a J Vidkun Quisling a Norwegian military officer politician and notorious Nazi sympathizer Was appointed as head of the government The Quisling regime was extremely hateful and life for the Jews became harsh Quisling cooperated so fully So enthusiastically with the Germans That his very name Quisling came to mean collaborator and traitor But only in 1942 they really started to round up Jews It started around Trondheim about 450 kilometers north of Oslo On October 25, 1942 Jewish men over the age of 15 were arrested across Norway and taken to concentration camps Luckily my father and his brother had gotten away but several hundred men were arrested and put in camps and prisons around Norway and they were Norwegian police who arrested them all over the country Women had to go everyday to the police station otherwise their men it be their sons their husbands their fathers, their brothers would be killed that was the story The restrictions were stronger and stronger and suddenly it became really dangerous and some people understood that very early But of course it's in human nature they had a home here they had made their life here and established here in a very good way so you couldn't imagine that they had to flee from it all Those who avoided the first wave of arrests had one month to escape to neutral Sweden before all of the remaining Norwegian Jews were rounded up for deportation Norway and Sweden are connected with mountains and forests so all over the country there were escape routes If you look across the woods over there and you see the white dot, the white egg If you go further and further there is Sweden and it's very far It's not around the corner and it's in the woods and when you're in the woods you lose your sense of direction you do not know where you are Of course it was very dangerous because the routes were discovered and they had to change routes Many were arrested on their escape route The Norwegian resistance helped Jews cross the border but nearly half the people who were able to escape had to find their own way to Sweden as it was very costly to be guided across the border There were also Norwegians who worked with the Nazis and turned in Jewish refugees So it was hard to know who to trust The men were arrested first and still they didn't think they would arrest women and children One month later everyone else was taken the sick ones, the children and the women They were taken in the night of the 26th of November 1942 A cold and foggy early morning Norwegian police got hold of them after a very well thought out plan Using 100 taxis drove around picking up one family after the other bringing them down to the harbor where a ship named SS Donau was waiting to take them to Stettin in Poland and from there on directly to Auschwitz where they came 10 days later on And so on the 26th of November my mother by chance was not arrested with my sister My sister was three years (old) at that time and so they were helped by friends and people who had organized help for rescuing Jews First they had to go by train by cars east to the border My mother and my sister were brought to a little farm very close to the border and they had to stay there overnight and start early in the morning and they walked for many, many hours through the woods The Germans that night were looking for their own soldiers who had run away from the army so there were a lot of soldiers in the forest that night so it was a very dramatic escape The refugees who did not have anyone to help them across the borders used several days and nights my uncle and aunt who had to walk these miles on their own used 4 nights and 4 days and they were of course exhausted when they reached the border Babies had to be sedated You know my sister when they escaped she was only three and during that march through the woods they were so afraid she was going to cry or scream and she was very scared and overtired so she was crying all the time and couldn't get to sleep First they put sleeping pills into her she didn't go to sleep and so they put more and more pills into her and in the end the man who helped them over he said now we stop giving her more medication so he put her into a backpack and carried her over the border and she had got so many pills and so much medication so she was clinically dead when they arrived in Sweden so they came to a place where they were taken in and given some food and fortunately she threw up all over the place and that's how she survived 25 of November when they were about to arrest everyone my parents had bicycles and they bicycled to Sweden and halfway my mother's one pedal broke it took days On November 25th my mother and our housekeeper were told through spies and the police That time had come to arrest the women and the children I was in a park in a play group and the housekeeper and my brother came to pick me up and the housekeeper said we are going on a vacation Irene we're going to pick potatoes and we are going to a place called Hadeland so I was excited We were going to pick potatoes you know you don't tell a 4 year old child that we are going to escape Germans Fortunately we had several sets of Norwegian Resistance people that helped us and we were able to arrive in Sweden Sweden was neutral in quotation marks and the Jews were able to cross over at the very, very, last minute Sweden was not so very willing to take Jews Lots of Jews who tried to cross over before it was disastrous here were sent back and we have stories of people who tried to flee and were sent back three times and only the fourth time they were able to cross the border and there were stories told of where it was easier to cross and where it was more difficult 771 Jews were deported to Auschwitz from the whole of Norway at the time the Jewish population of Norway was 2,200 And two thirds of them were gassed immediately all the women and the children were killed upon arrival they didn't even make it into the camp they were killed immediately the last third approximately were young strong men who were used for slave labor all together 29 of them survived the very special thing about the Norwegian Jews I think is that there were so few that we know exactly the story of every single one of them nobody can come and say it didn't happen Everyone that was rescued had close family that was deported and killed so it was a shattered completely torn apart group of people that returned to Norway something like 1,000 1,200 and they had nothing because all their belongings were taken from them even their life insurances their flats their bank accounts It was very, very difficult for the Jewish community

