Info on the top lady & statue: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/woman-nazi-handbag-sweden-1985/
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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To provide context to anyone that wonders about this, the woman with the handbag wasn't proud of the event. She faced harassment for it, and for a while she and her partner lived under police protection. She committed suicide at the age of 41, around 3 years after this photo was taken.
Her son is unhappy with the image being used as propaganda.
There's more info on Wikipedia.
That is strange. I knew her grandson, who was very proudly boasting about her and her pure hatred for nazis, and this image. He was himself very vocally anti-nazi, that's how we met.
It's important to note that according to the article her son is not against the expression against nazis themselves, but rather because of the trauma to having to be constantly reminded of having lost his mother at such a young age. Just so that nobody gets the idea that he's even remotely defending nazis or their modern Swedish offspring, the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna).
So I listened to the documentary that was sourced as the origin of the quote. I wrote a comment here.
In essence, it doesn't seem like she regretted punching a nazi per se, but that she feared that it'd cause the life she'd worked so hard to build here to fall apart. I'd imagine that I also wouldn't be very fond of seeing an image my mother hated popping up left and right, and being reminded of what she went through because of it, even if it is as a symbol for a cause I align with.
Reading the sources, it primarily sounds like she was embarrassed of looking like an old lady in the photo, and afraid of Nazis striking back at her and her family.
One of the sources is her husband's coworker who said, "Danuta was mentally ill, but she had a solid hatred of Nazis as a Pole. She probably got caught up in the hateful atmosphere that was whipped up against the NRP-demonstrators in Växjö."
I don't care for how that's phrased, both in that he's speculating about her and that he seems to think you need some kind of personal grudge in order to oppose fascism.
If there's a source saying she regretted the action in itself, I missed it.
e: I was mistaken about that quote. It's from the article, but it's not attributed as a direct quote from the coworker. Swedish doesn't always use quotation marks, so I read it as a direct quote mistakenly, but it lacks a dash at the start of the paragraph. Without knowing the original I can't be sure how much the author is paraphrasing or speculating.
I can let you know that there is a lot of white and sane-washing of nazi ideology in Sweden today. The nazi party is literally the largest party in Sweden and could even achieve a majority vote in this fall's elections. Yes, you read that right.
It says that it's from the 2015 documentary. It's linked, but not transcribed. I've not listened to it yet so I can't say either way.
Were it me, I could see myself regretting the general event (händelsen), and the whole thing around it. Don't think I'd regret punching a nazi. They have it coming.
I unfortunately can't listen to it myself, so I just went off the text under it and the Expressen article about it. (I can hear, but my brain doesn't cooperate at listening.) I can't understand why they don't just transcribe the entries.
Relevant: https://www.sverigesradio.se/artikel/7424380
Right so I got to the point in the documentary where they mention it, it's around 36:50 in.
Off the cuff, rough translation:
The documentary highlights that initially no one knew who she was. There were rumours published in the news about a 54 year old woman making her way to Sweden from Poland just to attend the demonstration. That she'd previously been in a concentration camp.
It also mentions that she herself was just kind of looking for a new start in Sweden. She worked hard to blend in, and wanted to earn the respect of those around her. It mentions her growing up raised by her grandmother, because her own mother lived with trauma from the nazis and couldn't handle it. How she in turn was traumatised, and it was something she struggled with.
It doesn't strike me that she regretted punching a nazi, but more that she wished it hadn't happened because she feared the fallout, particularly given how hard she'd worked to start a new life. I'd imagine she feared all it collapsing around her. Supposedly the police never published her information, and they never got harassed by anyone, but she and her husband did request and were approved for police protection in the event of potential fallout.
Yeah I was looking for a transcription because I'm not quite in the mood to sit and listen to a documentary right now, but I might tomorrow.
Edit: that article kind of pisses me off. "We don't get money to make our content accessible."
We all pay taxes for that content, including deaf people. They should have equal access to it.
Granted this could be a right-wingers thing. I think they restricted how detailed SVT can report on things because "state owned media would unfairly compete with private media otherwise." Fucking bollocks.
Link to the English version of the same article but I get the sense that it doesn't have the same level of detail as the Swedish version.