Hanna
1946 Malmö, Sweden
Hanna lies awake every night. With sleep come the nightmares. The kindly matron of the girls’ home comes and takes her on her lap. She asks Hanna to talk to her, but Hanna can’t bear to talk about her time in the Nazi camps. Just thinking about it sends a chill down Hanna’s back. She also doesn’t want to be troublesome. What if the matron sends her back?
HANNA WAS SENT FROM MAJDANEK TO the Nazi factories in Hamburg. The working days there were long and hard. Hanna and the other prisoners were forced to search the bins for something to eat.
One day, white ambulances rolled into the forced labour camp in Hamburg. It was one of the Red Cross rescue operations. In early May of 1945, Hanna became one of the few Roma to be transported to Sweden. Under Swedish law, Roma were prohibited from entering Sweden until 1954.
Hanna was transferred between numerous war refugee camps and care homes. In the autumn of 1946, at the age of fifteen, she arrived at the Salvation Army’s girls’ home in Malmö. That same year she met Georg Dimitri, a Swedish-Roma man whose family ran a travelling carnival. In April 1947 Hanna and Georg were married at Klara Church in Stockholm.
Swedish rescue operations
In the spring of 1945, former camp prisoners came to Sweden on the so-called White Buses of the Red Cross. The rescue operation was planned in collaboration between Norwegian, Danish and Swedish authorities. It was made possible by negotiations that the Red Cross and the World Jewish Congress managed to conduct with the supreme leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. All Scandinavian prisoners were to be taken to Denmark and Sweden.
Once they were there, Red Cross staff also brought other former prisoners, mainly Jews and Poles. The figures vary, but the Red Cross estimates that about 15,000 people came to Sweden on the White Buses. Through the UNRRA (predecessor of the UN Refugee Agency UNHCR) and the so-called White Boats of the Red Cross, another 9,000 former prisoners arrived in Sweden during June and July 1945.
Arrival in Sweden
Upon arrival, the former camp inmates had to go into quarantine to prevent the spread of disease. Then they went to refugee camps and emergency hospitals around Sweden. Many of them were seriously ill, weak and undernourished. Some did not survive the journey or died after a short time in Sweden.
Life in the refugee camps was limited by routines and rules. Many of the former prisoners were young women who soon began to long for a new life in freedom. At the same time, the search was going on for family and friends who may have survived.
The idea was that the former prisoners would stay in Sweden for a short time. Then they would return home. But few of them had a home to return to. After some time, the Swedish government decided that all those who had come to Sweden with the rescue operations were allowed to stay.