Hitler's Slaves: Life Stories of Forced Labourers in Nazi-Occupied Europe 9781845459901

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
Foreword
Acknowledgements
I
Introduction
II
1. Reports from Germany on Forced and Slave Labour
2. Work, Repression and Death after the Spanish Civil War
3. Czechs as Forced and Slave Labourers during the Second World War
4. Slovak Republic (1939–1945)
5. ‘You can’t say it out loud. And you can’t forget’
6. The Fate of Polish Slave and Forced Labourers from Łódz
7. Interviews with Polish Roma
8. The French Experience
9. The Experiences of Hungarian Slave and Forced Labourers
10. ‘Mother, are the apples at home ripe yet?’
11. Of Silence and Remembrance
12. ‘If you lose your freedom, you lose everything’
13. They Survived Two Wars
14. Forced Labour in Bulgaria 1941–1944
15. Lithuania 1941–1944
16. Belarusian Forced Labourers
17. Forced and Slave Labour in Belarus
18. The Experience of Forced Labourers from Galician Ukraine
19. Oral Histories of Former Ukrainian Ostarbeiter
20. Oral Testimonies from Russian Victims of Forced Labour
21. The Experience of Citizens of the Former Soviet Union as Forced Labourers in Nazi Germany
22. Presenting Life in Captivity
23. Women’s Biographies and Women’s Memory of War
24. The Deportation of the Italians 1943–1945
25. Former Forced Labourers as Immigrants in Great Britain after 1945
26. Slave Labour and Shoah
27. International Slave and Forced Labour Documentation Project
28. Forced and Slave Labour in the Context of the Jewish Holocaust Experience
III
29. A Memorial for the Persecuted, Materials for Education and Science
30. ‘A moment of elation … and painful’
31. Witnesses at the First Auschwitz Trial in Frankfurt
32. Twenty-five Years Later
33. It Was Modern Slavery
Appendix 1: Interview Guidelines
Appendix 2: Timeline
Appendix 3: Interview Partners
List of Contributors
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

HITLER’S SLAVES

HITLER’S SLAVES Life Stories of Forced Labourers in Nazi-Occupied Europe

Edited by

Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh and Christoph Thonfeld

Berghahn Books NEW YORK • OXFORD

First published in 2010 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com German edition, Hitlers Sklaven. Lebensgeschichtliche Analysen im internationalen Vergleich, published 2008, Boehlau Publishers. ©2010 Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh and Christoph Thonfeld All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

This research was financed by the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hitlers Sklaven. English Hitler’s slaves : life stories of forced labourers in Nazi-occupied Europe / edited by Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh, and Christoph Thonfeld. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-84545-698-6 (hbk. : alk. paper) 1. Forced labor—Germany—History—20th century. 2. Forced labor— Europe—History—20th century. 3. Slavery—Europe—History—20th century. 4. World War, 1939–1945—Conscript labor—Germany. 5. World War, 1939–1945—Conscript labor—Europe. 6. World War, 1939–1945—Biography. 7. Concentration camp inmates—Europe—Biography. 8. Prisoners of war— Europe—Biography. 9. Germany—History—1933–1945—Biography. 10. Europe—History—1918–1945—Biography. I. Plato, Alexander von. II. Leh, Almut. III. Thonfeld, Christoph. IV. Title. HD4875.G4H5713 2010 940.54’05—dc22 2010013476 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed in the United States on acid-free paper. ISBN: 978-1-84545-698-6 Hardback

CONTENTS

Foreword Board of Directors of the Foundation ‘Remembrance, Responsibility and Future’ Acknowledgements

ix

xiii

I Introduction Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh and Christoph Thonfeld

3

II 1. Reports from Germany on Forced and Slave Labour Alexander von Plato

23

2. Work, Repression and Death after the Spanish Civil War Mercedes Vilanova

37

3. Czechs as Forced and Slave Labourers during the Second World War Šárka Jarská 4. Slovak Republic (1939–1945) Viola Jakschová 5. ‘You can’t say it out loud. And you can’t forget’: Polish Experiences of Slave and Forced Labour for the ‘Third Reich’ Piotr Filipkowski and Katarzyna Madon;-Mitzner

47 59

71

vi

Contents

6. The Fate of Polish Slave and Forced Labourers from Łódz; Ewa Czerwiakowski and Gisela Wenzel

86

7. Interviews with Polish Roma: A Report of My Experiences Artur Podgorski

99

8. The French Experience: STO, a Memory to Collect, a History to Write Anne-Marie Granet-Abisset 9. The Experiences of Hungarian Slave and Forced Labourers Éva Kovács

113 124

10. ‘Mother, are the apples at home ripe yet?’ Slovenian Forced and Slave Labourers during the Second World War Monika Kokalj Koc=evar

138

11. Of Silence and Remembrance: Forced Labour and the NDH, and the History of their Remembrance Christian Schölzel

151

12. ‘If you lose your freedom, you lose everything’: The Experiences and Memories of Serbian Forced Labourers Barbara N. Wiesinger

166

13. They Survived Two Wars: Bosnian Roma as Civil War Refugees in Germany Birgit Mair

177

14. Forced Labour in Bulgaria 1941–1944: Tracing the Memories Ana Luleva

188

15. Lithuania 1941–1944: Slave and Forced Labourers Remember 199 Rose Lerer Cohen 16. Belarusian Forced Labourers: Types and Recruitment Methods Alexander Dalhouski

211

17. Forced and Slave Labour in Belarus: Experiences, Coping Strategies and Personal Accounts Imke Hansen and Alesja Belanovich

226

18. The Experience of Forced Labourers from Galician Ukraine Tetyana Lapan 19. Oral Histories of Former Ukrainian Ostarbeiter: Preliminary Results of Analysis Gelinada Grinchenko

238

250

Contents

vii

20. Oral Testimonies from Russian Victims of Forced Labour Irina Scherbakova 21. The Experience of Citizens of the Former Soviet Union as Forced Labourers in Nazi Germany Natalia Timofeyeva 22. Presenting Life in Captivity: Oral Testimonies of Former Forced and Slave Labourers from St Petersburg and the Russian Northwest Anna Reznikova

262

276

286

23. Women’s Biographies and Women’s Memory of War Olga Nikitina, Elena Rozhdestvenskaya and Victoria Semenova

296

24. The Deportation of the Italians 1943–1945 Doris Felsen and Viviana Frenkel

310

25. Former Forced Labourers as Immigrants in Great Britain after 1945 Christoph Thonfeld 26. Slave Labour and Shoah: A View from Israel Margalit Bejarano and Amija Boasson

324 338

27. International Slave and Forced Labour Documentation Project: United States, Atlanta, Georgia Sara Ghitis and Ruth Weinberger

351

28. Forced and Slave Labour in the Context of the Jewish Holocaust Experience Dori Laub and Johanna Bodenstab

364

III 29. A Memorial for the Persecuted, Materials for Education and Science: The Compilation of Biographies of Former Slave and Forced Labourers Almut Leh and Henriette Schlesinger 30. ‘A moment of elation … and painful’: The Homecoming of Slave and Forced Labourers after the Second World War Christoph Thonfeld 31. Witnesses at the First Auschwitz Trial in Frankfurt Dagi Knellesen

377

394 407

viii

Contents

32. Twenty-five Years Later: Revisiting Testimonies of Holocaust Survivors Dori Laub and Johanna Bodenstab

426

33. It Was Modern Slavery: Some Results of the Documentation Project on Forced and Slave Labour Alexander von Plato

441

Appendix 1: Interview Guidelines (Alexander von Plato)

485

Appendix 2: Timeline: Forced Labour and Compensation (Joachim Riegel)

495

Appendix 3: Interview Partners

509

List of Contributors

523

Bibliography

525

Index

538

FOREWORD Board of Directors of the Foundation ‘Remembrance, Responsibility and Future’

T

he Foundation ‘Remembrance, Responsibility and Future’ has a twofold mandate: firstly, in recognition of Germany’s responsibility for National Socialist injustice, to make payments to former victims of National Socialism, in particular former forced labourers, and secondly to keep alive the memory of this injustice for future generations and promote projects that enable us to learn the lessons of history and so foster understanding between peoples. In the summer of 2001, one year after it was founded and as the culmination of a nationwide debate and international negotiations, the foundation began making payments to former victims of National Socialism. Between 2001 and 2007, *4.37 billion was disbursed to 1,655,000 forced labourers in almost 100 countries. Payments were also made to victims of National Socialist medical experiments and to those who suffered property and insurance losses. In addition, over €300 million was used to support special humanitarian assistance programmes for Jewish and non-Jewish Holocaust victims. These payments, which were made fifty-five years after the end of the war and reached only a fraction of former forced labourers, were not intended as ‘compensation’ for the personal suffering inflicted, but nevertheless represented real material assistance for many. They were also understood as moral recognition of the suffering caused. The payments may have brought financial closure to the question of compensation for forced labour, but according to the text of the Foundation Law, they did not draw a line under our moral and political responsibility. We must now ask ourselves: how can the memory of the injustices

x

Foreword

inflicted on forced labourers be kept alive for current and future generations? The first way is to document the memories of these people. The importance of this task was underscored by the representatives of the victims’ organisations on the foundation’s Board of Trustees. In contrast to the political persecutees of National Socialism, who have documented their remembrances in a variety of ways since 1945, and unlike the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, who have been encouraged since the 1970s to bear witness and for whom an impressive memorial has been created through the over 50,000 interviews conducted worldwide by the Shoah Foundation initiated by Steven Spielberg, forced labourers have had little opportunity, to date, to report on their fates and to document these in written form. This applies especially (but not exclusively) to victims in Central and Eastern Europe. In the summer of 2003, the Board of Trustees therefore decided to launch an international programme that would give former forced labourers an opportunity to relate their life stories and talk about their suffering. In recognition of the injustices brought upon them, victims who were not legally entitled to payments from the foundation were also invited to take part in these interviews: these included former Soviet prisoners of war, Italian military internees and forced labourers from Western Europe. It is particularly difficult for the survivors to talk about their past suffering to strangers, most of whom belong to a much younger generation. Nobody finds it easy to recall pain and degradation, even if they know that in doing so they are helping save future generations from this experience. On the other hand, for many of those affected it was a chance to ‘share’ their fate with others – a fate that many had remained silent about for decades or had revealed only to close family members. The interviews, which were conducted in the native languages of the interviewees by researchers from the respective countries, did not focus exclusively on reports of injustice. The intention was rather to give the survivors an opportunity to talk about their lives, thoughts and feelings, and to go beyond the experiences of victimhood during the National Socialist era. For many, the postwar era was also very painful, and some were once again victims of discrimination or new forms of persecution in their own countries. Many of the interviewees found this broader biographical approach particularly beneficial; it also allows members of postwar generations to recognise and show respect for the impressive life achievements of these people. The foundation’s partner, Alexander von Plato and the team at the Institute for History and Biography at the Fernuniversität Hagen, fulfilled these expectations professionally and sensitively. Between 2005 and 2006, thirty-two projects in twenty-seven countries were carried out under his leadership. The result is a unique collection of biographical inter-

Foreword

xi

views that will be available for research and education purposes once the technical and academic preparatory and compilation work is complete. This volume breaks new ground in academic research. It not only contains interpretations of the individual interviews but also focuses on how the collection came into being and how it will be applied in future research. For the first time, objective and personal historical accounts of forced labour under National Socialism are brought together in a broad international perspective, and research into the history of the Holocaust is combined with that of forced and slave labour. If we thus succeed in anchoring the subject of forced labour under National Socialism as a field of international research, we will have achieved one of the foundation’s primary objectives. At the same time, we still face a great challenge: to prepare and compile the eyewitness accounts collected in this project for future educational work. With this in mind, the foundation has joined up with the Freie Universität Berlin and the German Historical Museum to create a living archive entitled ‘Forced Labor 1939–1945: Memory and History. A Digital Archive for Education and Research’. The Freie Universität went online with the archive in January 2008, and the materials are now available to researchers, teachers and other interested persons throughout the world at . After registering, visitors can access the audio and video interviews, use the transcripts and the database for their research work, and view documents that have already been translated into German. In the same month, the German Historical Museum at Berlin installed a PC work station containing excerpts from twelve interviews as part of its permanent exhibition. These are also available online at . Teaching materials for use in schools are currently being prepared and will be available in 2010. The academic team plans to continue developing the collection, and by 2012 the ‘Forced Labour 1939–1945’ online portal will have grown into an interactive platform for academics and educators working in this field. Over the long term and on this basis, the foundation will support projects that enable young people to consult these extraordinary eyewitness testimonies, each according to his or her individual interests and background knowledge. For the foundation, the task is to ensure that the biographical accounts of the victims of National Socialism remain available for use in historical and political education over the long term. On behalf of the Board of Directors of the foundation, I would like to thank Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh, Christoph Thonfeld, Elena Danchenko, Joachim Riegel and Henriette Schlesinger for their excellent work in managing the programme and for initiating this first study. My thanks also go to all the researchers, who brought their academic expertise to the programme and conducted the interviews with great dedica-

xii

Foreword

tion and sensitivity. I would also like express my appreciation to the staff at the foundation, especially Ralf Possekel and Evelyn Geier, who have provided academic, conceptual and organisational support throughout the entire project. Without them, the excellent results achieved in the work with the various parties would not have been possible. They also supported the Board of Directors in finding solutions to complex project design and financing issues. Finally, I would like to thank the former forced labourers who were willing to relate their life stories and allow these to be used for the purposes of research and education. This is a real sign of trust, and we are greatly indebted to them for this. Günter Saathoff Member of the Board of Directors Foundation ‘Remembrance, Responsibility and Future’

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

T

he editors are grateful for the assistance of Elena Danchenko, Joachim Riegel and Henriette Schlesinger in the preparation of this volume.

I

INTRODUCTION Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh and Christoph Thonfeld

I

T

here are numerous publications on forced labour in National Socialist Germany during the Second World War. But a publication such as this one, combining the depiction of historical conditions and developments with the biographies and memories of former forced labourers from twenty-seven countries, is unprecedented, particularly in that it displays such regional variety and adopts a comparative international perspective. This is the first time that research on the Holocaust and its survivors has intersected with investigations of the experiences of slave and forced labour. Up to now, no publication has succeeded in productively crossing the borders between different regional research fields, between documentary and lived history, or between research and educational work in ways that are both productive for scholarship and accessible to young people and adults at schools and universities or at non-university educational institutions.

II During the Second World War about 13.5 million people in all were employed in forced labour in Germany or in the territories occupied by the German Reich. They included 8.4 million civilian workers who had Notes for this chapter begin on page 17.

4

Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh and Christoph Thonfeld

to work for private companies and public agencies in industry and in agriculture. In addition, there were 4.6 million prisoners of war whose deployment as labour far exceeded the extent permitted by the relevant sections of the Geneva Convention which had been signed by the German Reich (Figure 1)1 and 1.7 million concentration camp prisoners who had to do forced labour in concentration or similar camps or were ‘lent out’ or sold by the SS.2

Figure 1. Prisoners of War and Civil Workers 1939–1945 Forced labourers came from different parts of the world, the majority from Eastern and Western Europe (Figure 2); they came from every imaginable milieu and ethnicity. As this book makes extremely clear, the fate of those who had to work like slaves in concentration camps under extreme living and working conditions – principally Jews, so-called Gypsies and political opponents of the National Socialists – was particularly harsh and brutal. The death rate among them was particularly high. Most forced labourers came from the Soviet Union – Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and the Baltic countries (which were not statistically recorded as individual Soviet republics in those years) – and from France,

Introduction

5

with its overwhelming share of prisoners of war, Poland, and Italy. After Italy’s surrender on 8 July 1943, the Italian armed forces in Italy, Greece, the Balkans and elsewhere were disarmed by German troops, and under the name ‘Italian military internees’ (IMI) the bulk of them were deported to Germany for forced labour. Without these millions of forced labourers the German war economy, the infrastructure of the German Reich and the occupied countries, and the supply of food to the German population would have broken down at an early stage. Many buildings, canals, reservoirs and factories built by their labour still exist today. In the course of the war the proportion of forced labourers among the total number of people employed in productive work in the Reich increased.   &%& -2/2+-201 /*,,,*,,,

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Figure 2. Forced Labourers by Country Most of the forced labourers worked in agriculture, where they provided almost half of employees; in the mining, building, chemical and metal industries they made up about one third and in the field of transport more than one fourth (Figure 3). In August 1944, 26.5 per cent of those working in the economy as a whole were foreigners who had been forced to work in the German Reich in one way or another (Figure 3).3

6

Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh and Christoph Thonfeld

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Figure 3. Share of foreign workers among the total number of workers in per cent (August 1944)

III For decades, forced labour remained ‘invisible’ to the public and outwith the official culture of remembrance in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG).4 This reflected, among other things, the fact that compensation payments hardly needed to be discussed publicly, as the London Debt Agreement of 1953 postponed any compensation payment for foreign (non-German) forced labourers until the conclusion of a peace treaty, which never came or – in the form of the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany – was not called a peace treaty. (This naming practice may have been a direct reflex of anxieties about Germany’s liability for compensation, or it may have been intended to avoid any kind of similarity to the Versailles Treaty after the First World War.)5 German forced labourers were soon confronted with the argument of the statute of limitations. In short: the old Federal Republic of Germany did not provide for compensation for forced labour, and the new Federal Republic, reunited Germany, started to settle this question only at the end of the 1990s. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) too avoided introducing policies on compensation for forced labour. The Cold War may be supposed to have done the rest, inasmuch as it was possible to keep the states that were now West Germany’s allies quiet on this question, while demands for compensation could be denounced as Soviet propaganda. “At best, some of those forced labourers who belonged to the concentra-

Introduction

7

tion camp workforce which was deployed at a rather late stage, could make claims for compensation for wrongful imprisonment according to the Bundesentschädigungsgesetz (Federal Compensation Act).”6 Thus some former forced labourers tried to make claims under civil law, but most of them failed in court. In the 1950s there was a first settlement between a forced labourer from a concentration camp and the IG Farben i.l. (in liquidation) at the Frankfurt District Court. A further German industrial enterprise and the Jewish Claims Conference followed this example, settling out of court. Further examples followed in the 1960s and 1970s, so that one may say that former concentration camp prisoners had a limited chance of success – if any – through direct negotiations with companies, without the latter acknowledging any binding claim against them. Only at the end of the 1980s, when German banks and industrial concerns were increasingly appearing on the US market, was there a shift in attitude on their part, in the context of which the question of security against the claims primarily of former forced labourers from concentration camps played quite a considerable role. Now there were moves to create a foundation in partnership with the federal government, which was to receive funds of about DM10 billion, half from business and half from public funds. However, only 7.1 per cent of addressed companies joined in, even though making a commitment did not imply any admission of guilt. About 200,000 companies with more than ten employees were asked for financial help, regardless of whether they had existed before 1945. The federal foundation Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft (Remembrance, Responsibility and Future) was created in the year 2000. Its principles were agreed after lengthy and difficult international negotiations, and it set about developing a scheme for scaled payments of humanitarian aid.7 Thus, former concentration camp prisoners (‘slave labourers’ of both sexes) had a claim to higher payments than ‘common’ forced labourers, and forced labourers in agriculture could receive compensation only in the context of the so-called ‘openness clause’8 and again received less money than forced labourers employed in industry or the building trade. Prisoners of war had no claim for compensation from Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft, nor did the former Italian military internees who tried but failed to enforce their claim in court (see the chapter from Italy on this topic in this volume). Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft in Berlin and its five partner organisations in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and the Czech Republic, as well as the Jewish Claims Conference (the partner in charge of payments to Jews) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) (responsible for beneficiaries elsewhere in the world, especially Roma),

8

Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh and Christoph Thonfeld

continued to make compensation payments until June 2007. The process is now complete. Former forced labourers received as much as DM5,000 (€2,556.38), former slave labourers as much as DM15,000 (€7,669.38) each, in two instalments. In all, between the first payouts in June 2001 and the end of the programme in June 2007, some €4.37 billion was paid to about 1.66 million beneficiaries in 100 countries.9 The partner organisations had discretion over the disbursement of about 95 per cent of the funds allocated by the foundation, and they also had some funds of their own. This made it possible to augment the total of DM8.1 billion (about €4.05 billion) that the law provided for this project, as well to take into consideration a wider range of beneficiaries than originally anticipated.10 However, in the light of the total of 8.4 million civilian workers and 1.7 million concentration camp prisoners pressed into forced labour, the dimension of the payments needs to be considerably qualified. Even if compensation payments have meant a certain degree of satisfaction for most of the individuals we interviewed, it was too late for the bulk of the deported and exploited. They did not live long enough to see its benefits. Apart from payments to former forced labourers, the foundation Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft has also funded various projects and programmes in Germany and other countries with a total of €27 million since its founding in the year 2000.11 Among these was the international project on documenting the biographies of former forced and slave labourers, whose results are presented here.

