Overview
- Interview Summary
- Leopold Sommerfeld, born in 1926 in Gothenburg, Sweden, discusses the Jewish community in Gothenburg; the presence of Swedish Nazis in Gothenburg during the 1930s and WWII; growing up in Olivedal, a working-class area in Gothenburg; attending a regular Swedish public school; his parents, who were orthodox Jews from Grajewo, Poland; not being aware of the persecution of European Jews when he was a child; helping Jews who arrived in Sweden from camps in Germany; meeting his future wife who was a survivor; his belief that his experiences during these years strengthened his Jewish identity; and his identity as a Jew in Sweden rather than a Jewish Swede.
- Interviewee
- Leopold Sommerfeld
- Interviewer
- Carolyn Östberg
- Date
-
interview:
2018 May 09
- Geography
-
creation:
Goteborg (Sweden)
- Credit Line
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection
Physical Details
- Language
- Swedish
- Extent
-
1 digital file : MP4.
Rights & Restrictions
- Conditions on Access
- There are no known restrictions on access to this material.
- Conditions on Use
- No restrictions on use
Keywords & Subjects
- Topical Term
- Altruism. Antisemitism--Sweden--Göteborg. Holocaust survivors--Sweden. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Sweden. Jews--Identity. Jews--Social life and customs. Jews--Sweden--Göteborg. Jews, Polish--Sweden. World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, Swedish. World War, 1939-1945--Refugees. World War, 1939-1945--Sweden. Men--Personal narratives.
- Geographic Name
- Göteborg (Sweden)
- Personal Name
- Sommerfeld, Leopold.
Administrative Notes
- Holder of Originals
-
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- Legal Status
- Permanent Collection
- Provenance
- This is a witness interview of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Perpetrators, Collaborators, and Witnesses: The Jeff and Toby Herr Testimony Initiative, a multi-year project to record the testimonies of non-Jewish witnesses to the Holocaust.
- Funding Note
- The cataloging of this oral history interview has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
- Special Collection
-
The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive
- Record last modified:
- 2023-11-16 09:41:32
- This page:
- https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn616245
Additional Resources
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- See Rights and Restrictions
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- This record is digitized but cannot be downloaded online.
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Oral history interviews of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Swedish Witnesses project
Date: 2017 March
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Oral history interview with Rosa Koklin
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Oral history interview with Inger Josephson
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Oral history interview with Eva Cohn
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Oral history interview with Ester Grynwald Rytz
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Carl Wahren, born in 1933 in Norrköping, Sweden, discusses his paternal grandfather, who was a secular Jew from an old Swedish-Jewish family; his maternal grandparents, who were not Jewish; growing up in a wealthy bourgeois family; experiencing antisemitism a few times in connection to birthday parties; taking piano lessons from Peter Freudentahl’s mother; his family’s efforts to help Jewish refugees during the war; his family hosting a Finnish child during the war; and writing an anti-Nazi song with his friends.
Oral history interview with Ingert Glasman
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Ingert Glasman (née Hoffman), born in 1932 in the borough of Södermalm, Stockholm, Sweden, discusses being a Jewish child in Stockholm during the Nazi era; her mother, who was a Swedish-born Jew, and her father, who had immigrated to Sweden from Lithuania as a young man; keeping kosher until they gave it up due to war-time food rationing; not knowing much about the persecution of the Jews in Europe; Jewish community in Södermalm; and learning about the Holocaust after the war ended.
