image: The Ravensbrück Archive in Lund has received Memory of the World status
Credit: Lund University
Ten years’ work has paid off – UNESCO has added the unique archive of 500 in-depth interviews with Holocaust survivors to the Memory of the World Register. This means the Ravensbrück Archive is recognised as an example of cultural heritage of great value to humanity.
Following the end of the war in spring 1945, Folke Bernadotte's White Buses rolled out of a bombed-out Germany. A total of 20,000 people were transferred to Denmark and Sweden. One of them was Genek Granek, a Polish Jew, who grew up in Łódź, just over 100 kilometres from Warsaw.
“In a monotone voice, Genek Granek tells us how he, as a 12-year-old, watched the German trucks pull up to the hospital and how ‘patients were thrown out of the windows onto the flatbed trucks – among them were pregnant women, newborn babies and people with typhus and dysentery,’” says Håkan Håkansson, digitisation coordinator at Lund University Library, who led the work to make the archive available digitally.
Genek Granek's voice is one of the 500 stories that make up the Ravensbrück Archive. On 11 April, UNESCO decided to add the Ravensbrück Archive to the Memory of the World Register. The Ravensbrück Archive is thus recognised as an example of cultural heritage of outstanding value to humanity. Other entries on the Memory of the World Register include the original sheet music of Ludwig van Beethoven's 'Symphony No. 9 in D minor' as well as the Gold Lists of the Qing Dynasty Imperial Examinations in China. Preparations for the recognition have taken more than a decade.
“It is a great honour for the Ravensbrück Archive to receive this status and a recognition of the extensive work that has gone into creating, preserving and making the archive accessible. As a Memory of the World library, we now want to take responsibility for continuing to cherish the memory and to take advantage of the opportunity to learn from history that the collection offers,” says Håkan Carlsson, Library Director at Lund University Library.
“It is now almost 80 years since the end of the Second World War and the horrors of the Holocaust becoming known. As survivors become fewer and fewer, documenting their voices becomes more important, not least for a younger generation for whom the Holocaust may seem so distant as to be irrelevant. The voices of the survivors make clear how incredibly fragile a democracy is; how quickly the moral foundations of a society can crumble and make the unthinkable possible,” says Erik Renström, Vice-Chancellor of Lund University.
The Ravensbrück Archive exists thanks to a unique initiative taken in Lund in 1945. Polish-born lecturer Zygmunt Lakocinski (1905-1987), who had been living in Sweden for a decade and working as a lecturer in Polish at Lund University, decided to document the experiences of Holocaust survivors in Nazi Germany's concentration camps.
”My father, Bozyslaw Kurowski, came to Sweden after the war with the White Boat rescue operation. He was one of the nine concentration camp prisoners who conducted the interviews and wrote down the testimonies between 1945 and 1946. In total, Bozyslaw Kurowski conducted 73 of the 514 interviews with other survivors from the concentration camps. The interviews are now part of the Ravensbrück archive”, says Jadwiga Kurowska.
BACKGROUND
The archive was sealed until the 1970s
The archive consists of thumbed poetry books, written from memory on yellowed paper stolen from the factories and bound in strips of discarded, blue-striped prison clothes. The archive also contains small glossaries and schoolbooks that travelled from hand to hand at night when people were gathered in the barracks and secretly held study circles for children and adults.
“After liberation, many survivors planned to return to Poland, which had by then fallen under communist rule behind the Iron Curtain. The interview material included descriptions of not only Nazi atrocities, but also war crimes committed by the Red Army,” says Håkan Håkansson.
To protect the integrity of the witnesses, Lakocinski therefore chose to seal the entire archive for 50 years. Since the 1970s, the material has been stored at the University Library in Lund, but it was not until the mid-1990s that the archive capsules could be opened and the material revealed to the world.
5,500 carefully written pages
What Lakocinski and his team were trying to achieve was in many ways unique. The work consisted of a systematic, in-depth documentation of the camp's horrors, produced in the months following liberation.
“The result of their endeavours is as remarkable as it is terrifying: 512 unique eyewitness accounts – a total of more than 5,500 carefully recorded pages – give voice to the millions of victims of the Holocaust,” says Håkan Håkansson.
All the interviewees were from Poland and the majority were young women who had been imprisoned in Ravensbrück. For most, however, Ravensbrück was just the last stop on a long journey across the Nazi system of camps; one that had taken them through camps such as Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, Dachau, Majdanek, Neuengamme, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Stutthof, Buchenwald.
Key facts: Memory of the World is an honour bestowed on a document or collection in an archive or library that is deemed to be of great value to humanity. A document can be any kind of information bearing media, such as computer files, photos, films, documents on paper, and stone.
Contact
Håkan Håkansson, digitisation coordinator at Lund University Library E-mail: hakan.hakansson@ub.lu.se Telephone: +46 46 222 36 43
Jadwiga Kurowska: Telephone +46 737-825742 E-mail jadwiga175@gmail.com
Håkan Carlsson, Library Director at Lund University Library E-mail: hakan.carlsson@ub.lu.se Phone: +46 46 222 82 22 Mobile: +46 70 981 78 83