The Yiddish Book Center's
Wexler Oral History Project
A growing collection of in-depth interviews with people of all ages and backgrounds, whose stories about the legacy and changing nature of Yiddish language and culture offer a rich and complex chronicle of Jewish identity.
Yiddish Speakers and Yiddish Culture in Post-War Sweden
Watch now:
Jan Schwarz, Associate Professor in Yiddish at Lund University, explains the "White Buses," the Swedish effort to rescue and rehabilitate concentration camp survivors at the end of World War II, and how this operation caused the city of Boras to become a predominantly Yiddish-speaking town -- "a shtetl, basically." To this day, there is still a lively community of native Yiddish speakers in Sweden -- so much so that Yiddish is listed as an official minority language of the country!
This is an excerpt from an oral history with Jan Schwarz.
This excerpt is in English.
Jan Schwarz was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1954.
This interview is part of the Yiddish in the Academy: scholars, language instructors, and students series.