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On April 9th, 1940 the Germans invade Denmark

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King Christian the 10th was the King at the time King Christian the 10th told his people to just sit quietly and let things happen the way they're happening cause no way could Denmark fight Nazi Germany Germany lacked interest in ruling Denmark resulting in a relatively peaceful occupation The Danish were willing to cooperate The Danish government stayed in office The King remained in Copenhagen at his palace but the police were obliged to cooperate with the Germans King Christian the 10th used to ride around on his horse through the city of Copenhagen to assure his people and give them the feeling of comfort that everything would be okay while the Nazis were occupying Denmark and Christian the 10th was the one who told the Jewish people that he would not give them up to the Nazis because his dedication to the Jewish people as citizens of his country was remarkable And in 1943 the Danish people got tired of the occupation and they began a lot of sabotage activities they blew up ships in the harbor they blew up factories they tried to impede the advancement of the Nazis The next thing was that Germany decided it's time to round up the Jews in Denmark In September 1943 After the great German loss at Stalingrad it appeared as if Germany would lose World War II SS General Werner Best Hitler's chief representative in Denmark was ordered to deport all of Denmark's Jews to Theresienstadt concentration camp General Best had efficiently and brutally conducted similar operations in other parts of Europe however, the Danes were protecting their Jews their fellow citizens and if they were rounded up it would increase Danish hostilities towards Germany In an unlikely act General Best leaked the news to Georg Duckwitz a German diplomat stationed in Copenhagen Duckwitz was sympathetic towards the Danish people Predictably once warned by Werner Best of the impending deportation of Jews Duckwitz utilized his connections to warn the Danish Resistance Jewish leaders and key Danish government officials The deportations were scheduled to begin on the eve of Rosh Hashanah also known as the Jewish New Year a time when Jews would be together in synagogue So when the Jews went for services the Rabbi said to them Leave the synagogue Go home Get over to neighbor's houses Get out of your homes as fast as you can You have to get out of the country and Sweden at that point realized that Hitler was not going to be the all powerful man that he thought he would be had said that they could send them to Sweden The distance by sea between Denmark and Sweden gets closer the farther north you travel The Danish fishing village of Gillelje is separated by 9 nautical miles from the Swedish city of Hoganas

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We're in this little town of Gillelje where most of the rescue attempts took place to save Danish Jews to go across the water

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you see the coastline of Sweden very clearly with the naked eye In 1943 despite the danger of German patrol ships Danish fisherman secretly helped Jews flee to Sweden These rescue attempts were so effected They would drive them up the coast They would camouflage their passengers and make it look like they were taking sick people to a hospital in an ambulance or a funeral

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Jorge Jensen-Schroder was 15 years old in 1943 with the approval of his parents he was one of the fishermen in Gillelje who risked his life to ferry the Danish Jews across the Oresund Strait to Sweden Danish Jews came to the harbor fellow Danish citizens brought food and supplies to the refugees Sweden had announced that they were willing to accept Scandinavian Jews The fisherman were secretive about what they were doing There were 24 boats with a staff of 3 on each ship They placed the people in a house right near the harbor so they could get to the boats as easily as possible on the fishing boats the refugees had to go below deck or hide under tarps there were guards on the lookout for German Gestapo it was only when the boats arrived in Swedish waters that a sense of safety came over the refugees and crew fisherman caught hiding or rescuing Jews were sent to prison camps Some of Jorge's friends met this fate The fisherman risked their lives saving people because it was just the thing that had to be done This is like an incredible story could not have happened without the help of ordinary Danish people people who don't consider themselves big heroes but ordinary every day people who just became totally involved in rescuing the Jews in bringing them out from Copenhagen up the coast to the fishing villages and then put them on fishing boats to bring them across the water to Sweden and of course if not for the fact that Sweden allowed them to come in and they opened their doors the rescue of 97% of the Jewish population of Denmark would not have been possible

