The Stockholm Holocaust Memorial

Sweden’s status as a neutral country during World War II and its traditional reluctance to explore its actual role in that conflict has ensured that the country has an entrenched reputation as merely a bystander nation. This image is slowly beginning to change, however, as academics and historians explore the ways Sweden engaged in what historian Dr. Paul A. Levine defined as Sweden’s “bureaucratic resistance.”

The Monument to the Memory of the Holocaust Victims in Stockholm stands testament to one such act of bureaucratic resistance: the rescue of Jewish prisoners from Nazi concentration camps in the spring and summer of 1945. Before the end of the war, Sweden liberated around 21,000 Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners of Nazi concentration camps in an episode known as The White Buses. A further 10,000 concentration camp survivors were brought to Sweden for recuperation following the end of the war. Of the 31,000 survivors who came to Sweden, about 10,000 were Jewish.

The 8,500 names on the Stockholm Holocaust memorial are not theirs, however. They are their relatives, those who didn’t make it to freedom but were exterminated by the Nazis in Jewish ghettos, concentration camps, and mass executions. They were children, the elderly, entire families. Their names are on this memorial because someone who knew and loved them managed to survive and live out their life in Sweden. A plaque on the monument reads in part, “Glöm oss inte” (“Don’t forget us”) – a reminder that resistance can take many forms.