Gunhild Tegens samling

The collection contains a rich assortment of records related to the experiences of Jewish survivors of concentration camps, compiled by Gunhild and Einar Tegen as part of their post-World War II documentation project. The documentation was gathered at the initiative of the Swedish Joint Committee on Democratic Reconstruction (Samarbetskommittén för Demokratiskt Uppbyggnadsarbete), of which professor of philosophy Einar Tegen, the author Gunhild Tegen’s husband, was president. The interviews were conducted by Swedish psychologist Valdemar Fellinius and polyglot Dory Engströmer and carried out at refugee camps and university locales. Though the documentation process encompassed over 600 refugees, many survivors would abstain from answering the questionnaire out of fear that inclusion in such a book might compromise their identities and lead to future persecution. The questionnaires and interviews touched upon victims’ conditions of abduction/arrest, their conditions of escape or rescue, their treatment during their detainment at concentration camps, as well as the victims’ personal experiences and general well-being following their exposure and subjection to atrocity. A considerable number of interviewees in the collection are Jews who had been prisoners at Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, Neuengamme, and Belsen. As the questionnaires and interviews of Jewish victims were quantified separately from Christian prisoners, the Tegens’ preliminary work with the assembled material offers specific insights into the experiences of Jewish survivors, offering graphic statistics on the types of abuse that they suffered in the camps. Additional statistical information includes countries of origin, nationalities, spoken language, and quantified data on specific concentration camp internment. In addition to the documentation covered by the committee initiative, the collection includes correspondences between Gunhild Tegen and her acquaintances from other European countries who, having learned of the committee’s work with refugees, decided to share their accounts of survivor experiences.

The collection furthermore contains various source material related to Testimonial of the Condemned, the 1945 book in which Einar and Gunhild Tegen published the documentation mentioned above. The collection includes correspondence between the Tegens and various publishing houses in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, and the Netherlands in the couple’s attempts to translate and publish the book abroad, which met limited success. Plans to translate the manuscript to Hebrew and send it to Mandatory Palestine for publishing and revision were made as early as December 1945. The correspondence in the collection further shows that discussions to use the Testimonial of the Condemned as evidence in the Nuremberg trials had taken place. Though the endeavor was ultimately not realized, a copy of the book was sent to the Chief United States Prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, Robert H Jackson.