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When the Danish Jews returned after the war unexpectedly they found their homes and belongings even their synagogues intact In almost every other part of Europe Jewish properties were ransacked and overtaken If Jews returned they could not reclaim their property however Danish neighbors took care of Jewish homes and awaited their return

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The greatest Christian hero of the Second World War the Nazi Holocaust is certainly Raoul Wallenberg a modest individual who sort of came from if you will The Rockefellers of Scandinavia The Wallenberg family He went way beyond what anybody could have expected of him to rescue thousands of Hungarian Jews Hungary was an ally to Germany in World War II Its Jews managed a semblance of normal life until 1944 They were persecuted but not killed with the invasion of Nazi troops in March the Jews were herded into ghettos and by July 1944 nearly half a million were deported to death camps primarily Auschwitz all that remained were the Jews of Budapest Hungary's capital In September the Hungarian government was overthrown by the Arrow Cross the fascist Hungarian military considered more anti-semitic and more cruel than the Nazis The Jews of Hungary were in a very critical situation they were being taken day by day thousands of them put into train loads US President Roosevelt didn't want to give passage to Jewish refugees from German occupied areas his only concern was to win the war in January of 1944 Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau threatened to expose US State Department discrimination against Jews if Roosevelt didn't do something in response Roosevelt created the US War Refugee Board One of its diplomats was Raoul Wallenberg a businessman from neutral Sweden who was sent to Budapest to aid in the rescue and relief of Jews All of Europe was occupied but Sweden was not Norway was Denmark was And so Sweden was chosen in Budapest in order to rescue Jews Wallenberg was selected Wallenberg was given a title of Secretary to the legation It was known as the legation in Budapest He was working in Hungary for a man who was in the business of export import so he was acquainted with Hungary he was acquainted with Budapest and he seemed like a likely choice and they asked him to go there as a diplomat though he had zero training in the art of diplomacy but it would ease the conscience of the United States to have him stationed over there So he was hired by the U.S. He was paid by the U.S. His expenses were covered by the U.S. This was a U.S.

