As politicians and dignitaries take part in Trondheim Synagogue's centennial celebrations later this month, for the city's small but growing Jewish population it has become a safe haven from post-October 7 antisemitism.
TRONDHEIM, Norway – When it comes to the attendance list, it's hard to imagine a more distinguished and high-ranking one in Norway. Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre will deliver a speech. Mayor of Trondheim Kent Ranum will be there along with other municipal leaders and senior representatives of the Norwegian government. The Royal Family will also be represented alongside leaders of Norwegian Jewish communities, several bishops and leaders of various Christian denominations, an imam and representatives from the Israeli and American embassies in Norway.
The occasion? The 100th anniversary of one of the northernmost synagogues in the world, the Trondheim Synagogue, which will take place on October 26. The synagogue serves the small Jewish community (numbering approximately 200) in Norway's third most populous city, positioned about 350 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle.
Trondheim Synagogue, 2025, photo: Martin Borg
"The events will include religious services, a concert featuring Edan Tamler, a well-known Israeli cantor, and a festive dinner for congregation members and visiting guests," says John Arne Moen, the chairman of the community. Moen, who's a retired journalist and editor, has been a member of the community's board since 2006 and now serves as chairman. "The event will also include a keynote address by Chief Rabbi of Norway, Michael Melchior, who has served as an Israeli government minister and MK (the community itself doesn't have its own permanent rabbi).
The story of Trondheim's Jews goes 150 years back. "The first Jews to arrive in Trondheim came from today's Lithuania and Poland via Sweden in the 1870s," says Moen. "At the end of World War I, there were about 340 Jews in Trondheim and in other towns in Western and Northern Norway. Unlike Jews who came to Oslo, many of whom came from Denmark and German speaking parts of Europe, these were poor immigrants who escaped pogroms and poverty in the Russian Empire."
Moen goes on to say, these Jews "didn't speak Danish or German, which were languages common for educated Norwegians at the time. Instead, they spoke Yiddish and Russian. They came from small shtetls and it must have been really hard for them to settle here. Most of them didn't even intend to stay. They wanted to go to America, and Trondheim was just a stop during which they hoped to make some money for the ship ticket. However, almost all of them ended up staying here."
"These immigrants mostly settled in an area close to the harbor, known for prostitution and poverty, and they transformed it into the only Jewish quarter in Norway. It became rich in Jewish cultural and religious life led by a rabbi who arrived in 1896 from Belarus. A synagogue was founded in a building borrowed and then bought from a Baptist church, and the small community had a women's organization and a Zionist youth organization," Moen says. "There were also unique challenges."
Moen is referring to Trondheim's geographic location. Because of its proximity to the Arctic Circle, the sun in Trondheim sets after 11 p.m. in the summer and before 3 p.m. in the winter. Naturally, this is a challenge for Orthodox Jews when it comes to determining when Shabbat and holidays start and end. "This has been an issue for many years," Moen says. "Rabbi Samuel Brandhändler – the first rabbi in Trondheim – decided to have set times for Shabbat during some weeks in the summer and some winter weeks. Later, in the 1920s, that became the practice year-round making Trondheim probably the only Orthodox Jewish community with set times for Shabbat."
Moen says that the golden age of the community was between the two world wars. It was then that the community moved into its current location – a building which was decommissioned as a train station, purchased by the Salvation Army and then bought by the Jewish community. After extensive renovation work, it was inaugurated in October 1925. The building became the center of Jewish life in Trondheim and it still is today. It serves not only as the synagogue, but also the Jewish community center and home to Jewish Museum Trondheim, the permanent exhibition of this unique community.
"As a museum, we communicate knowledge, we take care of the exhibits, we research and renew," says Agnete Eilersten, 40, who has been the museum's collection manager and curator for the last five years. "The people who come here are mostly school …children [ages] 13 to 18, but we also have [individual visitors] including students, tourists and Norwegians of all ages."
Walking around the museum, Eilersten points out the old ark and Torah scrolls from Trondheim's first synagogue, pictures of the first Jewish families, exhibits about Jewish traditions and an old mikveh (Jewish ritual purification bath) in the cellar. When asked why she was drawn to work at this particular museum Eilersten, who is not Jewish herself, speaks of her fascination with Norwegian-Jewish culture which has been "hidden in many ways." But it's also about combating antisemitism. "We try to counter antisemitism by disseminating knowledge and teaching people about Jewish history," she says, "we believe that more knowledge means less prejudice." And, of course, there's also the war. "It is very important to preserve the history of World War II," she says. "We need to [pass it on] to new generations."
In Norway, this attitude isn't a given. Norway's World War II legacy is complicated by the fact that many Norwegians supported and cooperated with the Nazis. As such, it has remained in the shadows for decades. The Nazis occupied Trondheim and the rest of Norway in 1940. A year later, they took over the synagogue which became barracks for German soldiers. "We think that the soldiers, who were probably drunk, lay in their beds and shot at the ceiling," says Moen, the synagogue chairman. "The building was heavily damaged and during those years more than half of the community's members were deported and murdered. No other Jewish community in the Nordic countries suffered more than Trondheim's."
On the eve of World War II, Norway had around 2,400 Jews, including a few hundred from other nationalities. When Germany invaded and occupied Norway in 1940, the Norwegian king and government fled the country forming a government-in-exile in London, while Norway was ruled by a Nazi official named Josef Terboven, who governed through a pro-Nazi puppet government headed by Vidkun Quisling, the leader of a Norwegian fascist party, Nasjonal Samling (The National Union), founded in 1933. The party cooperated with the Nazis in taking over the country, and in many cases Norwegian policemen, not German Nazis, were the ones who arrested and deported the Jews.
Persecution of the Jews began in 1941 with arrests, property confiscation and some executions on false charges. In 1942, mass arrests of hundreds of Jews were carried out. Most were transported on the SS Donau to Auschwitz. Another ship, the MS Gotenland, transported over 150 more to the same destination in February 1943. In total, 772 Norwegian Jews were arrested or deported. The oldest among them was 80 and the youngest an eight-week-old baby. Fewer than 40 came back. Those who survived had mostly escaped to neutral Sweden. When the war was over, they returned, and although they survived they were deeply traumatized. And even worse – they stood alone.
Irene Levin turned the hundreds of notes her mother left behind after her death into a book chronicling the story of Norwegian Jews during the Holocaust.
When Irene Levin's mother was 96, she left her apartment in Oslo and moved into a Jewish old age home. Levin and her two children wanted her mother's – and their grandmother's – new home to feel like a miniature version of the elegant, meticulously arranged apartment she had lived in for decades. To do so, they moved in the gilded-upholstered furniture, the paintings, the silverware, and the mirrors her mother never passed without briefly checking her reflection. As part of the process, they also cleaned and organized the apartment.
It took Levin more than five years to understand the significance of what she found during that process. "There were notes everywhere," she told Haaretz in an interview. "Some were hidden in piles of newspapers, other were tucked away in drawers, on shelves, and in cupboards. Some had only one or two sentences, others were full pages written in my mother's handwriting. Although they weren't dated, her handwriting showed they spanned different time periods – the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
"When I first found the notes, I didn't read them. They became just one more thing I would get to when I had time. For five years, they stayed enclosed in an envelope." Levin's mother, Fanny Raskow, died in 2013 at the age of 101. "After she passed away, and after I retired, I started reading the notes," Levin recalls. "Mostly the notes were about World War II, but also about her upbringing before the war in a family that had escaped to what is now Lithuania. There were many unfinished sentences, especially those dealing with the arrest and deportation of her father, my grandfather. It's unclear who the notes were meant for. Maybe she wrote for herself, as a way of venting, or perhaps she hoped I would eventually find them. But she never mentioned them".
Levin says the notes revealed the dilemmas and choices her mother faced. "My mother blamed herself all her life for not being able to save her father," she says. "It haunted her constantly, until the end of her life. In all my upbringing there was a silence, and the war was never discussed openly. If it came up, it was always indirectly or through broken, incomplete sentences." At a certain point, Levin realized that her mother's story was also the story of other Norwegian Jews. The result was her book, ("Vi snakket ikke om Holocaust. Mor, jeg og tausheten," Gyldendal, 2020, literally translated as "We Didn't Talk About the Holocaust: Mother, I, and the Silence"). The English version, titled "Everyday Silence and the Holocaust", was published by Routledge last year.
"My mother was trapped in a history that had been imposed on her, and one that for decades remained almost unspoken in Norwegian society," Levin says. "When I began researching in the National Archives of Norway in Oslo, I tried to see whether other Jewish families' stories were similar to that of my mother. I started asking new questions about my personal history and discovered experiences and events that had always been there, just not talked about.
"As a child, I simply acted on behaviors that seemed normal. As an adult – and as a professional – I began questioning my own story. Are the gaps in the stories significant? The fact that the life of our tiny nuclear family was defined by specific, historical events was something I simply knew. Just as one learns one's mother tongue intuitively, I learned about 'the war'. I lived my whole life in a community of World War II survivors, yet I still didn't really know much, despite believing I knew the whole story."
'What Happened to Our Jews?'
The story of Irene Levin is, to a great extent, the story of an entire generation of Norwegian Jews. Her grandparents' families emigrated to Norway around 1905 from Lithuania, fleeing poverty, hard conditions, and persecution. Levin explains that this migration differed from that of other Scandinavian countries. While Denmark and Sweden received "Ost-Juden" – Jews from Central Europe – there were already established Jewish communities in those countries. Some were prominent figures in society and openly identified as Jews. In Norway, by contrast, Jews were only permitted to enter starting in the mid-19th century. They were few in number, poor, and mostly uneducated.
Less than 40 years after her grandparents arrived in Norway, they and their children had to flee. This time, it was due to the German occupation during World War II, and their destination was Sweden, the neutral and thus safe neighboring country to the east. Levin's parents were among hundreds of Jews who left Norway as the Nazi persecution escalated, peaking in the fall of 1942 when hundreds of Norwegian Jews were deported to Auschwitz.
Levin's parents received help from a neighboring family, and their escape was aided by friends and members of the resistance movement, who hid them from the Gestapo and the Norwegian police in various locations. Their journey took 23 days. Levin's mother was pregnant during the escape, and she gave birth to Irene, her first and only child, in the Swedish town of Norrköping, where the family stayed until the war ended.
After the war, Levin, her mother, and father returned to Norway and began rebuilding their lives. She was less than two and a half years old and doesn't remember Liberation Day, but it's clear to her that even then, silence began to play a significant role. "We didn't talk about the war," she recalls. "The fact that the family went through a disaster was always present, but it wasn't spoken about. In the 1950s, when I was ten, we could be sitting with guests around the dinner table, and someone might suddenly say something like, 'It was Norwegian police who made the arrests, not the Germans.' And someone would reply, 'It doesn't matter, we're not getting them back either way.' Then the conversation would switch to the previous topic, and no one would ask, 'What do you mean?' Everyone knew what it meant, they just didn't talk about it for decades."
Did the silence begin right at the end of the war?
"You can tell from the Norwegian press how knowledge about what had happened slowly evolved. The free press resumed operations as early as May 14, 1945. On the second day, the country's largest newspaper, Aftenposten, asked, 'What happened to our Jews?' The article reported, 'There is reason to fear that many Norwegian Jews have died,' and quickly added that no confirmation had been received. In the weeks that followed, reports ended with phrases like, 'There is no reason to lose hope.' On May 17, the same newspaper reported, 'We have 750 Jews in Germany. So far, we've heard from only nine or ten.' Slowly, the news worsened, and by May 23, it was reported that the Jews had been taken to 'the notorious concentration camp Auschwitz.'
"After a while, the topic was no longer written about. It resurfaced in the trials of Norwegians who had collaborated with the Nazis, and in the court case of the Norwegian traitor Vidkun Quisling [a Nazi collaborator who headed the government of Norway during the country's occupation by Nazi Germany] where two survivors testified. One of them, the later well-known psychiatrist Leo Eitinger, told of Jews being gassed. When asked by the judge if Norwegian Jews were treated in the same way, he answered 'Yes, I swear to God.'"