IV It fits well into this history of late compensation payments that for decades the history of forced labour has also been relatively neglected by research historians. There were various reasons for this. First of all, the London Peace Conference in 1953 had its effects in this field too, because, as already mentioned, it postponed compensation until the conclusion of a peace treaty and thus made debates on forced labour look less urgent – particularly among members of those generations that had experienced National Socialism and shrunk back from problems of ‘compensation’ in the Germany of the postwar period. Second, the self-image of most entrepreneurs of the postwar period was almost entirely untroubled by questions of responsibility, compensation or even personal guilt: war was war, the ‘employment of foreign workers’ had been necessary for the war effort, most forced labourers had been treated decently, and information about killing, even killing through work, particularly of Jews, had been

Introduction

9

available only afterwards. Furthermore, neither the US nor France, and definitely not the Soviet Union, had treated German prisoners of war as combatants after the war: they too had been forced to work. The widespread image of the ‘decent’ Wehrmacht, which had had nothing to do with SS crimes, was echoed in the equally powerful image of the ‘decent businessman’ who justified himself with sentences like: ‘We stayed decent; crimes against forced labourers and against representatives of the workers movement were committed by fanatical Nazis and the SS.’ One entrepreneur, a relative of the well-known industrialist Vögeler and himself a shareholder in the ‘Union’ works at Auschwitz, defended himself against accusations of guilt with a special kind of ‘domino theory’: any concession to claims by former Jewish forced labourers, even in a single case, he explained in 1989, would result in the collapse of the entire (West) German postwar economy. And anyway, he stated, it was his experience that former forced labourers were only trying to make money out of the case.12 A third reason for the dearth of historical research is that until the early 1980s almost all big company archives remained closed to researchers seeking to study this topic. Most public archives, too, retreated behind the sign reading ‘data protection’. The first scholars who nevertheless succeeded in writing fundamental studies on ‘foreign workers’ or ‘displaced persons’ in the early 1980s – notably Herbert and Jacobmeyer13 – had to struggle against this policy of refusal. But when the state and economic interests – notably the big banks and industrial firms – began to worry that in the wake of globalisation and international mergers they were in danger of being ‘handicapped’, particularly in the United States, if compensation claims were not settled, the already weakened levees broke. Some of the big companies, such as Volkswagen or Daimler-Benz, some banks such as Dresdner and Deutsche Bank, initiated scholarly studies on the history of their companies during National Socialism and in particular on the question of slave and forced labour. The public archives also changed their policy towards such studies, most of them even earlier. Since then there has been a whole host of general, regional and local research, most of it in Germany. But in other countries, too, such as Russia, Ukraine, the US and Austria, growing interest in this topic can be observed.14

V As for the history and the tasks of the project, after talks in early summer 2003 between the representative of Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft, Ralf Possekel (himself a historian with a doctorate), and the

10

Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh and Christoph Thonfeld

head of the Institute of History and Biography at the Fernuniversität Hagen, Alexander von Plato, the first application was made for funding an international video documentation on the biographies of former forced labourers,15 which was basically accepted by the then board of the foundation Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft. However, one question remained unresolved: were these to be life-history interviews, as proposed in the application, or were they to be restricted to the experience of forced labour? As a result, the project was put out to tender, and in the end – more than a year later – the institute’s proposal for a biographical documentation project was again accepted.16 In agreement with the Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft foundation it was determined that at least 440 biographical interviews were to be conducted on an international scale, a goal that was clearly exceeded by the end of the project, when nearly 600 interviews had been recorded. The original hope of being able to videotape all interviews was abandoned during the first phase of planning, in favour of a greater number of interviews. Thus, it was decided that only one quarter of all interviews would be videotaped (though in the highest possible quality, BETA SP), and the rest recorded only on audio cassettes. Also there was an agreement that – 80 interviews should be conducted in Ukraine – 80 in Poland – 60 in Russia – 40 in Belarus – 40 in the Czech Republic – 30 in the US – 25 in Israel, and – the remaining ones in Western and Southern Europe, in some Eastern European countries (the Baltic countries, the Balkans, Moldova) and the ‘rest of the world’ (including those states that had been National Socialist Germany’s allies), as well as non–country-specific interviews with Roma and Sinti (about 5 per cent); and that – about 80 interviews should be conducted with Jewish slave labourers.

Essentially, these guidelines were met.17 Originally, in its application the Institute of History and Biography had suggested selecting interview partners at random on the basis of international databases. However, most representatives of the organisations of forced labourers and the partner organisations of Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft wanted the interview partners to be chosen according to countries and groups of victims. After the beginning of the contract in the autumn of 2004, qualified interviewers had to be found quickly; they needed to be familiar with

Introduction

11

the existing research in the field and have some oral history experience, good or very good English language skills (maybe also Russian), and experience with international projects. Also, it was intended that at least some contributors to the project would be familiar with administrative problems in different countries, as well as able to deal with databases and problems of archiving. It proved possible to assemble the team that coordinated the project from Germany very quickly.18 Given the short timescale of 24–30 months, it was necessary almost simultaneously to find qualified groups of interviewers in as many countries as possible and as fast as possible. The project was advertised internationally, and the International Oral History Association and existing contacts with the contributors to the International Mauthausen Documenting Project were also mobilised;19 50 groups from 29 countries responded with applications. Based on the suggestions of the Institute of History and Biography and with the help of an international jury of experts, 32 groups were finally chosen to conduct interviews in 27 countries.20 Basically, these 32 groups with about 72 staff members stayed together for the entire time of the project. Those participants who had responsibility for conducting the interviews and writing the interpretative essays attended three seminars with us in Berlin, so that all the teams would be able to conduct the interviews at the same level and using the same method. For this purpose a set of training materials was produced in several languages. Soon we agreed that the interviews should deal with the whole life story of each interviewee, including their early lives, forced labour and persecution during the Second World War, and subsequent lives, even though the events during forced labour remained essential. Furthermore, we agreed to write a record of the interview, a short biography, and a data sheet after each interview, following common guidelines. Basic training regarding technological problems turned out to be quite important: operating the recording equipment, being aware of problems of camera, light and sound in the case of video recordings, and so on. Moreover, we intended to create a comprehensive archive of the biographies, which required that we standardise our terms and procedure in the data sheets – something we were able to perfect in the course of the project. The third and probably most essential step, of course, was the search for interview partners. Apart from the above mentioned selection criteria, it was agreed that interview partners for each part of the project should comprise half men and half women, have worked in a range of different economic sectors, represent a range of accommodation experiences (private homes or farms, concentration or labour camps of various kinds) and include forced labourers deployed with the Organisation Todt (OT) and people imprisoned in detention camps. Their experiences of homecoming and postwar treatment should also have been different.

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Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh and Christoph Thonfeld

Above all, as far as possible they should not have been interviewed before. We also intended to interview individuals who were not entitled to compensation but nevertheless had been forced to do forced labour, such as Italian military internees or prisoners of war. In the course of the project some particular problems arose that should at least be mentioned here, as they influenced the results. Some of the problems were practical, and some arose from the nature of the subject itself: Our project teams found it most difficult to find so-called ‘Gypsies’ – Roma in Eastern Europe and Sinti in Germany – as interview partners. One reason for this is the life expectancy of Roma in Eastern Europe, which at an average of 65 years is relatively low. Another reason was that they live and work in transnational contexts. Some had fled during the Bosnian civil war, and quite a considerable number of them live or are ‘tolerated’ in Germany, where their permission to remain has to be regularly renewed. 21 Others could not be reached, as they were not organised, while still others did not see any sense in interviews because so much has happened to them since the war that they have little or no specific memory of the particular experience of slave or forced labour – or do not want to remember it.22 On the question of whether there should be interviews with Jewish slave labourers in Eastern Europe or only in Western Europe, the US and Israel there were differences with partner organisations from Eastern Europe. They took the view that up to now only Jews – if anybody – had been interviewed: in projects such as the Shoah Foundation interview project, other victims, particularly Soviet prisoners of war, who also suffered an enormous death rate (almost 60 per cent) in camps comparable to concentration camps, had barely been taken into consideration at all. This problem persisted throughout the project. Nevertheless, we decided to conduct interviews with slave labourers, mostly Jews, in Eastern Europe, since for comparative purposes they could not be left out – leaving aside the fact that they represented the group with the lowest chances of survival. Another problem was that some people who wanted to be interviewed or had been suggested as interview partners qualified as victims of Nazi persecution in a general sense but had not done slave labour. This was the case with individuals who had been children at the time, but also with many Roma who for various reasons had been able to evade the National Socialist system of forced labour. Here, some interview partners found it difficult to understand that this project was primarily about forced labour and the international comparison of the experience of forced labour, and that a person had to have experienced forced labour to be interviewed.

Introduction

13

VI Of the objectives we pursued in this project, one of the key ones was researching the ways in which experiences during National Socialism influenced the later lives of those deported to Germany for slave and forced labour or subjected to forced labour in the occupied territories: in respect of health, education or career, love and family, religious belief, political orientation, finances as far as compensation for wrongful imprisonment or pension, and much more. This was based on the assumption that the situation might be different depending whether people had been in death camps, as most Jewish slave labourers were, where labour, no matter how brutal, often meant the only hope for survival; or had been accommodated in camps attached to factories, in a town or in the country, or privately, with farmers who might have been brutal, compassionate or even friendly; or whether or not there had been contact with Germans or forced labourers from other countries. Obviously, there were differences between men and women, especially since women in particular suffered the threat of sexual harassment or rape. We also assumed that there would be differences depending on whether the individuals had suffered punishment, whether they had survived by drawing on particular religious or political convictions, whether they had been young or relatively old, what personal and family circumstances they had been forced to leave behind, and the like. We were also interested in how people came to terms with the period of forced labour in the respective countries, both individually and collectively, and how this period ‘fitted into’ one’s own biography. We had to question them about their education and training and their family life, asking for example to what extent forced labour in Germany had interrupted or even completely blocked their education. But there is also the unavoidable question about how they were received by their ‘own’ states, their own immediate or wider community, and their own family. Thus, homecoming played a significant role in our interviews. For example, were our interviewees able to return to a family and an intact environment, or had the family been killed or scattered to the four winds? Of course we knew that in the territories of the Soviet Union returning forced labourers were generally suspected of having supported the German war economy or of even having committed treason. In Moscow, for instance, we had seen files or read reports about former forced labourers who after 1945 had to embark on a new odyssey, being sent on to other camps even after they had passed through the filtration camps where the history and attitudes of all returnees were investigated. At the same time it was clear that those who emigrated to Palestine or the US were

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received differently in terms of the acknowledgement of their persecution and growing acceptance in the host society, but at the same time faced the new difficulties of emigration. In what ways have ‘homecoming experiences’ of so many kinds influenced today’s memory or narratives? In what ways were ‘the Germans’ perceived afterwards? Or, to put it more broadly, how have these differences shaped the remembrance cultures of the respective countries up to now? Conversely, was the remembrance culture of any particular individual’s country capable of representing his or her own experiences adequately or offering help in coming to terms with his or her personal history? What is the significance of these differences for the construction of one or many European cultures of remembrance? Could it be that a single international remembrance culture has grown up in respect of the Holocaust, while there continue to be multiple remembrance cultures around forced labour? After such a long time – more than half a century, after all – we did not assume that we would be able to fill significant gaps in the history of forced and slave labour as such using the tools of oral history. It may be presumed that the experience of the Second World War has been eclipsed by new experiences, placing memories of those days increasingly out of reach. It is more in elucidating this dialectic of experience and eclipsing, this processing of history, that oral history normally demonstrates its strengths – and less in reconstructing ‘real’ history, precise dates and sequences of events, names of places, companies, brutal bosses or camp personnel. Nevertheless, our preliminary discussions and early interviews had made it clear that some interview partners were astonishingly well able to remember such dates and facts. Consequently, we included questions of this kind in our guidelines for the interviews.

VII At the end of the project – and as intended right from the beginning – we planned to publish a volume of reports on each country and some essays on general questions. The main part of this book consists of twenty-eight reports from twenty countries, principally in Eastern and East Central Europe. There are more reports than countries because in some countries there were several teams at work; in Russia, for example, there were four, in Poland three, in Ukraine two. Those countries that provided most of the forced labourers during the Second World War are represented, but so are those that were allied to the German Reich, whether voluntarily, under military threat or following occupation by the Wehrmacht: Slovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria, among others. Some countries that experienced forced and slave labour are not represented, either because it was

Introduction

15

not possible to conduct any interviews in the first place,23 or because the project partners were prevented by other commitments from contributing a final report. We have structured the section of the volume that includes the country reports to reflect the course of the war. Thus we begin with Germany, the country where forced labour started with the onset of Nazi rule, and then proceed to Spain and Czechoslovakia, followed by articles from Poland, the countries of Southeast Europe and Eastern Europe, and Italy. This section concludes with reports from the countries of emigration: Israel, the US, South Africa and Great Britain. The reports on countries introduce the political-military background of forced labour and/or the German occupation, and the interview partners are described in terms of their experiences, memories and life histories; it was also our intention that each report would analyse the effects of occupation and forced labour on the national remembrance culture. In practice, the structure and content of the reports varies, reflecting the peculiarities of the respective regional or national circumstances and the division of labour within the team. We chose Spain primarily because Spanish political activists, having taken part in the civil war or the fight against Franco’s dictatorship, had been taken to Germany or Austria for forced or slave labour (notably in Mauthausen) and thus formed a special group of slave labourers who were indeed perceived as such at the time. In cases where there was more than one report on the same country, the authors avoided duplication by agreeing which topics would be covered in each report, one emphasising the historical background and another the biographical data.24 As indicated above, there were some problems with the Roma reports that – thanks to the support of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) – were expected to come from those Eastern European countries where Roma had to do slave or forced labour. At least we did manage some interviews with Roma from these and other countries, such as Poland and Bosnia. In Belgium we were not able to find partners for the project, nor were we successful in Denmark or Sweden. Our Dutch partners were able to conduct very impressive interviews with Jewish survivors (interviews with other groups were not planned there), but because of other obligations they were unable to write them up for this volume. The second section of the book deals with transnational themes, in which comparisons between the memories of different national and ethnic groups play a significant role, as do the different meanings of slave and forced labour for the respective national remembrance cultures. Alexander von Plato introduces this section with an interpretative essay that sets out some initial conclusions and propositions drawn from the totality of

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the reports. The three contributions that follow deal with very different topics, exemplifying the kind of scholarship that can be developed using the interviews from the project. Dori Laub presents an analysis of the experience of meeting for a second time interview partners whom he had already interviewed and filmed for the Fortunoff Archive (Yale University) twenty-five years before. He and Johanna Bodenstab locate the changes they noticed in the interview partners and in themselves in the context of a changed Jewish remembrance culture in the US. Christoph Thonfeld pursues the question of how the very different ways of coming home and the positive or negative reception and further treatment of returnees influenced their attitudes and orientations, their careers and family ties. In this context, the comparison between individuals returning to the Soviet Union, who were sometimes received negatively, and those who stayed in Germany or emigrated to Great Britain is of particular significance. Dagi Knellessen sought a comparison of completely different kind: she asked witnesses at the Auschwitz Trials in Frankfurt (1963–1965) about their persecution and slave labour, as well as about the significance of the trials for them individually. The difficulties of temporarily returning to a country where they had suffered from most terrible persecution, to which they were now supposed to bear witness under the difficult conditions of trials founded on the rule of law, are discussed. Almut Leh and Henriette Schlesinger conclude this section with a description of the full set of the interviews, and of their documentation. They provide examples of how the content of the interviews can be analysed and develop questions and proposals on the relationship between quantitative and qualitative strategies for interpretation that are intended to stimulate readers to make the most intensive possible use of this rich repository of data. The third section of this book, an appendix, offers guidance on the secondary literature and archival sources for study of forced and slave labour and some aids to understanding the project and its results. These include a timeline (assembled by Joachim Riegel) and the guidelines according to which the interviews were conducted.

VIII One experience that proved very positive – almost surprisingly so – in the course of this international project was the stimulating and productive cooperation of researchers in the fields of Holocaust and forced labour. Although there were some differences of opinion, these could be used productively and resulted in mutual appreciation particularly of East and West, something we had hoped for but actually hardly expected. Among the positive experiences in the context of this project we would also cite

Introduction

17

the fact that out of this heterogeneous Eastern and Western Europe, and the US and Israel with their different remembrance cultures, it was possible to form an international group of researchers with a similar research ethos and interest, something we hope will have resonance beyond this project. It is clear that we share a common ground in respect of methods and research ethos, and perhaps even of the history of scholarship, and these may help to overcome what still divides us.

IX We would like to express our gratitude to Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft for funding this large-scale and complex study, and particularly this book. We are indebted to Ralf Possekel and Evelyn Geier, our partners in the foundation, for the extremely fruitful cooperation in negotiating the perilous terrain of two different bureaucracies. We also thank the jurors who selected the project partners and the staff members of the subprojects. Eve Rosenhaft (Liverpool) agreed to work as an editor for the English manuscript and thus to take on the dual roles of a scholar familiar with the topic and a native speaker with an educated eye for content and style. For this too, we would like to express our profound thanks. Special gratitude, however, is reserved for our interview partners, the former slave labourers and forced labourers. From the very beginning we had hoped to be able to erect a ‘memorial of a different kind’ to them through this project and this volume, a memorial made not of cement and stone but of recorded and published memories. This was and still is one of the main objectives of this project. We hope that they will be able to recognise and accept the work in the spirit in which we offer it.

NOTES 1. According to the Geneva Convention the deployment of captured rank and file for work was generally legal. However, there were a number of regulations restricting this. These regulations were basically adhered to only in the case of Anglo-American prisoners of war. In the case of Frenchmen and Yugoslavs the regulations were partly adhered to, whereas they were simply ignored for Poles, Soviet citizens and Italian military internees. As the Soviet Union had not joined the Geneva Convention, Soviet prisoners of war could only hope to be treated according to the much more general regulations of the Hague land

18

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

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war regulations. In most cases not even these were adhered to. Poland and Yugoslavia had signed the Geneva agreement; however, the German Foreign Office argued that after the defeat of Poland and Yugoslavia these states no longer existed as subjects under international law, so their joining of the Geneva Convention was invalid. See for details Mark Spoerer, ‘Die soziale Differenzierung der ausländischen Kriegsgefangenen’, in Jörg Echternkamp (ed., im Auftrag des Militärgeschichtlichen Forschungsamtes), Die deutsche Kriegsgesellschaft 1939 bis 1945: Ausbeutung, Deutungen, Ausgrenzung (second semi-volume) (Munich 2005), 485–576, 502ff. Figures from Spoerer, who has identified and removed 1.1 million double entries from the total of 14.7 million (particularly prisoners of war transferred to civilian status). Spoerer also takes an estimated margin of error of plus/minus 0.75 million into consideration. Mark Spoerer, Zwangsarbeit unter dem Hakenkreuz Ausländische Zivilarbeiter, Kriegsgefangene und Häftlinge im Deutschen Reich und im besetzten Europa 1939–1945, (Stuttgart and Munich 2001), 223. On figure 2 and 3 see Ulrich Herbert, Fremdarbeiter: Politik und Praxis des ‘Ausländer-Einsatzes’ in der Kriegswirtschaft des Dritten Reiches (Berlin and Bonn 1985), 270 (Table 41). This was probably not always the case in private contexts, where forced labourers had to work for families or on small farms and their presence was an inescapable part of everyday experience (see the concluding essay on the results of this project). Thus the FRG’s former Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher. See HansDietrich Genscher, Erinnerungen (Berlin 1995), 692ff.; Alexander von Plato, Die Vereinigung Deutschlands: ein weltpolitisches Machtspiel (Berlin 2002), 209ff. Constantin Goschler: ‘“Sklaven” und “Agenten” zwischen Kaltem Krieg und Globalisierung: Zwangsarbeiterentschädigung und Wiedergutmachungsrecht in der Bundesrepublik’, lecture manuscript, n.p. (Berlin) und n.y. (2005), 1ff. On the general question of compensation or so-called Wiedergutmachung here and for the following, see his book: Constantin Goschler, Schuld und Schulden: Die Politik der Wiedergutmachung für NS-Verfolgte seit 1945 (Göttingen 2005), passim. On the history of Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft, see Lutz Niethammer’s essay ‘Wahrheitskommissionen im Vergleich: Haben wir bei der Zwangsarbeiterentschädigung den Wahrheitsauftrag verfehlt?’ in Hans-Christoph Seidel and Klaus Tenfelde (eds), Zwangsarbeit im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts: Bewältigung und vergleichende Aspekte (Essen 2007), 19–38. The ‘openness clause’ gave the partner organisations the freedom to determine the preconditions for compensation themselves, within the limits of the funds available to them for distribution. Forced labourers in agriculture, who had not normally worked or lived in prison-like conditions, were particularly affected by this consideration. Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft Foundation and Erinnerung und Zukunft Fund: press release of 11 June 2007, on the twenty-first meeting of the Board of Trustees on that same day. Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft Foundation and Erinnerung und Zukunft Fund: press release of 14 December 2006, on the twentieth meeting of the Board of Trustees on 13–14 December 2006. Ibid., 2. Interview with Heinrich van de Loo by Alexander von Plato at the Institute of History and Biography, Hagen 1989.

Introduction

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13. Herbert, Fremdarbeiter; Wolfgang Jacobmeyer, Vom Zwangsarbeiter zum Heimatlosen Ausländer: Die Displaced Persons in Westdeutschland 1945–1951 (Göttingen 1985). 14. See references at the end of this volume. 15. Lebensgeschichten ehemaliger Zwangsarbeiter und Zwangsarbeiterinnen: Vorschlag für eine große internationale lebensgeschichtliche Video-Sammlung mit Ausstellung, Institut für Geschichte und Biographie der Fernuniversität Hagen (Alexander von Plato und Almut Leh), Lüdenscheid, 2003. 16. Internationales Dokumentationsprojekt Lebenszeugnisse von ehemaligen Zwangsarbeitern und Holocaustüberlebenden: Angebot des Instituts für Geschichte und Biographie der Fernuniversität Hagen, 6 September 2004. 17. For details see the contribution by Almut Leh and Henriette Schlesinger in this volume. 18. They were: Alexander von Plato, the head of the project, Almut Leh and Christoph Thonfeld as research associates, and Henriette Schlesinger as expert on archives and documentation. Elena Danchenko was in charge of contacts mainly with Russian-speaking partners, Joachim Riegel was in charge of the website and archival and literature searches, and Marlies Wahnbaeck was responsible for the secretariat. 19. In the two preceding years several members of the Institute of History and Biography had already contributed to the international Mauthausen project headed by the Viennese historian Gerhard Botz: e.g. Almut Leh, Julia Obertreis, Alice von Plato and Alexander von Plato (being in charge of the German region and also contributing to the training of the international interviewers). 20. Apart from one representative of the Institute of History and Biography, the jury consisted of representatives of Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft and its seven partner organisations, as well as the unaffiliated scholars Gerhard Botz (University of Vienna), Joan Ringelheim (Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.), Mark Roseman (University of Indiana, Bloomington), Frank Stern (then University of Jerusalem, now Vienna), Wladyslaw Bartoszewski (former Polish Foreign Minister and survivor of Auschwitz), Victoria Semenova (Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow) and Hermann Schäfer (then Haus der Geschichte Foundation, Bonn). Once the 32 external groups were appointed, the Institute of History and Biography itself as the 33rd group took over the task of conducting interviews in Germany and Great Britain. 21. See the contribution by Birgit Mair in this volume. 22. See the contribution by Artur Podgorski on his interviews with Roma in Poland. 23. In Belgium, Sweden and Denmark it was not possible to find project partners. 24. For example the two contributions on Belarus.