operation My father was a diplomat during the war in Budapest in 1943 as the intentions of Hitler became evident the mission was to try to save as many as possible of the Jews that were around Budapest area Sweden was a neutral country They asked the Swedish government If it was possible to get some reinforcements and eventually this legendary Raoul Wallenberg appeared on the scene and Raoul started designing the so called Schutz-Pass They became the tool of which they helped thousands and thousands of Jews to escape the ghetto and the claws of the Nazis It is a very very important document and this is for us who have been saved with the Swedish document is unbelievable how much it means The Hungarian Arrow Cross the Germans didn't really speak any other languages so very often a simple receipt a stamp an impressive document of any kind that the soldiers couldn't read was often the savior We knew we were going to die We just didn't know when and how But we knew we were going to die When we heard about Raoul Wallenberg and what he was doing that was the only way they could be saved by going over to the Swedish border and having the Swedish papers My brother Gershon ripped off his star and snuck out of the ghetto He again took upon himself that he has to save our family and I was probably 11 years old 11 12 years old a kid I got up real early in the morning I came there there was tens of thousands of people standing in line overnight defying curfew They took a chance with their lives and when I came I felt I ruined it for my family I blew it He sat down on the sidewalk and he started to cry and who should come along Came over to me a young man with a short leather jacket I think he was a little bit tallish Raoul Wallenberg was a very handsome and very tall man but his ID was he wore a bomber jacket a leather bomber jacket and he noticed my brother and he said why are you crying he says it's my job I have to get the papers to save my family He picked me up on his shoulders and he carried me into the embassy people say that was Wallenberg this is how he dressed and who would have the nerve to pick up somebody and carry him inside of the embassy That's our connection to Raoul Wallenberg Both my wife and I have our lives profoundly influenced by Raoul Wallenberg Raoul Wallenberg who saved both of our lives who is our hero When the Germans occupied Hungary March 19, 1944 I was a 12 year old child as I was listening on the radio that the German SS troops are marching down the boulevards of Hungary I turned to my mother and I said I am leaving this place and I'm never coming back here I took my coat walked out and my mother walked out with me My mother and I went to hide in the Portuguese Embassy Because of the example that Wallenberg has set with his protective passports the Portuguese ambassador issued us Portuguese protective passports He didn't do it on a big scale like Wallenberg He had about 10 people hiding in the embassy and so that was our indirect way of being saved by Wallenberg No laws, no rules, no regulations, applied anymore It was a question for Raoul Wallenberg outwitting the Germans and the Hungarian Nazis the Arrow Crosses The bulk of the rescues was not so much people coming to the embassy building itself The bulk were rescued by Raoul Wallenberg and sometimes my father pinpointing locations where they rounded up say 500 a 1,000 at a time ready for deportation and he used the most fascinating ways of getting people out he got into the trains he pulled out people he spoke perfect German My father was Raoul Wallenberg's right hand man and went with Wallenberg to the train stations handing out the Swedish Schutz-Pass to the people in the wagons who were about to be sent off to Auschwitz and various other camps a typical example Raoul turns up in a railway station the wagons are already filled they're about to close the doors where he just stops the soldiers from closing the door saying we just like to inspect here to make sure we feel that there are a lot of people in this wagon that have Swedish protective passports and in comes Raoul Wallenberg who says now I recognize some of you surely you have Swedish protective passports He would call out names and say I have a safety pass for let's say Cohen or Schwartz and then other people would call out and say ooh do you have one for Rosenstock do you have one for Spitzman and even if he didn't he would like secretly write it He bluffed his way very often where they just pointed out the facts to this German soldier that if you don't obey these people that you have rounded up are Swedish citizens or have Swedish protective passports or are under the protection of the Swedish embassy If you don't release these immediately We will make sure that you are prosecuted after the war we will report you to your commander Totally perplexed the German soldiers find themselves releasing hundreds of people out of a wagon that was ready to go to the gas chambers My father did relate that Wallenberg had an incredible presence He would argue with the German officers and the fact that he would argue with them Somehow impressed them these Nazis were impressed by a man of such courage The death marches were a terrible arrangement that the Germans had thought of They were short of fuel they felt that there was only one way of transporting the Jews en masse (all together) using the ordinary roads that were available and so they forced the Jews to march elderly, children in the bitter cold of the winter kilometer after kilometer after kilometers As soon as Wallenberg got wind that they would reach certain points he and my father and various other aides would hop into Wallenberg's car arrive at the designated point of the death march berate the German guards wave the Schutz- Passes hand them to people and then demand that they be handed over as Swedish citizens those people were then put in Swedish safe houses in Budapest He put the Swedish flag on buildings and called them the Swedish House and he said this is the Swedish House My God, we had thousands of people under the Swedish flag because of his ruses and his courage He had some 32 buildings that became homes for Jews that he was able to rescue and with the U.S. money he could buy houses like this so this is how he could finance the Swedish rescue operation This is the place we lived since October 'Twas a big sign on this door telling you that you are under Swedish protection We were more than 280 people in this building We not only have enjoyed the Swedish Schutz-Pass from Raoul Wallenberg the Shutz-Pass which gave us a life but we have got from the Swedish embassy also the shelter, the food Tom's story was of course that he was in forced labor camps escaped over and over again and finally ended up in a Wallenberg house with his aunt and basically because he was blonde, blue-eyed looked totally Aryan He was the only one who could go out in the street and try to bring some bread and some medication and he could get away without wearing the yellow star I am very anxious to underscore whenever I talk about Wallenberg that while technically I worked with him I was one of scores of young men who really had very simple chores He was a larger than life figure From December 1944 through February 1945 Budapest was victim to one of the bloodiest sieges in modern history The Arrow Cross tried to annihilate as many Jews as possible before they were defeated by the Soviets During the last days of the siege Hungarian Jews were killed at the shore of the Danube River We were sure that we will be ending up here and this was the playground of the Arrow Cross The massacre took place in the nights Ammunition was scarce The Arrow Cross tied the hands of 2 or 3 people together shooting only one of them so the victim would drag the others down into the freezing water of the Danube River to drown We in our exhibition have a lady who tells how she twice was rescued Her story is that the first time she received a Shutz-Pass and with that paper, she was supposed to be safe But when the Arrow Cross leaders took over the power in October '44 no one was really safe They also came into the Swedish houses and brought out people so she was in January brought out to the shore of Danube where she was naked in a group of 50 people and she was about to be shot when she suddenly out of nowhere saw Raoul Wallenberg enter the scene and in her eyes at that time in that very difficult situation he was almost Godlike She did not quite dare to look at him because she thought she was hallucinating But she wasn't and he was very powerful and he demanded that the whole group which he said was his people his Swedish citizen(s) should be freed and they did as he told The Arrow Cross raided this building on the 7th of January and this is where the Arrow Cross came It was shouting going like this (marching sound) down to the cellar and shouting "Get out, get out" "We'll kill you if you don't get out" We were thinking that we are all marching to the Danube but we ended up fortunately in the ghetto We were thrown into the ghetto January the 8th in the middle of the night because the Arrow Cross have done everything in the middle of the night When we were thrown in there were a lot of corpses on the street and the ghetto should have been blown up by the Arrow Cross and the Arrow Cross had the guns outside to blow up that, I saw personally the Arrow Cross surrounded these houses and they were ready to demolish and kill everybody in these houses when Wallenberg was notified what was happening somehow or other he made his way into the office of General Schmidhuber He brought it to his attention what was going to happen and he asked him to prevent this action and General Schmidhuber said "You are a nobody" "You have no power" "If I kill you now, nobody will know the difference" "as to what happened to you" Wallenberg, this is the last story that shows his brilliance "I came totally prepared" "before I left, I sent a cable to Sweden telling them" "where I'm going, whom I'm going to see" "and who is responsible for my death if I don't come back" "and if you don't do something" "to prevent this last minute genocide" "I will see to it that after the war you are hung for this crime" and at that point Schmidhuber you know was outraged kicked Wallenberg out of the office and so he decided to send out the regular German army that disarmed the SS and the Arrow Cross and prevented them from demolishing the ghettos That's how Wallenberg saved 100,000 people Raoul Wallenberg was a person who also never gave up from the point of view that when the Soviet troops came into Budapest he stayed to try to protect the Jews in the houses to have a person with some degree of authority present in this inferno Most of the foreigners including all diplomats left The Wallenberg case, it's well known and it's a very tragic one he disappeared in Budapest in January 1945 when he was trying to contact the Russians My father tried to talk Wallenberg out of going to the Russians that he thought it was very dangerous Wallenberg replied that the Russians were the occupying authorities he was the official representative of the Swedish government and having been summoned it was his obligation to go As he departed and saying to my father I'm not sure whether I'm being received as a friend or as a prisoner And then suddenly that day on the 17th of January a big black car appeared outside his office and that was the last we saw of him and then he was brought to Lubyanka once you get into the Lubyanka prison and dealt with by the KGB you may just get stuck So the final irony is that he survived all these dangers and then was imprisoned by the Russians who he thought arrived in Budapest as liberators And one of the theories as to why the Russians took him is that they really couldn't conceive as to why a non-Jewish person would ever be terribly interested in saving Jews and they actually thought he was an American CIA agent It's very easy for the Russians to interpret it that way simply because how would a Rockefeller of Sweden all of a sudden turn up as a diplomat in Budapest equipped with a diplomatic passport and endless amounts of cash For many people in officialdom of Sweden many elected officials had no idea why Raoul Wallenberg did what he did Why he would put his life on the line for strangers Raoul Wallenberg suddenly emerged as a great role model for humanitarian behavior across the globe The most shocked people of all about this development were the Swedish people

