To mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we will hold a special session titled ‘The White Boat mission – part of the UNRRA activities at the end of WWII” led by the Holocaust researcher dr. Roman Wasserman-Wroblewski. 

The event will be held on Friday, January 27 at 11 a.m. at the library of the Polish Institute in Tel Aviv (Beit Psagot, 3 Rothschild Blvd, Floor 22). 

 
About the session’s leader:  

‘White Boats’ mission brought to Sweden 10 000 former concentration camp inmates. Most of them were women and children from the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen.

When in Sweden, they received the hospital ward and were thereafter helped to repatriate to their home countries or were given the possibility to move from Sweden elsewhere in the world, also outside Europe. Some of them immigrated to Israel between 1946-1948.  

The fate of the children from the Piotrków ghetto that passed several concentration camps and landed in Sweden during White Boat mission will be especially emphasized as numerous of them came later to Eretz Israel. 

The children’s story, besides dealing with their personal fate, also presents Polish, German and Swedish documents showing the logistics of the Holocaust. 

The book will be published in English in the fall of 2023.

The session will be led dr. Roman Wasserman Wroblewski, a Holocaust researcher, who wrote several fascinating books.

Among them the first book published in Swedish about the Holocaust titled Six Thousand out of Six Million – Requiem (1995). 

These days, dr. Roman Wasserman-Wroblewski latest book about Janusz Korczak, his pedagogy and the orphanage he created in Warsaw, written in Polish, will be published.  

He is also finishing a unique book about a group of children from the first ghetto established in Poland in Piotrków Trybunalski. 

Dr. Wasserman Wroblewski belongs to the second generation of Holocaust survivors. His parents, who were in the Warsaw ghetto, escaped after the Gross Action in 1942.

His father, Misza Wasserman, was the only teacher serving at Janusz Korczak’s orphanage that survived the deportation to Treblinka on August 5th, 1942.

For several decades, Dr. Wasserman Wroblewski and prof. Halina Neujahr created the Holocaust Name Monument in Stockholm. 

He is the chairman of the Swedish Holocaust Remembrance Association SHMA and Korczak Association there.. 

The meeting will be held in English.

Participation is subject to pre-registration no later than January 24, by email: julia.mackiewicz-saban@instytutpolski.pl  

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“UNRRA White Boats” – a lecture on the occasion of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day

“This story is not known to the general public” – said Dr. Roman Wasserman Wróblewski, a Swedish Holocaust researcher. “In the early 1990s, I met a Swedish Holocaust survivor, Professor Halina Nayer. She told me that she had come to Sweden on the “White Boats”. It was then that I first heard about this story and I decided to investigate further”.

On the occasion of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Dr. Wasserman Wróblewski gave a lecture called “The White Boats Mission” – part of the activities of the United Nations Relief and Reconstruction Administration (UNRRA) at the end of World War II. On January 27, at the headquarters of the Polish Institute in Tel Aviv, he told the story of the Swedish humanitarian mission, thanks to which 10,000 people were brought to Sweden. They were former inmates of concentration camps, mainly women and children from the Bergen-Belsen camp, and a large group of children from the Piotrkowski ghetto.

During his lecture Dr. Wasserman Wróblewski detailed the activities of the Polish Source Institute in Lund under the direction of Dr. Łakociński and the work of Polish consulates in Sweden. He also mentioned the important role of the Polish government issuing Polish passports to Holocaust survivors thus aiding them to speed up the process leading to their joining their relatives waiting for them outside of Europe (including in Israel and North America).

The large audience at the Institute also numbered representatives of the Swedish Embassy in Israel and namely Mrs. Eva Taylor and Mrs. Matilda Kyhlstedt.

Zdjęcia z prelekcji/ photos