 II 

1

REPORTS FROM GERMANY ON FORCED AND SLAVE LABOUR Alexander von Plato

In the last more or less free parliamentary elections in Germany in November 1932, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) won only 33.1 per cent of the votes – 4.2 per cent, or two million votes, less than in July 1932. However, on 30 January 1933 the party became part of a coalition government, and President Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler Chancellor of the German Reich. Hitler was barely in power before the arrests began and the first concentration camps were erected. It was from these camps that prisoners were selected for forced labour. The subsequent burning of the Reichstag provided a motive for the arrest of political opponents, especially communists. By 1935, the parties and trade unions of the labour movement, as well as the Catholic Centre Party, had been driven underground, their infrastructure destroyed or ghettoised, and many of their officials either arrested or forced to emigrate. From 1935 onwards, and again during the Second World War, the Nazis intensified their racial policy in Germany and the occupied territories of Eastern Europe in particular: some 270,000 of the 500,000 Jews in Germany were driven out of the country, and approximately 200,000 were killed (around 6 million altogether in Europe), mainly in concentration and extermination camps. It was in these camps that most prisoners also had to perform forced labour (slave labour). Roma and Sinti suffered a similar fate under National Socialist ‘gypsy’ policy. Estimates of the number of Roma and Sinti killed by the SS, police task forces and Notes for this chapter begin on page 35.

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Wehrmacht units in Europe range from 75,000 to 500,000.1 But the Nazis’ persecution policies were not only politically and racially motivated. Jehovah’s Witnesses, artists like Erich Mühsam, homosexuals, disabled people, criminals, ‘antisocial’ people, deserters and many others were also arrested, put in camps, used for forced labour and even killed. Forced labour in Germany predated the Third Reich. As early as 1931, towards the end of the Weimar Republic, the Volunteer Labour Service (FAD) had been introduced under Chancellor Brüning. A law passed on 26 June 1935 made it compulsory for all men and women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five to complete Reich Labour Service (RAD) for six months. The ‘duty year’ was also introduced and universal conscription enforced, particularly during the war, when RAD was subsumed to war aims and became increasingly important for tasks such as trench digging. This kind of compulsory labour is only touched on here, although in some cases it is not clear when compulsory labour ends and forced labour in its stricter sense begins (see below).

Life Stories Merely selecting our interviewees proved difficult, the process serving to highlight the unusual aspects of this German project. We conducted nine interviews for the project2 but have access to more material in our archive, which contains several hundred interviews.3 I spoke to the following interviewees in 2006 as part of the ‘Slave and Forced Labour’ project. Jutta P., born in 1922, comes from an assimilated Jewish family that did not follow a kosher diet or observe Jewish rituals and festivals. ‘Like many others, we only became Jews when Hitler made us Jews.’ Her father owned two cinemas but lost them to partners in the great depression after 1929. He then ‘managed artists’, and eventually the family was able to struggle on only thanks to the help of relatives and the Jewish community. They also had to keep moving to smaller and cheaper apartments. Jutta’s older brother was able to emigrate to England shortly before war broke out, but once there, he was detained because of his German nationality and deported to Australia. In February 1939, Jutta started work at a (Jewish) agricultural training centre in Gross-Breesen near Berlin before moving to the Landwerk4 in Neuendorf. Her parents were taken to the Theresienstadt camp in January 1943 and later murdered in Auschwitz. In February 1943 all Jews still working in factories in Germany were rounded up for deportation (Fabrikaktion).5 She should have been arrested in this context, but the company she was now working for managed to retain her.

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However, she still ended up being transported with others to the Hamburger Straße in Berlin (to a former old people’s home, which was ill-equipped to accommodate so many people) and then to Auschwitz. She was relatively lucky there, as she soon started to work as a seamstress along with many others from Neuendorf, in the cellar of the main SS building, where she was looked after better and enjoyed more hygienic living conditions than ordinary Auschwitz inmates. ‘I did not experience the real hell of Auschwitz … The worst time for me was the death marches of 1945 from Auschwitz to Ravensbrück – three days and nights on foot followed by three days and nights in goods wagons’ to the overflowing punishment barracks, and from there to the Neustadt-Glewe concentration camp near Ludwigslust in Mecklenburg. It was here that she was liberated, two days before the Red Army arrived. During this time she and others went looting, but she was separated from her friends, who were scattered all over the world. First she went to Brussels with a friend, then returned, stayed briefly in Hamburg, then worked in a biology institute in Berlin (at which point she was refused entry to the US because of protracted pulmonary tuberculosis) and ended up employed by the Public Services and Transport (ÖTV) trade union in Stuttgart. In 1958 she met her (non-Jewish) husband, who was eight years her junior. They had no children. In her account of her life, Jutta consciously avoided dramatisation or exaggeration: ‘I was lucky.’ For her, the most important thing was that so many of her female friends from Neuendorf survived with her and gave her strength in every way possible. ‘Without these friends, I wouldn’t have made it.’ Some of them were very religious and – unlike Jutta – even had the strength to help others on the death march. She encountered ‘other Germans’ too, including her former nanny, who took it upon herself (with the knowledge of her husband – ‘a minor post office official’) to help Jutta’s family through the war, even offering to hide them. The same offer of help also came from Jutta’s father’s boss. When I asked whether she has been criticised for ‘playing down’ the enormity of Auschwitz, she answered: ‘Yes, but I can only recount what the experience was like for me.’ Presumably, her experience of ‘other, better Germans’ was one reason – along with her pulmonary TB and desire to find the nanny – why she stayed in Germany. Today, as a German trade unionist, she is critical of Israeli policy, remains indifferent to her religion and does not eat kosher food. Since the war, she has hardly spoken of her Jewishness or her persecution. But she has become increasingly annoyed with Germans who refuse to acknowledge the systematic extermination of European Jews. And the memory of being freed by Soviet troops, along with her trade union leanings, meant that she found herself at odds with the anti-communist mood that prevailed in the 1950s.

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Hans F. (born 1926) and his older brother played down their Jewishness much more than Jutta P. during the postwar years. They came from a cattle-dealing family from a rural region in Southern Westphalia and were taken to Auschwitz as adolescents with their parents. As they stood on the ramp for selection, they claimed they were older than they were, and were employed to work on dangerous structural engineering works in support of the industrial activities of the concentration camp. They were the only ones in their family to survive. After 1945, they returned to their hometown, where they had problems obtaining the inheritance of their murdered parents, married Christian women and had their children baptised. However, relatively soon after the war, in the 1950s, they personally erected a memorial to the murdered Jews of their hometown. Not until the 1970s did Hans become a major player in the fight against the Federal Republic of Germany and the large companies that had exploited him and his fellow Auschwitz prisoners, sending many to their death or tacitly condoning such acts. He has focused his efforts on the subsequent owners of the IG Farben6 conglomerate in particular. ‘Half-Jewish’ journalist Wolfgang R. also kept quiet about his Jewish father, until he was contacted by a woman from Israel whom his mother had saved from the Warsaw ghetto. Together, they arranged for his mother to receive the honour of ‘Righteous among the Nations’. Philipp W., born in 1910, falls into the category of ‘political’ individuals who were arrested very soon after 30 January 1933. He came from a socialist working-class background. His father was the leader of the Socialist Worker’s Party, a splinter group of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). He completed an apprenticeship as a stucco plasterer and pattern maker, but high unemployment during the Great Depression compelled him to find work on the inland waterways. He became a sailor, working mainly on Flemish and French vessels on the Rhine. This allowed him to distribute leaflets and illegal materials from the International Transport Workers’ Federation along the length of the Rhine in 1933. He came to the attention of the Gestapo thanks to the carelessness of a ship’s boy, who had time to warn Philipp, who then hid the material between the decks. Nevertheless, the Gestapo beat the living daylights out of him. The doctor was critical of the Gestapo (‘How can anyone do that to a young man?’), who then warned him that things were going to be different from now on. But the doctor refused to be intimidated and kept Philipp with him longer than necessary to nurse him back to health. This helped him get through the next few months in the Osthofen concentration camp (near Worms in Rhineland-Palatinate). His fellow prisoners included other ‘political’ individuals and many Jews, who suffered much greater torture. Jewish lawyer T. hatched a ‘little plot’ with Philipp, who had been detailed for construction work: ‘He “groomed” me.’ The idea

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was that when Philipp called out the type of worker he required each morning (bricklayer, plumber etc.), Jewish prisoners would pretend to be qualified. Philipp would then take them with him so that ‘Jewish fellow prisoners could escape the constant, the constant [his repetition – AvP] torture.’ He described, for example, how two ‘Jewish prisoners had to climb into the latrine and scoop out the waste with cutlery.’ Philipp was released after a year, and he says he worked illegally again for the International Transport Workers’ Federation. But in 1937 he was taken to Albert Speer’s office premises in Berlin. He could give me no explanation for this move, nor say who had recommended him. He then avoided all political work (if he hadn’t already given it up – AvP). He said he always wondered why he did this. In 1939, he was called up for service in the Polish campaign. In 1940, he was ‘transferred’ to Penal Battalion 500 for one year to sweep for mines, for a ‘criminal offence’ he did not commit. Two drunken comrades had pushed over a bust of Hitler from its pedestal in the barracks. He was the only member of the corps to survive, although he was severely wounded. At the end of the war, he returned to Worms, where he had obviously been married (a fact he omitted to mention previously) as he was divorced by his wife, who had met another man in the meantime. He remarried, rejoined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and worked as a city model maker for the city of Worms. In 1956, after the KPD was banned, he lost his job and became self-employed. While in the KPD, he became local secretary, a position that involved safeguarding party material, including the membership list. He handed this material over to the German Communist Party (DKP), which was founded in 1968. Philipp W. stresses that in 1933, the conditions in the Osthofen concentration camp were much better than those in the wartime concentration camps, not to mention those of the extermination camps. But some of the guards, particularly the camp commandant’s deputy, were brutal, especially towards Jews. ‘Even then!’ he says. However, other guards were ‘just normal police officers’. For Philipp, and his Jewish fellow prisoners especially, the work performed outside the concentration camp was not forced labour: ‘No, it was a rest. We liked working outside the camp. We worked on construction sites or for farmers, and we ate really well.’ This is why he didn’t apply for compensation. ‘We knew why we were there. I worked for the Party and against Hitler. For that, I had to face the consequences.’ Elisabeth K., born in 1919, was an illegitimate child. Her mother and stepfather were members of the KPD. Her stepfather was head milker, responsible for farms and estates used for livestock farming; her mother was ‘in service’ and helped in the house and on the farm as a maid, as did Elisabeth, who joined the Communist Youth League (KJVD). In 1933,

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her stepfather was held under arrest for a few weeks. In 1936, Elisabeth, who had hitherto lived with her grandparents, moved in with her mother and lost her political contacts. She was nonetheless arrested in 1940 and transported to the Gestapo cellar in Weimar. When she arrived she faced her worst nightmare. She was placed opposite a former KJVD member whose face they had smashed in and whose fingernails they had torn out. Despite her fear of being treated similarly, she didn’t ‘talk’ but was transported to the women’s concentration camp in Ravensbrück without further interrogation. There, her hair was cut off (by Jehovah’s Witnesses), which was just as upsetting as having to undress in front of men. She felt, as did her fellow prisoners, that she was still very naïve for her age, which was why some of the older women took her under their wing. This meant a great deal to her. To everyone’s surprise, she was given a conditional release in 1943. After her release, she had to do forced labour on a farm near her parents. She was given board and lodging and a small amount of pocket money in return. ‘The old farmer gave me a bit of something now and again, but his son’s wife was hard.’ She had to report to the police at 6 o’clock every third morning and was allowed to speak to no one – not just about Ravensbrück but ‘to no one at all’. So great was her fear that she managed to avoid speaking even to her own family and children. ‘It was terrible – worse than in the concentration camp. At least there we had solidarity. Now I had to shy away from anyone who wanted anything from me.’ The solidarity she experienced in Ravensbrück had worked well on the whole, even if there were some exceptions. She was particularly sorry for Jewish and Polish women, especially ‘when they cut open their legs and put stuff in them and sewed them up again. When they were dying and screamed. … You can’t put that behind you. … I often dream about it. I often scream in my sleep.’ She was never tortured herself. After her release, she joined the KPD and was awarded the status of victim of fascism. She was soon put to work for the communist cause in the Soviet occupation zone, initially as the manager of the cowsheds and livestock on a new farm (refugee farm). As more and more farmers left for the West because of agricultural production cooperatives (LPGs) or a fear of collective farming, it fell to her to take charge of an entire farm. The role of mayor was later hers for the taking, but like other workers who were expected to fill leading civil positions vacated by those leaving for the West, she began to feel overburdened. In addition, her stepfather became disabled after falling from a hay wagon and her mother had a heart condition, which meant she had five people including her children to support. So she refused. In 1974, she received the ‘honorary pension’ – an additional 600 East German marks on top of the customary 300 marks – for her victim status. When the East German regime collapsed, she was

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receiving 1,400 East German marks; after reunification these payments continued, the amount being exchanged at a rate of 1 East German mark to 1 deutschmark (DM). In 2000, she was awarded DM15,000 by the Remembrance, Responsibility and Future foundation in recognition of her deportation and forced and slave labour. Hans-Jürgen S. is a special case for two reasons: he is ‘half-Jewish’, and it is hard to ascertain exactly when forced labour began for him. He was born in 1926, attended three primary schools and had to work for a bookshop delivering newspapers and books in his spare time in order to earn money. ‘Up to 1935, school was so-so,’ he says, although he felt rejected by many teachers because ‘we were of mixed Jewish race.’ On one occasion a teacher caned him so hard that he was barely able to deliver his books. Eventually he was expelled from school, even though his mother managed to get a priest to confirm him – without him having been christened. ‘But it didn’t do me any good; I didn’t get anything out of it, because from then on, I got the blame for the slightest thing.’ After leaving school, he was unemployed until the bookshop where he had previously worked offered him an apprenticeship as a bookbinder. He learned a lot there, but one day ‘the boss’s son said to me: “You can’t take the apprenticeship examination, people of mixed Jewish race aren’t allowed to.”’ After that, he worked on farms. Later he was called up for essential service, firstly in a munitions factory in Dömitz, then in France for the RAD. Soon after being discharged again, he was called up for military service and went to Schwerin to join the infantry. But when the military passbooks were being handed out, the platoon leader ‘shouted from the office across the hall: “The Jew must report to the orderly room!” and the game was up, I was released.’ He was interrogated three times by the Gestapo, once on account of his sister, who was wanted for refusing to work. ‘She was later arrested, and spent virtually the whole of the rest of the war in the women’s prison in Bützow.’ Hans-Jürgen mentions at this point that he joined a resistance group in the camp belonging to the munitions factory in Dömitz. This group comprised five men. When he complained on one occasion after female forced labourers showed him meals containing green maggots, he was promptly arrested and transported by goods train with others to work in the mine near Neu Stassfurt (a satellite camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp). The work was supervised by the SS, the camp by the Gestapo. He later worked in a quarry, in road construction and in a brick factory. Shortly before the end of the war, he was taken by truck to a location near Quedlinburg, where he was liberated by the Americans in May. After 1945 Hans-Jürgen S. joined the KPD, which later became the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), and gradually rose in society

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until he became mayor of a town in the Harz Mountains. He strove for recognition not only as a ‘victim of National Socialism’ but also as a ‘fighter against fascism’. In East Germany, where Hans-Jürgen lived, this distinction made a big difference in terms of recognition, benefits and pension entitlement. But his request was turned down, as the camp and resistance group to which he belonged could not be traced. This rankled, and even today he is still hopeful for support from former comrades in the US. Nevertheless he remained a loyal citizen of East Germany. Ludwig B., born in 1922, grew up in straitened circumstances in Hamburg, although his father achieved sporadic success as a tobacco wholesaler and in the property business. His father had voted for the National Socialists in 1932, a decision he came to rue in later years. In contrast to his sister, Ludwig did not attend secondary school, instead embarking on a bricklaying apprenticeship at fourteen. When he was fifteen, his mother died. ‘I can hardly describe what a shock it was to me. … I stopped being well-behaved and conformist. So I didn’t join the Hitler Youth, although they really hassled me to join at the front door and at work. I became a soldier in 1940. But even then I disobeyed orders; for example, when it was my turn to polish my superiors’ boots, I refused to do it.’ He was eventually transferred to a naval unit in France. ‘It didn’t have any bearing on the war, but for me it was my destiny.’ There, he came into contact with French communists and deserted after Germany invaded the Soviet Union. He was arrested and court-martialled. ‘We were sentenced to death in Bordeaux, and – as I now know from the file – the sentence was commuted seven weeks later to twelve years in prison.’ At the time however, he knew nothing of this.‘I spent 10 months in a death cell. Hands and feet manacled day and night. Every morning, when they changed the guard, I thought, they’ve come for me. And when they walked past the cell, I knew I would live for another day. It was absolutely horrific, I’m still traumatised by it now.’ Later, he was sent to a penal battalion. ‘We were just thrown in, undernourished and badly armed, so hardly anyone survived.’ Finally, he was transferred to the Esterwegen prison camp in Emsland, where he was a forced labourer in the marshland alongside many ‘political’ prisoners. ‘After the war, we hoped that our actions would be recognised, but this was not the case. We continued to be insulted and threatened and treated as cowards, scum and traitors to the fatherland, until we ended up feeling guilty ourselves.’ After his father died, ‘I drank away my entire inheritance and became an alcoholic, because I couldn’t find a reason to live any more.’ Ludwig married, and his wife bore him four children. She died giving birth to his last child, which forced him to ‘find a reason to live.’ It also led to his political awakening. He campaigned for deserters to be recog-

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nised as victims of Nazi persecution, and finally won his battle in 1989 – extremely late in the day. He became chairman of the Vereinigung der Opfer der Militärjustiz (Association for the Victims of Military Justice). A similar fate befell Fritz N., who was sterilised in Hamburg during the war because he was diagnosed with a mental disease and forced to work as a slave labourer in a concentration camp, living in constant fear of death. He was not recognised as a victim of National Socialism after the war, because the same medical officer who had condemned him to sterilisation now testified against him. Albert L. of Thüringen, who was also sterilised because of the same reason, did not wish to talk about it and thus was not recognised by the former East German regime as a victim of fascism.

Summary Unique Aspects of the German Situation The human (and inhuman) face of persecution and slave and forced labour is international, particularly at the extremes. Our interviews, like those carried out in other countries, show that those in the death or extermination camps saw forced labour as a chance of survival, a means of escaping the lethal camp regime, if only temporarily. But the German context had particular features that shaped the experience and profile of the victims. The persecution of political opponents, Jews, Sinti and Roma began in Germany immediately after 1933, much earlier than in the territories occupied by the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. By this time, these groups of people were being subjected to the greatly intensified form of persecution that had developed under the National Socialists’ regime of terror, the system of forced and slave labour for the ‘war effort’, and martial law. The number of people forced to emigrate from Germany was proportionately higher than that emigrating from the occupied territories, whereas the number of people murdered in Eastern Europe was proportionately higher than the number forced to leave the region. An analysis of German slave and forced labourers further reinforces the unique nature of their experience. This analysis must begin with the difficulties encountered in simply finding interviewees, as this reveals something about how the victims of persecution related to postwar Germany. The majority of Jews who survived the Holocaust emigrated in 1945/46. Those who remained in Germany, from among whom we wanted to select our interviewees, did not necessarily consider themselves Jewish, or at least were not practising Jews, but were ‘made Jews by Hitler’. Some of them later went in search of their Jewish roots and traditions, joining

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Jewish communities after decades of considering themselves ‘non-Jews’,7 with some subsequently emigrating to Israel. A third group ‘hid themselves away’ in Germany after the war, practised ‘mimicry’ and concealed their Jewish origins and persecution (such as Wolfgang R. or the F. brothers). For us, this meant that they were hard to find and obtain for an interview. Many ‘half-Jews’ also stayed in Germany at that time, some being placed in hostels or orphanages where they were obliged to work, sometimes on a forced labour basis (like Hans-Jürgen S.). Some of them also emigrated, while others concealed their origins and persecution for many years. Also subjected to racial persecution were hundreds of thousands of Sinti and Roma (especially Sinti in Germany), who had already been persecuted before the war and a high number of them murdered. Not until the beginning of the 1990s were they officially recognised as ‘racially persecuted’ groups. In 1992, they established the Documentation and Cultural Centre of German Sinti and Roma in Heidelberg, which houses an exhibition about their persecution under the National Socialists. Many were also afraid of revealing themselves as ‘gypsies’ or victims of National Socialist gypsy policy, including another of our interviewees Reinhard F., who after his liberation from Mauthausen was initially classified as stateless. This would later present him with problems when he tried to claim compensation, even though he was one of those who reached the Muselmann8 stage during his time at the brutal Mauthausen quarry. The experiences of the politically persecuted were just as varied. The first concentration camps were erected in 1933 to silence political opponents, particularly those on the left, to intimidate them through acts of violence and torture, or even to kill them. Nevertheless, there is no comparison between the type of early forced labour required in these camps and the forced labour carried out in the later concentration and extermination camps during the war. The guard squads were less homogeneous (i.e. they did not just comprise SS and SA members and Nazi police) and less brutal compared to those in the later concentration camps, there was less control, the labourers could move more freely while working and there was more contact with ‘normal workers’ (Philipp W.). This shows once again how important it is to distinguish between different periods when examining forced labour experiences and their impact on the subsequent lives of the POWs. Since the politically persecuted Germans were already active before 1933, they are mostly relatively advanced in years. Thus, older people were more prevalent among the politically persecuted than young people. Accordingly, younger people do not feature as frequently in our archive or among our interviewees. Two of the few younger forced labourers are the ‘half-Jew’ and subsequent communist Hans-Jürgen S. and Elisabeth K., who was arrested in 1940. She was, and

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still considers herself today, a communist. Communists were the largest politically persecuted group, followed by socialists and social democrats. It may sound unlikely, but the politically persecuted also included former National Socialists who came into conflict either with the party or their superiors during the Second World War, or who committed (or were alleged to have committed) crimes. For instance, one of our interviewees, Wilhelm N., who joined the Waffen-SS (Armed SS) early on, had an argument with his superior. Accused of stealing a uniform from company stores in Russia, he was sent to Dachau, but survived to become a baker in Ravensbrück. Deserters from the army were mostly shot, but the few who survived, including Ludwig B., clearly experienced severe problems in later life as a result of their early traumatic experiences, as well as because of selfdoubt. Their recognition as victims of National Socialism persecution was extremely slow in coming; only in 1997 they were rehabilitated by the German parliament, and they had to contend with particularly vicious accusations in West Germany. Some of them emigrated. Along with their self-doubt, there is another reason why relatively few of them put themselves forward for interviews: they wanted to avoid going public with their stories if at all possible. The same applies to disabled people, as they are called today, who were sterilised by the National Socialists, often incarcerated in concentration camps and forced to do slave labour. Fritz N. was the only one of our interviewees to have been sterilised – one of the few to break his silence and allow himself to be interviewed. Jehovah’s Witnesses were and still are persecuted in virtually all dictatorships, including that of Nazi Germany, one reason being that they refuse conscription. However, it was also precisely because of their adherence to religious principles that they were entrusted with special duties by the SS in concentration camps or employed as cleaners in the houses of SS officers. In addition, Jehovah’s Witnesses were less likely to assault anyone. Another probable reason for the particular difficulty encountered in finding interviewees for the project in Germany is that the number of ‘criminals’ or ‘antisocial’ people was significantly higher among German concentration camp prisoners. Even disregarding the classification of prisoners by the SS, many of those who were assigned to these categories may have had reservations about putting themselves forward for interview. One such person whom we were able to interview, Mr. O. was more interested in a hot meal and payment for the interview than relating his story or taking part in the interview itself. For language reasons alone, comparatively more of the prisoners entrusted with special duties were from Germany than from other countries.

