On August 29, 1945, the head of an unnamed aliens’ camp writes in the daily Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfarts-Tidning (GHT) that the only “more general dissatisfaction” he has noted relates to food:
As a rule, this is because they are unused to Swedish food — they find black pudding and fish balls particularly hard to come to terms with, and most of them find it impossible to appreciate the Swedish habit of putting sugar in all kinds of dishes.
A more intractable problem is how to teach the refugees not to waste food; some kind of hoarding instinct seems to force them to store up supplies, which then go dry or moldy and eventually end up in the pig bucket.
The refugees’ unstable emotional state provides fertile soil for what might be termed camp psychoses, which take various forms. Sometimes it is individuals suddenly feeling themselves unjustly treated or persecuted by other camp residents, sometimes a general sense of alarm spreads rapidly, with anxieties about the future, the fate of relations.…
For the most part, however, the Swedish press doesn’t write very much about the aliens’ camps and the people who populate them. In community after community, Auschwitz temporarily moves in behind the local co-op store but leaves little trace in public life. Only rarely do journalists take the opportunity to visit the camps and interview the people who inhabit them and provide an account of their experiences and thereby also try to understand why some of them sometimes behave as they do. It’s as if a curtain of silence has descended between the world the visitors bring with them and the world that surrounds them. Or a curtain of anxiety, perhaps, that the two worlds will prove incompatible, or at least will not readily tolerate meeting each other. I note this anxiety also in Alva Myrdal’s otherwise enlightened view of the camps: anxiety that the darkness inside the residents will infect the enlightened society around them. “The victims of brutality themselves become brutalized,” she writes.
When life is reduced to its bare minimum, primitive selfishness is the only natural response.… Women whose reason should tell them that they will get enough food, and that there will be food for the next meal and for the next day too, cannot believe it because of their old terror. They save every crumb left over from the table. They pick dandelion shoots and other things to eat. They collect the pigs’ potato peelings. They rake up every dry little pea that has fallen on the ground. They even continue to steal from the camp stores.
The question is raised: what are we to do with such people? In two articles in Expressen (June 22 and 25, 1945), they’re described as animals. The writer maintains that “most of them survived thanks to those more or less animal qualities that Western society otherwise tries to keep in check: trickery, cunning, lying, obsequiousness, pilfering, and selfishness, combined with a certain brutal will to live.”
She’s consequently concerned about who would eventually want to employ them: “It won’t be easy for them to adapt, and it won’t be easy for their employers. The latter will presumably require more tireless understanding and generous humanity than the average employer can muster.”
The writer doesn’t specifically identify the Jews as the problem here (in fact, quite the opposite); most of the women in the camp she visits (Doverstorp), and on whose conduct she bases her conclusions, are non-Jewish Poles. The vast majority of people living in the archipelago of aliens’ camps in Sweden in the summer and autumn of 1945, it should be noted, are non-Jews.
Sometimes, however, the Jews are specifically identified as a problem, as in an article signed G.B.G. in Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfarts-Tidning on September 5, 1945:
Swedish employers are not, as many may imagine, particularly accommodating when it comes to taking on Jewish workers. The present writer has considerable experience of the difficulty of finding decent work for such workers. Only textile workers seem to be accepted. With its low wages, the textile industry has taken on many refugees who have not been able to find any other work.… We know from experience that the Jews will not take on just any old work except in cases of extreme necessity. Business is in their blood, and of the other professions, that of tailor is the most attractive to them.…
If these young Jews are now to become Swedish citizens, it should be made clear to them that they must set their sights on careers other than business.…
Assuming these young Jews are now to be trained as, say, workers in manufacturing industries, carpenters, painters, etc., a new problem presents itself, namely how the Swedish trade union movement would react to the prospect of Jewish workmates.… One can occasionally sense a certain unwillingness, even among Swedish workers, to work with Jewish comrades.
I do wonder how many of all these problems with the Jews G.B.G. had already identified before having anything to do with actual Jews, if indeed he ever did. At any rate, none of these problems appears to stop the more or less Jewish Poles in Öreryd from soon being in great demand as forestry workers in the vast forests surrounding the camp, and as agricultural workers on the farms nearby, and as workers in the numerous manufacturing companies in the region. In a letter to the camp administrator at Öreryd dated November 9, 1945, the chairman of the local council in the small town of Norrahammar, some forty kilometers to the north toward Jönköping, pleads for permission for the refugee David Szpiegler to be granted an extended leave of absence from the camp, “so his job is not put in jeopardy,” since he has “shown himself both competent and hardworking, and is liked by the management.” David Szpiegler has found his job at the Norrahammar works, which produces iron ranges, pots, and pans, through the mediation of Mr. Åke Roström, who also arranged board and lodging for him and is said to invite him to his home on a daily basis, “to keep him informed about work and other matters.”
“As I am also there on a daily basis and have learned much about the refugees’ sad situation, I hope that the best possible provisions can be made for him,” the chairman of the Norrahammar council ends his written plea to the camp administrator at Öreryd.
There’s a recurring tendency to stress the sadness of your existence and the occasionally strange way some of you behave. It’s much rarer to see anyone stress the fact that the sadness of your existence has very little to do with conditions in the camp, still less with conditions in Sweden. Rather, you keep pinching yourselves each morning when you find a Swedish breakfast laid out for you in the dining room, followed by a Swedish lunch and a Swedish dinner, and even if there’s too much sugar in the food and a few of you squirrel away a bit of it here and there, Sweden must still seem like paradise to most of you.
I know you had thought of yourself as being in paradise before, but this paradise here will still be standing in the morning. And the morning after that. Admittedly, it’s a paradise that seems at times unfamiliar and hard to understand, and the shadows that follow you all will follow you into this paradise as well, but nowhere in the letters you write to Haluś during this time do I find a word of criticism directed at conditions in the camp or in the country.
If it didn’t sound so trite, I’d say you’re grateful, deeply grateful, and for brief periods happy, too.