And in the Vienna Woods the Trees Still Stand

Elisabeth Åsbrink is a Swedish writer and journalist, recipient of numerous literary awards in Sweden and abroad. Her work is haunted by the Holocaust as seen from a Swedish perspective — from a country that escaped occupation, but whose neutrality and passivity in the face of the fate of European Jews is a subject long left unspoken. And in the Vienna Woods the Trees Still Stand is a reckoning with that history — and at the same time a personal story, since Åsbrink is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor.

At the centre of the book is the story of Otto Ullmann — a Jewish boy whose parents sent him in 1939 from Nazi-occupied Vienna to Sweden through a Swedish evangelical mission. Otto is to be baptised and taken in by a Protestant foster family. Over five years of separation his parents write him more than five hundred letters. In 1944 both perish in Auschwitz. Otto remains in Sweden.

Åsbrink interweaves Otto’s story with that of his contemporary — Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, who as a teenager belonged to the Swedish Nazi movement and maintained close ties with fascist circles. The two boys were friends; one was a Nazi, the other a Jewish refugee. This juxtaposition is not the product of fictionalisation but of painstaking archival research.

The book is a reckoning with a Sweden that liked to present itself as an open and humanitarian country, while for years turning a blind eye to antisemitism and collaboration with Nazi Germany. Åsbrink writes with precision and economy, without bitterness and without melodrama — her strength is precisely this cool, analytical gaze, which makes the picture all the more devastating.