Between Liberation and Freedom: Women Holocaust Survivors’ Early Postwar Narratives

Pluwak, Anita; Pluwak, Anita

The panel introduces an under-researched and largely overlooked archive: the Ravensbrück collection, which constitutes one of the largest systematically gathered sets of interviews conducted in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust (1945–1946) in Lund, Sweden. In 2025, the archive was recognized by UNESCO for its historical importance. The panel highlights its significance through the lens of emancipatory narratives articulated by Jewish and non-Jewish Polish women. Approaching this material through multiple analytical lenses such as autobiographical writing, microhistory, and narrative agency, as well as mothering, hope, and archival labor, the panelists shed new light on how survivors of Nazi persecution created what may be understood as “emancipatory narratives” in their efforts to move from liberation toward freedom. This transition echoes Hannah Arendt’s well-known insight that “liberation and freedom are not the same” (On Revolution, 2016). Although survivors were liberated from concentration and labor camps, hundreds of thousands who became displaced persons under the care and control of Allied military powers and national governments were far from free. Subject to restrictions on movement, employment, and emigration within DP camps, they also had little influence over the political reshaping of their homelands in the postwar order. Moreover, while the war had formally ended, racial, ethnic, and retaliatory violence often continued. In conditions of precarity and limited legal agency, many survivors turned to writing as a crucial form of self-expression and intervention, an act through which they asserted voice, agency, and the possibility of a future.

One key aim of the panel is to bring to light previously unknown materials, including the émigré weekly Polak (1945-1946). Victoria Van Orden Martinez presents a microhistorical study of a Jewish survivor’s narrative, focusing on Fela London-Łobzowska and her short story “Quarantine 1943 - Quarantine 1945". The text narrates the space between liberation and freedom through a striking comparison of Nazi and Swedish quarantines, articulated from the gendered perspective of a persecuted young woman.

Building on this perspective of narrative resistance, Urszula Chowaniec examines poems and stories, including submissions to Polak, as well as personal and institutional correspondence and testimonial interviews. Focusing on themes of motherhood, the paper argues that “mothering” functions as a narrative, a technology of hope, transforming trauma into forms of expression that enable both individual survival and the emergence of postwar cultural identity.

Anna Krakus investigates the writings of Halina Strzelewska, a Polish resistance woman imprisoned in the Stutthof concentration camp. Deported there in 1942 and liberated in 1945, Strzelewska relocated to Sweden in 1946 and worked as an archival assistant at the Polish Research Institute in Lund. She conducted and documented interviews with survivors while also evaluating their credibility, at times in relation to her own experience as a former prisoner.

The panel is followed by a discussion with Anita Pluwak, whose expertise in memory studies and gendered, intersectional perspectives further opens questions about the role of narrative in creating hope and enabling emancipatory trajectories after trauma. This concluding part of the panel frames the archive not only as a site of preservation, but also as a space for developing new strategies of reading Holocaust and postwar narratives: approaches that foreground narrative as a means of working through trauma and imagining forms of life beyond it.

This panel situates itself within archival and identity studies, drawing on Swedish and international perspectives, including Astrid Erll (2011), Svetlana Boym (2001), Hannah Arendt (2016), and testimony theory (Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 1992). It builds on recent work on Holocaust survivors in Sweden, especially Victoria Martínez (2024) and Johanna Bergqvist Rydén (2018), alongside Malin Thor Tureby (2022), while extending this field through new archival discoveries and close readings.

The panel consists of four women from two different institutions. The closeness of the universities, Copenhagen and Lund, is due to the location of the Ravesbrück archive at Lund University. Although the panel participants are similarly positioned within Western academic contexts, the four scholars range in terms of linguistic and national perspectives: American, Scandinavian, Polish and Yiddish. Furthermore, the papers engage a wide range of voices through their focus on juxtaposing immediate responses of Jewish and non-Jewish women’s survival, often marginalized in mainstream Holocaust studies. The papers also vary in their approaches to the multilingual archive as they study varied narrative forms through a multitude of disciplinary methods approaching testimonial materials.

138 Between Liberation and Freedom: Women Holocaust Survivors’ Early Postwar Narratives: Calls for Papers