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Ravensbrück Archive in Lund receives Memory of the World status

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By sanna [dot] trygg [at] kommunikation [dot] lu [dot] se (Sanna Trygg) - published 11 April 2025
Objects like notes and clothes from survivors.
Photo: Lund University

Ten years’ work has paid off – UNESCO has added the unique archive of 500 in-depth interviews with Holocaust survivors to the Memory of the World Register. This means the Ravensbrück Archive is recognised as an example of cultural heritage of great value to humanity.  

On 10 April, UNESCO decided to add the Ravensbrück Archive to the Memory of the World Register. 

“It is a great honour for the Ravensbrück Archive to receive this status and a recognition of the extensive work that has gone into creating, preserving and making the archive accessible. As a Memory of the World library, we now want to take responsibility for continuing to cherish the memory and to take advantage of the opportunity to learn from history that the collection offers,” says Håkan Carlsson, Library Director at Lund University Library.  

“It is now almost 80 years since the end of the Second World War and the horrors of the Holocaust becoming known. As survivors become fewer and fewer, documenting their voices becomes more important, not least for a younger generation for whom the Holocaust may seem so distant as to be irrelevant. The voices of the survivors make clear how incredibly fragile a democracy is; how quickly the moral foundations of a society can crumble and make the unthinkable possible,” says Erik Renström, Vice-Chancellor of Lund University.  

Background of Ravensbrück Archive

 The Ravensbrück Archive exists thanks to a unique initiative taken in Lund in 1945. Polish-born lecturer Zygmunt Lakocinski (1905-1987), who had been living in Sweden for a decade and working as a lecturer in Polish at Lund University, decided to document the experiences of Holocaust survivors in Nazi Germany's concentration camps.  

The first interviews were conducted in autumn 1945. In the year that followed, a small working group comprising nine individuals would travel between the different reception centres in southern Sweden and carry out 512 in-depth interviews resulting in 5,500 carefully written pages. It is one of the most important efforts the world has seen to document the horrors of the Holocaust. 

To protect the integrity of the witnesses, Lakocinski therefore chose to seal the entire archive for 50 years. Since the 1970s, the material has been stored at the University Library in Lund, but it was not until the mid-1990s that the archive capsules could be opened and the material revealed to the world. 

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11 Apr 2025