About the difference between Jews and repatriandi there’s initially some confusion, or even downright ignorance, among the Swedish authorities, and about the difference between Poles and Polish Jews as well. The authorities eventually learn to know better, which presumably is one of the reasons why in late December 1945 most of the Polish-Jewish men in the aliens’ camp at Öreryd are transferred to the aliens’ camp at Tappudden-Furudal, and most of the Polish-Jewish women to the aliens’ camp in Doverstorp.
In Öreryd, all “former concentration camp clients” (yes, that’s what they write) are categorized as Poles, whether they’re Jews or not. This isn’t a very good idea, for among some of the Poles there’s a tradition of anti-Semitism that hasn’t necessarily been softened by the fate of the Polish Jews. Among the former concentration camp clients there are also some who were perpetrators, and some who were both victims and perpetrators, and it happens that victims are directly confronted with their former tormenters, which isn’t good for camp discipline. Subsequently, the idea of putting the Jews and the Poles into separate camps comes up, and this rouses the indignation of a leading Swedish opinion maker, Alva Myrdal, who writes in the weekly magazine Vi (no. 35, 1945):
If the tendency to segregate were to triumph, we would have to acknowledge that this is the first introduction of the ghetto in Sweden — a terrible calamity and a horror that a democratic society cannot tolerate. We must not unleash such racial hatred and racial fear: we must do all we can to conquer them by education and information.
Which, as we have seen, does not prevent the aliens’ camp at Öreryd from being almost emptied of its Polish Jews in December 1945, so that a postcard sent there to Dawid Rozenberg must be forwarded to the aliens’ camp at Tappudden-Furudal.
You’re transferred to Öreryd on August 10, 1945, after three weeks of quarantine in the small university town of Lund. Öreryd is located amid the vast forests of Småland, between Jönköping and Gislaved, and it too is a place hard to find on the map if you don’t know where to look beforehand, which is presumably an important reason why a camp for Norwegian refugees is opened here on March 16, 1941. At any rate, such a camp is not exactly something that Sweden would want to advertise to Germany, which at that point looks likely to win the war and therefore should not be needlessly provoked. Further camps for Norwegian refugees are consequently set up in equally undistinguished and hard-to-find places with names like Holmudden, Bäggböle, Voxna, Skålmyra, Bäckehagen, Älgberget, Stråtenbo, Gottröra, Mälsåker, Mossebo, and Tappudden-Furudal.
Yes, as you can see, Tappudden-Furudal is also initially a camp for Norwegian refugees and part of a growing Norwegian-Swedish camp archipelago. As the winds of war change direction in 1943 and 1944, the camps are turned into bases for the training of Norwegian “police reserves.” The training is organized by the Norwegian exile government in London and carried out with the consent of the Swedish government, with the aim of creating military and police units that in the case of a German surrender shall be capable “of restoring Norwegian law and justice as soon as possible.”
The story of the Norwegian training camps on Swedish soil is a reasonably heroic one that many people will have good reason to remember, and memorials, to the extent that they’re erected on former camp sites, are dedicated to the Norwegians. Since 1994, the old ironworks in Furudal is home to a Norwegian veterans’ museum, and in Öreryd in the summer of 2008 a musical theater performance was put on to commemorate the years when the Norwegians came to town, and Elsa’s cafe was the center of world politics, and Sweden made some contribution to the right cause, after all. On a rough-hewn stone on the site of the former camp, a plaque reads “Öreryd refugee camp 1940–46,” and another conveys the gratitude of the Norwegians “for the good reception and kindness shown to us in the war years.”
Far fewer people remember the Poles. Actually, no one really remembers the Poles, still less the Polish Jews, who in fact do not officially exist, since they go by the name of Poles or Polish repatriandi. When the well-known Swedish journalist and writer Jan Olof Olsson (Jolo) happens to be passing through Öreryd in April 1972, he visits the churchyard by the white wooden church, where among the stones for departed shopkeepers, manufacturers, farmers, and stay-at-home daughters he finds two iron crosses engraved with clearly foreign names. “No dates; nothing more,” he notes. “Just these strange names in the Öreryd graveyard. The names are Polish. How did these two get here?”
The people with the Polish names get to Öreryd by train and bus in July and August 1945, after the Norwegian police reserves, just a day or so following the German surrender, have marched off “with flags flying and music playing” toward the railroad station in Hestra. Unlike the Norwegians, who are viewed by the locals as brothers or cousins of a sort, the people with the Polish names are viewed as foreigners first and foremost. Contacts between the villagers and the camp residents cool and drop off. The language barrier doesn’t help, and neither does the anxiety about — one might even say fear of — what the foreigners may bring with them. Pretty much everyone knows a bit about where they come from and what they’ve been through, and that presumably they’re all scarred in some way. Rumors of scuffles, fits of madness, and cases of suicide filter out into the little community around the white wooden church, and in any case the word is that the foreigners’ stay at the camp will be only a short one, because these are transit migrants or repatriandi who will soon be moving on to somewhere else.
So why make the effort?
Even those who make the effort don’t always have an easy time of it. On August 2, 1945, the Christian daily Svenska Morgonbladet publishes an article signed B.J. and titled “Our Guests from German Torture Camps”:
Brought together in camps of varying sizes surrounded by tall, barbed-wire fences, with only forestry workers’ primitive barracks or similar to live in, they are isolated from the outside world for week after week, month after month.… When the author of this piece tried to telephone one such camp in the Stockholm area … the female operator replied that the telephone number of the aliens’ camp “was unlisted.”…
These guests in our country, invited by the Red Cross, should have the right not to be seen as mere numbers in an impersonal mass of “Lagerschwestern” [camp sisters]. It is the isolation from “ordinary people” that really gets on their nerves.
Only the kindest of people should be allowed to have anything to do with these — often Jewish — victims of Nazism. One can hardly call the head of one such camp kind who when asked by a visiting member of the women’s corps if she could go and say hello to her friends, replied: “There is too much mollycoddling of these unpleasant refugees.” When she told him that she had got to know “these refugees” as charming and grateful, and that moreover one had to bear in mind that most of them had seen their parents and siblings consigned to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, he interrupted her curtly: “That has nothing to do with it.”…
We must remember that these are living people whom we have committed ourselves to rescuing, not a mere collection of numbers from miscellaneous clusters of German barracks.
On August 17, 1945, Svenska Dagbladet reports that forty “inmates” at Öreryd (“Polish camp in Småland”) panicked and set out on a march to Stockholm to protest against the camp conditions, and that the police stopped them at Mossebo, about five kilometers north of Öreryd, and that they were presently under arrest in Jönköping, awaiting further proceedings. “The forty who did not want to stay apparently fell prey to some kind of concentration camp psychosis. They are all very young, in the age range 16–20. They claim, among other things, that they did not receive sufficient allocations of food or tobacco in the camp.”