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Having performed such tasks still appears to pose problems for those who were not communists, because they could not view their duties in the camps as party work or even as part of the party’s mission. But after 1945, even the communists could not be sure that their work would not affect them negatively, as the Buchenwald example shows.9 A further group can obviously only be found in Germany, namely the foreign forced labourers who remained in the country after the war – the same land where they had been forced to work or where as members of the former Vlassov army they found refuge from Soviet retribution.10 Some foreigners (mostly Jews) also subsequently came to Germany as immigrants, and are now German citizens. However, I have not interviewed them in any depth. Some of them appeared as witnesses at the Auschwitz Trials.11

Irreconcilable Memories and Divergent Cultures of Commemoration It is all too apparent and also well documented that the experiences of former slave and forced labourers in Germany contrasted sharply with how most Germans perceived these experiences in the first few decades after the war. It is also extremely clear that the position of the racially persecuted was similar to that of the politically persecuted in West Germany; all had to find out the hard way that their persecution was not taken seriously. Another consequence of this was that many of our interviewees who were persecuted under National Socialism and lived in the West were initially extremely well disposed towards the Soviet occupation zone. And considering the fact that many former concentration camp prisoners saw the Red Army as their liberators, it is hardly surprising that scores of them (along with other, former exiles) chose East Germany as their new home. However, growing anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union in the wake of the Slansky trials, the Cold War in general and the increasing anti-Zionism also taking hold in East Germany all made it increasingly difficult for people to keep crossing the border in this way. Many Jews emigrated from East Germany and moved to the Federal Republic in the West, or abroad. But in West Germany, the tension remained over the experiences of forced labourers and how they were perceived by the majority of Germans. It was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that people began to sympathise with the victims of National Socialism, invite them to talk in schools and feature them in radio and television reports. Even so, there remained a gulf between these victims and those who wanted to draw a line under the whole affair, even if the latter were diminishing in number. Until the late 1960s and early 1970s those persecuted under National Socialism tended to be accorded less respect and attention than, for in-

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stance, German POWs, refugees, exiles and the former inmates of Soviet camps in the Soviet occupation zone. However, this ‘apportionment of respect’ was reversed at the beginning of the 1970s: the latter in particular were now seen as Nazi perpetrators, while people like persecuted Jews or resistance fighters were treated with growing sympathy – especially by the younger generations. The depth of the struggle for possession of the high ground in the cultures of commemoration right up to the 1990s is revealed by the furore surrounding the exhibition ‘Crimes of the Wehrmacht’. In the Soviet occupation zone and East Germany, the racially persecuted were accorded less importance than victims of political persecution, and among the persecuted a distinction was made between victims of fascism and fighters against fascism. In both states of divided Germany, therefore, different victim hierarchies and even competition among victims prevailed. The forced labourers were also denied recognition and material compensation until well into the 1990s. In addition, historians were largely denied access to archives relating to the labourers’ history, especially company archives. It was not until the end of the century that the conditions governing the labourers’ recognition were changed, one of the reasons undoubtedly being the fear of class action lawsuits being brought by former forced labourers against major banks and conglomerates participating in the US market. Efforts have since been made to establish a compensation fund supported by businesses and the public sector; the archives have also since been opened. Germany thus provides compelling evidence that there is no such thing as a single culture of commemoration pertaining to the postwar period that is accepted by the majority. There have been divergent, hotly disputed and even irreconcilable cultures of commemoration that have driven a wedge between East and West, different generations and political camps. These divisions persist to this day, albeit in diluted form, and have been manifested most recently in debates over the comparability of the repressive measures exercised by the National Socialist and SED dictatorships.

NOTES 1. Cf. the various relevant works by Michael Zimmermann, including his early, definitive work on the subject, Verfolgt, vertrieben, vernichtet: Die nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik gegen Sinti und Roma (Essen 1989).

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2. Including seven on video, all on audiocassette. 3. Including a project for the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., material from interviews with former prisoners of the Ravensbrück and Mauthausen concentration camps, material about the Wehrmacht justice system (deserters) and the persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and individual interviews for the ‘Children of the Resistance’ project by the University of Wuppertal. Interviews with Sinti and Roma were made available by Michael Zimmermann. 4. An organisation, in this case Jewish, whose aim was to help people learn about country life and offer appropriate training. 5. ‘Fabrikaktion’, or in the SS language ‘Großaktion Juden’: at the beginning of 1943 about 15,000 Jews were still working in factories in Berlin, and more than 5,000 outside of Berlin. In the early morning of 27 February 1943 the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei) arrested nearly all of them at home, on the streets or in the factories. During the first week of March 1943 they were transported to Auschwitz or to Theresienstadt. It is assumed that nearly two thirds of them were murdered at once upon their arrival. The ‘Fabrikaktion’ led to the demonstration in the Rosenstraße. 6. IG Farben was the biggest German chemical conglomerate of the period, formed in 1926 through the fusion of the principal individual firms in the sector. After the victory in the Second World War the Allied Control Council decided to dissolve IG Farben because of its complicity and involvement in the crimes of National Socialism, especially in the system of concentration camps and forced labour. Some ‘smaller’ firms emerged from it, including Hoechst, Bayer Leverkusen, and BASF. The rest was called IG Farben in Liquidation and was the legal successor in law of IG Farben; this fact became important for all claims for compensation. All the component firms of the former IG Farben mentioned above were absolved of liability. 7. This intensified after the collapse of East Germany. Cf. Robin Ostow, ‘Helden und Anti-Helden: Zwei Typen jüdischer Identität in der DDR’, BIOS 4 (1991): 191ff.; on Jews in East Germany in general: Karin Hartewig, Zurückgekehrt: Die Geschichte der jüdischen Kommunisten in der DDR (Cologne 2000). 8. German term used among Nazi concentration camp inmates to describe prisoners who had reached a near-death state due to starvation, exhaustion and fear, and had lost all capacity to respond to their situation. 9. Lutz Niethammer (ed.), Der ‘gesäuberte’ Antifaschismus: Die SED und die roten Kapos von Buchenwald. Dokumente (Berlin 1994). 10. See the essay by Christoph Thonfeld in this volume. 11. Some were interviewed by Alice von Plato. See her essay ‘Witnesses of the Auschwitz-Trial in Frankfurt (West Germany) in 1963 to 1965’, Fondation Auschwitz, Cahier International sur le témoignage audiovisual 5 (2000): 41–52). Others were interviewed as part of this project by Dagi Knellesen (see her essay in this volume).

2

WORK, REPRESSION AND DEATH AFTER THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR Mercedes Vilanova

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he eleven life histories included in this project introduce us to people who faced severe repression in Spain, France or Germany as a result of General Franco’s victory in 1939. Their testimonies are an example of how the combination of Hitler’s and Franco’s policies resulted in the cruellest of fates: execution in Spain or in German concentration camps. Spain did not take part in either of the two world wars of the twentieth century, but nevertheless the course of Spanish politics had a very strong impact on the lives of the persons interviewed. In April 1931, after centuries of monarchy, the Spanish Republic was proclaimed, but the new regime came to an end five years later as a consequence of a coup d’état that was the start of a long civil war. Spain was the last European democracy to succumb to fascism. The Republican government was defeated in April 1939, but the retreat of its army had begun in January that year with the fall of Barcelona. Accompanying the troops were hundreds of thousands of people, including leading politicians and military officers, some of them with their entire families. Most of them crossed the frontier over the passes in the Pyrenees in an appalling exodus, and in some cases their exile lasted until Franco’s death in 1975. The long period of dictatorship, very soon supported by the United States in the new context of the postwar years and of the Cold War, gave added significance to the repression that many Republicans suffered, their memories of the Civil War and their role as sacrificial victims. During the Notes for this chapter begin on page 46.

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Franco regime they were disparagingly referred to as ‘reds, Communists and atheists’, had problems in finding work and were obliged to remain silent about their experiences. It was as if they were hidden, invisible: ‘None of us said anything’ (Pi: 67).1 During the period of transition that began in 1975, the monarchy was imposed as a legacy of the dictatorship, no charges were brought against anyone, and the conflicts generated by the Civil War were stifled. Those of Franco’s supporters who wanted to were able to continue their political careers and stand as candidates in the first free elections. As a result, the individuals interviewed here who returned to Spain and did not join any of the new political parties remained on the outside, in silence. Later on in the 1980s and particularly the 1990s – and even today – tributes began to be paid and frequent mentions appeared in the media: Sixty years have passed and nobody has wanted to know anything or even speak about it, and now suddenly it is everywhere, in newspapers, magazines, universities. I was telephoned by the Generalität [Autonomous Government of Catalonia] and they gave me a medal. The university also gave me a medal – after sixty years, huh! (Garriga: 68)

Profile of the Interview Subjects The sample includes men and women who suffered various kinds of repression, the worst of which was experienced by those who were in German concentration camps. Their experience was barely comparable to that of people who worked in occupied France under the supervision of the Organisation Todt (OT), or in Franco’s Spain in the euphemistically named Disciplinary Battalions of Worker Soldiers (Batallones Disciplinarios de Soldados Trabajadores, BDST). It is difficult to attribute a ‘profile’ to the sample because it is so small: eleven individuals can hardly be representative of the almost 100,000 compelled by the Franco regime to do forced labour or the thousands who were deported from exile in France to be interned in various German concentration camps. The eleven interviewees were anti-fascist combatants who suffered varying degrees of repression: four were in German concentration camps (three in Buchenwald and one in Ravensbrück), two worked in France for the OT and five laboured in Spain after being taken as prisoners of war or arrested crossing the frontier. All of them were born between 1915 and 1923. Five belonged to the Communist Youth organisation (Juventudes Comunistas, JC), two were members of the anarcho-syndicalist trade union CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo), two were activists in the moderate reformist faction headed by the Catalan Republican Left Party (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, ERC) and two said they had

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never belonged to any political group. The sample is especially unrepresentative as regards gender, since it includes only one woman, who was in Ravensbrück – no doubt because fewer women than men were sent to German concentration camps and because although women were tortured, imprisoned and shot in Spain they never did forced labour there. Today, everyone takes a certain pride in recounting tales of their past captivity, and it was therefore easy to contact and interview people since they are keen to talk about their lives: ‘I like to talk about all my experiences so that people are aware of what happened’ (Durán: 35). All of them had been interviewed beforehand by students, researchers or the media – the press, television and radio – but in hardly any cases had they talked at such length and in such detail as they have done here. Almost all the interviewees can be considered members of what might be called an elite due to their political militancy and their level of education in a country in which a large percentage of the population was unable to read and write at the time. As regards social class, they can be divided into four groups: the sons and daughters of people in business or the professions, who as children had lived a reasonably comfortable life, completed their secondary education, later gone on to higher education and become members of the Communist Party or ERC (Gimeno, Semprún, Subirats). Others were skilled workers from educated, nonreligious, Republican families who started work in their teens and during their youth belonged to the Young Libertarian association (Juventudes Libertarias) (Casañas, Garriga). Four of them came from peasant families in Catalonia or the Valencia region and belonged to the JC; some of their parents could not read or write (Català, Farré, Pi, Rubio). Finally, the poorest group financially and intellectually are the persons who started work as children, and in one or two cases belonged to the lowest ranks of the Cuerpo de Carabineros, the border police corps that remained loyal to the Republic; some of these considered themselves apolitical or indifferent, which later enabled them to adapt to postwar Spain and work as private security guards (Durán: 4) or in business (Gálvez: 40). Despite these differences, the eleven persons have some characteristics in common. All come from Republican families in which one or other of the parents had anti-clerical leanings – a defining factor in the Catholic Spain of that time. All the men fought in the Republican army, and after its defeat, if they had not been taken prisoner, they decided to go into exile for fear of Franco’s repressive regime. Many belonged to families who were politically prominent at a local level (Gimeno) or national level (Semprún), sometimes holding institutional positions of importance. Despite the widespread illiteracy of the time and the fact that several interviewees came from families who were illiterate or only semiliterate, they all learned to read and write; two of them won prizes for

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essays at school (Català, Subirats). Those who were not from Republican families said their parents were politically indifferent but without conservative leanings. Two interviewees have subsequently had spectacular political careers: Semprún was Minister for Culture in Felipe González’s socialist government and Subirats was a member of the Senate in the first legislature of the transition period and later Spain’s representative at the European Court of Auditors.

Some Experiences The Spanish Republicans who were interned in Buchenwald reached the camp in 1943 or 1944, when the defeat of Nazism was already in sight and, according to them, conditions at the camp were less severe. They were few in number: ‘There were hundred fifty of us at the most in Buchenwald. They were Spaniards arrested while working for the French Résistance – in other words a different type of prisoner or deportee [from those who went to Mauthausen].’ Mauthausen was the concentration camp in Austria where about nine thousand Spanish Republicans were sent; two thirds died there or were killed there, and most of survivors stayed there four years (Semprún: 2). The help they received from the Communist Party was decisive: organised in cells, one of their basic principles was solidarity, and even those who had been anarcho-syndicalists joined the Communists. As I knew they were organised, I joined them … for reasons of solidarity, to help a comrade who was depressed or didn’t have enough to eat … because, of course, it’s not the same being isolated among Germans, Russians and Poles. I would have died if it hadn’t been for a small nucleus of comrades. (Garriga: 47)

The presence, among the prisoners in Buchenwald, of former members of the International Brigades who had fought in Spain against Franco’s troops was also decisive for the survival of the interviewees because they spoke or at least understood Spanish and therefore could talk with the Spanish prisoners. These prisoners were given better jobs in the camp administration, in the kitchen or even feeding the SS’s dogs (Gimeno: 46) by former brigadists who were functionary inmates. The Spaniards who were in occupied France had a better deal. Some of them escaped from the French camps and joined the OT in order to pass unnoticed or even be afforded some protection: ‘It was easier in the occupied zone than in the unoccupied part – well, once you knew the ropes … And there was also one of them [a member of the SS – MV] who favoured the Spanish: he was a refugee but working for the Ger-

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mans’ (Casañas: 11). The Spaniards who had been taken prisoner during the Civil War had to do forced labour in Spain, and the same applied to those who decided to return and were caught and imprisoned shortly afterwards: ‘I was tired of escaping and of the Gendarmerie and I said to myself “That’s it. If I stay on I’ll get caught by the Germans”’ (Durán: 28). I went with the troops to France, and there was no way of working there and if you wanted to get out of the refugee camps you had to go into the battalions to dig trenches to defend the French, so as I didn’t want to do that I decided to return to Spain, whatever the outcome might be. (Farré: 1)

From then on, if they were not sentenced to death and shot they were made to join the army and then do forced labour. Their suffering was nothing compared to those in the German camps, but even in the Spanish camps those who had some knowledge of accounts received better treatment, and those who managed to form friendships with the officers were even allowed out. Forced labour in Spain was presented to the public and to those sentenced to do it as moral and spiritual regeneration: They made us stand in formation in order to get us in the frame of mind where those criminal Marxist ideas could be ‘regenerated’ by the new national, syndicalist, Catholic regime. And the camp commandant said: ‘Anyone who doesn’t want to go to confession, step forward. Let’s see. Who’s the smart guy who dares step forward?’ (Rubio: 13)

There was the occasional priest who tried to help them and was punished: ‘They made us go to Mass, but there was one priest … And a few days later he disappeared because he took our side’ (Farré: 3). When they returned to Spain or were released, they all had to conceal the fact that they had fought for the Republic, and that they had been in German concentration camps or done forced labour in Spain, because if this was known, upon returning to their villages they were reported and were obliged to move away. There were some who, for fear of being reported, returned secretly. At any rate the religious or political testimonials they were able to obtain were decisive: ‘My mother was very friendly with Father Castro’ (Pi: 25). ‘My father came to the Modelo prison in Valencia with a testimonial and I was given a conditional release … but within a month people had reported me and I was handcuffed in the middle of the village, in the main street’ (Rubio: 18). ‘I got my discharge from the Batallón de Trabajadores. But on a corner of the street I bumped into the mayor and they arrested me again and sent me to the concentration camp in Reus’ (Farré: 5). Among the civilian population, however, there were people who turned a blind eye in order to help them:

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In the end, some guards who knew us let us out at nights and we would go into the fields to steal beets, potatoes, wheat, anything. And I told one of these farmers years later, ‘Look, I apologise on behalf of all my comrades.’ And he replied, ‘We knew about it but we didn’t report you, did we?’ (Rubio: 40)

Some interviewees returned with solid testimonials obtained, for instance, from the Spanish ambassador in Paris (Gálvez: 30), or as a result of their family’s repeated efforts: ‘When they sent me clothes and money I realised they were all right, because at that time people were going hungry in Spain’ (Garriga: 57). Others, like Neus Català and Jorge Semprún, decided to settle permanently in France and held positions of varying degrees of importance in the communist organisations linked to the clandestine Spanish anti-Franco movement. They have spoken little to their families about what happened to them: ‘I didn’t want to make my parents suffer. And the people who hadn’t done anything would look at you and turn their backs’ (Català: 73). Some, like Casañas, have not recounted their experiences to their children. In other cases, like that of Rubio, their families have not listened to them. Many of them have not kept in touch with their fellow inmates; and some of them when visiting a concentration camp years later have felt distressed: It killed me, remembering it all over again, reliving those walls … that was where they all spoke, the archbishop of Vienna, an American soldier, all of them … and these speeches that make you remember against your will … it’s not pleasant. (Garriga: 69)

The way in which they describe their experiences varies: some have still not come to terms with the tragedy, and others, like Jorge Semprún or Joan Subirats, have written about it, published books and obtained recognition, fame and awards. They are all concerned about their memories, and are writing or have written their memoirs – for their grandchildren, they say. Some have managed to get their accounts published; others are trying to do so, seeking help from the Amical de Mauthausen y Otros Campos y de Todas las Víctimas del Nazismo de España (association of inmates of Mauthausen and other camps and all the victims of Nazism in Spain), their local authorities or the Generalität. Some anarchists even think the revolution is still possible: At that time we believed the revolution would transform society. I still believe that now, but in what I might call a personal way. I’m an anarchist who’s optimistic not fanatical. I consider myself a present-day revolutionary who looks for every opportunity in society to practise solidarity. (Casañas: 49)

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Others have devoted their efforts to seeking recognition and compensation through various associations: ‘I was chairman of the Asociación de Ex-presos [Ex-Prisoners’ Association] for five years’ (Tario: 30). For Neus Català, [t]he most important thing is to recover the historical memory. We didn’t think there were so many of us; we didn’t attach importance to it. But when we saw how the men were starting to write books and didn’t even mention the women, we decided this wasn’t good enough: we’ve got to write this ourselves. (Català: 73).