The outcome of the war was catastrophic for Levin's family. Thirty-two members of her extended family, including her maternal grandfather, were murdered in Auschwitz. Her grandfather was deported along with hundreds of other Norwegians –men, women, and children – on November 26, 1942. Levin's mother tried to spare him by putting him in a hospital but he was taken from there, arrested and, the next day, loaded onto the ship SS Donau. After four days in its cargo hold, he and the others arrived in Stettin, where they were crammed into cattle cars. On December 1, they reached Auschwitz-Birkenau. Levin's grandfather's exact fate remains unknown. He was one of an endless number of victims who didn't survive and never returned to Norway.
The facts about World War II in Norway and the fate of its Jews are well-known. On the eve of the war, Norway had around 2,800,000 inhabitants, of whom about 2,400 were Jews, including around 500 from other nationalities. During World War I, Norway had remained neutral, and hoped to maintain neutrality again during World War II. But events took a different turn. A Norwegian fascist party, Nasjonal Samling (The National Union), founded in 1933 by officer and politician Vidkun Quisling, offered the Nazis cooperation in taking over the country. Germany invaded Norway and Denmark on April 9, 1940, in Operation Weserübung. Denmark surrendered within hours, while battles in Norway lasted around two months before the German victory, achieved after the Allied forces retreated and Narvik – a strategic port used for shipping iron ore from Sweden – was captured.
As the Germans occupied the country, the Norwegian king and government fled and formed a government-in-exile in London. Civilian rule in Norway was overtaken by Nazi official Josef Terboven, appointed Reichskommissar by Hitler. Terboven governed through a pro-German puppet government headed by Quisling. The Norwegian parliament was dissolved, all parties banned except Quisling's, and the judiciary was subordinated to German control.
Persecution of the Jews began with sporadic decrees early in the occupation. In 1941, arrests were made, property confiscated, and some Jews were executed on false charges. In 1942, mass arrests of hundreds of Jews were carried out, most of whom, including Levin's grandfather, were transported on the SS Donau to Auschwitz. Another ship, the MS Gotenland, transported 158 more Jews to the same destination in February 1943. In total, 772 Norwegian Jews were arrested or deported. The oldest among them 80, the youngest an 8-week-old baby. Fewer than 40 came back. Those who survived the war had mostly escaped to neutral Sweden or Britain.
The facts were known for decades, but their meaning has been the subject of public debate – one that Irene Levin, after publishing her book, is now central to. Levin is a professor emeritus of social sciences at Oslo Metropolitan University. Her work started in the area of family studies with emphasis on new family forms and gender studies. In recent years, she has moved her area of research into history and Holocaust studies and has been closely connected to the Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies, including working with surveys on antisemitism. She has worked with Soviet Jewry and been active in applying for Norwegian non-Jews receiving the Righteous Among the Nations award, granted by Yad Vashem.
Her recent book adds to numerous other publications she's written or edited, covering topics from social sciences to remembrance, and the Holocaust in Norway.
Her new book generated considerable attention in Norway. Positive reviews appeared in major newspapers; she was interviewed by media and gave lectures across the country for over a year. Headlines focused on themes like "The Holocaust That Always Sat Within the Walls" or "The Mother Who Dealt with Trauma Through Silence." Critics noted that Levin "presents her family's history as a gateway to understanding the Jewish tragedy in Norway," "gives us a micro-history that opens wounds – with painful, terrifying details," and "breaks the silence, telling dramatic stories of fate."
Is the silence of the survivors and Norwegian society similar to that of survivors in other countries, or does it have unique characteristics?
"The phenomenon of silence is not unique, but circumstances vary. What's special about Norway is that it had a small number of Jews and geographically, with the long border with Sweden and the long coastline to England, one would think that it would be possible to hide more".
"Moreover, Norwegian Jews loved Norway. They learned the language and embraced the culture; they embraced the Norwegian love of nature and even changed their surnames to make them easier for their neighbors to pronounce. That's why what happened shocked them. They told themselves that they were arrested by the Gestapo – when, in fact, it was the Norwegian police.
"My mother always said: 'It took such a long time until we really understood, Irene.' Those who survived and returned weren't like the other Norwegians coming back after the war – the resistance fighters or political exiles. They weren't heroes. They won the war. The Jews had not won the war. They were deported or fled because of who they were, not what they did – and that came with a sense of shame. They asked themselves, 'What kind of Norwegians are we now?'"
Levin explains that other elements were involved. Some blamed themselves for failing to save relatives. They were grief-stricken, and many had to face the painful, often unsuccessful process of reclaiming seized property. Homes and businesses had been confiscated or auctioned off. Only in the 1990s, following a media campaign and the creation of a restitution committee, did Norwegian society begin to seriously reckon with the Holocaust. Survivors received compensation, and the Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies was established.
"Until the 1990s, the story of the Jews was not integrated into the national historical narrative," Levin says. "It's not that people didn't know what happened – there were books and survivor testimonies – but Jews were not part of the main story. The Holocaust in Norway was like an appendix to Norwegian history, not part of the official narrative."
So, if the Holocaust wasn't part of Norway's war story, would it be accurate to say that Norway didn't take responsibility for what happened to its Jews?
"In three major historical books that shaped the narrative and were published in 1950, the extermination of the Jews was described merely as a 'detail'. Later, in the 1980s, six volumes titled 'Norway at War' asked: What happened to the Jews? The answer is mostly covered in the third volume, spanning 18 pages with photos. In the final section, the question is raised – could more have been done to help the Jews? could they have been warned about what deportation meant? the answer the book gives is that Jews in all occupied countries and even in the free world underestimated the cruelty of the SS. That is, responsibility was ultimately shifted to the Jews themselves – because they didn't resist arrest.
"When I first read these, I thought that they did the same as my mother, blaming herself for her father's arrest, as did society at large. Both the minority and the majority put the responsibility on the Jews. But I realized that when my mother blamed herself, she was taking the burden on herself, bearing the responsibility – as a Jewish woman and a daughter. When the author, as a representative of society, blamed the Jews, it was the opposite: it was the removal of responsibility."
Do you think this perspective still echoes in Norway in 2025, amid rising antisemitism and claims that Norwegian society is abandoning its Jews?
"For the Jews in Norway [the community numbers approximately 1,500 people], October 7 is an echo from the war, while knowing that it was not the same and that the Holocaust is unique. But Norwegian society at large did not hear the same echo. They only heard the voice from Hamas and very quickly defined the attack as a continuity of occupation.
"It was a shock that the empathy that the Jews in Norway had earned due their history during the war, suddenly disappeared. I never thought that during my lifetime, I would experience a rise of antisemitism. When researching the Holocaust and antisemitism, I was doing it as something belonging to the past to ensure it would not happen again. Suddenly, the Jewish state was attacked and its legitimacy was at stake. The Jewish voice has lost its legitimacy.
"My grandmother would always tell me: 'Die Juden sind schuldig' – the Jews are to blame, always. I thought that was relevant to the shtetl, not my everyday life. There is a shift in the perception of responsibility and legitimacy – the focus has changed, and it is no longer in our favor. I demonstrated on Women's Day and my fellow feminists didn't allow us to participate! They questioned whether there were even sexual assaults on October 7; and if they did accept that they happened, they minimized their significance, treating it as something that 'naturally' happens in every war.
"In my research on silence, an important factor is the interaction between the individual and society. After World War II, it was not only the Jews who were silent. The society at large was silent, too, but for different reasons. The space the minority has is shaped by the majority. It took Norwegian society 50 years before it recognized its responsibility in the atrocities. In the current situation, the Jewish voice has little legitimacy and the connection with society at large is of distrust. But can we Jews wait for the society to show us such a space? We have to take it. In that sense, it's like a revolution."
At the end of the interview, Levin returns to the topic of silence, which she sees as the common thread between the biographical and the historical. It's a silence shared by many survivors of the war, but Levin suggests that it is an even broader phenomenon.
"If you had asked me about the Holocaust while I was growing up – if you had asked me whether I knew about the war and what happened to the Jews – I would have said yes," she says. "But today I know that I didn't know. I didn't have the details; I didn't know what really happened. What I had was a sense that a catastrophe had occurred, and that it had happened to the Jews. Nothing more.
"And maybe that's similar to other disasters, like what happened on October 7. Even though information spreads much faster today, the feeling is similar. We know a disaster occurred, we think we understand it, but as time passes, we realize in hindsight that we didn't know everything, that we didn't grasp the scope, and that we still haven't dealt with all the implications."
In an article in SvD this week, Göran Rosenberg shared his concerns about the Jewish world. Many, myself included, share some of his worries — for example, concern over Israel’s extremist settler movement and the situation in Gaza. But several of his claims are dangerous and misleading.
"The Israel project is morally dead," writes Rosenberg. The project, not the country. That’s an extremely important nuance. If Israel is a project, then it can either succeed or fail, in which case, like any other failed project, it loses its right to exist. But Israel is not a project; it is a country. A country with a political right and left, babies and pensioners, gangsters and hipsters, programmers and midwives, people sitting in traffic jams and people demonstrating against the government. That is the entire point of Zionism — Jews have the right to be like any other people and have an unconditional right to self-determination. Israel should not be the only country in the world whose existence is conditional, and the right to self-determination of its people can't be dependent on their ability to meet Rosenberg’s moral standards.
What are Israelis supposed to do now that "the project has failed"? Pack their bags and leave? Vanish into thin air? Go up in smoke? That’s exactly the propaganda Hamas spreads through Western protest movements — if Israeli Jews are so morally bankrupt, then it’s not about regime change or electing a new government, as it is with Russians or Iranians. Instead, the Jews must disappear. Or die.
It's no coincidence that Israel's worst enemies — those who want to wipe it off the face of the earth — refuse to acknowledge it as a state among states. The Iranian regime calls Israel 'the Zionist regime' or 'the occupying regime of Jerusalem'. Hamas speaks of 'the Zionist entity' or 'the occupation', and the Houthis in Yemen refer to 'the Zionist enemy'. Always an abstract creature — an entity, a project — never a state. Even Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia were allowed to be states. But not Israel.
Rosenberg writes that Israel’s “genocide in Gaza” is now putting Jews in other countries into an “existential crisis” and that voices like his are being silenced. Besides the fact that he regularly writes in one of Sweden's main daily newspapers and is far from being silenced, there's a much more important falsehood in his claim. In fact, in a broader context, the opposite of what he writes is true — Israel, with all its sins, is the answer, not the problem (and the problem can be explained in one word – Auschwitz). Historically, there have been Jewish non-Zionist movements, but the reason most of them disappeared has nothing to do with silencing voices. It has to do with the fact that Zionism understood antisemitism better and offered a concrete answer based on international law. The other solutions vanished in the Holocaust. What alternative does Rosenberg propose? Another socialist utopia? Or should we return to the pogroms on European streets?
Then there’s the conflict with the Palestinians. Rosenberg is right that Israel has oppressed the Palestinians for decades and made every conceivable mistake. But the Palestinians have too. They are not the eternal victims Rosenberg sees them as, and their violence is not a natural "expression against oppression". The violence started long before Israel was founded — before the occupation, before the oppression — and much of it is imported. Just as Israel receives American support, the Palestinians received support from the Nazis in the 1940s, from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s, and more recently from dictators and jihadists in Qatar, Iran, and Yemen — countries that have no territorial conflict with Israel, but still support fascist, chauvinistic, and corrupt Palestinian movements.
We can all enjoy philosophical discussions about the Jewish intellectual world, but the bigger problem right now is those who persistently blame Jews and Israelis for all the world’s problems. Some even build nuclear weapons to "wipe out the Zionist entity". It’s true that polarization within the Jewish world and anti-democratic tendencies in Israel are serious, but most Jews are more concerned about genocide-prone regimes that are after Jewish blood. Even if Rosenberg finds it uncomfortable or unpleasant, Israelis still have the right to face these challenges and build themselves a future.
Irene Levin turned the hundreds of notes her mother left behind after her death into a book chronicling the story of Norwegian Jews during the Holocaust.
When Irene Levin's mother was 96, she left her apartment in Oslo and moved into a Jewish old age home. Levin and her two children wanted her mother's – and their grandmother's – new home to feel like a miniature version of the elegant, meticulously arranged apartment she had lived in for decades. To do so, they moved in the gilded-upholstered furniture, the paintings, the silverware, and the mirrors her mother never passed without briefly checking her reflection. As part of the process, they also cleaned and organized the apartment.
