🇸🇪 🇵🇱 In WWII, Sweden may have remained officially neutral, but Swedes, well . . .

 🇸🇪 🇵🇱

In WWII, Sweden may have remained officially neutral, but Swedes, well . . .

Everyone who knows a thing or two about that war has heard of Raoul Wallenberg, the rescuer of Hungarian Jews, or Count Bernadotte and his white buses ferrying concentration camp inmates to safety.

 Yet, more Swedes were on the light side of the force. Take Swedish volunteers in Finland, invaded by the USSR. 

Take all these good souls who accepted the Jews smuggled out of Denmark in their homes. Take charming Elna Gistedt.

This operetta singer came to Warsaw in 1922 on a two-week contract, fell madly in love with a Polish businessman, married him and stayed for good.

 By the time WWII broke out in 1939, she’d gotten head over heels with the country too, which loved Elna back for that lyric soprano and charming personality of hers.

 And then, with the German occupation of Poland and Warsaw, the soprano found herself living in a city taken over by the Sopranos.

The German mobsters immediately hit the local people with their organized crime, and, of course, banned artistic activity, unless it was pro-Nazi.

 Few artists went along, and Elna was also thank you but no thank you: under no circumstances would she entertain the Krauts. 

What she would do was open a café in the heart of Warsaw, where she'd employ and shelter Polish performers and save them from starvation or ending up standing blindfolded over a Palmiry mass grave.

Elna could have just flashed her Swedish passport to obtain safe passage to neutral Stockholm, but she had more to do in occupied Warsaw, with all that persecution, injustice and suffering going on around.

 She helped her Polish friends but didn’t forget about the Jews either. 

By late 1940, the Germans had locked them up in the ghetto – but forgot to lock it out from Elsa, who frequently sneaked in with food, medication and consolation.

In late 1942, the fertile Zamość region in eastern General Government saw the launch of a large-scale social engineering operation aiming to replace the local Poles with German settlers. 

Over 100,000 people, 30,000 of them children, were removed, and it was the underage who suffered the most.

 4,000 of them were sent to Germany for denationalization, of older and stronger kid

s sentenced to slave labour, but the young and weak, well . . .

The young and weak, if lucky, would join the elderly in the Rentendörfer [retirement villages], abandoned without any means of living, or – and that was the worse alternative – got sent for annihilation in concentration camps, mainly KL Lublin and KL Auschwitz. 

In early 1943, eastern General Government saw dozens of trains run with their underage cargo to denationalization, exploitation, extinction or extermination centers.

The word got around; people would look out for such transports to intercept a kid here or two there, and Elna Gistedt became one of the trainspotters.

 In March 1943, she borrowed a truck from the Swedish embassy, grabbed all her money and drove southeast, until at a countryside station she saw hundreds of children being sardined into cattle cars. 

The SS wouldn’t let them all go, but Elsa’s cash and jewellery bought 34 of the weakest ones, marked for gas chamber.  

She brought them to Warsaw, and had her friends help oganize treatment before distributing the children in the local families.

 They would be returned to their parents after the war, but meanwhile, these 34 and others needed to be supported, so Elna reckoned that these were the circumstances under which she would, after all, entertain the Krauts. 

Except she told the German patrons enjoying performances in her café that she was fundraising for the Wehrmacht.

She kept doing that until the Warsaw Uprising, which she survived, although her husband didn’t.

 He died of exhaustion in a transit camp near Warsaw, after the Germans, having murdered a big part of the capital population, drove the rest out of the city. 

In the camp, they tried to force Elna to perform for their frontline troops but she’d seen what they’d done to her city. To the Zamość children.

 To Poland. Thank you but no thank you. She left for Sweden. 

After the war, she returned to Poland destroyed by the war, to bombed theatres, to incomplete casts of the same shows and operettas, to perform for decimated Polish audiences.

 Yet, the country was being taken over by the communists, who didn’t want this pre-WWII socialite, widow of a capitalist and citizen of a democratic country to infect the newly promoted working class with decadent ideas of the West. Thank you but no thank you.

In 1949, they made her leave. 33 years later, Elna Gistedt, Polish expat in Swedish exile, died in her home Stockholm, missing a faraway Polish city that had also become her home.