Project Manager
Håkansson, HåkanProject manager
Lund UniversityAmount granted
200 000 SEKYear
2015
In 1945, over 20,000 liberated prisoners from German concentration camps arrived in Sweden on the so-called white buses. Their experiences during the war are documented in a unique archive material that is now stored at the University Library in Lund. In order to make this internationally significant material available to researchers and the public, extensive digitization and registration work is required.
Among other things, the archive consists of more than 500 in-depth interviews with survivors - a total of more than 5,000 document pages - which are completely unique, as the interviews were conducted in the months immediately after their liberation. In addition, the archive includes a large amount of other material brought to Sweden by the survivors: notebooks, diaries, letters, poems, photographs and drawings, as well as official documents reflecting the Nazi administrative apparatus around the concentration camps.
The archive's great international research value has been underlined by the US Congress, which in June 2015 formally recognized the archive as 'a critical link to the history of the Holocaust'. In spring 2015, with the help of private donations, the University Library started a project to record, index, digitize and translate the interviews into English and publish them in a searchable database. Subsequently, the remaining material will be registered and indexed, and a selection will be digitized and published in the same database.