How Sweden Welcomed Hundreds of Ravensbruck Concentration Camp Survivors with Open Arms

In the desperate, final weeks of WWII, as the German SS acted on orders not to leave one prisoner behind to fall into Allied hands, the Swedish government rushed their famous “White Buses” to camps to rescue as many prisoners as they could. Below, Ravensbruck survivors and the buses arrive on the ferry to Malmo, Sweden.

Sweden’s Count Bernadotte appealed to Himmler and arranged to have survivors of all nationalities and religions taken from the camps. Above, Ravensbruck survivors Nadine Hwang, daughter of a Chinese ambassador, Rosetta Achmed (left), Elsie Ragusin (right) and Mary O’Shaugnessy (back).

In the final, chaotic days before Ravensbruck was liberated by the Russians, more than 6,000 women had been gassed, others shot, starved and forced on death marches so it’s no wonder that when 500 of the Ravensbruck survivors arrived safely on April 28, 1945, many seemed so stunned by and grateful for their good luck. Many, like the woman above with her swaddled child, escorted by a Swedish medical worker, arrived with their children, conceived before they arrived at the camp. Other survivors, sick with typhus or TB or starvation had to be carried by stretcher. 

Sweden welcomed the Ravensbruck survivors with open arms, helping them to showers, clean clothes and food. Hundreds of the women were housed in a makeshift rehabilitation center at the Malmöhus Museum, below.

Below, survivors recovering at the museum catch up on world events, which they missed while they were prisoners at Ravensbruck.

By early May, as Allied victory in Europe came closer, a total of 7,000 Ravensbrück women and 17,000 prisoners overall arrived on the Malmö quay for asylum. The Swedish government allowed the survivors to remain as long as they needed to recover and many chose to stay in Sweden permanently. The women who returned to their countries took home kits of food and lovely memories of people who treated them like human beings for the first time in so long.