Swedish Jews’ supposed inactivity over Europe’s persecuted Jews during the Holocaust has been a prevalent discourse during the post-war period. This article ponders the origins of that discourse and how it affects how and what Swedish Jews narrate about aid and relief work, and Jewish refugees and survivors, when recounting their memories from the 1930s and 1940s. This investigation also examines how previous research has addressed and represented the aid efforts of the Jewish minority in Sweden and discusses what new empirical knowledge about Swedish Jewish aid and relief work during the Holocaust we can ascertain by using oral history. Hence, it is also a contribution to the ongoing debate in the research field of ‘refugee studies’, initiated by the historians Philip Marfleet and Peter Gatrell, who emphasise both the importance of working with historical perspectives and asking questions about the sources at the disposal of historians and what sources they choose to work with when writing about aid, relief work and refugees.    

Although digitization has become a word that is almost synonymous with democratization and citizen participation, many museums and other cultural heritage institutions have found it difficult to live up to this political vision of inclusivity and access for all. In Sweden, political ambitions to digitize the cultural heritage sector are high. Yet, institutions still struggle to reconcile their previous practices with new technologies and ethical guidelines for collecting and curating material. In this article we identify, analyse, and try to find resolutions for the current gap that exists between cultural heritage practice and government policy on digitization, open access, and research ethics. By examining two Swedish examples of Holocaust collections that have not been digitized because of internal policies of secrecy and confidentiality, we attempt to demonstrate how discourses about vulnerability affect the ways in which certain archival practices resist policies of accessibility and ethical research. In order to unpack the discourses on vulnerability, Carol Bacchi’s post-structural approach to policy analysis has been used together with Judith Butler’s theories on vulnerability and resistance. In addition to understanding how cultural heritage institutions in Sweden have protected some of their collections and how this has obstructed efforts to make these collections more accessible, we also offer some suggestions on how these issues can be resolved by reimagining digitization as transformation.

In a Swedish context, Jewish women’s experiences and actions have gone unrecorded and unrecognised; most narratives of Swedish Jewish history offer only a partial account of their past. Marginalised or ignored, or absorbed into universalised categories of ‘Jews’, ‘women’ or ‘survivors’, the experiences and histories of Jewish women are in general not represented in previous Swedish research on the history of the Jewish minority, the Swedish Jewish response to the Nazi terror and the Holocaust or the history of the women’s movement in general. Previous research on the Swedish Jewish response and assistance for the Jewish refugees and survivors of Nazi persecution has mainly dealt with the Jewish community in Stockholm and its relief committee, where the women were absent from leadership positions. The purpose of this study is to explore if and how the Jewish women’s club in Stockholm initiated or was involved in relief activities for and with the persecuted Jews of Europe. Specifically, this is investigated in the context of how the club was established and manifested in public by examining what questions the club raised and what activities it organised in the 1930s and 1940s.

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Remembering the migration. Intersectional perspectives on the Nordic Museum’s collections and selections of immigrant narratives e Swedish self-image has been transformed in recent decades from the self-image of a homogeneous country with immigrants to a self-perception of a multicultural society. In this article we investigate how memory institutions contribute to constructing and dissolving the boundaries of the Swedish community by including or excluding immigrants in the constructions of a national self-perception. e ongoing collection ”Remembering the Migration” at the Nordic Museum constitutes the empi- rical case study. e current collection and previous collections of different immigrant narratives at the museum are examples of documentation of subjective experiences and interpretations of the mul- ticultural society in Sweden against a background of increased migration in the postwar period. Our analysis concludes that the collection, ”Remembering the Migration” has an including per- spective. ere is an outspoken objective to incorporate the immigrants’ stories about migration in the common historiography and the national cultural heritage in multicultural Sweden. However, our study also shows that the questionnaire used in the collection lacks questions about experiences of discrimination or racism and thereby contributes to recreating a tacit narrative about Sweden as an inclusive and non-racist country or nation. is self-perception is also generated at the website of the Museum, where a selection of 17 collected narratives are published. In general none of these stories tell about experiences of racism or discrimination. On the contrary, most narrators in these narratives position themselves as well-included in Swedish society, mostly through their personal efforts of hard work and/or ambitious studies. However, our study indicates that this including, multicultural and non-racist self-perception is questioned and negotiated by some people who submitted their life stories and rather reveals that Sweden is characterized by, and has previously been characterized by, both inclusion and exclusion in relation to migrants. Furthermore our ana- lysis of the published excerpts from the life stories reveals that exclusion could also be experienced from gender and class positions as well as in some cases also on the basis of ethnicity.