Livia Fränkel was the chairperson of the Association of Survivors of the Holocaust and appeared as recently as on the Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27 this year.
She was engaged until the very end, says her daughter Lis Wohlin to Expressen.
Livia Fränkel came to Sweden together with her older sister Hédi Fried in the summer of 1945.
Taken to Auschwitz
She was born in 1927 in the city of Sighet in what was then Romania, in a part of the country that later became part of Hungary. In May 1944, she was taken together with her family to the concentration camp Auschwitz Birkenau, where her parents were murdered in the gas chambers upon arrival, while the sisters were moved after a few months to the labor camp Eidelstedt and from there to the concentration camp, which was liberated by the British on April 15.
The only thought when it dawned on me that we were free was that maybe one could get food, said Livia Fränkel in an interview with TT in 2015.
Awarded a Medal
Fränkel came to Sweden with the Red Cross ship M/S Rönnskär. She was then 17 years old. Two years later, she married Hans Fränkel. He was also of Jewish descent and had fled from Germany via Denmark to Sweden.
She educated herself and passed a commercial exam, and had three children. It was not until in connection with her retirement that she began to lecture about her experiences from the Holocaust. Livia Fränkel was a summer host in P1's "Summer" in 2023. In 2017, she was awarded the royal medal Illis quorum for her work in spreading knowledge about the Holocaust.
Her sister Hédi Fried, who was also a strong voice among Holocaust survivors in Sweden, passed away in November 2022.
