On December 4, six new grants were added to Norway's documentary heritage, the Norwegian part of UNESCO's Memory of the World register: One of them is the archive of Robert Savosnick.
- The fact that my father realized early on that he had to preserve documents describing his experiences during the Holocaust is very important to me. His work as a witness after the war has meant that they will remain unchanged forever as Norwegian cultural heritage. The contrast between being exterminated as a people and becoming part of Norwegian cultural heritage is great and emotional," says Chava Savosnick.
- «My father's documents strengthen the Norwegian document archive because his »voice' shows how the Norwegian Jewish minority became a victim of the Norwegian Holocaust, and how several Norwegian Jews after the war contributed as eyewitnesses to raise awareness in Norwegian society about how prejudice and intolerance can ultimately lead to murder," she says.
– Important to highlight in the national documentary heritage
Robert Savosnick was born into a Jewish family in Trondheim in 1915. After the Nazi actions against the Jews in Norway in 1942, both Robert and his father were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. Savosnick's mother and brother managed to escape to Sweden.
While his father was killed in Auschwitz in January 1943, Robert was one of the very few deportees to survive the war.
He returned to Norway in 1945, completed his medical studies and worked for many years as a pediatrician and school head doctor in Trondheim. Throughout much of the post-war period, Savosnick was also an active contemporary witness: He regularly participated in the public debate about the war and the Holocaust, and volunteered as an interviewee and traveling lecturer in schools in the Trondheim region. In 1986, he published his Holocaust memoirs under the title «I didn't want to die».
- Documenting the Holocaust in Norway is a key part of the HL Center's mandate. The Robert Savosnick archive documents the fate of one of the victims of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, and how Savosnick after the war actively used his experiences in the fight against anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial and racism. Therefore, we at the HL Center are pleased that the archive is now also highlighted as part of the national documentary heritage," says HL Center Director Guri Hjeltnes.
Documenting your work as a time witness
Savosnick's archive primarily documents his work as a contemporary witness. It contains handwritten manuscript drafts, notes and letters related to the publication of both the war memoirs and his participation in numerous radio programs and newspaper interviews. In this way, the archive also provides an insight into the place of the persecution of the Jews in Norwegian memorial culture and the wider public.
It also includes specific relics from Norwegian Holocaust history. Like the letter Savosnick wrote to his family from a makeshift collection camp for surviving Jewish prisoners in May 1945: «Unfortunately we are only 5-6 Norwegian Jews alive. The others are all dead».
Second nomination from the HL Center for Norway's documentary heritage
The archive of Robert Savosnick is the second one the HL Center nominates for Norway's document heritage. In 2014, the archive of Ruth Maier was included in the same register.
Both archives have the Holocaust as their framework. Both include key testimonies from the history of the Holocaust in Norway. At the same time, they tell parts of this story from different perspectives: Ruth Maier was a Jewish refugee, Robert Savonick was born and raised in Norway. Maier gave her testimony in the period leading up to the deportation, Savonick in the period after the end of the war. Maier was one of the murdered, Savosnick one of the survivors.
Together, the two archives make Norway's documentary heritage a more representative register. Not only because they give a voice to representatives of the country's Jewish minority. But also because they highlight one of the darkest chapters in Norwegian history.
And not least because their inclusion in the national documentary heritage underlines the majority community's obligation to continue managing the history of this darkest chapter.
Here you will find more information about the HL Center's archive collection.