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Another Swedish hero was Count Folke Bernadotte a member of the royal family and Vice President of the Swedish Red Cross He was in prime position to save lives in the final desperate weeks of the war By the spring of 1945 the Germans were rapidly losing ground to an advancing Russian army Jews were being forced on death marches shot starved and gassed in a last ditch attempt to empty the concentration camps and conceal the horrific Nazi war crimes Heinrick Himmler the architect of the Holocaust who headed the SS recognized German defeat was approaching and wanted to save himself from the consequences he would face after the war The man who organized the murder of millions thought he could now become a rescuer Himmler went behind Hitler's back and negotiated a Swedish Red Cross operation with Count Folke Bernadotte known as the White Buses the agreement was to transport Scandinavian prisoners from German concentration camps to Sweden After a series of negotiations Himmler announced that Bernadotte could take prisoners of all nationalities including the Jews Just before the war ended in the short period between March and May 1945 the White Bus operation resulted in the rescue of more than 17,000 concentration camp prisoners who were brought to Malmo, Sweden for medical treatment and rehabilitation Himmler's actions to save himself, were to no avail He was captured by the Allies and committed suicide on May 23, 1945 Magda Eggens was a very beautiful young woman She was very fortunate she was able to come on the White Buses (speaking Swedish) We came 3rd of May, 1945 to Malmo to the tennis stadium that's where they gathered us Miracle I just had a few hours left to live and then this miracle occurred (speaking Swedish) The Swedish Red Cross buses came the white buses with the red cross to pick up Norwegian and Danish prisoners of war With the initiative of Folke Bernardotte they were able to arrange that they should take all of us Hungarian girls that were still alive So they brought us in railroad cars to Denmark and they bathed us First time in 14 months that I had warm water on my body and our clothes were taken away from us The clothes were so filled of lice they could have walked on their own and then they gave us overalls to put on and they gave us shoes and it was just a wonderful feeling We went across the water to Sweden on the ferry and as we were going on this ferry in the White Buses then we saw little boats out in the water and people were throwing flowers to us and they were greeting us and welcoming us and that's when I understood that we were free We ended up in Malmo in Sweden I was sure I was in heaven After the war ended the White Buses picked up 10,000 more refugees to bring to Swedish hospitals Jenti who became my sister-in-law came from a well-to-do home in Hungary and had never heard of Sweden in her life I came to Sweden after we were liberated We were liberated from the Americans and just said you're free Free what? Free from where? What should we do? Where are we going to go?