Explanations of Survival Survival was possible due to a combination of factors. The most important of these were perhaps age, solidarity and the fact that none of them, except for Neus Català, had children or were married, which made separation from the family less painful. They were a relatively young group, and all say they arrived at the camps in excellent physical shape: ‘I was very strong and at a good age – 25 – because those who were 17 or 18 found it much harder to survive and those who were over 50 too. They were the ones who succumbed’ (Garriga: 51). They were also a group dedicated to armed and political struggle who were able to establish contact with the camp officers, the SS or the Spanish army in order to sometimes escape the vigilance of the guards or to help their comrades. In the camps, the communist and anarchist networks were of fundamental importance. The survivors were also helped by their psychological perspicacity: ‘I always tried to be in the middle, neither on one side nor the other, because those were the ones who always got it’ (Garriga: 37). Being literate and able to work in the offices or assist with the running of the camp was an advantage, as was knowing how to make oneself ‘indispensable’ (Subirats: 58). ‘I was promoted because I used to write the reports and therefore knew what was going on’ (Pi: 4). Also helpful was being able to speak a foreign language and express oneself well: ‘It was there that I came to realise that one of the greatest injustices in life – well, inequalities in life – is this: those who are able to express themselves clearly and those who cannot. For me it is much greater than any social difference’ (Semprún: 11). Others were saved by their sense of fun: And everyone crying and laughing with happiness. We got things going immediately – there were choirs, recitals, everything. Never have I laughed so much as in the camp. If I cried it was in private. After the liberation I lost my sense of humour; in the camp I needed it to stay alive. (Català: 40)

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Evaluation of the Experience and Subsequent Career Most of the survivors offer a positive assessment of the experience: ‘I can tell you frankly, I consider all this as an enriching experience. It has made me much stronger’ (Casañas: 45). There in the final circle of hell and exile I found myself returning to the root, returning to Spain, returning to the language, returning … because of the chance fact of being arrested and being in Buchenwald, where there were Spaniards … the return within the camp to the language and to what I’m not sure whether to call the homeland.’ (Semprún: 3)

‘Yes, yes, and the solidarity and friendship were very positive and are something I’ve never come across since in my life’ (Rubio: 39). For others, though, it was ‘wasting time, wasting time’ (Pi: 61). Still, at another point in the interview Pere Pi said he felt fortunate to have done forced labour in Spain since this prevented him from returning to his village, where he was likely to have been reported and possibly executed. Others decided to return to their villages only in the 1980s, but still fear their neighbours and live in semi-seclusion with their memories of the atrocities perpetrated during the Civil War. Others who live in Barcelona are still troubled at having been ‘badly thought of in the village’ (Farré: 38). All of them have managed to improve their financial situation, and their children are better off than they were; they have been to university and have good jobs. This is one notable difference compared with the workers who stayed in Spain and whose children started work at the age of fourteen without any secondary education. All the interviewees receive a pension from France, Germany or Spain for having served in the Republican army and for the work they did, but although they fought hard to achieve this financial compensation they place greater value on social recognition. None of them has suffered any physical after-effects, unlike many of those who were in Mauthausen.

Ways of Returning Home Five groups can be distinguished among those who returned to Spain, according to their circumstances and the repression they were subject to: those who returned with a testimonial (Gálvez), with family support (Garriga) or clandestinely (Casañas) and were not imprisoned by the Spanish police; those who returned and were sentenced to forced labour (Farré, Durán); those who were taken prisoner by the Francist authorities and ordered to do forced labour (Pi, Rubio, Subirats); those who stayed in France as militant communists and then returned with a passport or clandestinely (Català, Semprún). A fifth group comprises individuals ar-

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rested, condemned to death and executed. Joan Subirats says that the best thing he did when he was taken prisoner was to change his name ‘because otherwise probably I would not be alive’ (Subirats: 4). While he was in prison, Subirats attended many men in the last few hours before they were executed, and in his interview he describes them: Those who had principles or an ideology knew they had lost the war, but they had faith in the future and accepted their death with a certain equanimity. The ones who had an ideological basis and had fled to France but decided to return because of their girlfriend, wife or children and because ‘their hands were not stained with blood’ found it harder to accept death. Those who had held official positions and had a sense of commitment, but would have acted in the same way had they been on the other side, despaired because they could not accept death. Finally, there were the ones who had commitment but had no guiding principles and had decided to return – they were the most difficult to help: their despair was absolute. (Subirats: 46)

Commemoration after Franco One of the agreements reached in Spain after the death of Franco was to refrain from any political purge of those who had profited from the dictatorship and also not to recognise in public the contribution to democracy made by those on the losing side in the Civil War. This ‘amnesia’ made any commemoration impossible until the end of the 1990s, when a social and political debate that many call a ‘recovery of historical memory’ began. One of its characteristics is intensive reflection on the Franco repression.

Interviewees Individuals interviewed between April 2005 and January 2006 are listed in alphabetical order, along with year and place of birth, whether they were members of the BDST or the OT or were imprisoned in German concentration camps, their political affiliation during the Civil War, their main occupation, and the place and date of the interview.

REFERENCES Casañas, Enric (1919, Barcelona). OT. CNT . Housepainter. Interviewed in Barcelona, 16 January 2006.

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Català, Neus (1915, Els Guiamets, Tarragona). Ravensbrück. JC. Maid, nurse, journalist. Interviewed in Rubi, 28 April 2005. Durán, Josep (1915, Barcelona). BSDT. Apolitical. Private Security Guard. Interviewed in Sant Boi de Llobregat, 20 November 2005. Farré, Salvador (1918, Corbera d’Ebre, Tarragona). BSDT. JC. Foreman. Interviewed in Barcelona, 8 October 2005. Gálvez, Joaquín (1923, Fuenterrabía, Guipúzcoa) OT. Republican. Whitecollar manager. Interviewed in San Sebastián, 7 January 2006. Garriga, Marcelli (1916, Vilanova i la Geltrú, Barcelona). Buchenwald. CNT. Fisherman. Interviewed in Vilanova i la Geltrú, 12 January 2006. Gimeno, Edmund (1923, Caseras, Tarragona). Buchenwald. JC. Editor. Interviewed in Caseras, 13 January 2006. Pi, Pere (1920, Granollers). BSDT. JC. Bank director, businessman. Interviewed in Santa Maria del Curcó, 30 April, 2005. Rubio, Trinitario (1920, Les Useres, Castellón de la Plana). BSDT. JC. Taxi driver. Interviewed in Barcelona, 27 April, 2005. Semprún, Jorge (1923, Madrid). Buchenwald. Communist Party. Writer and politician. Interviewed in Paris, 15 December 2005. Subirats, Joan (1920, Tortosa, Tarragona). BSDT. ERC. Accountant, politician and writer. Interviewed in Barcelona, 5 December 2005.

NOTE 1. The numbers behind the name indicate the page of the original transcript where the quotation appears.

3

CZECHS AS FORCED AND SLAVE LABOURERS DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR Šárka Jarská

Historical Background

F

ormed in October 1918, the Czechoslovak Republic consisted of the historical countries of Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia. German rule began with the Munich Agreement, signed on 29 September 1938, which annexed part of the bordering regions of Bohemia and Moravia (Sudetenland) to the German Reich. Germany’s influence on the political, economic and social life of this area increased sharply after 14–15 March 1939, when its troops occupied the remaining parts of Bohemia and Moravia and Hitler declared them a protectorate of Germany. Some areas of Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia fell into Hungarian hands following the Vienna Award of 1938. In the area of Slovakia that had become politically autonomous in October 1938, an ‘independent’ Slovak state was created on 14 March 1939 as a German satellite. Subcarpathian Ruthenia, which had also declared its autonomy within Czechoslovakia on 22 November 1938, was completely occupied by Hungarian troops at this time. From the autumn of 1938 onwards, thousands of unemployed people voluntarily left their homes in the Protectorate, tempted by offers from German employment offices that promised them work under favourable Notes for this chapter begin on page 58.

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conditions in the Reich. Although the reality seldom lived up to the promise, most of these workers were no longer in a position to return home and were forced to stay in the Reich. In March 1939, it became increasingly difficult to avoid compulsory labour in the Reich as the German economy demanded ever more foreign labour. In spring 1942, General Plenipotentiary for Labour Allocation Fritz Sauckel and Deputy Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich agreed to mobilise 100,000 Czech labourers1 for the following year. The only way to achieve this goal was through forced labour, or Totaleinsatz. In autumn 1942, all Czechs born in 1921 and 1922 began to be sent to the German Reich as forced labourers. This was later extended to include those born in 1918, 1919, 1920 and 1924. As a result, the winter of 1944/45 saw several thousand young men (and a small number of women) working in extremely harsh conditions on the front lines, building defences against the advancing Red Army. According to contemporary statistics as well as current estimates, it is highly likely that between 400,000 and 450,0002 Czechs were forced to work in the German Reich in the war years. During this period, 3,461 people died through work-related accidents, illness, bombing and repression,3 while others were seriously injured and still suffer health problems to this day. Others became mentally ill, and several thousand returned home either disabled or partially disabled. However, the majority of forced labourers managed to leave the German Reich and return to their home country. The situation was different for those who were used for slave labour in concentration camps, special internment camps, prisons and corrective labour camps. These people included political opponents of the Nazi regime, members of the Resistance, persecuted Jews and people who were treated as Jews on the basis of the Racial Laws, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, ‘anti-social’ people, people of various faiths (e.g. Jehovah’s Witnesses) and forced labourers accused of employment contract breaches, sabotage or attempting to escape. Of the Jewish population in Bohemia and Moravia, some 73,000 Jews4 were killed outright in extermination camps or other actions. Others died in labour camps or prisons, were executed or died as members of Czechoslovak army units fighting with allied forces or as partisans. It is estimated that a total approaching 80,000 Jews5 from Bohemia and Moravia were killed during the war. Of the Roma population in the Protectorate, which numbered between 8,000 and 10,000 in March 1939, at least 6,000 people were killed.6 Most slave labourers never returned home; the few survivors had severe physical or mental difficulties, often lost all their relatives and had to carry the burden of their past for the rest of their lives. Very few former Czech slave and forced labourers are still alive today. In 1999/2000, there were 86,000.

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The Interviews Of the forty interviews conducted (interviews with another 70 or so witnesses were deemed unsuitable), ten were video interviews and thirty were audio interviews. The interviews lasted between 2.5 and 6.5 hours, most being about 3.5 hours long. The majority were recorded in one day, with two days needed for three of the interviews. All interviews were conducted in the Czech language and were held at the interviewee’s home, with one exception. Nine of the forty interviewees wanted their personal data to be handled anonymously. We conducted a total of twenty-four interviews with forced labourers and sixteen with slave labourers.

Forced Labourers The majority of Czechs compelled to work for the German Reich in the Second World War did so as forced labourers. In Czechoslovakia, a term was coined to describe forced labour: Totaleinsatz, or comprehensive mobilisation. This reflected the fact that, after 1942, entire age groups were enlisted without restriction. The living and working conditions of Czech forced labourers were generally worse than those endured by Western labourers or workers from ‘friendly’ nations, because the Czechs were Slavs and as such were classed by Nazi ideology as an ‘inferior’ race. Most workers lived together in large groups in timber barracks in the camps or in large factory buildings that were provisionally set up as accommodation. Hygiene standards were sometimes bearable, but in some places they were very poor, with lice being a common problem. On the other hand, by comparison with the Poles and Ostarbeiter, the Czechs enjoyed many advantages. They could move around freely and there was no barbed wire fencing round the camps. They did not have to wear badges or pay special taxes. If they breached their employment contracts, they faced lesser punishments than the Poles or Ostarbeiter. Many of them spoke a little German and, thanks to their good education, were often permitted to perform skilled or technical work. After work, it was usually possible for them to undertake sporting or cultural activities. Sometimes Czechs were given a few holidays. Food was in short supply almost everywhere, a situation that became worse as the war progressed. On most days, the main dish was a stew made with cheap ingredients. Czechs could also receive food parcels, although sometimes these arrived so late that the food had gone bad, or the parcels had been raided. Nevertheless, in many cases these parcels were the difference between life and death from starvation.

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As well as hard labour, difficult living conditions and poor medical care, forced labourers in the German Reich also had to face increasingly frequent air raids, which meant that they also feared for their lives. Only a handful of the interviewees said that they experienced no fear or trauma; this was because they were young and thought that nothing could happen to them. In terms of the kind of work they did as well as the conditions under which they lived and worked, the twenty-four forced labourers we interviewed fall into four groups. The first group included eight women and five men who worked in industry or for Reich organisations. The second comprised four individuals who were employed by paramilitary organisations. This group endured harsher working and living conditions than the first group. The labourers were under constant psychological pressure and often had traumatic experiences. They were also subjected to a strict disciplinary regime – any breach of the rules was handled by military or police courts. Unlike other foreign workers, they wore a uniform. The tasks these young men were required to perform included clearing rubble after air raids, helping to rescue people buried in the rubble, extinguishing fires and sometimes locating and disarming unexploded bombs. One example of this type of work was given by René Šírek (born 1923). On completing his studies at the archiepiscopal grammar school in June 1942, Mr Šírek was prevented from searching for a job by being sent to perform forced labour in Hamburg and Kiel, where he stayed until the end of 1943. He was trained by the Air Raid Protection Service as a fireman and completed a course on locating and disarming unexploded bombs. His worst experience during this time was being confronted by the death of other people and the threat to his own life during air raids and when looking for bombs. He felt he could so easily have died – it was only a matter of luck that prevented him from being hit. The best aspect of the experience was the firm friendships that he formed. For him, the idea that he, a member of the Protectorate, should help the German civilian population after Allied air raids, was absurd: On the one hand, as members of the Protectorate, by which I mean Czechs, we wanted … National Socialism to be destroyed. … Back then, during the war, at the time of the Protectorate, the people here in Bohemia, we made no distinction between Germans and Nazis. … And now just imagine, that’s how you think, in that climate, and we are sent to Germany, made to wear a German uniform, given paramilitary training, we Czechs, who were in fact filled with hatred, but they treat us normally, like human beings, they are even friendly towards us, on the streets and among the people there was no animosity towards us. On the contrary, because we helped with the air raids. … they just knew that although we weren’t Germans … but there was no animosity towards us and we had to get it clear in our heads. So it wasn’t easy, it wasn’t easy. … We wanted

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National Socialism and the German Reich to collapse as soon as possible, collapse, be defeated, so that we could go home and the war would be over, so that we could finally begin to live like normal people again.7

After the war Mr Šírek completed a degree in law at the Charles University in Prague and started to work for companies specialising in international shipping and maritime transport. He is still employed in this field today. Every year, Mr Šírek meets up with other former forced labourers from the air raid service in Hamburg and Kiel and also visits German schools to discuss his experiences as a forced labourer during the war with the students. He is married with two daughters. The two interviewees who made up the third group were exposed to harsh conditions similar to those of forced labourers working for paramilitary organisations. They worked as trench diggers on the front line against the Red Army on the Austrian-Hungarian border and in Moravia (on the eastern border of the Protectorate). In the winter of 1944/45, they were forced to toil in freezing weather with little to eat. They mostly lived in barns, had no medical care and often suffered frostbitten toes. The fourth group comprised five people whose stories were not typical of Czech forced labourers. One former forced labourer was of Polish nationality from the Cieszyn area in former Czechoslovakia. One woman worked as an agricultural labourer and another, whose father and uncle were arrested in 1939 because of their resistance activities, was a forestry worker near her home in the Protectorate. The fourth interviewee in this group was unemployed and sent to Germany in the summer of 1939 and had to stay for several years as a forced labourer. Interestingly, he met his future wife, a German, here. The final interviewee in this group came from a Slovak Roma family persecuted during the war on racial grounds.

Slave Labourers As is generally known, the slave labourers had to work under much harsher living and working conditions than the forced labourers, with barely sufficient food and lodging and very little medical care, often existing at the very limit of their physical and mental strength. They had to perform the hardest labour and cope with the intimidation and punishment meted out by their guards. This was the most extreme form of workforce exploitation – extermination through labour. The living and working conditions of Czech slave labourers were similar to those of other prisoners of other nationalities in certain concentration camps and corrective labour camps. The interviews did not reveal any major differences in living conditions based on the reason for arrest (nationality, racial origin, political orientation etc.).

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From this group of slave labourers, we recorded interviews with sixteen individuals. Five people within the sample were persecuted on the basis of the Nuremberg Racial Laws because of their Jewish religion or ancestry. One example is Bedr=ich Blasko (born 1918), born Blaskopf. Mr Blasko grew up in a secularised and assimilated family. In the 1930s, his father left the Jewish community in Prague. Although Mr Blasko had not maintained any contact with Jews, he was persecuted soon after war broke out as a ‘Jew’ on the basis of the Nuremberg Racial Laws. Between autumn 1940 and July 1941, Mr Blasko was interned in the Jewish labour camp Lípa near Havlíc=ku`v Brod. After his release, he was transported in November 1941 to the Terezín (or Theresienstadt) ghetto, before spending February to December 1942 in the Gestapo prison in Charles Square in Prague and then fortunately returning to the Terezín ghetto. In autumn 1943, he was sent with his father to Auschwitz I – two days cooped up in a railway wagon. A Kapo who was standing on the platform looking into the train helped save Mr Blasko’s life by saying to him: ‘You’ll all be dead by tomorrow. And take off your glasses!’ The three days he spent in Auschwitz were appalling. Of the three thousand people who arrived there, only a few hundred survived. The others, including his father, were gassed on the same day. Luckily, Mr Blasko himself was deported to the Friedland concentration camp in Lower Silesia after three days: ‘There was no selection there, no crematoriums. We were just there to work.’ It was obviously a relief for him to have been sent to a ‘normal’ concentration camp. The atmosphere was not as harrowing as in Auschwitz, and the Ukrainian guards ‘only’ beat them sometimes. Even so, Mr Blasko could hardly believe what happened when the Friedland camp was closed at the beginning of May 1945. Suddenly, the inmates were summoned for a roll call, and the senior camp commander asked them whether anyone had any complaints! Of Mr Blasko’s family, only his brother survived the war. Fifteen of his relatives were murdered during Nazi rule. After the war, Mr Blasko pursued a successful career as a chemist until 1971, when he was banned from working for political reasons. However, after 1989 he worked as a journalist and photographer, having acquired extensive knowledge of culture and politics. Five of the interviewees were persecuted under Nazi anti-Roma legislation. The life story of Ms Josefa Šte=pánková (born 1925) is one example. Ms Šte=pánková came from a family of Moravian Roma who led nomadic lives before the war. In August 1942, her family was interned in the ‘gypsy camp’ in Hodonín u Kunštátu. Here, families were split up and accommodated in separate quarters, but Ms Šte=pánková, aged sixteen, managed to stay with her mother. All prisoners had their hair cut

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short, and every morning after the roll call they had to start construction work. Later, Ms Šte=pánková was given lighter work as a cleaner for the police. Disobedience was punished with beatings. Prisoners were accommodated in wooden barracks, and – a major plus – they were allowed to bring one of their own warm blankets from home. There were also places to wash and facilities for washing clothes. There was too little to eat, though, and the prisoners were always starving. Compared to her later experiences, Ms Šte=pánková nevertheless recalls the meals at Hodonín in a positive way: ‘It was good there, we could … then, when we went to Auschwitz, we kept thinking of the concentration camp here at home. Despite everything, it was clean and the people cooked, didn’t they?’8 When the camp was closed in August 1943, she was deported to the Auschwitz II (Birkenau) concentration camp. Here the number Z-9332 was tattooed on her arm, and anyone who didn’t respond immediately to the roll call was tortured. In her opinion, the living conditions in Auschwitz were the worst of all. In April 1944, she was deported again to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she also suffered poor conditions and inadequate nourishment. It was probably here (or in Auschwitz, she can no longer remember which) that she was subjected to medical experiments, as she was ill for a long time and given many injections, something that was not otherwise the norm. Whenever a prisoner was ill, he or she was left to recover slowly without medication or die without any medical intervention. In Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, her work included lighter duties such as clearing up and sweeping roads. Later she was transported to the Dachau concentration camp and to an unspecified labour camp near Leipzig, where she worked in a factory manufacturing cartridges and components of V2 weapons. During one journey between concentration camps towards the end of the war, a young German soldier on the train gave her a sugar cube: ‘So I said, he may be a German, but you shouldn’t tar all Germans with the same brush.’ Of her immediate family, only she and her uncle returned home. The others died in various concentration camps. Ms Šte=pánková completed an apprenticeship as a tailor and still sews today when she has time, something she really enjoys. Another seven of our interviewees were interned in concentration camps, prisons and corrective labour camps because of their political views or nationality, or because of sabotage or escape from the labour camps. The living and working conditions in the corrective labour camps were often the same as those in concentration camps, and sometimes the punishment was even worse. Furthermore, because fewer people were interned in these camps, the guards took more notice of their activities.

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Interpretation and Analysis Most of our interviewees had never before spoken publicly on the subject of slave and forced labour. One exception was Mr C.R., who had given an interview for Steven Spielberg’s foundation and also discussed the subject with employees of the Jewish Museum in Prague. Some of the Roma and Jewish interviewees had already recorded interviews on the subject for the Museum of Roma Culture in Brno and the Jewish Museum in Prague. Most of our interviewees had told their spouses, children and grandchildren about what happened to them in the war, though not always in the same level of detail. Some of them had only told their story in rough outline (e.g. Mr Michejda, Mr Jakeš, Mr Procházka, Ms Šte=pánková and Ms M.H.), while others did not like talking about this period of their lives at all and did so more out of a sense of duty (e.g. Ms M.A. and Mr J.I.). Sometimes they would have been prepared to tell everything, but their children were not interested (including Mr Blasko, Mr J.K. and Ms E.H.), while in other families the subject was freely discussed (e.g. Ms Kormanová). One daughter was even ashamed of her mother’s story and her tattooed concentration camp number, which her mother took badly. Ms E.H. had spoken of her experiences during the war only to her husband, not to her children. The manner in which the stories were told varied and depended on the temperament, personality and emotional disposition of the interviewee. Some stories were told dispassionately and with careful consideration, in an effort to analyse the behaviour and attitudes of that time (e.g. Mr Jakeš and Mr Michejda). Other styles of narrative were completely subjective, more emotional than factual, and concentrated on experiences (including Ms Kýrová and Ms Šte=pánková). Some witnesses proved excellent at telling their stories, speaking fluently, chronologically, and in a gripping and moving way (e.g. Ms Militká, Ms Jeníková, Ms Sklenic=ková, Mr Šírek, Mr Blasko, Mr Doležal, Mr Havlíc=ek, Mr Procházka and Mr C.R.). Other interviews, such as those with Ms Kormanová and Mr J.I., were characterised by a tendency to provide answers to questions rather than deliver an independent narrative. Even though not all the interviewees were born storytellers, a combination of their willingness to oblige and some carefully chosen questions meant that we always managed to unearth some of their more interesting memories. For instance, Ms M.H. and Ms E.H. tended to pause at length at the end of each sentence, so that it was sometimes difficult to tell whether they had nothing more to say or were thinking about what they would like to add. The style adopted by Mr J.K. was rather formal, as if he was reluctant to overstep the boundaries of reason, preferring or perhaps only being able to assume the role of detached observer.