It took Levin more than five years to understand the significance of what she found during that process. "There were notes everywhere," she told Haaretz in an interview. "Some were hidden in piles of newspapers, other were tucked away in drawers, on shelves, and in cupboards. Some had only one or two sentences, others were full pages written in my mother's handwriting. Although they weren't dated, her handwriting showed they spanned different time periods – the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
Levin's mother, Fanny Raskow, died in 2013 at the age of 101. "After she passed away, and after I retired, I started reading the notes," Levin recalls. "Mostly the notes were about World War II, but also about her upbringing before the war in a family that had escaped to what is now Lithuania. There were many unfinished sentences, especially those dealing with the arrest and deportation of her father, my grandfather. It's unclear who the notes were meant for. Maybe she wrote for herself, as a way of venting, or perhaps she hoped I would eventually find them. But she never mentioned them".
Levin says the notes revealed the dilemmas and choices her mother faced. "My mother blamed herself all her life for not being able to save her father," she says. "It haunted her constantly, until the end of her life. In all my upbringing there was a silence, and the war was never discussed openly. If it came up, it was always indirectly or through broken, incomplete sentences."
At a certain point, Levin realized that her mother's story was also the story of other Norwegian Jews. The result was her book, ("Vi snakket ikke om Holocaust. Mor, jeg og tausheten," Gyldendal, 2020, literally translated as "We Didn't Talk About the Holocaust: Mother, I, and the Silence"). The English version, titled "Everyday Silence and the Holocaust", was published by Routledge last year.
"My mother was trapped in a history that had been imposed on her, and one that for decades remained almost unspoken in Norwegian society," Levin says. "When I began researching in the National Archives of Norway in Oslo, I tried to see whether other Jewish families' stories were similar to that of my mother. I started asking new questions about my personal history and discovered experiences and events that had always been there, just not talked about.
"As a child, I simply acted on behaviors that seemed normal. As an adult – and as a professional – I began questioning my own story. Are the gaps in the stories significant? The fact that the life of our tiny nuclear family was defined by specific, historical events was something I simply knew. Just as one learns one's mother tongue intuitively, I learned about 'the war'. I lived my whole life in a community of World War II survivors, yet I still didn't really know much, despite believing I knew the whole story."
The story of Irene Levin is, to a great extent, the story of an entire generation of Norwegian Jews. Her grandparents' families emigrated to Norway around 1905 from Lithuania, fleeing poverty, hard conditions, and persecution. Levin explains that this migration differed from that of other Scandinavian countries. While Denmark and Sweden received "Ost-Juden" – Jews from Central Europe – there were already established Jewish communities in those countries. Some were prominent figures in society and openly identified as Jews. In Norway, by contrast, Jews were only permitted to enter starting in the mid-19th century. They were few in number, poor, and mostly uneducated.
Less than 40 years after her grandparents arrived in Norway, they and their children had to flee. This time, it was due to the German occupation during World War II, and their destination was Sweden, the neutral and thus safe neighboring country to the east. Levin's parents were among hundreds of Jews who left Norway as the Nazi persecution escalated, peaking in the fall of 1942 when hundreds of Norwegian Jews were deported to Auschwitz.
Levin's parents received help from a neighboring family, and their escape was aided by friends and members of the resistance movement, who hid them from the Gestapo and the Norwegian police in various locations. Their journey took 23 days. Levin's mother was pregnant during the escape, and she gave birth to Irene, her first and only child, in the Swedish town of Norrköping, where the family stayed until the war ended.
After the war, Levin, her mother, and father returned to Norway and began rebuilding their lives. She was less than two and a half years old and doesn't remember Liberation Day, but it's clear to her that even then, silence began to play a significant role.
"We didn't talk about the war," she recalls. "The fact that the family went through a disaster was always present, but it wasn't spoken about. In the 1950s, when I was ten, we could be sitting with guests around the dinner table, and someone might suddenly say something like, 'It was Norwegian police who made the arrests, not the Germans.' And someone would reply, 'It doesn't matter, we're not getting them back either way.' Then the conversation would switch to the previous topic, and no one would ask, 'What do you mean?' Everyone knew what it meant, they just didn't talk about it for decades."
Did the silence begin right at the end of the war?
"You can tell from the Norwegian press how knowledge about what had happened slowly evolved. The free press resumed operations as early as May 14, 1945. On the second day, the country's largest newspaper, Aftenposten, asked, 'What happened to our Jews?' The article reported, 'There is reason to fear that many Norwegian Jews have died,' and quickly added that no confirmation had been received. In the weeks that followed, reports ended with phrases like, 'There is no reason to lose hope.' On May 17, the same newspaper reported, 'We have 750 Jews in Germany. So far, we've heard from only nine or ten.' Slowly, the news worsened, and by May 23, it was reported that the Jews had been taken to 'the notorious concentration camp Auschwitz.'
"After a while, the topic was no longer written about. It resurfaced in the trials of Norwegians who had collaborated with the Nazis, and in the court case of the Norwegian traitor Vidkun Quisling [a Nazi collaborator who headed the government of Norway during the country's occupation by Nazi Germany] where two survivors testified. One of them, the later well-known psychiatrist Leo Eitinger, told of Jews being gassed. When asked by the judge if Norwegian Jews were treated in the same way, he answered 'Yes, I swear to God.'"
The outcome of the war was catastrophic for Levin's family. Thirty-two members of her extended family, including her maternal grandfather, were murdered in Auschwitz. Her grandfather was deported along with hundreds of other Norwegians –men, women, and children – on November 26, 1942. Levin's mother tried to spare him by putting him in a hospital but he was taken from there, arrested and, the next day, loaded onto the ship SS Donau. After four days in its cargo hold, he and the others arrived in Stettin, where they were crammed into cattle cars. On December 1, they reached Auschwitz-Birkenau. Levin's grandfather's exact fate remains unknown. He was one of an endless number of victims who didn't survive and never returned to Norway.
The facts about World War II in Norway and the fate of its Jews are well-known. On the eve of the war, Norway had around 2,800,000 inhabitants, of whom about 2,400 were Jews, including around 500 from other nationalities. During World War I, Norway had remained neutral, and hoped to maintain neutrality again during World War II. But events took a different turn. A Norwegian fascist party, Nasjonal Samling (The National Union), founded in 1933 by officer and politician Vidkun Quisling, offered the Nazis cooperation in taking over the country. Germany invaded Norway and Denmark on April 9, 1940, in Operation Weserübung. Denmark surrendered within hours, while battles in Norway lasted around two months before the German victory, achieved after the Allied forces retreated and Narvik – a strategic port used for shipping iron ore from Sweden – was captured.
As the Germans occupied the country, the Norwegian king and government fled and formed a government-in-exile in London. Civilian rule in Norway was overtaken by Nazi official Josef Terboven, appointed Reichskommissar by Hitler. Terboven governed through a pro-German puppet government headed by Quisling. The Norwegian parliament was dissolved, all parties banned except Quisling's, and the judiciary was subordinated to German control.
Persecution of the Jews began with sporadic decrees early in the occupation. In 1941, arrests were made, property confiscated, and some Jews were executed on false charges. In 1942, mass arrests of hundreds of Jews were carried out, most of whom, including Levin's grandfather, were transported on the SS Donau to Auschwitz. Another ship, the MS Gotenland, transported 158 more Jews to the same destination in February 1943. In total, 772 Norwegian Jews were arrested or deported. The oldest among them 80, the youngest an 8-week-old baby. Fewer than 40 came back. Those who survived the war had mostly escaped to neutral Sweden or Britain.
The facts were known for decades, but their meaning has been the subject of public debate – one that Irene Levin, after publishing her book, is now central to. Levin is a professor emeritus of social sciences at Oslo Metropolitan University. Her work started in the area of family studies with emphasis on new family forms and gender studies. In recent years, she has moved her area of research into history and Holocaust studies and has been closely connected to the Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies, including working with surveys on antisemitism. She has worked with Soviet Jewry and been active in applying for Norwegian non-Jews receiving the Righteous Among the Nations award, granted by Yad Vashem.
Her recent book adds to numerous other publications she's written or edited, covering topics from social sciences to remembrance, and the Holocaust in Norway. Her new book generated considerable attention in Norway. Positive reviews appeared in major newspapers; she was interviewed by media and gave lectures across the country for over a year. Headlines focused on themes like "The Holocaust That Always Sat Within the Walls" or "The Mother Who Dealt with Trauma Through Silence." Critics noted that Levin "presents her family's history as a gateway to understanding the Jewish tragedy in Norway," "gives us a micro-history that opens wounds – with painful, terrifying details," and "breaks the silence, telling dramatic stories of fate."
Is the silence of the survivors and Norwegian society similar to that of survivors in other countries, or does it have unique characteristics?
"The phenomenon of silence is not unique, but circumstances vary. What's special about Norway is that it had a small number of Jews and geographically, with the long border with Sweden and the long coastline to England, one would think that it would be possible to hide more".
"Moreover, Norwegian Jews loved Norway. They learned the language and embraced the culture; they embraced the Norwegian love of nature and even changed their surnames to make them easier for their neighbors to pronounce. That's why what happened shocked them. They told themselves that they were arrested by the Gestapo – when, in fact, it was the Norwegian police.
"My mother always said: 'It took such a long time until we really understood, Irene.' Those who survived and returned weren't like the other Norwegians coming back after the war – the resistance fighters or political exiles. They weren't heroes. They won the war. The Jews had not won the war. They were deported or fled because of who they were, not what they did – and that came with a sense of shame. They asked themselves, 'What kind of Norwegians are we now?'"
Levin explains that other elements were involved. Some blamed themselves for failing to save relatives. They were grief-stricken, and many had to face the painful, often unsuccessful process of reclaiming seized property. Homes and businesses had been confiscated or auctioned off. Only in the 1990s, following a media campaign and the creation of a restitution committee, did Norwegian society begin to seriously reckon with the Holocaust. Survivors received compensation, and the Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies was established.
"Until the 1990s, the story of the Jews was not integrated into the national historical narrative," Levin says. "It's not that people didn't know what happened – there were books and survivor testimonies – but Jews were not part of the main story. The Holocaust in Norway was like an appendix to Norwegian history, not part of the official narrative."
So, if the Holocaust wasn't part of Norway's war story, would it be accurate to say that Norway didn't take responsibility for what happened to its Jews?
"In three major historical books that shaped the narrative and were published in 1950, the extermination of the Jews was described merely as a 'detail'. Later, in the 1980s, six volumes titled 'Norway at War' asked: What happened to the Jews? The answer is mostly covered in the third volume, spanning 18 pages with photos. In the final section, the question is raised – could more have been done to help the Jews? could they have been warned about what deportation meant? the answer the book gives is that Jews in all occupied countries and even in the free world underestimated the cruelty of the SS. That is, responsibility was ultimately shifted to the Jews themselves – because they didn't resist arrest.
"When I first read these, I thought that they did the same as my mother, blaming herself for her father's arrest, as did society at large. Both the minority and the majority put the responsibility on the Jews. But I realized that when my mother blamed herself, she was taking the burden on herself, bearing the responsibility – as a Jewish woman and a daughter. When the author, as a representative of society, blamed the Jews, it was the opposite: it was the removal of responsibility."
Irene Levin and her mother on 1943. Photo: Irene Levin
Do you think this perspective still echoes in Norway in 2025, amid rising antisemitism and claims that Norwegian society is abandoning its Jews?
"For the Jews in Norway [the community numbers approximately 1,500 people], October 7 is an echo from the war, while knowing that it was not the same and that the Holocaust is unique. But Norwegian society at large did not hear the same echo. They only heard the voice from Hamas and very quickly defined the attack as a continuity of occupation.
"It was a shock that the empathy that the Jews in Norway had earned due their history during the war, suddenly disappeared. I never thought that during my lifetime, I would experience a rise of antisemitism. When researching the Holocaust and antisemitism, I was doing it as something belonging to the past to ensure it would not happen again. Suddenly, the Jewish state was attacked and its legitimacy was at stake. The Jewish voice has lost its legitimacy.
"My grandmother would always tell me: 'Die Juden sind schuldig' – the Jews are to blame, always. I thought that was relevant to the shtetl, not my everyday life. There is a shift in the perception of responsibility and legitimacy – the focus has changed, and it is no longer in our favor. I demonstrated on Women's Day and my fellow feminists didn't allow us to participate! They questioned whether there were even sexual assaults on October 7; and if they did accept that they happened, they minimized their significance, treating it as something that 'naturally' happens in every war.
