29 June, 2022
IHRS held its first conference
On June 17th, the IHRS and HL-senterets conference Sweden and the Holocaust in a Scandinavian Context. Local and Regional Aspects took place at Statens Historiska Museum in Stockholm, Sweden. The conference gathered 40 participants and new research on local and regional aspects of the Holocaust was presented in four sessions, see the full programme here: Sweden and the Holocaust in a Scandinavian Context. Historians, Ethnologists, Art Historians, and Culture Historians from Trondheim, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Lund, Oslo, Stockholm, och Uppsala spoke on the mass-violence in Mid-Norway at the time of the deportation of the Norwegian Jews, the importance of gender and sexuality in the treatment of female survivors in Swedish internment camps, early Holocaust memory in Sweden, the importance of antisemitism and rewards given to Danish informants who revealed hiding places of Danish Jewish refugees.
Dr. Jan Lambertz (photo) of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, USHMM, gave a keynote lecure on War Zones, Neutral Zones: Reconstructing the Holocaust through Local Encounters and in the panel discussion on meeting the challenges for the Swedish Holocaust Museum Dr. Emile Schrijver, General Director of National Holocaust Museum, the Netherlands, Dr. Jan Lambertz, Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, USHMM, and Dr. Katherine Hauptman, Director of the Swedish Holocaust Museum participated.
The conference also included a cultural programme where the actor Hannes Meidal recited Sholem Asch’s poem “Der marsh fun kedoyshim” (The march of the martyrs) to the funeral march of Chopin. The recitation was a recreation of a poem often read in Yiddish in early commemorations in Sweden, and was introduced by Dr. Simo Muir. The IHRS and HL-senteret is pleased to learn about all the new research and perspectives presented at the conference and we are planning on publishing an anthology to further spread and increase the knowledge about Sweden and the Holocaust.
BILDTEXT: Dr. Jan Lambertz of the Mandel Center giving the keynote. Photo: Karin Kvist Geverts