A doctor would come He says you know something Sweden is taking in refugees Would you like to go there? They're taking people only from hospitals So my sister says she has a stomachache and I forgot what Freidy my cousin said something was wrong with her so he wrote three notes They have to go into the hospital After 10 days they told us the boats are here we should go We arrived in Malmo They were waiting there with hot cocoa with cakes with flowers They treated us absolutely unbelievable They took us to a place we got clothes coats shoes raincoats, underwear, everything Every day Swedish people would come to the gates and just throw in chocolates and candies and gifts I mean we thought where were we in paradise or something? Who could believe that it's possible? Lenke Rothman was a 16 year old Hungarian girl rescued on the White Buses from the hell of Germany When we liberated in Bergen-Belsen I was very sick I was taken to a hospital I could not eat anything because I just get up everything That could also partly saved me because we didn't get anything to eat in 3, 4 weeks in Bergen-Belsen who could eat have eaten too much and they died because their stomach was not used to to be able to have food So the Red Cross came one day and I was lying there in a room with another Hungarian girl she said Here was somebody who asked if we want to go to Sweden they say it is just for six months So I said yes so did I come to Sweden I was treated very, very well Outstanding actually So I was very lucky with that and I never wanted to move away not a little piece from Sweden because I felt very safe and very protected Sadly, some people were in such bad health they perished shortly after their arrival

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Most of them are buried in 1945 there were all these survivors who came to Sweden with the White Buses but they were so weak and they had such infections so they came to freedom and died in freedom It wasn't until after the war when all the survivors came to Sweden and we heard first-hand accounts of the horrors that they had suffered during World War II that I became fully aware of how incredibly fortunate we were to have lived in Sweden during the war years and I just am very proud of the fact that I grew up in a country that was so humanitarian and so compassionate through their activities they helped countless and countless survivors thousands of them to get back to real life

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