"In my research on silence, an important factor is the interaction between the individual and society. After World War II, it was not only the Jews who were silent. The society at large was silent, too, but for different reasons. The space the minority has is shaped by the majority. It took Norwegian society 50 years before it recognized its responsibility in the atrocities. In the current situation, the Jewish voice has little legitimacy and the connection with society at large is of distrust. But can we Jews wait for the society to show us such a space? We have to take it. In that sense, it's like a revolution."
At the end of the interview, Levin returns to the topic of silence, which she sees as the common thread between the biographical and the historical. It's a silence shared by many survivors of the war, but Levin suggests that it is an even broader phenomenon.
"If you had asked me about the Holocaust while I was growing up – if you had asked me whether I knew about the war and what happened to the Jews – I would have said yes," she says. "But today I know that I didn't know. I didn't have the details; I didn't know what really happened. What I had was a sense that a catastrophe had occurred, and that it had happened to the Jews. Nothing more.
"And maybe that's similar to other disasters, like what happened on October 7. Even though information spreads much faster today, the feeling is similar. We know a disaster occurred, we think we understand it, but as time passes, we realize in hindsight that we didn't know everything, that we didn't grasp the scope, and that we still haven't dealt with all the implications."
Athena Farrokhzad is responsible (together with Ida Linde) for the international literature stage at Stockholm's Kulturhuset stadsteatern, arguably one of Sweden's most important literary institutions.
David Stavrou is an Israeli/Swedish journalist based in Stockholm.
Hej Athena,
Since we don't know each other, I'll start by introducing myself and explaining why I'm writing to you publicly.
I'm a journalist who writes for "Haaretz", one of Israel's daily newspapers. Although I write about various issues worldwide, as an Israeli who's lived in Stockholm for many years, I'm particularly interested in Swedish politics, economy, society and culture. As you can imagine, these days "Haaretz” is highly focused on the terrible war in Gaza and its implications for Israel. As a foreign correspondent, rather than writing about the military and political issues of the war, I've concentrated on some of its European aspects – demonstrations, diplomacy, and its effects on local Jewish communities.
At some point, another issue caught my interest – the intense debate about the war in cultural circles. I decided to ask leading cultural figures about how the war has affected their work. I wanted you to be my first interlocutor after I discovered that Kulturhuset had invited Palestinian writer Adiana Shibli for a discussion in March. I thought this was an interesting and exciting choice. Unlike others, I don't see any problem in hosting Shibli, but I was interested in the larger picture: how Kulturhuset is affected by the war that everybody's interested in (unlike, say, recent conflicts in Ethiopia, Sudan or Azerbaijan)? Are you planning to host writers from both sides of the conflict? Is your strategy to embrace the political debate or focus on more abstract themes? Do you have to deal with a lot of political pressure?
When I discovered that you yourself are very politically active, I became even more interested. After all, you're not only a writer, but also a public figure with a key role in Sweden’s literary world – and you work for a public institution. So, I sent an interview request to Kulturhuset's press department. I think you know what followed.
After a few friendly messages, it was made clear that "Athena declines to participate in an interview at this time". I then wrote to you privately. And then I wrote again. And again. Obviously, you don't have to answer me and I guess no one can make you talk to journalists. Still, you're a public figure paid from public funds and I think, modestly, that my questions are important. In the past I've been granted interviews by Swedish parliamentarians, government ministers, and leaders in all aspects of Swedish political, social and cultural life. Most were happy to grant interviews, and I found it strange that you're so unavailable. So I decided that if you don't want me to ask my questions privately, I'll ask them here. Publicly.
First, Kulturhuset's program for the next few months doesn't include any Israeli writers. That's fine of course. Only a handful of countries are represented in the programme. But I noticed that a few years ago you signed a petition proclaiming that "we must refrain from Israeli participation in cultural exchanges". Have you changed your mind – or does the same policy apply now that you’re a public official? Are Israeli writers banned from Kulturhuset from now on? Will Stockholmers who are interested in meeting writers like David Grossman or Dorit Rabinyan be unable to do so anymore?
Secondly: the fact that your salary is paid by Stockholmers of all shades of opinion, hasn't stopped you from making some very extreme statements. On Instagram you recently told your friends who "spread the voices of the Palestinian resistance" that you'll see them on the streets next year for the "Global Intifada 2024". I’m sure you know that although the word "intifada" has many meanings, in the current Palestinian context it means violent resistance. My question is: as Stockholmers of all shades of opinion, might we be meeting violent resistance next time we visit Kulturhuset. Or is our safety guaranteed only if we belong to those who "spread Palestinian resistance"?
For the next couple of questions, let me add some background. Solidarity with civilian victims of war and a demand for humanitarian aid are integral elements of Swedish mainstream politics. And rightly so. But in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there is a particularly extreme political thesis that is popular in certain circles. This school of thought proclaims that the war isn't a violent clash between two national movements with legitimate claims to the same territory, but instead involves colonialist Israelis committing genocide against powerless indigenous Palestinians. Historically this discourse is obviously uninformed: it ignores inconvenient truths like the fact that Jews are indigenous in Israel since they've lived in the region for thousands of years (including in Gaza where a synagogue predated the Viking period by hundreds of years), the fact that the Palestinian National movement has violent genocidal fractions (like Hamas) and the fact that the Arab world is at least as responsible for the Palestinian tragedy as Israel. Still, in a democracy it is legitimate to be ignorant.
But my third question isn't about ignorance, it's about what public servants are allowed to do and say. Athena, on social media you invite us to demonstrations against genocide which ignore the genocidal Hamas attack on October 7 and advocate destroying Israel by violent resistance (I know: I was there). You've also recently signed political demands addressed to various writers' associations (PEN, the Journalists association and the Writers Union) requesting stronger pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli action. One can't help but wonder – are you using your status as a public appointee to promote agendas which some of those who pay your salary may strongly oppose? Is it reasonable for someone who sets an agenda to publicly express extreme ideas which many regard as not only mistaken, but also deeply offensive? These opinions may be appropriate for radical students living in a commune and publishing syndicalist poetry online magazines with 14 subscribers – but you're part of a municipal apparatus, responsible for the careers of many people. But you have a rather middle-class job which is meant to supply services to Swedish lovers of literature. If you want to be a militant freedom fighter, perhaps you should consider a career change? And if you don't, if you stand behind your opinions, why won't you talk to journalists about them?
The latest demonstration you publicly embraced occurred on International Holocaust Memorial Day. You shared a picture stating "Never Again for Anyone". If the Palestinian flags and the dates shown (1941, 1948, 1967) weren't enough to clarify that you're comparing the current conflict to the Holocaust, your byline couldn't be clearer: "All of Sweden for Palestine in Stockholm on Saturday. Come, spread".
Again, one could argue about the absurdity of this comparison. How many Jews fired rockets at German civilians? How many Jewish militants raped German girls? And how many Jewish suicide bombers blew up German buses? I could ask about the Palestinian leader Haj Amin Al Hussaini, Hitler’s ally and supporter of the "Final solution". I could engage in this debate, but what's the point? You decline to grant an interview at this time.
But it's not only about words. Words lead to action. After the demonstration you promoted, a group of people, ("presumably from the demonstration" according to the police), arranged a “spontaneous demonstration” outside the synagogue where a memorial service was being held for the victims of the Holocaust. The demonstrators filmed the participants, including Holocaust survivors, and chanted slogans like "child killer" and "intifada". Is this also legitimate criticism of Israel, Athena? At the synagogue? On Holocaust Remembrance Day? Are you serious?
According to the working definition of the international Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, contemporary examples of antisemitism include "drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis". You may object to this. In fact, I'm sure you do, and that's fine. But most western democracies – including your own government – disagree. Which means that Sweden's public institutions should be committed to this definition. So, I guess my last question is this: as someone who works for such an institution, are you committed? And more importantly, considering your involvement in antisemitic campaigns, am I still allowed in Kulturhuset? Or are Jews not welcome anymore?
This is a tectonic and world-changing event, carried out by thousands of people supported by hundreds of thousands of people, as well as by movements, states and regimes. Not condemning it is supporting it. And the results are inevitable. Because of the horror that these people have inflicted on the world, an even darker night is to come before we will see the light.
A is my friend. He is a Burmese expatriate from Myanmar living in Europe. He is an academic, an educated and friendly person, and a veteran human rights activist. As a journalist who writes, among other things, about countries where acts of genocide, ethnic cleansing and human rights violations take place, I consult with various experts. A is one of them. This is the letter I sent him last week.
Hello, A. I am writing in response to your letter regarding the “colonial character and genocidal policy of Israel.” As you can imagine, I am quite busy these days, and as someone who is far away from his family in Israel, I am distracted. I am responding to you despite all this, mainly because your words opened with a reference to Auschwitz, a place where many of my family members were murdered about 80 years ago.
According to you, Israel is using the Holocaust as a “blank check” to justify the imprisonment, bombing and starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, almost half of whom are children. "In these circumstances, 'never again' is a hollow phrase," you write. “It becomes a call for uncontrolled violence, battle cries and a campaign of revenge and extermination." In the past and under different circumstances, I must admit that I might have agreed with you.
A, you must remember that we got to know each other after several occasions when you very generously shared with me your expertise, knowledge and experience regarding Myanmar. When I first contacted you, I wrote that as a journalist working in a free country, I felt obliged to tell the story of the victims of atrocities there – amongst others, the Rohingya people other minorities who have been suffering from genocidal policies for years since the military coup in 2021.
Since I am not an expert myself, I reached out to you, just as I reached out to many other experts, witnesses and human rights activists who could shed light on other places I wrote about, such as China, Ethiopia, Syria, Iran, Mexico, Belarus and Iraq.
This is an important point. As you know, there are complicated conflicts in many of these places about which there are different opinions. Still, my feeling was that we shared a real commitment to expose and fight certain types of acts which cannot be excused under any circumstances, regardless of the different narratives that explain the conflict. I mean the kind of actions that cannot be permitted even if there is no agreement on the history of the conflict or even on the identity of those responsible for it.
These actions include those that took place in Rakhine province in Myanmar, which I wrote about with your kind help. The barbaric murder, torture and rape of innocents that happened in your country is inexcusable. Political, ethnic, religious or demographic claims simply cannot justify throwing babies into fire, torturing children to death in front of their parents, and the mass rape of women before their execution. I thought we agreed on that.
This week, I received a long email from you, Dr. A. Extremely long. Long enough to clarify your words or even to add something along the lines of: "despite all this, of course I condemn [Hamas’ actions],” or even "despite the absolute truth of the Palestinian claims and genocidal policy of Israel, I do not justify killing civilians."
But there was none of that. Somehow, your post references 100 years of conflict prior to October 7 (including explanations using maps, cartoons, pictures, and quotes). And there is a reference to the days after October 7.
But the day itself, when over a thousand people, most of them civilians, were brutally murdered and over 200 people, again most of them civilians, were kidnapped, was completely absent. And it's strange given the fact that, as I recall, we share an interest in cases of throwing babies into fire, torturing children to death in front of their parents, and the mass rape of women before their execution. Yes, to make the point clear to a person from your background, for one historical moment, Israel's Gaza envelope region became Myanmar's Rakhine.
A, since I received your message, I have been trying to understand why you do not recognize October 7th. I understand your opinion about the essence of Zionism and the essence of Israel. I don't agree with it, but I understand your point. Still, there's that little matter of “under all circumstances.” Perhaps there is a certain type of fascist, fundamentalist, racist, and violent organization that, against your usual leftist positions, you actually do support.
But if so, what are the criteria? Is it because they are jihadists? Is it a matter of religion? Or that according to the accepted code of the post-colonialist discourse, the "natives" have certain Jew-killing privileges because of the many years of oppression they have endured? Oppression, which, as you know, I have never denied.
And maybe you are one of those who do not believe the photos, the direct testimonies of survivors, the explicit confessions of the attackers and the unwatchable and undeniable videos. Do all these not meet your strict standards? Strange, because we never applied such strict standards when I wrote about Myanmar.
Do you think it's all a conspiracy of Western governments spreading fake news? Is it all the settlers’ lies, supported by American imperialists? Are you really not affected by the testimonies of Israeli women, children and elders, many of whom, by the way, are peace activists who built their homes in socialist communes that are not in any way located in the West Bank or in any way disputed. Unless the very existence of Israel is disputed, a position I assume you hold since you treat Israel as a settler and colonialist entity.