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Some interviewees were much more emotional than others, especially the women who were imprisoned as slave labourers or who experienced some kind of emotional trauma. The men were more reserved, although they were not completely without emotion. Mr Doležal, for instance, often had tears in his eyes – when speaking about seeing his mother again after returning from the corrective labour camp in Oberlanzdorf, or when he remembered the song describing the life of the inmates in the Kunc=ic=ky labour education camp. Mr J.I. told his story calmly, without gestures, and remained unruffled even when relating sad events. But he also described his feelings of guilt that arose from being the only one in his whole family to survive. The lowest points for the slave labourers were their stays in the concentration camps, saying goodbye to their families before deportation, the death or unknown fate of relatives or friends, and worst of all (for the majority of interviewees) the constant sense of insecurity, the sword of Damocles that hung over them, the feeling of not knowing what was going to happen the next day. Then there were the beatings, in some cases incessant, carried out for no reason (e.g. Mr Procházka), the trauma associated with the murder of innocent Roma (including pregnant women and children) in the gypsy camp in Dubnica nad Váhom (Ms Kormanová), the sound of children crying at night in a Polish camp (Mr Michejda), and spending Christmas and public holidays alone without parents in the internment camp for children in Jenerálka in Prague (Ms M.H.). For the forced labourers, the worst experiences were chiefly work-related accidents and injuries, the death of friends and the fear of air raids. Indeed, the constant air raids frightened Mr Jakeš so much that he preferred to escape from the forced labour camp and get himself interned in a labour education camp. These difficult times, according to our interviewees, were alleviated mainly by the firm friendships that they forged. One positive moment recalled by Mr J.K., who was at the internment camp for ‘mixed-race Jews’ in Postelberg, was the opportunity to eat his soup in peace behind a pile of rotten cabbage. Quite a few of the former forced and slave labourers even met their future spouses while working in the Reich (e.g. Mr F.P., Mr Blasko, Ms Audrlická and Ms Rómerová). Most of those who were ‘only’ employed as forced labourers were not permanently traumatised by their experiences. One exception was the harrowing experience of enduring air raids and clearing up after them (life-threatening situations, death of close friends). Around a third of those imprisoned in concentration camps, internment camps or labour education camps (slave labourers) were traumatised, and some remain so to this day. Mr Procházka had nightmares for at least a year after the end of the war, but he does not have them now. Some have nightmares

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more often now than they did in the postwar years, because practical everyday concerns took priority at that time (e.g. Ms Militká). After 1945, Ms Sklenic=ková had great difficulty relating to other people of her own generation and generally learning to trust people again. Her memories of the war caused mental and psychosomatic problems that she was unable to come to terms with until she was much older (at the age of 70). The trauma experienced by Ms M.A. was passed on to the next generation in a much stronger form, and her daughter was even afraid that it could all happen again. Surprisingly, however, many of the former concentration camp inmates are mentally stable people who have dealt with their experiences and are now very happy to be able to pass on their stories to the younger generation. Almost all the interviewees described themselves as optimists, and health permitting, they lead active lives going to work and travelling, and appear to have a youthful outlook. Ms Kýrová, when discussing her imprisonment in the concentration camp, made a witty and ironic comment on her basic knowledge of German: ‘If only I could have stayed in Germany a bit longer, I could have spoken German really well.’9 Mr Blasko describes himself as a naturally sceptical person, but one who can see the humorous side of life. One exception was Ms M.H., who considers herself a rather pessimistic person who is not particularly courageous or strong-willed, although in reality she overcame some very hard times as a child in the internment camps. Asked to cite vital factors that helped them bear all the hardships, many of the former slave labourers mentioned cautious optimism, luck, courage, help from friends and the conviction that they would survive. ‘It took strength to keep believing that we would be liberated one day,’ said Ms Militká.10 Listening to all these eventful stories, it is interesting to discover how the labourers sometimes managed to exploit the rules of the game for their own ends. Ms Kýrová, for instance, a concentration camp inmate, was given better work because she was good-looking, and a German guard regularly shared food with her. Mr Cerar, who was employed at the Enzesfeld metalworks, forged factory stamps to fake holiday permits so that he could go home more often. Mr Merta, who worked at the Siebel aircraft factory as an electrical fitter, had access to the work centres of the camp inmates. He regularly took them mail and food, which resulted in beatings from factory security personnel. Some interviewees connected things they had read or seen elsewhere to their own experiences. However, they kept these ‘third-party’ facts clearly separate from their own stories. Ms M.A., who was interned in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, tried to describe the accommodation at the camp and the slogan above the camp (‘Arbeit macht frei’) by comparing it to Auschwitz (‘like it was in Auschwitz – but everyone

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knows the Auschwitz slogan’). When Mr J.K. could not remember certain details of his time in the Postoloprty internment camp, he alluded to things he had read and referred to an academic text. However, he kept the facts he had read strictly separate from his own experiences and did not mix the two sources. The same was true for Ms Sklenic=ková, who at a certain point of her narration enhanced her own recollections with the collective memories of the village of Lidice and information from literature on the subject. With regard to the financial ‘compensation’ offered by German and Austrian governments and businesses, which began in February 1999 with the initiative of the Stiftung der deutschen Wirtschaft (a foundation set up by German business firms), all the interviewees were pleased that something was finally being done. Although the money was a significant help, it had been too long in coming, and most saw it as more of a symbolic gesture than a genuine attempt to provide adequate compensation. Many of the interviewees were grateful to the Czech government for its commitment to the cause and also reflected that it would not have been possible without pressure from American lawyers and the general public. Mr Blasko was more sceptical and felt that the compensation was a profit-making exercise, particularly for the lawyers. The collective culture of commemoration in Czechoslovakia after 1945 was heavily influenced by geopolitical developments in Central Europe and assumed its ultimate direction following the communist putsch of February 1948. Even though western Czechoslovakia had been liberated by the Americans, it was the Red Army that assumed cult status. Following the lead of the Soviet Union, the country preferred to use images of political (especially communist) detainees in concentration camps and prisons, of partisans and of civilians murdered in the horrific destruction of the villages of Lidice and Ležáky (as symbols of Nazi atrocities) to shape public memory for the war years. Excluded from this national agenda, kept out of the public eye and therefore out of the culture of commemoration until 1990 at the earliest, were Jewish victims, Roma victims, the internment camps for gypsies and those persecuted for being anti-social, homosexual, mentally or physically disabled or members of particular faiths, as well as the broader group of forced labourers. Their status as victims was not even mentioned, let alone acknowledged, when certificates began to be issued in line with Act No. 255/1946 Coll. in 1946, which gave active members of the Resistance and prisoners (arrested for political, racial and religious reasons) a range of social benefits. Even the Project for Social Assistance, which was part of the GermanCzech Future Fund set up in 1997 and managed funds of around DM90 million, provided no financial benefits for forced labourers (the money was allocated to former prisoners and people who had lived in hiding).

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The forced labourers did not receive any payment for the work they had done in the Reich until 1999, when funds were made available as a result of the compensation activities of the German and Austrian governments and businesses. Since then, many publications, books and exhibitions have focused on hitherto neglected groups of Nazi victims, so the general public is now more aware of their experiences. When asked whether they celebrated the anniversary of the end of the war, all the interviewees said yes. Those who are not officials of victim associations celebrate privately, at home. Mr J.I. still pays several visits a year to the town where his family were interned in the Hodonín gypsy camp. Ms E.H. answered the question about celebrating in no uncertain terms, and so deserves the final word: ‘So I celebrate. Because the end of the war is worth celebrating.’11

NOTES 1. Miroslav Kárný, ‘Der “Reichsausgleich” in der deutschen Protektoratspolitik’, in Ulrich Herbert (ed.), Europa und der ‘Reichseinsatz’: ausländische Zivilarbeiter, Kriegsgefangene und KZ-Häftlinge in Deutschland 1938–1945 (Essen 1991), 37. 2. Tomáš Jelínek, ‘Nucená práce v nacionálním socialismu’, in Kolektiv pracovníku` Kancelár=e pro obe=ti nacismu C+NFB (ed.), ‘Nepr=ichází-li práce k Tobe=…’: Ru`zné podoby nucené práce ve studiích a dokumentech (Prague 2003), 31. 3. Pavel Škorpil, ‘Bilance: Celkový poc=et obe=tí na životech’, in M. Hor=ák and T. Jelínek (eds), Nacistická perzekuce obyvatel c=eských zemí: Studijní materiál pro uc=itele de=jepisu (Prague 2006), 73. 4. Pavla Plachá, ‘Konec=né r=ešení židovské otázky’, in M. Hor=ák and T. Jelínek (eds), Nacistická perzekuce obyvatel c=eských zemí: Studijní materiál pro uc=itele de=jepisu (Prague 2006), 45. 5. Miroslav Kárný, ‘Konec=né r=ešení’: Genocida c=eských židu` v ne==mecké protektorátní politice (Prague 1991), 171. 6. Pavel Škorpil, ‘Bilance: Celkový poc=et obe=tí na životech’, 74. 7. Quoted from interview with René Šírek, Czech transcription, 28. 8. Quoted from interview with Ms Šte=pánková, 43. 9. Interview with Ms Anna Kýrová, Czech transcription, 33. 10. Interview with Ms Antonie Militká, Czech transcription, 81. 11. Interview with Ms E.H., Czech transcription, 61.

4

SLOVAK REPUBLIC (1939–1945) Viola Jakschová

Background and Context

T

he Slovak Republic, as its official name was, was declared on 14 March 1939 within the boundaries fixed by the Vienna arbitration.1 Its creation was the result of a long period of aggressive policy towards Czechoslovakia by the German government under Adolf Hitler. In the course of these developments Slovakia, under the political leadership of Monsignor Jozef Tiso since 1938, acquired first the status of an autonomous entity within ‘Czecho-Slovakia’, and then, after October 1939, that of a formally independent state. However, Slovakia was a German ‘protectorate’, that is, a satellite state of the German Reich; it was forced to accept a legate holding ministerial rank, in fact a commander sent by Hitler,2 and to gradually accept claims and demands raised by Germany.3 Our interview partners follow the literature in characterising the regime in Slovakia as ‘Fascist’ on the one hand, emphasising how its institutions of repression, Ústredna státnej bezpecnosti (Central Institution of State Security) and its paramilitary organisation Hlinkova garda (Hlinka’s Guard), brutalised its opponents. On the other hand there are also those who refer to a relatively liberal treatment of opponents by the regime. German influence had disastrous consequences in the case of the deportation of the Slovakian Jewish population: from 1942 onwards, the Slovak authorities deported 57,628 Jews to Poland. Only 800 returned after the war. Tiso, who was executed in 1947, never showed any signs of regret for this ‘Jewish policy’, nor did he distance himself from it. Notes for this chapter begin on page 69.

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The extension of National Socialist policies to Slovak territory can be roughly divided into two periods. The first phase, from March 1939 to July 1944, may be called the period of relative Slovak independence. The second, from August 1944 to May 1945, is characterised by Slovakia’s complete subordination to the German Reich after the Wehrmacht had occupied its territory.

Persecution of Political Opponents of the Slovakian State The Slovak state was an ally of the ‘Third Reich’, but in the field of penal law it followed the liberal legal system of Czechoslovakia. Legal repression, however, was not the primary means of dealing with political opponents. Thoughout the whole existence of the Slovak state, extralegal repression predominated, increasing over the course of the years.4 In practice, the police and gendarmerie were subject to no formal restrictions; they carried out house searches, monitored the population, and were entitled to decide about the whereabouts of ‘suspicious’ individuals. The organs of repression were not even subordinated to other state administrative authorities and were thus able to act free of any control. Immediately after the foundation of the Slovak state, Hlinka’s Guard, and in some cases the police too, imprisoned hundreds of so-called enemies – principally supporters of the former government and left-wing parties. These people were interned in the Ilava security camp. During the years 1939–45 nearly 3,000 people went through this camp. Although punishments became harsher in the course of the war, the death penalty was still considered an exceptional punishment, and the courts pronounced this verdict only if the defendant was absent. The situation changed dramatically after the Slovak national uprising against the Germans and the Tiso regime broke out on 29 August 1944, precipitating the occupation of Slovakia by the German Wehrmacht. During the fight against the uprising and after its defeat at the end of October 1944, captured partisans, resistance fighters, Jews and Roma were liquidated in cold blood by the Wehrmacht and Hlinka’s Guard. After 1 September 1944, SS-Obersturmbannführer Witiska started his work in Bratislava. Under his leadership the office of the commander of the Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police – Sipo) and Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service – SD) was established in Slovakia: Z.K.V. Kommando 29 Pressburg. From then on, German authorities were entitled to act directly to imprison Slovak citizens in Slovakia and deport them to concentration camps; they were deported to Sachsenhausen and after the beginning of 1945 to Mauthausen. At the beginning of February 1945, all political prisoners from Slovakian prisons were handed over to the Gestapo, and

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in March 1945 they were transferred to Mauthausen, where the bulk of political prisoners died at the end of the war.5

Slovak Labour for the ‘Third Reich’ The Slovak Republic committed itself by a contract to provide manpower for Germany. According to various estimates, during the Second World War between 100,000 and 200,000 Slovaks worked in industry and especially in agriculture in Germany and the occupied territories.6 The Slovak Interior Ministry was responsible for distributing the Slovak workforce. In 1940 the obligation to work was introduced, and the former labour exchanges became employment offices working to German specifications. During the first years (1939–40) it was easy to satisfy Germany’s demands because Slovakia was suffering from acute unemployment. Moreover, in Slovakia there had been a long tradition of looking for work beyond the border. But the Slovak state also had the means to exert pressure, often refusing unemployment benefits to those who refused to work abroad. Men born in 1919, 1921, and 1922 were excluded from labour recruitment actions because they still had to do their military service. The German authorities did not oppose this special regulation: they were already planning for war against the Soviet Union, and Slovak troops would be involved in this campaign right from its beginning in June 1941. In the face of persistent labour shortage, Germany increased its demand for manpower in 1943 to 50,000, but the Slovak authorities were able to provide only 34,000 workers. In 1944 they decided to extend all contracts, which up to then had only been made for one year, until the end of the war. At the end of 1944 the General Plenipotentiary for Labour Allocation, Fritz Sauckel, issued a decree that banned all Slovak workers from returning home. In spite of this, in the course of 1944 many Slovakian workers left their workplaces in industry, so that by the end of the war most of the Slovaks in Germany were agricultural workers. In 1944 the shortage of civilian workers was partly answered by deploying people who had been imprisoned following the Slovak uprising. Slovak rebels formed the last national group to arrive at different prisoner of war, labour and concentration camps. They were used as forced and slave labourers. The first prisoners arrived as early as September 1944, the largest group during the first days of November. In January 1945, these twenty-one camps held 15,157 Slovaks: 384 officers, 2 medical orderlies, 809 NCOs, 13,684 rank and file, and 278 civilians. They were destined to be deployed in mining. However, all camps were soon evacuated as the Red Army approached. The prisoners were liberated only after death marches of hundreds of kilometres.7

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The Slovak state also used other instruments for mobilising labour. Young people were ordered to Slovak firms that were important to the war effort, and students were ordered to work in agriculture. From 1944 on, as the front drew nearer, the Wehrmacht undertook arbitrary deportations of Slovak civilians to work for the military. The work of Roma and Jewish labourers in labour battalions, labour camps and ghettos constitutes a specific category of forced and slave labour on Slovak territory. Because the Slovak state was officially an ally of the ‘Third Reich’ it was not possible for the German authorities to use the same methods of workforce mobilisation in Slovakia as were used in the occupied countries. Even if Slovakia could not evade pressure from Berlin, the conditions of forced labour had to be determined by formal diplomatic negotiations and by contract. This position changed completely after the Slovak uprising. From then on, the German authorities decided Slovakia’s fate until the end of the war.

The Solution of the ‘Gypsy Problem’ in Slovakia The number of Roma living on Slovak territory is estimated to have been 100,000. The first restrictive measures against the Roma population were introduced in June 1939; these included a ban on trading in horses and compulsory registration. A ban on nomadism was enacted in 1941. After 1940 Roma could not join the Slovak army; instead Roma recruits had to do their military service in so-called labour battalions. Compulsory internment for labour of so-called social misfits and the ‘workshy’ happened from 1941 on and affected almost exclusively the male Roma population. In the beginning, these labour battalions and camps were not intended to lead to the liquidation of the Roma population. But that was clearly the purpose of the so-called security camp for gypsies at Dubnica nad Váhom, opened in November 1944, where 729 people were gathered, 250 of them children. After a typhoid epidemic had broken out, the sick people in the camp were brutally shot. After the autumn of 1944 there was bloody terror and harsh repression on the reconquered and occupied territory where the uprising had taken place. The actors principally responsible for these criminal acts were the security alert units of the Sipo and the SD, assisted by SS units, Wehrmacht units, Gestapo, the security alert units of the Hlinka Guard, and the departments of Home Security and of Central State Security. From the beginning of the uprising until liberation, 5,304 people were tortured to death or murdered outright; their bodies were later found in 211 mass graves. More than ninety villages and settlements were burned down. Of these victims, 832 were murdered in the part of Southern Slovakia that was occupied by pro-fascist Hungary. The repressive agencies

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of the Slovak regime also cooperated in persecuting resistance fighters, Jews, Roma and civilians who were suspected of taking part in the uprising in Slovakia. It is not possible to give the number of Roma victims among those in the mass graves. Since the Red Army had already arrived in Eastern Slovakia by the end of 1944, the bulk of Slovak Roma saved themselves by hiding in the woods and engaging in resistance.

The Interviews Among the relatively small group of seven interviewees were two former partisans, one political prisoner, two members of the mutinous Slovak army (one recruit, one officer) and two from the ranks of the racially persecuted (Roma). Contact with our subjects was made with the help of seven institutions.8 In the end, we made direct contact with thirty-four individuals who met the project criteria. They all welcomed the project, but most declined to participate because of their age or told us that they had already given too many interviews. For all the subjects this was the first time they had been invited to tell their whole life story; up to then, they had only been interviewed in the context of the period of National Socialism. Among the group of interviewees was also a screenwriter who has made his memories into films. With one exception, all interviews were conducted at people’s homes. Mr Ján Klines was born at Detva near Banská Bystrica in 1929 and lived not far from the centre of the Slovak uprising. He grew up in a settled Roma family living in very humble circumstances. He has very positive memories of the Czechoslovak period (1918–39), when he was able to attend school. Life under the Slovak state became increasingly difficult for the family because of the many restrictions on Roma, which he describes. After Slovakia had been occupied by the Wehrmacht, the German army forced him to labour together with other inhabitants of his settlement. They carried loads and did cleaning work, among other things. He succeeded to escape and hid with the partisans in the mountains to avoid the Wehrmacht reprisals. Also, he knew that Roma and Jews were being murdered. Together with all his relatives his father was murdered at the Jewish cemetery at Zvolen.9 In the war Mr Klines lost one of his arms when he was shot by a Slovakian collaborator, allegedly to prevent him from reporting anyone after the war. After 1945, in spite of being disabled, he worked at a factory until retirement, played in a band and with it visited other European countries. He has a very favourable view of the Communist policy of forced assimilation of Roma before 1989. For Roma, he said, it was more important to learn the Slovak language than Romanes because that would help them to find better jobs.

