Memory and Activism: Survivors Remembering, Commemorating and Documenting the Holocaust

This project examines the role of Holocaust survivors and survivors of Nazi persecution as memory activists in the memorialization, commemoration and remembrance of genocides and human rights abuses.

Even though a cadre of Holocaust historians have begun investigating the roles of survivors in memory processes, there is still a tendency within Holocaust studies and Memory studies to treat survivors as passive victims.

Therefore, this two-part project will explore the memory activism of survivors in Sweden between 1945 and 2003 and the memory of and in activism through the activities of survivor descendants.

By developing the concept of “survivordom” in line with Peter Gatrell’s notion of “refugeedom” the project aims to elucidate the multiple ways in which survivors have struggled with and against formal institutions to have their own memories and the histories of others, acknowledged and recognized.

Through this focus, the project will further elaborate the notion of agonistic memory; a concept in which both conflicts and solidarities between different interests, perspectives and individual memory agents are included.

Furthermore, the project will develop existing oral history methods regarding shared authority through conversations with descendants of survivors.

Although the project primarily focuses on Swedish survivors and Swedish memory culture, it also stretches beyond the borders of Sweden in order to map the networks formed by survivors after the Second World War.