And maybe I didn't understand what you meant. In this case, perhaps in the future, we can discuss the true nature of Israel. As you know from our previous correspondence, I never supported Netanyahu, I have always believed in compromise with the Palestinians and I am absolutely against any kind of war crime, including against civilians in Gaza. You also know that I am a social democrat and a person who is aware of the climate crisis and the hardships of the "global south.” But wait, here I am, once again falling into this trap. If I were not all of these things, if I were a Netanyahu supporter or a settler in the West Bank, would my massacre and that of my family members be justified?
Again, there's that "under all circumstances" nuisance. Even if the Jews were like the French in Algiers, and they are not, deliberate murder of innocents is always evil and mass murder is absolute evil. Among us Jews, even complete secularists like me sometimes recite from the ancient texts: “I have set before you today the heavens and the earth, life and death; I have set before you the blessing and the curse. Choose life, for your lives and for your descendants,” as it is written in the book that you call the Old Testament. Do you understand A? You chose life – without “buts” and without “maybes.” This is why I always opposed my own people murdering other innocent people. And you know what, I'm angry at myself for not resisting enough.
***
And so for the record, I want to mention that I believe that Jews, not just Palestinians, also have rights in the place where I was born. They have personal, social and national rights and they also have responsibilities that are well described in the Declaration of Independence of their country, our country, which was founded 75 years ago. You don't acknowledge that, which is probably the real reason you didn't mention October 7th in your message. If "Palestine will be free from the river to the sea," as they are now shouting in the streets near my house in Europe, the events of October 7th are probably not an accident in your eyes. They are the first step in the plan.
"Free from the river to the sea” means without the people who are living there now. This is not the two-state solution, nor a partition plan, nor a federation. I think with your education, you know exactly what it means. But in case it's not clear enough, I'll say it explicitly: Hamas is the genocidal wing of the Palestinian national movement, and it turns out that it has quite a few supporters. My friends say that such views stem from antisemitism, but I don't know what is hidden in a person's heart. How much darkness, how much hatred.
I also don't know what is hidden in your heart. But I know that October 7th was not another attack, another battle, another chapter in the bloody history of the Middle East. It cannot be solved with sentences like "I cannot be expected to condemn every action taken by the weak and oppressed.” This is a tectonic and world-changing event, carried out by thousands of people supported by hundreds of thousands of people, as well as by movements, states and regimes. Not condemning it is supporting it. And the results are inevitable. Because of the horror that these people have inflicted on the world, an even darker night is to come before we will see the light.
***
And so, as a wise man wrote during the World War II, you and I now stand on two sides. "My opinion is clear about your motives,” he wrote, “and you would do well to speculate on my motives.” And he added: "I have one more thing left to say to you, and let it be the last. I want to tell you how in the past we were so similar and today we are enemies. How could I have stood by your side, and and why everything between us is over now.”
And that's the thing. In Xinjiang and Syria, in Tigray and Iran, in Myanmar and Israel, acts like those committed by Hamas are not only the absolute lowest of what the human race is capable of. They also redefine the lines. If they do not fill a person's heart with unconditional anger and disgust, they place him outside the legitimate discussion of civilized people. If you can only find room in your heart for the pain of one side, that's your problem. But with your permission, I think I'll find myself a different expert on Myanmar.
Before I finish, I will ask just one last thing. Do me a favor – next time, please refrain from referring to Auschwitz. Not because I have a monopoly on the memory of the Holocaust or the memory of the victims. But because when it comes to the 1940s, those people on whose behalf you are currently campaigning, they tend to be something different than you imagine. When you remove the appearances of European leftist movements, those people tend to be supporters of the side that built Auschwitz, not of those led there to their deaths.
Malmö, the large city in southern Sweden, has been in the headlines in recent years because of expressions of antisemitism. This is the story of the slow awareness of local and national authorities and the measures taken to deal with the problem. Could Malmö's experience be of any value for the whole of Europe, where many large cities are facing similar problems.
Those who believe in the old saying “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” would do well to study the case of Sweden’s third largest city – Malmö. Home to some 350,000 people, it‘s not particularly big, it’s not Sweden’s oldest or most beautiful city and it’s not exceptionally cheap or expensive to live in. Still, in the last few years it made an international name for itself, though perhaps not the name its leaders were hoping for. Instead of being praised for Västra Hamnen which claims to be Europe’s first carbon neutral neighbourhood, for its multiculturism or for the Turning Torso building, Scandinavia’s highest skyscraper, Malmö is known around the world for a much less appealing feature – antisemitism.
The new antisemitism of Malmö
It’s hard to say when or where it started. Antisemitism isn’t a new phenomenon in Sweden. In fact, it was there even before the first Jewish communities were founded in Stockholm and Marstrand near Gothenburg in the late 18th century. Towards the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, official state restrictions and discrimination slowly disappeared, but antisemitic ideology and propaganda could be found throughout both the old political establishment and newly founded neo-Nazi and fascist movements. Surprisingly, the end of WW2, which left neutral Sweden relatively unharmed, wasn’t the end of Swedish Nazism. Quite the opposite. After the war Sweden became host for many racist, nationalist and fascist movements. While the political elite was gradually embracing universal values and continuing to develop a social-democratic welfare state, the extreme right on the margins of Swedish society was, and some say still is, flourishing. Neo-Nazi skinheads, antisemitic publishing houses and movements based on pre-Christian imagery that promote nationalist, racist and anti-establishment ideas became an integrate part of Swedish society.
Malmö played an interesting role in this story during the final stages of WW2 and the following years. On one hand, this was the city that became a safe haven for Danish Jews who arrived at its shores after crossing the Öresund strait fleeing the Nazis in 1943. This is also where the Swedish Red Cross’ “White Buses” arrived in 1945, carrying survivors of the Nazi concentration camps. On the other hand, this was the home of the so-called Malmö Movement, which played a central role in the rehabilitation of Europe’s extreme right, back in the 1950’s. The movement’s leader Per Engdahl took a leading role in the project of connecting the remnants of fascist and Nazi movements from all over Europe and forming a political network which published literature, organized conferences and created an escape route for Nazis from Europe to South America. The center of all this was Malmö were Engdahl lived and worked. But all this is ancient history.
For over ten years now, Malmö has become, in the eyes of many, a symbol of a new kind of Swedish antisemitism. While right wing extremism is still dangerous and threatens Jews in Malmö just like anywhere else, in the last few years an imported antisemitism originating in the Middle East and Islamist environments has taken over. In Sweden, the combination of the two proved itself particularly worrying and Malmö is sometimes seen as the center of it all. In 2012 an explosion shook the Jewish community center. In 2009, Molotov cocktails were thrown at the local Jewish funeral home. In the same year Malmö was the scene of what is now known as the Davis Cup riots. As Israel and Sweden were playing an official tennis match, thousands of anti-Israel demonstrators took to the streets and the protest developed into physical and verbal attacks against the city’s Jews and law enforcement forces. At the time, former mayor IImar Reepalu, was accused of being part of the problem, rather than part of the solution when he said to a local daily that “We accept neither Zionism nor antisemitism which are extremes that put themselves above other groups”. But problems didn’t stop when Reepalu was replaced in 2013. Pro-Palestinian demonstrations, especially during periods of conflict in Gaza, continued to feature heavily antisemitic slogans, signs and rhetoric.
When I visited the city in 2015 in order to write a report for “Haaretz” I spoke to a few members of its Jewish Community. Those were the days when hundreds of asylum seekers were arriving every day, mainly from Syria and Afghanistan, crossing the bridge from Copenhagen and arriving at Malmö which became their Swedish port of arrival. As authorities in Sweden were struggling with challenges of housing, employment, education and integration, many in Malmö were worried. “There is fear and harassment on a daily bases”, one woman who immigrated from Israel to Malmö decades ago told me. She claimed that authorities were doing nothing against the daily harassment and the incitement from local mosques. “I’m not against accepting asylum seekers”, another community member told me, “one should not close the door to people in need of help, but this is what happens when we want to solve one problem by creating a bigger one. We need to use our heads, not only our hearts”. After this, I returned to the city on several occasions and reports continued to be troubling. Some claimed that Jewish families were leaving the city because they no longer felt safe. In 2021, a report commissioned by the municipality described Malmö schools as an unsafe environment for Jewish students who suffer from verbal and physical attacks while teachers prefer to avoid conflict with the aggressors. Other reports claimed that Holocaust survivors are no longer invited to tell their stories in certain schools in Malmö because Muslim students treat them disrespectfully.
Malmö at the center of the world
As a response to all this, Malmö’s Jewish community which has existed since the 1870s and now has two synagogues, a community center, a variety of educational activities and just under 500 members, decided to speak out. Now it became harder for the Swedish press to ignore the problem and the picture it painted wasn’t a pretty one – the reports included children who had to put up with their schoolmates burning Israeli flags, making threats and praising Hitler, youngsters who were suffering from bullying and threats of rape and murder on social media and Jewish teachers who were told to put up with the harassment and keep a low profile. These are all well documented facts. They are based on resident’s testimonies, information collected by journalist, NGOs and authorities and studies conducted by serious researchers. But when it comes to Malmö there seems to be a layer of mythology covering the facts. This is the Mythology that gave Malmö unflattering titles like “Sweden’s antisemitism capital” or even “Europe’s most antisemitic city”. During the last few years, reports on Malmö, mainly in the international press, became full of stories about so-called honor killings, forced marriages, polygamy, female genital mutilation, parallel societies, riots, organized crime of ethnic clans and no-go zones in which local criminals have taken over and police and authorities cannot operate.
All this seemed to go hand in hand with the reports on antisemitism and although many of the reports in the media were true or at least based on some aspect of reality, others were extremely exaggerated, taken out of context and, more importantly, highly politicized. This is where Malmö became part of the global list of “greatest hits” for everyone who was spreading stories and conspiracy theories about Sharia law taking over Sweden, Sweden becoming the “rape capital of the world” and Sweden as proof of the “Great Replacement Theory”. With these reports, the attention of the Jewish world was turned towards Sweden and in 2010 the Los-Angeles based Simon Wiesenthal Center started advising Jews to not visit Malmö. With the populist right in Sweden growing stronger, integration of immigrants from the Middle-East becoming harder and the Israel-Palestinian conflict growing closer, Malmö‘s small Jewish community suddenly became a symbol for all the problems in the world, even if a reluctant one.
Public authorities react
It’s hard to say if the situation in Malmö is really as bad as it’s sometimes portrayed in foreign media, or if it’s really that different from the situation in other Swedish cities or any other multicultural European city for that sake. Still, at some point local authorities and the government in Stockholm realized they have a serious problem. The situation in Malmö, whether exaggerated by the press or not, was making Sweden look bad. But it was more than that. In the last couple of years, I have spoken about antisemitism with the Mayor of Malmö, Sweden‘s Education Minister, Foreign Minister and former Prime Minister (all Social Democrats) and there is no doubt in my mind that they were all troubled by antisemitism and dedicated to the fight against it. For them, this is not only a PR problem. This doesn’t necessarily mean that their efforts were 100 percent effective, but at least their concern was sincere. Last October, When I interviewed Katrin Stjernfeldt Jammeh who has been Mayor of Malmö since 2013 she said that she realizes that Malmö isn’t vaccinated against antisemitism. “It’s a problem we’re addressing” she said, “we talk about it more today and, when you talk about it, it seems like it’s a bigger problem than it does if you don’t talk about it. But for me, (the image) is not important. The only thing that’s important is that we attack the problem and create change”.
Asked to detail what the city has done to confront the problem in the eight years she has been in charge, she said she has been working to combat antisemitism and racism since the day she was elected by “working with our citizens in various different set-ups, working with the Jewish community in several ways to map the problem, to create an understanding of the problem and, today, we have a long-term commitment”. She added that the city is investing more than 2 million Euros over four years. “This is not just a small project this year or next year”, she explained, “it’s a commitment to work in the long-term to create better conditions for the (Jewish) congregation, to enhance security and create knowledge. We’re also working within our school system, mapping the problem there too, and creating different ways to prevent prejudice”.