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In his opinion the new age (since 1989) is too tough for people without work and with a low level of education. Mr Klines has eight children. Every year he commemorates his murdered relatives at commemorative plaques that were erected for them. Mr Dusan Albini, born in 1923, comes from a family of Slovak intellectuals that had been active in Slovak nationalist educational projects since the beginning of the nineteenth century and had been persecuted by the ruling Hungarian elite. In 1918 his grandfather was also a member of the first Czechoslovak parliament. Mr Albini attended Protestant schools and later became a Protestant minister. Together with his friends, most of them university students, he printed flyers against the National Socialist regime after 1939. For this activity he was arrested and sent to the notorious prison for political prisoners, Ilava, on remand. He was lucky to be helped by lawyers who shared his views and demanded that his case be brought to trial – not common practice for prisoners in Ilava. According to the penal law the judge sentenced him to three months of prison, which he had already served as a prisoner awaiting trial. The public prosecuter immediately appealed, but at that point the uprising broke out and Mr Albini did not appear in court but took part in the uprising at Liptovký Mikulás. He was responsible for supplying the partisans and those hidden in the mountains. After the Communist takeover in 1948 Mr Albini was persecuted for his Christian faith and his activities as a Protestant minister. He was banned from his ministry for limited periods on several occasions. He welcomed the events of 1989 and the turnaround in Czechoslovakia, although now he is critical of some subsequent developments. For him the most positive consequence is freedom of speech in Slovakia. He lives with his wife in Sala. Mr Milos Krno, born in 1922, grew up in a middle-class family in Central Slovakia. As a university student at the University of Bratislava he became interested in politics. Together with friends he founded an anti-fascist circle and wrote poems against the regime. These poems were even published, which he thinks was possible both because of the Slovak censors’ illiteracy and their ‘grasping for alibis’. Mr Krno describes the corruption and hypocrisy of the Slovak fascist regime, the theft of Jewish property and much more in detail. A state policeman warned him and his friends that all of them were on the list of suspicious people. During summer holidays he was sent to help with the harvest, together with other university students. In 1944 all university students were called up to build earthworks for the defence of Bratislava. The uprising broke out, and Mr Krno joined the partisans in the mountains and together with others founded the Association of Fighting University Students. In April 1945 he was among the university students who welcomed President Beneš when he came to stay in Kosice. Mr Krno became a deputy of Vlado Cle-

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mentis, a Communist politician who had been in exile in London. With him he visited Moscow in the early 1950s and met the entire political nomenclatura, about whom he tells picturesque stories. After Clementis was executed in the course of the political trials in 1952 (together with Slánský) Mr Krno abandoned politics, but he remained a member of the Communist Party. He worked as a filmmaker and screenwriter and also wrote texts on the national uprising, but his writing remained within the terms of the communist regimes. In 1989 he left the Communist Party; today he is a supporter of one of Slovakia’s left-wing parties. Mrs Mária Oracková, born in 1921, describes the persecution of Roma in Eastern Slovakia. She lived at a Roma settlement near Levoca, not far away from a Slovakian village. Before the war she was married with a child and led a humble, quiet life. She describes how the Roma population was harassed by the Hlinka Guard after 1939. Together with all the inhabitants of the Roma settlement she was taken by the Wehrmacht to a place where it was said that all of them were to be shot. She was saved by a German woman from the nearby village who spoke German to the soldiers and tried to convince them that these Roma were honest and hard-working people. Thereupon all men and boys were transported from the village to construct earthworks. In a way that reveals her obvious traumas, she tells about how she lived without her husband, having to leave her child alone in the house to creep away and collect food directly behind the front lines. Mrs Oracková also spoke at length about the hardships of her life after 1945, as well as about the discrimination she and her children still experience in Eastern Slovakia. She feels she is a second-class citizen. A manual worker, she has three children. Mr Ján Rýs was born in Central Slovakia in 1929. Despite being young in those days – he was only sixteen at the end of the war– he actively took part in the resistance movement, helping his father to supply those hiding in the mountains. Mr Rýs describes the cruelty of the Wehrmacht’s reprisals against Slovak civilians. He was an eyewitness to the burning of Slovak villages; he saw the tortured corpses of innocent people. When they captured a member of a German unit, they found photographs of torture and mistreatment. He was wounded three times in action against German units. This experience, and his direct contact with Soviet partisans active in Slovakia, who were very brave, made him a committed friend of the Soviet Union. When assessing life after the war, he admits that there was injustice by the Communist Party against some people, but he still thinks the years between 1948 and 1989 were a time of justice. Mr Rýs led a successful and fulfilled life, holding a good position in public administration. Another representative of the Slovak resistance is Mr Teodor Slajchart, born in 1916. When he was a small child he lost both his parents

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and was raised by his aunt. As there was only very little money to pay for schooling, he attended state military schools. He embarked on a successful career as a military professional in democratic Czechoslovakia, serving as a young officer in Bohemia and Moravia. After Czechoslovakia had fallen apart (1939), he stayed with the Slovak army and moved to Slovakia. After 1940 he became increasingly involved with resistance activities. This was partly because the Slovak army had joined the war against the Soviet Union as an ally of the ‘Third Reich’; for a short period he fought in Ukraine, and he describes the terrible experiences of total war. After Slovakia was occupied by the Wehrmacht (October 1944), he took an active role in fighting against the occupiers. He describes the beginning of the struggle almost as an idyll: the Slovak army rose up against the aggressor, but the soldiers were allowed to decide whether they wanted to take part in fighting or not. After the uprising had been defeated he went to Southern Poland with his men, where he continued fighting the Germans. After 1948 he had to formally join the Communist Party in order to stay in the Czechoslovak army, though with a lower rank. In 1968 he was very active in the Prague Spring, running a broadcasting station for free broadcasts. He welcomed the year 1989 and the breakdown of the Communist regime with joy. For Mr Slajchart, the significance of the national uprising consists in the fact that it was not only against the occupiers but also against the collaborationist Slovak regime. After 1989 he was honoured for his achievements: he was granted the State Order of the Highest Rank and was appointed Major General. Mr Pavel Úkrop, born in 1924, volunteered for the Slovak army in revolt in 1944, although the uprising had almost been put down already. Having been active in the resistance movement as early as 1940, he wanted to take part actively in the fight for liberation. Before this happened, however, he was taken prisoner by the Wehrmacht and after a short period of internment in Slovakia was deported to Poland to the Stutthof concentration camp, where he had to work as a slave labourer at a brickworks and a building site. He describes the living conditions in the concentration camp itself as much more terrible than the work. The fact that it was Stutthof where he was interned only emerged in the 1970s, when he visited Poland and did some research with Polish friends. He collapsed at the sight of the camp gate. In his account Mr Úkrop, a Protestant, emphasises the role of Slovak Protestant ministers in the resistance to National Socialism. The ministers of the Slovak Protestant Church advised their members not to join Hlinka’s People’s Party or other asociations (Hlinka Youth, Hlinka Guard etc.). The Slovak People’s Party, which had been founded by the Catholic priest Andrej Hlinka and was led after his death by the later Slovak president, Jozef Tiso (also

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a Catholic priest), was the only legal party in the Slovak Republic. Mr Úkrop’s experiences in the concentration camp influenced his later life. As he grew older, he was increasingly preoccupied with the history of the Nazi period. At the age of seventy-one he wrote the monograph Slováci v Stutthofe (Slovaks at Stutthof).10 Owing to this interest, his accounts are full of facts. Yet he also speaks in a very emotional way, e.g. when describing the death march in northern Germany and an encounter with a transport of young Slovak Jewish women who were in a terrible state (he learned later that none of them had survived). His life after the war was relatively quiet. After the putsch in Czechoslovakia in 1948 he decided to join the Communist Party. Later he became aware of the fate of the resistance fighters and supporters of democratic parties who were harassed by the Communist Party, some of them even imprisoned. Mr Ùkrop reflects extensively about his life and about the current world situation, his thoughts often taking the form of rather cynical observations. He lives with his wife in Bratislava.

Interpretation and Analysis of the Narratives Despite their group being small in number, the interviewees’ fates are broadly representative of key aspects of National Socialist crimes in Slovakia. The stories of resistance fighters and the racially persecuted demonstrate the sudden escalation of persecution and terror in Slovakia after occupation by the Wehrmacht. Many of the interviewees characterise the Slovak regime’s treatment of its opponents as relatively liberal. This perspective is not shared by the victims of racial persecution, who accuse the Slovak government and its authorities of being guilty, among others at least, of crimes, particularly the murder of Slovakian Jews and Roma even before Slovak territory was occupied by the Wehrmacht. Each interviewee’s view of the Germans is influenced by personal experience. Some mention having been helped by local (ethnic) Germans in Slovakia (Mrs Oracková), others the mistreatment of captured Slovak soldiers in the German communities in Slovakia (Mr Úkrop). They comment particularly on the deterioration of the relationship between ethnic Germans and their Slovak neighbours after Hitler’s takeover of power (Mr Krno). In this context, though, German anti-fascists are also mentioned, and twice the opinion is expressed that Austrians had behaved more ‘humanely’. The view of Germans became even more individualised after 1945. Almost all interviewees are members of the Association of AntiFascist Fighters.

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Remembrance Culture(s) During the years 1948 to 1989, history was interpreted according to the view of the leading Communist Party in Czechoslovakia in ways that served the regime’s propaganda. At the top of the postwar hierarchy of those persecuted by National Socialism were the communist resistance fighters and partisans, whose memories of fighting against German National Socialism were considered most meaningful and ‘correct’. The memories of victims of persecution who had been members of other parties or interest groups were deliberately left out of consideration, as were the memories of those who had been racially persecuted, most of them Jews or Roma. Forced and slave labourers of both sexes, particularly women, were at the lower end of the hierarchy. Opening up the fate of those persecuted in the context of the Holocaust and that of forced and slave labourers would have exposed the contribution of Slovak state authorities and at the same time would have diminished the heroism of Communist victims. Relevant issues apart from resistance – such as how Slovaks contributed to and gained from the Holocaust – were more openly addressed only in the 1960s. These initiatives, which gained significance during the Prague Spring, were ended by the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, after which they became ‘non-topics’ again. Studies of the history of Slovakia that take into account the widest possible range of activities and memories of all former victims of National Socialism and even of the perpetrators became possible only after 1989. After Czechoslovakia had fallen apart and independent Slovakia came into being in 1992, several strands appeared in Slovak remembrance cultures. One of these ‘policies of the past’ (Norbert Frei11) consists of reinforcing the legitimacy of the new independent Slovak state by emphasising the ‘positive aspects’ of the history of the First Slovak Republic (1939–45). In this context there is again silence on the suffering of the racially persecuted and the Slovak state’s role in the Holocaust. This approach, which is popular with conservative groups, has met with a sharp critical response from mainstream historians and the associations of victims of National Socialism. Initiated by a former minister of the interior, the Institut pamati národa (Institute of the Memory of the Nation) was founded in 2002. This institute is charged with dealing openly with all matters about which there has been silence for almost seventy years. In the preamble of the act that created the Institute, the period 1939–45 is characterised as a time of slavery and oppression in the life of the Slovak people.12 Thus Slovakia, a Central European transition state, has made a first important step towards a new interpretation of history.

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The Communist period also calls for reinterpretation in its relation to both the period of fascist hegemony and to the post-Communist political configuration. In a situation where the future remains contentious and contested, the process of memorialisation will continue to be highly politicised. But there are independent institutions and research organisations making a stand against being monopolised. For the time being, hundreds of stories of Jewish and Roma victims have been recorded on video and audio tape, and now research is underway on members of both the communist and the non-communist resistance. A major challenge is the story of the Slovak national uprising, which, after having been exploited by Communist historiography, is being laboriously reconstructed today.13 At the very least it is clear that members of the Slovak armed forces played an important part in it, even though they had fought alongside the Germans up till then.

Summary For all interviewees the end of the war was not the end of dealing with past injustice. For all of them life meant new challenges, and in different ways and on different fronts they contributed to reconstructing history against the ‘common historic enemy’, National Socialism and the collaborationist regime. Apart from the persecution they actually experienced, almost all of them have carried a heavy psychic burden all their lives, as in most cases they had to not only deal with the loss of relatives but also regain their lost trust in society – something that has proved very difficult for many of them. Thus, the stories of Slovak interviewees add some pieces to the puzzle of the life stories of other victims of Nazism in Europe. In this context we should not forget that their stories are those of the lucky ones, for they are the stories of survivors.

NOTES 1. The first Vienna Arbitration was the result of negotiations held in Vienna from 2 November 1938; it stipulated that the areas with Hungarian majority populations in Southern Slovakia and the Carpato-Ukraine were separated from Czechoslovakia and given to Hungary. 2. SA-Obergruppenführer Hans Ludin was active as ‘envoy and Accredited Minister of the Greater German Reich’ in Slovakia from January 1941 to April 1945.

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3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Viola Jakschová

In 1947 he was executed in Bratislava. See i.a. the film by his son, Malte Ludin, 2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß (Two or Three Things I Know About Him), which discusses the family’s memory of Hans Ludin and the existing documentation, which is contradictory. On this see the treaty on the protectorate relationship between the German Reich and Slovakia and the secret record of the treaty concerning economic questions of 23 March 1939, as a result of which so-called protectorate zones were created on the basis of the occupational status, codified by the German-Slovak treaty of 28 August 1939; see also the treaty on war economy of January 1940 and the Slovakian-German negotiations in Salzburg in July 1940 and their actual consequences. See also the activity of the Abwehr, SD or Nachrichtendienst (Intelligence Service) of the NSDAP, Gestapo, the Deutsche Heeresmission (Mission of the German Army) in Slovakia, as the NS advisor had diplomatic status and (co-)controlled all fields of public life, thus also the carrying out of anti-Jewish steps. Formally, this persecution was made possible by the governmental decree on extraordinary measures of 17 December 1939, on the basis of which civil rights were suspended in Slovakia. See Jan Rychlík, ‘Perzekúcia odporcov režimu nna Slovensku 1938–1945’, in Michal Šmigel’ and Peter Mic=ko, Slovenská republika 1939–1945 oc=ami mladých historikov (Banská Bystrica 2005). Under the Slovak state a total of about 3,000 people were arrested for political reasons. The number of deported political prisoners was about 800 people. For more on this see Viera Zajacová, Slováci v Mauthausene (Bratislava 1970). Mark Spoerer, Zwangsarbeit unter dem Hakenkreuz: Ausländische Zivilarbeiter, Kriegsgefangene und Häftlinge im Deutschen Reich und im besetzten Europa 1939– 1945 (Stuttgart and Munich 2001), 43; Zdene=k Konec=ný and František Mainuš, ‘Slováci na pracích v Ne=mecku a protektoráte= za Druhé sve=tové války’, Historický c=asopis 17 (1969): 565–590. Edmund Nowak, ‘Slovenskí povstalci v táboroch Wehrmachtu pre vojnových zajatcov na území dnešného Polska (1944–1945)’, in Dezider Tóth and Katarina Kovác=iková, Adade pre Múzeum SNP Banská Bystrica, SNP 1944: Vstup Slovenska do demokratickej Európy (Brno 1999): 304–315. In the Czech Republic we asked Ústav pro soudobé de=jiny C+R AV (Institute of Contemporary History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic), the charitable society Post Bellum and Muzeum romské kultury (Museum for Roma Culture); in Slovakia, Ústav pamäti národa (Institute of the Nation’s Memory), Sväz protifašistických bojovníkov (Association of Anti-Fascist Fighters), Nadácia Milana Šimec=ku (Milan Šimec=ek Foundation) and Múzeum SNP v Banské Bystrici (Museum of the Slovakian National Uprising at Banská Bytrica). The murder of the Detva Roma is described in Ctibor Nec=as, R+ešení cikánské otázky na Slovensku v letech 1939–1945, Terezínské listy 1981, c=.11, 31. Pavel Úkrop, Slováci v Stutthofe: Prešiel som bránou smrti (Banská Bystrica 1999). Norbert Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik. Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die NSVergangenheit (Munich 1996) Act No. 553/2002; see http://www.upn.gov.sk/v2/?lang=en Among others, the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising at Banská Bystrica deals with this topic.

5

‘YOU CAN’T SAY IT OUT LOUD. AND YOU CAN’T FORGET.’ Polish Experiences of Slave and Forced Labour for the ‘Third Reich’

Piotr Filipkowski and Katarzyna Madon;-Mitzner

Historical Background

It is a matter of common knowledge (in Europe, at least) that the Second World War began with a German attack on Poland on 1 September 1939. After a month’s resistance Poland fell, having been weakened by the incursion of the Red Army into its eastern territories on 17 September (in accordance with the German-Soviet pact of August 1939). The vast majority of the country and its citizens came under German occupation (with about one third coming under Soviet rule until June 1941). In response, Poles immediately began to organise an underground resistance movement. While Soviet policy was similar throughout the annexed Polish territory, German occupation policy varied from one occupied region to another. Some differences were purely arbitrary, but the most important of them reflected the Germans’ categorisation of the population of the respective territories. The western regions, with about 10 million Polish citizens, were directly incorporated into the Reich and destined for complete and rapid Germanisation. This policy was carried out through the elimination of Polish elites at the very beginning of the occupation, Notes for this chapter begin on page 84.

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and the deportation of many others to Central Poland and to concentration camps or forced labour in the (old) Reich. Later, after the beginning of the German-Soviet war, a massive Germanisation campaign was enforced. Families who had not already been expelled or deported were either encouraged or pressurised to sign the ‘German national list’ (Deutsche Volksliste), an act by which they declared themselves to be German, or to have German roots and be ready to accept Germanisation. The central part of Poland (including Warsaw and Cracow, the largest Polish cities) was transformed into the Government General. The plan for this territory was exploitation and progressive Germanisation. After mass murders had been committed behind the fast-moving front in autumn 1939, more precise steps were undertaken. In the so-called AB action (Ausserordentliche Befriedungsaktion) in spring 1940, thousands of representatives of the prewar Polish elite – doctors, teachers, lawyers, priests and others – were murdered on the spot or sent to concentration camps. There are no exact data, but it has been estimated that during each year of the German occupation about 100,000 Poles – mostly political opponents (or rather ‘political opponents’, since it was the occupiers who defined the group) – were sent to concentration camps to be exploited as slave labourers. The first deportations started just a few weeks after the beginning of the war in 1939. The last mass transport took place after the Warsaw uprising. In the Nazi plans Poland was treated as a source of cheap labour for the Reich; compulsory labour was introduced throughout occupied Poland. Concentration camps – at least at the beginning – had a different purpose: the elimination of elites and those identified opponents of the regime. The current historiography is uncertain about the number of Polish slave labourers, who were primarily concentration camp prisoners. The maximum figure proposed (probably somewhat exaggerated) oscillates around 500–600,000 inmates. Starting in the first weeks of German occupation a radical anti-Jewish policy was put into practice by measures of stigmatisation, ghettoisation and the confiscation of Jewish property. These were the first steps towards total extermination – of the three million Jews who lived in Poland before 1939 no more than 300,000 were still alive in the spring of 1945. As early as October 1939 new regulations were announced introducing forced labour in occupied Poland. Their aim was obvious – to provide manpower for free or as cheaply as possible for the Reich’s economy. Although the occupation authorities were agitating for voluntary recruitment, the vast majority of men between fourteen and sixty years of age were in fact forced to work. For most of them the starting point of the procedure, a gate that finally led to the Reich, was the local employment office. For many, however, it started much more suddenly when they were

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caught in street round-ups. Poles were (after citizens of the USSR) the second biggest group of forced labourers in the Reich – it is estimated that altogether over 2.5 million were deported to work there.

Construction of the Sample: Choice of Interviewees Our sample was a relatively large one: 80 interviews (out of about 600 collected across the documentation project overall). This reflects – as was intended by the project leaders – the representation of Poles among the totality of slave and forced labourers. Sixty Polish interviews were to be carried out by the Karta Centre, an independent nongovernmental organisation (incorporated as a foundation) dedicated to documenting and popularising the recent history of Poland and East Central Europe. Karta can be characterised as something between documentation centre, research institute and educational institution.1 As the remaining 20 interviews conducted in Poland in the context of the project were split into small, topical projects related to particular groups of eyewitnesses, the 60 interviews Karta was to conduct were designed to represent a variety of Polish slave and forced labour experiences – or, to be more exact, contemporary personal memories and narratives (including cultures of commemoration and master narratives) relating to those experiences and their after-effects. The project’s vision of a ‘representative’ sample was in fact a quite general and open one. No one expected, of course, that we would use any quantitative, statistical methods to construct a list of 60 interviewees from total of about 400,000 persons.2 Such a procedure would not have made much sense here at all. The fact that, more than sixty years after the end of the war, we can have direct access only to members of the youngest cohorts of Second World War survivors is not the only reason underlying this decision. During this project we did not take into consideration victims and survivors of the Holocaust in Poland. That does not mean that Holocaust survivors did not work as slave or forced labourers. Paradoxically, some of them survived thanks to this status. Nevertheless, this aspect of their war experience is – in the Polish case – a minor and not distinctive one, and it is not usually constitutive for their identity as Holocaust survivors. This makes it hard to find them. They are, in fact, the most difficult former slave and forced labourers to find in Poland today.3 This does not mean that the Holocaust is not present in the Polish part of the project, for indeed it is – but as a series of events observed by Polish witnesses and bystanders. Survivors of the Majdanek concentration camp recall one day, 18 November 1943, when 18,000 Jews were murdered. Auschwitz

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survivors, who were constantly breathing smoke from the crematoria, recount everyday scenes they saw on the railway ramp in Birkenau. The transports of Jews from Hungary are especially deeply inscribed in the memories of Polish Auschwitz survivors. Many of our interviewees recalled examples of Jewish-Polish relationships before and during the war; some talked about anti-Jewish pogroms in 1941, others about giving shelter to Jews and the consequences that could (and did) have.4 There were several ways by which we found our interviewees. Very important were the contacts we established with the two biggest organisations of Second World War survivors in Poland: one formed by Nazi camp inmates,5 the other by Polish forced labourers who worked for the ‘Third Reich’ in agriculture or industry.6 Even more fruitful turned out to be our good relations with representatives of the Maximilian Kolbe Werk in Poland7 and the support we got from the ‘Polish-German Reconciliation’ foundation. The two latter contacts arose through personal tips and recommendations. Similarly, we got addresses from our interviewees (the snowball principle) and also looked back into the database we had kept from previous oral history projects. Polish former slave and forced labourers constitute a very diverse group in terms of their wartime (and also of course their pre- and postwar) biographies. Still, they can be sorted into three broad categories: concentration camp prisoners, and civilian forced labourers in industry and agriculture respectively. We concentrated on trying to gather as wide a range of different kinds of narratives as possible but almost entirely within these three big categories. That is, we decided to collect a substantial number of interviews within each of these ‘mainstream’ groups of war victims rather than trying to build a mosaic of isolated, ‘atypical’ cases. A mosaic would be bound to be incomplete. Moreover, it would not have allowed us to formulate meaningful general conclusions or research traces of Polish master narratives in the interviews. Consequently, our 62 (15 videos, 47 audio – two more than planned) interviews comprise: – 32 interviews with forced labourers. Sixteen interviewees from this group were engaged mainly in agriculture or related work (generally in the countryside), the rest mainly in industry, public works in urban areas or similar spheres; – 27 interviews with survivors of concentration camps or camps with similar status; – 3 interviews with penal camp survivors.8

There are 22 women (among them 11 former concentration camp prisoners) and 40 men in this sample (17 of whom were imprisoned in concentration camps). Twelve interviews were conducted in Warsaw, the vast majority in provincial cities (some of them very small) and eight in

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the countryside. The oldest interviewee was born in 1914, 11 interviewees were born before 1920, 47 in the 1920s, and 4 in the 1930s. The youngest interviewee was born in 1933.