On the national level, former Prime Minister, Stefan Löfven, made the struggle against antisemitism and Holocaust remembrance a major part of his political legacy. Here too Malmö played a critical role. Last October Löfven and the city of Malmö hosted a special conference – The Malmö International Forum on Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism. Although the conference dealt with a much wider issue than the concrete problems of Malmö’s Jewish community, it caught the attention of many around the world as heads of state and governments, researchers and representatives of private and civil society organizations engaged in what the Swedish government called an “action-oriented” program. The idea was that delegations from around the globe would present pledges of “concrete steps forward in the work on Holocaust remembrance and the fight against antisemitism”. The Swedish government, for example, promised to build a new Holocaust Museum, to criminalize organized racism, to contribute to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, to appoint a government inquiry on a strategy to promote Jewish life in Sweden and to “significantly increase” the funding for “security enhancing measures for civil society, including the Jewish community from 2022”.
The Malmö Forum took place just over twenty years after the original Stockholm International Forum which was initiated by one of Löfven’s predecessors, former Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson. This was the beginning of the international partnership to fight antisemitism and promote Holocaust remembrance and it led to the “Stockholm Declaration” which is the founding document of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). When I spoke to Löfven a few weeks after the conference he told me that the Malmö forum was “all about commitments, not about speeches”. He then explained that there were two kinds of commitments: “first, never to forget, which is why different countries undertook to have various memorial events and memorial sites, and second, the fight against antisemitism, which is also about commitments. In our case, this means doing more in schools, investing more in research so that we have a better understanding of the forces behind antisemitism and so on. We want to spread this to other countries, organizations and companies, such as social media companies for example. Everyone can make commitments. Individual schools can commit, more companies can make commitments, sport organizations can make commitments. That’s the way to address these issues”.
The limits of political mobilization
The Malmö Forum made some headlines and brought Malmö some positive attention for a change. But are these national and international initiatives, which are discussed by high-ranking politicians, business leaders, journalists and international organizations making any difference on the local level – in the streets, the squares and the schools of Malmö? That depends, naturally, on who you ask. Some local opposition politicians, for example, were skeptical even before the conference started. “It’s obvious we have a huge issue with antisemitism and it’s affecting people’s everyday lives in Malmö”, Helena Nanne the deputy chairman of the center-right Moderate Party in City Hall told me a few days before the Malmö Forum convened, “For families with children at school, the situation with antisemitism is a major issue, and we hear stories of families who choose to move because they don’t feel safe and can’t be sure the school will be safe for their children”. Nanne wasn’t opposed to the international forum as an idea but she claimed that the Social-Democrats who were organizing it had a home-made antisemitism problem. “This city is run by a party that has had a problem with antisemitism in its own organization”, she said, “It’s hard to take commitments they make seriously”. Another opposition politician based in Malmö, Ilan Sadé, who leads the right-wing Citizens’ Coalition party, was even more critical. “I’m not against the forum taking place in Malmö”, he said, “but this might just be an attempt to improve Malmö’s image. There’s a problematic connection between the Social Democrats and the immigrant population in neighborhoods like Rosengård (a Malmö neighborhood known for its immigrant population and gang-related crime, D.S). The Social Democrats have very wide support there, and they don’t want to lose it; they need to keep the balance. And of course, there are also many people from Arab countries who are party members. There were incidents like the one when members of the party’s youth league were heard shouting slogans like ‘Crush Zionism’ at demonstrations. That’s at least borderline antisemitism – they don’t shout that against other countries”. Sadé alleges that there is a lack of determination to prevent, stop and prosecute hate crimes in Malmö. “The police file on the attacks against the Chabad rabbi of Malmö is as thick as a Dostoevsky book”, he told me, “there are about 160 to 180 cases registered: anything from spitting on him to cursing and harassing him. This is absurd. In Sweden, a religious leader should be able to walk down the street. Priests can do it, imams can do it, so why not a rabbi? This should be prioritized, and it isn’t”.
Another way of approaching the problem does indeed involve both an imam and a rabbi. Imam Salahuddin Barakat and Rabbi Moshe David HaCohen, both based in Malmö, founded an organization which aims to create a trusting society while working to counter discrimination. The organization, Amanah, believes that deepening of identity and roots are key elements towards reaching their goal and it focuses on countering antisemitism and islamophobia within all levels of society – schools, universities, communities and official representatives. I spoke to rabbi HaCohen on the morning the Malmö Forum started and he told me that he appreciated the Swedish government‘s efforts even though not much attention was paid to Malmö itself since the forum was happening from the top down. His organization, on the other hand, is more of a grassroots one. HaCohen spoke about school programs combating racism that Amanah was promoting as well as a digital project that simulates dealing with antisemitic situations and the efforts the organization makes to address Holocaust denial in schools and monitor social media that can potentially “poison the minds of 9- and 10-year-olds”. Hacohen already sees some results to the interfaith dialogue. “During the last Gaza conflict (in May 2021), there was increased tension in the city, as we’ve seen in the past”, he remembered, “since there’s a large Palestinian community here, there were demonstrations against Israel, and as usual some of the protesters started to shout antisemitic slogans. But this time, these people were removed by imams who left their comfort zone and protected their Jewish neighbors. In the same way, we stood alongside our Muslim neighbors when supporters of a far-right Danish politician who was denied access to Sweden filmed themselves burning and kicking the Koran in the streets of Malmö”.
The people of Amanah aren’t standing alone. Other organizations and municipal leaders are doing their best to deal with the problem of antisemitism in the city. The Jewish community recently opened a new learning center that has been working with local schools. City Hall is working with the Swedish Committee Against Antisemitism to arrange trips to the concentration camps in Poland and its partnering with local football clubs to help them deal with racism and antisemitism. The city has also appointed a special coordinator to work on the problem of antisemitism in Malmö’s schools. The coordinator, Miriam Katzin, a Jew herself, a lawyer and a left-wing politician, gave an important perspective when she spoke to the Swedish Expo magazine just over a year ago. “There’s an antisemitism problem in in the whole of society which expresses itself in different ways”, she said, “I think it’s convenient for the majority of Swedes to turn to Malmö and place antisemitism there as the fault of groups that don’t belong to the majority. But that’s making it easy for themselves. The antisemitism I grew up with was expressed by regular majority swedes. That antisemitism is still alive, but it’s often overlooked. One wants to make antisemitism to be a problem of the others”. According to Katzin immigrant groups are blamed for antisemitism as part of this tendency, the right blames the left for being antisemitic and the left blames the right, while in reality antisemitism is a general social problem and it’s “deeply problematic to engage in a competition about who are the worst antisemites”.
This is indeed one of the most serious problems regarding antisemitism in Malmö and in many other European cities. The understanding that it still exists in this day and age is a depressing thought as it is. The thought that it’s not limited to one side of the political debate or to one particular social group, region or culture makes it even worse. Once one realizes that hatred of Jews is a problem that unites left-wing progressives, old-school conservatives, white supremist and hard-core Islamists, it’s hard to imagine a solution. In the same way, Malmö which became a symbol of antisemitism but in reality, was never the only or the worse expression of it, is just a tiny part of the bigger problem. After all that has happened in Malmö – the international attention, the media circus, the scores of high-profile politicians, the pledges, the promises and the time, effort and money spent on education, interfaith dialogue and security measures, there is still a serious problem. It’s not that nothing helped. Things are probably a bit better these days in this one medium sized city in southern Sweden. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Now, all that’s left to do is fix the rest of the world.
David Stavrou is a regular contributor for “Haaretz” based is Stockholm. This article is based on a series of articles about Malmö originally published in “Haaretz”.
In 1942, an SS officer told a Swedish diplomat about the Nazi death camps. Now, a new documentary revives the story. "En Svensk Tiger – The Swedish Silence" tells the amazing story of SS officer Kurt Gerstein and Swedish diplomat Göran von Otter, their meeting on a night train from Warsaw to Berlin in and the meaning and consequences that night carries to this day. It's a tragic and complicated story but a very human one too. A powerful reminder of all the hate, cruelty and indifference we are capable of but also of the fact that choice between good and evil is always possible, even in the heart of darkness itself.
On a summer’s night in 1942, on a train traveling from Poland to Germany, Swedish diplomat Göran Fredrik von Otter noticed a very troubled passenger. “I saw how he was looking at me,” he said in a 1968 interview, “as if he wanted to tell me something.” Since Sweden was neutral during World War II, it still had an embassy in Berlin, and von Otter was working there.
On this particular evening he was on his way back to Berlin after a day of meetings in German-occupied Warsaw. The passenger he met on the crowded train introduced himself as Kurt Gerstein, lit a cigarette and said: “I saw something terrible yesterday.” He then told his interlocutor that he was an SS officer, returning from a visit to two places that were almost totally unknown at the time: Treblinka and Belzec.
That summer, only a handful of office-holders in Germany knew what was actually going on in the death camps in Poland. The Nazi officer told the Swedish diplomat what he had seen, providing him with one of the earliest testimonies, both credible and detailed, to emerge from the extermination camps. From time to time the German officer broke down in tears, and in the end he urged von Otter to tell the Swedish government what he had told him and to see to it that the world put a stop to the crimes he had witnessed. The two parted ways when the train reached Berlin.
The annihilation of Jews did not cease, however, and the information revealed in that nighttime encounter, which were supposed to reach millions, were revealed to only a few in real time. Even after the war, Gerstein’s name did not become well known, even though it surfaced in a number of movies, plays and biographies. But now this story has surfaced again, in the form of a new documentary called “The Swedish Silence,” directed by Carl Svensson.
The wrong man
“I first learned about the story from Gitta Sereny’s book about Albert Speer,” Svensson says in a conversation in a Stockholm café in mid-April, referring to the Austrian-British author’s 1995 biography of the notorious Nazi leader. “I began to research it and naturally the meeting on the night train became the starting point of the film.”
The main protagonists of the story, Gerstein and von Otter, are no longer alive – the former allegedly committed suicide in 1945; the latter passed away in 1988 – but in the process of making the documentary, Svensson did track down some of their relatives. Indeed, the men’s daughters, Birgitta von Otter and Adelheid von Platen, respectively, star in the new film, which does not focus on the historical episode per se but rather on how it affected a much wider group of people over three generations.
“This became a new perspective,” Svensson tells me. “Von Otter is looking for the truth her father didn’t want to talk about, while von Platen talks a lot about being part of ‘an SS family’ after the war. We have to continue talking about the Holocaust but we need new perspectives so that it doesn’t become a cliché.
“In this film,” he adds, “the main characters are the next generation: They didn’t witness the events themselves, they are ‘witnesses of the witnesses,’ and the incident that led to the connection between them – the meeting on the train – is still very present in their lives. It’s an open wound.”
“Father didn’t really want to talk about it,” says Birgitta von Otter, who is in her 80s today and found out about the incident over the years, through letters, newspaper interviews and fragments of conversations with her parents. “My mother said that my father was pale after his encounter with Gerstein, and he proceeded directly to write a report about it. When he presented his report to his superiors at the embassy [in Berlin] he was asked not to write about it, but to tell the Foreign Ministry in Stockholm next time he went there.”
There is still a lack of clarity regarding the identity of the person who gave von Otter these instructions and the timing of his next trip to Stockholm, but it’s clear that when he arrived there a few months later, he reported Gerstein’s testimony to the head of the ministry’s political department, Staffan Söderblom.
“It’s not clear what Söderblom did with the information,” says von Otter. “At the foreign ministry they said that they only heard about Gerstein’s story when they read about it in the papers much later.”
For their part, the Swedes claimed later that they did not decide to take any action since the situation was known by the time they received it. To this day, no official document has been found to indicate that people-in-the-know in the Swedish government were planning to disseminate the information provided by Gerstein.
“I don’t want to judge von Otter,” says Carl Svensson, “but I think he was the wrong person at the wrong place and the wrong time. In many ways he’s a symbol of Sweden’s World War II policy. We were among the first to know about the Holocaust but we didn’t do anything about it. Being neutral is a commitment. We should have done more, we should have been a safe haven for refugees, not just avoid being attacked. Von Otter was in a way a typical Swede, a bureaucrat, someone that does as he’s told, respects authority and avoids conflicts.”
The documentary also presents the complex historical context in which von Otter was operating. Along with humanitarian operations such as those spearheaded by businessman and diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and efforts to help save the Jews of Denmark and Norway, Sweden cultivated ties with the Third Reich – selling iron to Germany’s military industries, which paid for it with money stolen from European Jews. Many claim that in this way Sweden contributed to the prolongation of the war.
“We are taught that Sweden was not part of World War II, but that’s not entirely true,” says Svensson. “We were also part of Europe’s history in the 1940s and we must face that.”
“The Swedish Silence” is a Holocaust movie but it’s not about Jews: Its main focal point is not the victims, and not even the murderers, but rather the onlookers and bystanders – those who had a choice about how to react.
Kurt Gerstein was an SS officer and part of the German extermination machine, but at the same time he opposed the Nazis and served as a one-man resistance movement within the SS, who tried to disseminate news about their crimes to the world. He was a devout Christian and was active in religious organizations as well as being a Nazi Party member.
In the mid-1930s, perhaps due to the murder of a relative by the Nazis, Gerstein became an active opponent of the regime, distributing anti-regime materials and participating in protests. He got into trouble with the authorities and was arrested by the Gestapo, losing his job as a mining engineer. A few months before the war broke out, however, he returned to the party, and in 1941 he became an officer in the Waffen SS Hygiene Institute. Among his responsibilities was supplying Zyklon B to Auschwitz. The highly poisonous pesticide was initially used for disinfection but in 1942 the Nazis began using it to gas people to death, and Gerstein was in charge of delivering it in large quantities.
In August of that year he was asked to go to Poland to advise senior Nazi officials Odilo Globocnik and Christian Wirth, who were responsible for building and operating camps for the extermination of Jews in that country. At those camps, Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec, the Nazis were then using carbon monoxide to murder Jews and Gerstein was tasked with two jobs: helping to expedite the process of killing people, and disinfecting the enormous piles of clothes that they left behind. After Globocnik warned Gerstein and his associates, at a meeting in Lublin, that everything they were going to see was top secret, and that divulging anything would lead to a death sentence – they left for their first stop: Belzec.
Gerstein was horrified by what he saw there. He watched a transport of thousands of Jews from Lwow arriving at the camp’s gates just after 7 A.M. one day. Hundreds were already dead. When they got off the train they were told to undress, the women’s hair was shorn, and they were all made to run naked along a fenced-in path, being whipped along the way. At the end of the path was the building holding the gas chambers. Gerstein noticed the geraniums in the yard and the picture of a Star of David on the ceiling of the building.
After an SS officer assured everyone that no harm would befall them, they were crowded into the chambers, the doors were locked, and a diesel engine started pumping in the poisonous gas. In the report he submitted to the Allies after the war, Gerstein describes how the engine failed that day, and the whole process was halted for three hours, with shouting and cries audible from the outside. After the engine started working again, the killing process took half an hour. Gerstein watched the bodies being taken out and buried.
“Even in their death you could identify the families,” he described in the report. “The bodies of children, women and men were taken out, still holding hands.”
After that fateful visit to Belzec, Gerstein toured Treblinka and then returned to Warsaw. On August 20 he got on the night train to Berlin, where he met von Otter and told him everything he’d seen. He didn’t stop after meeting the Swede by chance: He continued to disseminate the information at every opportunity: to leaders of the Catholic Church, to Swiss diplomats and to the Dutch government in exile.
His efforts had no effect, apparently, and Gerstein ended up serving in the SS until the end of the war. According to different testimonies, he suffered pangs of conscience and tried to diminish his own role in abetting Nazi crimes by destroying shipments of Zyklon B on several occasions. At the end of the war he surrendered to the French, and volunteered to write about the crimes perpetrated by Nazis and to testify at their trials.
At that time, after the war in 1945, Göran von Otter had been transferred to the Swedish embassy in Helsinki. He knew nothing had been done by his government with the information he had received from Gerstein, and asked a colleague in London to pass on the information to the Allies. If Swedish diplomacy could not save the victims, he may have thought, perhaps the information would help Gerstein avoid being executed as a war criminal. Here too, the diplomat’s actions were too hesitant and too late. The letter was sent, but the day it arrived in London, Gerstein was found hanging in his cell. He left behind a wife and three children, who learned of his death only three years later.
Families’ encounter
Birgitta von Otter (whose sister, Anne Sofie, is a world-famous opera singer) says that her father was in contact with Gerstein’s widow after the war. “He visited her in the 1980s, wanting to look her in the eyes. He must have felt guilty, thinking he could have done more.” In Svensson’s documentary, three generations are present at the encounter between the families.
“It was interesting to see how Adelheid lived in the shadow of her father,” says von Otter. “She can’t remember him but she talks about him and has kept photos and several of his possessions. Ultimately, she’s a child who lost her father and suffered greatly because of what happened to him. The family lived in poverty, was condemned as Nazis, and fought for years to clear his name.”
She adds that the recent visit to Germany helped her understand the importance of the role the war still plays there even today – as compared to Sweden, where it is much less present.
“There is a certain naivete in Sweden about the role it played during the war,” notes director Svensson, adding that Swedish TV turned down requests to air the film a couple of times. “Now we’ve shortened the film and we’re talking with SVT (Sweden’s public broadcaster), trying to have it aired anyway. But many Swedes just don’t want to talk about it.”
Thus, despite the fact that many of his countrymen wish to avoid the whole subject, Svensson’s film, in a way, is putting Sweden back in European history.
“Moral decisions are taken by individuals, not by collectives,” says Arne Ruth, a senior Swedish journalist and editor, who knew Göran von Otter personally and supports Svensson’s effort. “It’s not about collective guilt. Swedish TV may think it has dealt enough with the Holocaust and that it doesn’t need to deal with this rather strange story, but it’s an important story because it shows how a life of an individual changed because of inaction, and how even the next generation of the family was affected by this passivity. It’s a human perspective and therefore always relevant.”
Indeed, the story involving von Otter and Gerstein is important although it did not change the course of events over 70 years ago. The information brought by Gerstein about the annihilation of Jews did not stop it, and it is difficult to estimate how many people could have been saved had the official Swedish response been more resolute. However, the report he wrote at the end of the war was used in trials against Nazi war criminals, including at Nuremberg and the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. His testimony has also been used in combating Holocaust denial.
More importantly, perhaps, Gerstein’s legacy is a troubling reminder of human apathy and a powerful argument against averting one’s gaze, and against claims that it was impossible to oppose the Nazi war machine. Gerstein showed that choosing between good and evil is possible even under unbearable conditions, and that actions against evil can be carried out almost anywhere – even from within the very innards of the monster itself.
When writing about Auschwitz, it's important to start with the obvious. The theft of the camp's notorious entrance sign was an appalling act and those who are responsible for it must be punished. In a broader context, on the occasion of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 65 anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, it is important to point out that the original camp site, along with the museum and archive which were built on it, are in need of serious renovation. If the site's educational projects, research activities and ceremonial events, are to continue, there is need of a large investment, of international support and of course, a better security system.
So much for stating the obvious.
There is however another way of looking at the theft of the sign which naturally raised many angry reactions. Interestingly enough, statements made after the event were of the kind usually made when religious sites are desecrated. It's easy to forget that Auschwitz is not a holy site. It is not a vandalized grave or a burnt down synagogue, in fact it's as far from a holy site as one can imagine. Birkenau (Auschwitz 2) may well be the largest Jewish graveyard in the world and the site where thousands of Poles, Roma, Russians and many others were murdered, but the entrance sign of the main camp, Auschwitz 1, which simply states "Arbeit Macht Frei" (work liberates) is perhaps one of most profound symbols of evil and one of the most symbolic representations of Nazism. So much so that it is almost tempting to cry out to the thieves and to all the Anti-Semites and Neo-Nazis who support them: "If you want it so badly, just go ahead and take it!"
There is a reason why that sign is so symbolic. Auschwitz wasn't on another planet, as Jewish writer and Auschwitz survivor, Yehiel Dinur, once put it. It was made from the stuff of our very own planet. It took all the evils of this world and brought them to a new level. Though it developed new and monstrous techniques, it didn't invent anything new. It was the most accurate representation of the world view of the Nazi movement which, while being politically revolutionary, was based on old and conservative values. Like Nazism itself, Auschwitz was hierarchical, racist, and murderous all of which are typical aspects of the twentieth century. It was a world where human beings had no value, where every part of their body and belongings was used to make profit before they were annihilated. It was a world of cruelty and ruthlessness, but not less interesting, it was a world of lies. And this is where the "Work Liberates" slogan has its deeper meaning.
The lies in Auschwitz weren’t limited to the lies told to the victims who were told, for example, that they are entering the showers when they were standing at the doors of gas chambers. They were deeper, almost philosophical. Auschwitz had every aspect of human life. There was music, medicine and even a judicial system. There were work places, sex life, trade and industry. But these were all distorted. Any trace of humanity was sucked out of them. Music, for example, was transformed from an expression of beauty and human emotions to a soundtrack of slave marches and executions. In the so called "Joy Division", sex was transformed from a source of pleasure and expression of intimacy to violent and repeated rape. In the torture chambers of Block no. 11, the judicial system served might instead of right and in Dr. Mengale's Block medicine did not save lives, but practiced diabolical experiments to glorify a mythical ‘master race.’
And then there's work. Work can define us; it can give us pleasure, release our creative abilities or at least provide for us. Work can liberate. But in Auschwitz work was the exploitation of people struck by disease and hunger by corporations, some of which, sadly enough, still exist today. All this makes the stolen slogan not only cynical but also a pure symbol of everything wrong in this world. As such, perhaps we can do without it.
Many, myself included, were shocked by the theft of the sign. But was the response proportional? Is the symbol really so important? I have visited Auschwitz many times and have seen how the sign has turned into a tourist attraction and how groups of laughing teenagers from all over the world gather beneath it to have their picture taken. Visiting Auschwitz is important and Symbols are important too but they are not everything. It's important to remember that although the war ended in 1945 genocide, racism and oppression didn't. Perhaps it would be more effective if some of the attention given to the stolen sign were diverted to the atrocities in Darfur for example, or to the many cases of minority oppression and discrimination worldwide.
The Israeli historian Prof. Yehuda Bauer, who is one of the world's greatest authorities on the Holocaust, says: "There are many places in the world today where mass murder and even genocide are possible. Everyone knows about Sudan but there are other places like Burma (Myanmar) and East Congo. The situation in other regions like Iran, with its complex ethnical problems, The Balkans, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Iraq and some places in South America like Guatemala could also deteriorate into mass murder". Bauer, who is visiting Stockholm this week, serves as an senior adviser to many institutes including the Swedish Government, the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research and the International Forum on Genocide Prevention. "The Holocaust was an unprecedented event because of its totality, universality and the pure ideological motives behind it", says Bauer, "But it was not unique, since it was an act of human beings on other human beings, it can happen again".
Though Bauer's work with the UN and other international organizations to prevent future crimes, may be more important to future generations than the preservation of old Nazi concentration camps, it can be claimed that the stolen sign, like the camp itself, is important as a witness of what happened and can be used in the battle against those who deny the Holocaust. There is truth in this. But there will come a day when not much will remain of the original camp. What then?
Even today parts of it are falling apart despite all preservation efforts. Like it or not, physical artifacts, just like the testimonies of living survivors, important as they are, will have a smaller role in remembering and understanding the Holocaust in the future. It is, after all, an event from the past century, and sadly its' survivors are becoming fewer and fewer. Camps like Treblinka and Sobibor were totally destroyed and many documents and artifacts are already lost. Future discussion about the Holocaust will have to be based on books, museums and films, and if we want it to have a future at all, public debate, educational dialogue and historical research will have to take the place of visiting the sites themselves.
From a Swedish perspective, these observations are particularly important. The apparent involvement of a Swedish Neo-Nazi in the sign theft last month reminds us that there is a need to continue the efforts to fight racism, Anti-Semitism and undemocratic trends in Swedish society. Sweden's ambivalent role in WW2 makes this even more crucial. As a vital exporter of iron ore to the German war machine, and as an industrial and sometimes political and ideological Nazi allay, Sweden has a moral and political obligation to deal with its past even if it is also responsible for saving many lives through its diplomatical efforts and generosity to refugees.
"Anti-Semitism in Europe is getting worse", says Prof. Bauer and explains that it exists in the extreme Right-Wing as well as in the left and in parts of the second generation of Muslim immigrants who rebel against their communities by targeting Israel and the Jews. He points out Sweden's efforts in fighting these trends, "Sweden dedicated time and money and has created The Living History Forum, a government agency commissioned to promote democracy and human rights, with the Holocaust as its point of reference". There is of course still work to be done and Bauer claims that studying the core issues of the Holocaust and especially the dilemmas of its victims are crucial to this process.
As for the stolen sign, I don't really know what the thieves who climbed on Auschwitz's gate and removed the sign on that cold December night had in mind. Truth be told, I don't really care. I was shocked when it was taken and I'm glad it is now back. But that is stating the obvious again.
Beyond the obvious is another thought. In one of his books, Yehiel Dinur describes a vision of an Auschwitz prisoner. He is sitting in a truck full of prisoners on the way to the crematorium and he's looking at an SS officer. He realizes, to his horror, that under other circumstances the roles could have been reversed and he could have been the killer. The worst thing about Auschwitz, he realizes, is that it is man-maid, not the work of the devil and it lies within the potential of human behavior. He describes the truck passing under the German words "Arbeit Mach Frei" and in his mind the German words are transformed into Hebrew ones: "In the image of God created he him". The symbol of Nazism becomes the cradle of Humanism. Now that would be a sign no one could steal.
וגרסה עברית:
כשעוסקים באושוויץ חשוב לפתוח במובן מאליו. גניבת השלט משער המחנה לפני יותר מחודש היא מעשה נפשע והאחראים לו חייבים להיענש. זאת ועוד, יום השנה ה 65 לשחרור המחנה ויום השואה הבינלאומי, שיצוין השבוע ברחבי העולם, הוא הזדמנות נוספת להזכיר את מצבו הקשה של האתר בו נרצחו מעל למיליון וחצי בני-אדם ולקוות כי השמירה עליו תשופר, שהכסף הנדרש לשיפוצו יגויס בקרוב ושמאמץ ניכר יושקע בשימור המחנה ובהמשך הפעילות החינוכית, התיעודית והטקסית המתקיימת בו.
עד כאן המובן מאליו.
גניבת השלט "העבודה משחררת" עורר מטבע הדברים גל תגובות בישראל ובעולם. רוב התגובות הזכירו דברים שנשמעים כאשר מטרות יהודיות מותקפות בחו"ל. אך גניבת שלט הכניסה של אושוויץ איננה דומה לריסוס גרפיטי על בית-כנסת, להשחתת ספר תורה או לחילול קבר יהודי. מחנה אושוויץ איננו מקום קדוש, הוא מקום מקולל. שדות בירקנאו הם אמנם בית-הקברות הגדול ביותר של העם היהודי, אך דווקא השלט בעל הכתובת "ארבט מאכט פריי", הוא הדבר הרחוק ביותר מהיהדות או מהאנושיות שניתן לעלות על הדעת. הוא אולי הייצוג הנאמן ביותר של הנאציזם ושל הרוע עצמו. הוא ארור ומאוס עד כדי כך שמפתה לומר לגנביו כמו גם לכל האנטישמים, הניאו-נאצים והפשיסטים למיניהם שחוגגים את האירוע: "אם אתם כל כך רוצים את השלט הזה, בבקשה – קחו אותו!".
אושוויץ לא הייתה, כפי שאמר ק.צטניק, פלנטה אחרת. להיפך, אושוויץ הייתה בנויה מהחומרים של הפלנטה הזאת. היא לקחה את כל הרעות החולות של העולם המודרני והביאה אותן לקצה. היא פיתחה אמנם טכניקות חדשות, מפלצתיות, אך היא לא המציאה שום רעיון חדש. היא הייתה התגלמותו הנאמנה של האידיאולוגיה הנאצית, שהייתה מהפכנית אולי מבחינה פוליטית, אך התבססה על עקרונות שמרניים ומוכרים, החל מהפרקטיקה הניהולית ועד השימוש בפסיכולוגיה של התליינים והקורבנות. במחנה אושוויץ, כמו בנאציזם עצמו, היה כל מה שהיה רע במודרנה. הייתה בו ההיררכיה, הגזענות והרצחנות שאפיינו את המאה העשרים (ושלא חלפו עדיין מן העולם). נבנה בו עולם בו בני-אדם היו פחות מסך כל חלקיהם, חפצים חסרי ערך שכל חלק מגופם ורכושם נוצל למטרות כלכליות. היו באושוויץ אכזריות, חוסר חמלה ודיכוי אך מעניין לא פחות, אושוויץ הייתה מבוססת על שקר. וכאן בדיוק תפקידה של הסיסמא הידועה לשמצה: "העבודה משחררת".
ההונאה באושוויץ לא התבטאה רק בשקרים שסופרו לקורבנות שנכנסו לתאי-הגזים מתוך אמונה שהם מקלחות. השקר של אושוויץ היה עמוק יותר. כמעט פילוסופי. באושוויץ היו הרי כל ביטויי העולם האנושי, היו בה מוסיקה, רפואה ומערכת משפט, היו בה מקומות עבודה, חיי מין, מסחר ותעשייה. אך מחולליה של אושוויץ לקחו כל מה שהיה לו פוטנציאל אנושי והפכו אותו על פיו. המוסיקה באושוויץ, למשל, הפכה מביטוי של יופי ורגשות אנושיים לפס-קול של מצעדי עבדים והוצאות להורג. בבית-הבובות המין הפך ממקור של עונג ואינטימיות לאונס סדרתי ואלים. במרתפי העינויים של בלוק 11, המשפט לא עשה צדק אלא הנציח את שרירות לבו ואכזריותו של השליט. בבלוק 10 של הדר' מנגלה הרפואה הפכה ממצילת חיים לגיהינום של המתת ילדים וקטיעת איברים.
ויש כמובן את העבודה. העבודה מעצבת את מי שאנחנו, היא יכולה להיות מקום של יצירה ומקור של פרנסה, היא יכולה להיות משחררת. אבל לא באושוויץ. באושוויץ העבודה הפכה לעבדות, לניצול של בני-אדם מוכי קור, מחלות ורעב ע"י תאגידים כלכליים שחלקם, למרבה הציניות, קיימים עדיין היום. כל אלו מבוטאים היטב בשלט "העבודה משחררת". זוהי יותר מציניות, זהו הביטוי הטהור ביותר של השקר והרוע של הנאציזם.
רבים הזדעזעו, ובצדק, מגניבת הסמל החשוב הזה. אך האם הפרופורציות הופרו? האם הסמל הזה באמת כל כך חשוב? אני ביקרתי באושוויץ פעמים רבות. ראיתי כיצד השלט הזה הופך לאתר תיירות וכיצד קבוצות מצחקקות של בני נוער מכל העולם מתקבצים תחתיו כדי להצטלם. אין ספק, הביקורים באושוויץ הם חשובים וגם סמלים הם חשובים אך הם לא מראית הכל. המלחמה אמנם הסתיימה ב 1945 אך מעשים של רצח-עם, גזענות ואפליה הם לא נחלת ההיסטוריה. ייתכן שלא היה מזיק אם מעט מתשומת הלב שלו זכה השלט הנאצי באושוויץ היה מופנה לנעשה בדרפור, לדיכוי מיעוטים או לצמיחתן של תנועות פשיסטיות ברחבי העולם.
פרופ' יהודה באואר, אחת האוטוריטות החשובות בעולם בנושא השואה, אומר: "יש מקומות רבים בעולם כיום שהרג המוני ורצח-עם אפשריים בהם. כולם יודעים על סודאן, אך יש מקומות נוספים כמו בורמה (מיאנמר) וקונגו המזרחית. המצב במקומות כמו איראן, על המורכבות האתנית שלה, הבלקנים, זימבבווה, קניה ועיראק ומקומות מסוימים בדרום-אמריקה כמו גווטאמאלה, יכול גם הוא להידרדר לרצח המוני". באואר, המבקר בימים אלו בסטוקהולם, משמש כיועץ בכיר לפורומים בינלאומיים שונים הנלחמים בתופעות של הרג המוני ורצח-עם. "השואה הייתה אירוע אי-תקדימי במובן הזה שהיא הייתה טוטאלית, אוניברסאלית, שיטתית ומונעת ע"י מניעים אידיאולוגיים טהורים", הוא אומר, "אבל היא איננה ייחודית. מכיוון שהיא בוצעה ע"י בני-אדם היא יכולה לקרות שוב".
למרות שעבודתו של באואר ושל אחרים חשובה אולי לאנושות יותר משימור מחנות-הריכוז הישנים, יש הטוענים שהשלט הגנוב, כמו שאר שרידי המחנה, חשוב כדי להילחם בהכחשת השואה. יש אמת בטענה זאת אך יבוא היום שבו לא יוותר הרבה מהמחנה המקורי ומשרידיו. כבר היום חלקים ממנו מתפוררים ויש שרידים שיתכלו למרות כל מאמצי השימור. השרידים הפיזיים כמו גם העדים החיים, חשובים ככל שיהיו, לא נותנים היום מענה להכחשת השואה וגם לא להבנתה. אחרי הכל, מדובר באירועים מאמצע המאה הקודמת ובקרוב לא יוותרו להם עדים חיים. מחנות חשובים כמו טרבלינקה וסוביבור נהרסו לחלוטין ע"י הגרמניים וחומר תיעודי רב נהרס ונעלם. אם חשוב לנו שהשואה ולקחיה לא יישכחו ניאלץ להתרגל ללמוד אותם דרך ספרים, סרטים ומוזיאונים ובעיקר דרך מחקר היסטורי, דיון ציבורי ושיח חינוכי.
מנקודת ראות שוודית אבחנות אלו חשובות במיוחד. מעורבותו לכאורה של ניאו-נאצי שוודי בגניבת השלט בחודש שעבר היא תזכורת לחשיבותו של המאבק בגזענות, באנטישמיות ובמגמות אנטי-דמוקרטיות בחברה השוודית. זכר התפקיד האמביוולנטי של שוודיה במלה"ע השנייה רק מחזקת צורך זה. כיצאנית ברזל חיוני למכונת המלחמה הגרמנית וכשותפה עסקית, ולעיתים גם פוליטית ואידיאולוגית של גרמניה הנאצית, לשוודיה יש אחריות פוליטית ומוסרית להתמודד עם עברה, אפילו אם היא הצילה אלפי בני-אדם בתקופת המלחמה כתוצאה ממאמציה הדיפלומטיים ונדיבותה כלפי פליטים. זוהי מחויבות היסטורית שנוגעת גם למגמות מדאיגות בהווה.
"מצבם של היהודים באירופה גרוע יותר היום משהוא היה בעבר", אומר פרופסור יהודה באואר ומסביר כי יש היום באירופה אנטישמיות מסורתית, דומה לזו הטרום-נאצית וגם אנטישמיות חדשה יותר. האנטישמיות לדבריו מגיעה משלושה מקומות מרכזיים: הימין הקיצוני, השמאל והדור השני והשלישי של מהגרים מוסלמים שמפנים את המרד שלהם בחברות המערביות הקולטות נגד ישראל והיהודים. שוודיה, מציין באואר, מקדישה מאמצים, זמן וכסף רב להילחם במגמות אלו אך יש עוד עבודה רבה. השימוש בגרעין הקשה של השואה, ובעיקר בדילמות של קורבנותיה, היא הדרך הטובה ביותר להמשיך את הדיון החשוב הזה.
אינני יודע מה בדיוק עבר בראשם של החוליגנים העלובים שטיפסו על השער של אושוויץ, הבריגו החוצה את שלט הכניסה וברחו איתו. למען האמת, זה גם לא אכפת לי במיוחד. המובן מאליו אומר שהשלט חשוב להנצחת הקורבנות ולפעילות החינוכית של המוזיאון וטוב שהוא הוחזר. אבל מעבר למובן מאליו יש מחשבה נוספת.
הסופר ק.צטניק בספרו "הצופן" מתאר חיזיון של אסיר, שלד בין שלדים עירומים, היושב במשאית בדרך לקרמטוריום ומביט אל קצין SS. האסיר מבין שהזוועה האמיתית של אושוויץ היא בכך שהיוצרות יכולות היו להתהפך ושהוא עצמו, בנסיבות אחרות, יכול היה להיות קצין SS. אושוויץ הרי איננה יצירת השטן, הוא מבין, אלא יצירת בני-אדם, שכולם שווים וכולם נבראו בצלם. "המשאית עוברת את שער אושוויץ שמעליו האותיות הגרמניות: ARBEIT MACHT FREI", כותב ק.צטניק את חזיון האסיר, "והן מתחלפות באותיות העבריות: "בצלם אלוהים ברא אותו". כך הופך סמל הנאציזם לערש ההומניזם. את השלט הזה אין איש יכול לגנוב.
דיויד סטברו 