The Interviewees and their Narratives We talked to people who experienced forced labour while very young, some of them as children – ‘children of the war’, as they are labelled in public memory. Two of our interviewees were forced to watch Germans murdering their parents.9 A boy of ten, whose parents were shot for hiding Jews, was sent to work on a farm while his sister was Germanised. A twelve-year old girl, whose pregnant mother was beaten to death, was then taken to forced labour. She was later arrested and – after brutal interrogation and beating by the Gestapo – imprisoned in Stutthof concentration camp. The oldest among our interviewees were in their twenties when the war broke out. Only two interviewees had families of their own before the war.10 The vast majority were imprisoned in camps or sent to forced labour as teenagers. Usually they were still living with their parents, and often they were already engaged in various underground anti-Nazi activities. For them, the outbreak of war really meant the end of the world, and many recall this moment exactly in such terms. Several years or months of slave or forced labour are often perceived as a painful rupture in their life trajectories that caused irreversible losses and cut off the ‘natural’ process of intellectual and emotional maturation. ‘You lost your most beautiful years there. Here you were almost a child, and these beautiful years were left behind.’11 But it also often meant rapid maturation of a different kind. Education, professional work, personal and family life, the neighbourhood, the milieu – all this was destroyed or rapidly changed. People had to act under completely new circumstances, very different from what they had learned and got used to before. Our interviewees had an especially difficult task as their social world was destroyed and replaced with a violent and disordered one. Whether sent to a concentration camp or set to work on a farm, the labourer was always a victim of ‘abduction’, someone who was stripped of privacy and autonomy and became a slave. Former forced labourers often describe slave markets – having their mouths opened, their teeth inspected, their muscles palpated; being bought and paid for: ‘it touched me very much when I was being sold as a slave and reckoned up in Marks’.12 Camp survivors have vivid and painful memories of being labelled with a camp number and deprived of their names. The taboo of nakedness was broken, their intimacy raped. Women and girls had to walk unclothed

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in front of men, Germans: ‘We were so humiliated, frightened and also ashamed of our nakedness. They were very elegant, in uniforms … we were blue, exhausted, skinny, ruined.’13 And not only were taboos broken but identities were assaulted – hair was cut, belongings confiscated, young people changed into camp ‘puppets’: ‘We could not recognise each other anymore – our hair cut, in strange clothes. We cried terribly when we saw each other. The end, the end.’14 In fact it was only the beginning of their existence as slave or forced labourers. From this point their experiences became more and more differentiated, so it is impossible to generalise about all of them at once. Still, we can try to focus on some characteristic motifs in these various narratives. An important and recurring motif in many interviews is the persecution of other family members or the whole family. This way the reach of the project is indirectly extended to take in fates of those victims who are no longer alive. Some of them were killed during the war; others died during the following decades. It was often denunciation or betrayal that brought an end to one person’s conspiratorial activity and set in train his or her persecution and that of family members. Parents, siblings, spouses were arrested, imprisoned and sent to concentration camps. The father usually did not survive the camp. As a rule, our interviewee was the last survivor when a whole family was persecuted, and he or she spoke to some extent on behalf of the others, whose story was present in the background. Some of the women we interviewed were imprisoned in concentration camps together with their mothers and helped them to survive. For them this was a kind of symbolic reversal – they ‘gave life’ to their mothers. At the same time, the responsibility and care for the older, weaker and less resilient was often crucial for their own survival: ‘I had to think about another person who was helpless in that frightful world.’15 One of the consequences of the war was disintegration and destruction of families and homes. Liberation meant rapid entry into adult, independent life, often without any social or psychological support. Nevertheless, camp survivors often tried to do something with their experience and maintained contacts with their fellow inmates, creating strong networks, helping each other, often marrying other survivors. Being in touch (or in a marriage) with people who had shared similar war experiences was an important factor that helped them to understand each other and to come to terms with post-camp traumas. Forced labourers, on the other hand, were not socially integrated at all after the war, at any level; they had no distinct collective identity and for many decades were not even perceived as victims of Nazism. At the same time, they were often traumatised as well – very often after having experienced Allied bombardments in their factories towards the end of the war.

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Generally the end of the war brought a number of traumatic experiences. Camp survivors often recall death marches, extreme hunger, exhaustion and chaos that caused new fears. Forced labourers tell about sharing the fates of German civilians – bombardment, hunger and evacuation ahead of the approaching front and Soviet soldiers. But there is also a symbolic moment of liberation present in the narratives: ‘When I saw Polish and American flags crossed I thought I was in heaven.’16 ‘God! How precious was this liberty! No one can imagine! When we heard the word “liberty” we just shouted out loud.’17 But usually this joy was shortlived, for liberation opened another space of unexpectedness: ‘Everyone was shouting “We’re free!” … And now we’re alone, just prisoners – who are free, but what else, what now?’18 ‘What to do with oneself? We don’t know where to go.’19 ‘We were sleeping [on the way back to Poland] in fear – at any moment Russians may come in. And when they did come in … Oh! … It’s better not to remember, it was horrible!’20 The latter subject is present in the narratives of many women, both camp survivors and forced labourers: they were afraid, even terrified, of the Soviet soldiers who molested them when they were going back home after the war was finished. We cannot be sure how much of their experience from that very moment remains hidden to us, unspoken. It seems that some of our interviewees, while travelling to their homes in Poland on foot, or by transport improvised or seized from liberated Germany, may have been raped or witnessed others being raped. It was one of the most powerful experiences in those first days of freedom. Liberation and homecoming were usually remembered in much better detail (with more concrete pictures) than camp or forced work routine. For many liberated camp inmates and labourers the way home was a long and complicated process. Some stayed many months in different DP camps, waiting for transport or for word from home that relatives were (already) there and waiting, completing their education, but also hesitating between coming back to the new Poland or emigrating to Western Europe, the United States, Australia. Such opportunities to emigrate were open especially to camp survivors liberated by Americans. At the same time, many others tried to get to Poland as quickly as possible on their own – on foot, by bicycle, by any means possible. Such adventurous journeys are stories in their own right. It is characteristic that in the vast majority of cases in both groups, coming back to Poland is narrated as ‘homecoming’ – to family, relatives, colleagues. ‘I decided I have to come back home. I missed my parents, my sister – it was the most important thing to me … Later on I thought I had made a mistake. I’ve lived for forty-five years in the PRL (Polish People’s Republic), and I should have gone in a completely different direction then.’21 The

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lack of intensive formal screening (if any) by the new authorities, or the strong need to rebuild, to reestablish a ‘normal’ existence, or maybe the combination of both circumstances, means that there is no reference to official, state or public actors or agencies in the narratives at this stage. In some cases, however, contact with the state would result in new traumatic experiences. Conducting interviews with former camp inmates, especially with women, we were struck by the fact that over sixty years after the war these people still suffer from the consequences their traumatic experiences, struggling with irrational fears and obsessions. The camp reality is present in their minds every day; they suffer from insomnia, nightmares, migraine and neurosis, or are dependent on tranquillisers: ‘When somebody walks behind me, for example on stairs, I cling to the wall. I feel I am about to get a beating. It’s still there today. And will last forever.’22 At the same time, this is only a pale shadow of the fears and sufferings they were exposed to during the first years after the war. Without any organised psychological or psychiatric support, they learned how to cope with circumstances completely new and unknown to them. They hurried to complete their education, which had been cut off by the war; they started jobs and founded families. Seen from above it seemed they were living as ’normal’, ordinary people, concentrating on their everyday business and concerns. But somewhere deep inside they were still imprisoned in the camp universe. And former forced labourers had to cope with trauma, too, often arising from the experience of bombardment or front movements. One of our interviewees who survived the assault on Berlin recalls: ‘There was no night [after the war] when I did not dream about running away down familiar streets and through well-known places, as well as unknown, closed ones which I can’t get out of. … It was a horrible torture, I had terrible migraine.’23 An important subject present in the narratives is the range of attitudes displayed by Germans during the war. The camp experience was an experience of isolation from the ‘ordinary’ world, from everyday reality. There was no contact (or it was only very weak) with ‘ordinary’ Germans and everyday life in Germany. Social roles were to a great extent predefined. A strict hierarchy also structured contacts with and definitions of other members of the camp microcosm – personnel, functionaries and inmates of different national or ethnic groups. The interviews show that Nazism had different faces in different contexts, such as the concentration camp or a local neighbourhood. Forced labourers (especially in the countryside) could sometimes observe German families from the inside, and much depended on individual attitudes, on the goodwill or ill will of German employers. In the concentration camp the system was overwhelming, and not even the experience of ‘good Kapos’ could change the

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picture. By contrast, the memory of a good farmer could put a positive stamp on the experience of forced labour. Good farmers broke the rules and gamed the system; employing forced labourers proved to be a test of humanity. There are quite a number of examples of good memories from the war, stories of humane gestures by individual Germans – often told directly in parallel with particularly negative ones. The experiences of former forced labourers seem to have been more diverse than those of camp survivors. On the one hand we have many statements like this: ‘At six o’clock we started and we finished in the evening. … We had to stand so many hours a day at the machines. When I sometimes fell asleep standing up, our supervisor used to say “You, Emilia, you’ll never get back to Poland.”’24 But it also happened that they could see some positive aspects. For the young people from the countryside who were separated from their families and neighbours, rapidly resettled in a completely different country and forced to work for and with completely strange people, this experience also had a strong socialising effect. They had to rely on themselves, had to act under new conditions, interact with strangers, try to communicate in a foreign language, get to know different customs in new surroundings. Especially those who were not locked up in barracks but were quartered the countryside or small provincial towns quite often had to deal with the everyday life of the local community – at least some of its aspects. Their narratives contain interesting observations on life in provincial Germany, family life, different attitudes towards the war, the Nazis at a local level. The following passage is characteristic: ‘Germans in our village, they hated Hitler. There was one farmer who lost three sons at the front. He cried so much, this old man. He cursed Hitler so much.’25 What becomes very visible in these narratives is the discrepancy between the official Nazi ideology with its racist laws, and the everyday reality of war, which led to many pragmatic compromises in relationships between ‘Aryans’ and ‘subhumans’. Those who were sent to munitions factories in the cities had to live in barracks under camp conditions. But many of them seized the opportunity to get a pass to leave this closed space on Sundays and go outside and meet other forced labourers, including those from different countries: ‘In the streets of Berlin, especially on Sundays, in summer, thousands of young people of different nations; Czechs, French, Slovaks, Dutch, Polish girls and boys … in a word – the tower of Babel.’26 Another frequent motif in forced labourers’ narratives is escape from the workplace and desperate attempts to return home. Moved by homesickness or the need to rebel against hard work under bad conditions, some of them made the journey through Germany, sometimes crossing Czech territory, to Poland. Some others did not come back from ‘holi-

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days’ they had been granted to visit their homes. Usually their release was short-lived; they were caught and could be sent to prison or concentration camps. But sometimes the consequence was nothing worse than a transfer to a different (and sometimes better) workplace. One of our interviewees organised his whole story around several escapes he attempted – most of them unsuccessful.27 Speaking about their forced stay in Germany, many former labourers stress that they were treated like ‘air’, like nonpersons. After 1989 some of them had the opportunity to visit Germany as official guests. For those who seized that opportunity, the trip meant a kind of symbolic compensation for humiliations experienced decades before. It was also an important event in their lives. Our interviewees have very strong and detailed memories of these visits; they recall sightseeing tours, meetings with local officials and ordinary citizens (especially young people), journalists who interviewed them for local papers, hotels and guest houses where they stayed, restaurants where they ate meals (sometimes even the menus) and, of course, the places where they had worked during the war. ‘I did not expect such a reception and hospitality. The staff [was saying] all the time: “Please. Thank you” – not Germans, but people from another world. … It is … how to call it? 100 per cent reverse, 180 degrees.’28 Camp survivors who went on trips organised by the Maximilian Kolbe Werk had similar experiences: they were well looked after, sometimes received medical treatment hardly available in Poland, took part in meetings with young people. All of it helped significantly to allay traumatic fears and overcome prejudices towards Germans. It was very seldom that we met anyone who insisted on the uncompromising position adopted by this interviewee: ‘There are no good or bad Germans. All Germans are bandits.’29 Despite our initial anxiety about asking questions about compensation, our interviewees did not resist talking about it, even specifying how much money they had received and what they had spent it on. Some things were mentioned very frequently: washing machines, television sets, furniture, support for children and grandchildren, sightseeing trips abroad (in one case it was a journey to Alderney, the location of the branch camp in which the subject was interned). All of them stressed that they do not see this money as ‘compensation’ for suffering, lost health or slave or forced labour, but as a kind of ‘welfare payment’, ‘support’, ‘offering’ or even ‘alms, inadequate to the experiences or the extent of men’s exploitation’. One of our interviewees said: ‘It is just to wipe tears. And I used it to make [order] a gravestone for myself.’30 It is hardly possible to analyse in parallel experiences as diverse as long-term imprisonment in Auschwitz, Dachau, Majdanek, Groß Rosen, Ravensbrück, Mauthausen or another Nazi concentration camp (on the

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one hand) and living and working with (or even for) a ‘good’ German family in the countryside (on the other) – let alone compare them. And between these two extremes there lies a wide spectrum of experiences. But it was not only the material features of these two kinds of experience that were different – we could have established those differences without conducting the interviews. More to the point, they have generated different kinds of memory, different (master) narratives and different forms of commemoration and public recognition . There are different cultures of commemoration of forced and slave labourers in Poland. The traditions of commemoration among concentration camp survivors are strong and continuous; they are organised in groups (societies, clubs, networks) formed around particular camps (like Auschwitz, Dachau, Mauthausen – as noted above, we usually got access to them through these institutions). Their formal and informal meetings and celebrations have been going on for decades in some cases: Mauthausen survivors in Warsaw meet on the fifth of every month because the camp was liberated on 5 May 1945; this ritual has been maintained for sixty years. There are internal divisions and hierarchies, one of the most important factors being the duration of imprisonment. Today the youngest generation of camp survivors (usually those who were imprisoned after September 1944, during and after the Warsaw uprising) heads these organisations, while the oldest colleagues, the long-term prisoners, are the most esteemed ones. For those who were in more than one camp the most significant one (and also the decisive one for their organisational engagement) is the one where they stayed for the longest time. Sometimes the place where liberation took place is decisive. The location of the camp (whether or not its memorial today lies on Polish territory) is often important. The commemoration of such experiences was highly ritualised in Communist Poland, and there was always a special place for them in the public sphere. They could be also ‘used’ by the state (mainly as an argument for some action on an international stage, but also for internal policy). As camp survivors were treated as victims (and also heroes) of the war, there were plenty of works of history and published memoirs related to camp experiences. Forced labourers in Poland did not exist as a separate group of war victims until the late 1980s. There were no organisations or commemorations, and the attitude of the state was ambivalent. Living and working in National Socialist Germany was not as susceptible to political instrumentalisation as imprisonment in a concentration camp. The main impetus to acknowledging forced labourers as a distinctive group came from the introduction of some minor privileges in Poland at the end of the Communist period and then the move to paying compensation as of the early 1990s. But this kind of institutionalisation ‘from above’ provided only

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weak and superficial integration. Internment in concentration camps is narrated as a collective experience; the ‘we’ form is very dominant. By contrast, forced labour tends to be remembered as a common experience but an individual one. When it does happen to be remembered as a collective experience, it still seems to have been much more individualised – especially if it was experienced in the countryside, on a small farm. Camp inmates’ narratives are usually much more structured, constructed around typical points of reference (the landmarks of the camp routine): transport to the camp, entrance, registration, quarantine, allocation to a specific detail and the work done there, change of detail, ‘extraordinary experiences’, liberation, the way home). There is no such characteristic narrative scheme in forced labourers’ accounts. There is usually a distinct dividing line between memories of the time in the camp and memories of experiences before and after internment. In the case of forced labour the division is less obvious. Sometimes it does not exist at all. For concentration camp prisoners ‘slave labour’ is a strange, formal term that often does not belong to their language and does not properly express their identity as victims. Some even decisively reject the term and claim it is humiliating.31 For them, ‘working’ is but one of many aspects of the camp universe (and being forced to work was often nothing more than another method of extermination); they perceive and identify themselves as (former) camp inmates and not as former labourers. Forced labourers often talk about details of their work, even stressing some positive, socialising aspects of it: spending time ‘in the West’, or learning ‘how to work hard’ – that is, well and efficiently. One of our interviewees reflected on this aspect of his forced work in a German factory during occupation: ‘I think you can learn even from a devil, if he does any positive work. So if we had taken over everything from the Germans, our economy would be completely different. So my attitude towards Germans is ambivalent here.’32 Commemoration is another important subject for many interviewees. Among their commemorative activities, concentration camp survivors organise annual trips to the places of their imprisonment – former camps, today usually memorial sites. This ritual started shortly after the war and is ongoing today. Under Communist rule, national commemoration patterns were dominant. Today there is often an additional, Catholic element present (holy masses are a common commemoration ‘procedure’). Another common way of dealing with the slave labour experience is meeting young people, most often schoolchildren. Usually a ‘good speaker’ is delegated to ‘represent’ a local group of concentration camp survivors. His or her experiences are presented as an example of a group or generational experience. By contrast, forced labourers do not have any established formula of commemoration. During the last few years some

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of them have visited the places where they used to work (villages, cities, neighbourhoods). Such trips were usually organised in small groups or on an individual basis. They were often initiated by a local group – by Germans (or Austrians) who live close to former sites of forced labour today and feel a kind of responsibility for what happened in their neighbourhood over six decades ago. It might lead to inviting former workers for meetings, talks etc. This form of commemoration provides more space for individual, personal contact. The differences between the life-history narratives of Polish slave and forced labourers outlined above should not disguise the dominant narrative structure that characterises the freewheeling part of all collected interviews. It is very similar for both groups of interviewees: their life story usually begins with their first war experiences (the prewar period is summed up in just a few superficial sentences), or even with persecution (arrest, forced labour, imprisonment). The story usually finishes around 1945, sometimes a few years later, depending on when the postwar era – the ‘uninteresting’ biographical stage (in the speaker’s view) – started. The latter tends to be limited to just key points of the biography and has to be drawn out by the interviewer using targeted questions. But in the case of camp survivors the story is usually much more influenced by the lectures, commemoration rituals and master narratives they have been exposed to. Generally, our interviewees define themselves – in the situation of the interview, at least – first of all as survivors of the Second World War, and it takes additional effort to get them to tell more of their life story, or to tell it differently. This effort is worthwhile because most of them have never told their life story before, although many wanted and needed to. And while they may give the impression that they function ‘normally’ in everyday life, it often emerges that they are not able to come to terms with their traumatic experiences. For many years, forced labourers had no support in dealing with their harmful memories. They were left alone. Camp survivors, in contrast, had for many years been offered an official platform of commemoration and remembrance, though it was often closed to their individual stories if they did not fit into the dominant pattern. As a consequence, many of them have kept silent. Maybe that is the main reason why they are usually so open to those of us who want to listen to their stories and try to transmit their testimonies, even though they are often aware that this is possible only to a very limited extent. Let us give the last word to the interviewees, who – in their own, different ways – struggle with their memories: When I was completing my education, when I was working, I had no time, I did not think about my camp experiences … only as if through a dream. And now, when I am talking with you, I am recalling everything

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one hundred percent. One cannot forget it. … And when it is recorded on tape it will last for long years. When I am dead there will not be any witness who could give such testimony. And you can always use the tape; historians can have a look at it. Students will be interested in these things for sure as well, because they have not experienced them personally, those persecutions. I call it hell.33 Believe me – anyone who was not imprisoned in the concentration camp cannot understand it. That is why people with camp experience do not talk about it. You cannot speak it out. And you are not able to forget. A human being lives normally, laughs, plays, worries, has his own problems. But it sticks inside you. … I know how it is: You speak the words, but there are experiences behind them that you cannot express in words. … That is why I understand these women who do not want to talk. They do not want to come back to these moments, when practically they were not humans, they were numbers. … There is always something beneath the skin that you will be never told of.34

NOTES 1. Piotr Filipkowski has explained elsewhere, e.g. in his essay ‘Polnische Häftlinge im KZ Mauthausen: Versuch einer Typisierung’, BIOS (1) (2005), 128–137, why the Karta Centre, rather than an academic research institution, was chosen to carry out the International Mauthausen Survivors Documentation Project and most of the interviews for the International Forced and Slave Labour Documentation Project in Poland. 2. According to data from the ‘Polish-German Reconciliation’ foundation (Stiftung ‘Deutsch-Polnische Aussöhnung’), which as a partner organisation of the federal foundation ‘Erinnerung, Verantwortung, Zukunft’ is able to provide the most reliable information on the number of persecuted, there are almost 400,000 Polish former slave and forced labourers still alive today. Theoretically, any one of them could have become one of our interviewees. 3. And if you find one who lives in Poland today it usually turns out that she or he has been interviewed before – some even several times, many of them in the course of Steven Spielberg’s project ‘Survivors of the SHOAH Visual History’, for which about 1,500 (out of approximately 52,000) biographical video interviews with, mostly, Holocaust survivors, were recorded in Poland. During this project we made a point of trying to find people who had never before had a chance to record their life histories. Accordingly, the fates of Polish Jews, which are well documented elsewhere, are not represented in our particular sample. 4. In particular see the following interviews: Regina Łaguna (ISFLDP_014), Tadeusz Brzeczko (ISFLDP_009), Józef Sowa (ISFLDP_016), Jacek Zieliniewicz (ISFLDP_047), Władysław Rodowicz (ISFLDP_023), Urszula Grinn (ISFLDP_052). 5. Polish Association of Former Political Prisoners of Nazi Prisons and Concentration Camps (Polski Zwiaízek Byłych Wieíniów Politycznych Hitlerowskich Wieízien; i Obozów Koncentracyjnych), which has offices in most Polish cities. Within

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6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

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this organisation there also exist less formal, but in fact much stronger networks of groups of former prisoners of particular camps. Association of Poles Victimised by the Third Reich (Stowarzyszenie Polaków Poszkodowanych przez III Rzeszeí). Special thanks are due to Henryk Wojtalewicz, head representative of the association in Poland. In fact several of our interviewees belong to two of these groups: they were forced labourers and then were sent to concentration camps, or were sent from agriculture, usually by way of a prison sentence, to forced work in industry. Both changes of ‘category’ were usually a form of punishment. Interviews with Józef Sowa (ISFLDP_016) and Irena Błaszkiewicz (ISFLDP _045). See the interviews with Genowefa Nózækowska (ISFLDP_040), who lost her husband and daughter during the war, and Michał Czeczko (ISFLDP_049). Interview with Kazimiera Woz;niak, signature ISFLDP_048. Interview with Tadeusz Brzeczko, signature ISFLDP_009. Interview with Stanisława Imiołek, signature ISFLDP_058. Interview with Antonina Tajak, signature ISFLDP_022. Interview with Urszula Grinn, signature ISFLDP_052. Interview with Bogusław Skarzæyn;ski, signature ISFLDP_034. Interview with Antonina Tajak, signature ISFLDP_022. Interview with Alicja Kubecka, signature ISFLDP_060. Interview with Janina Tracz, signature ISFLDP_046. Interview with Alicja Kubecka, signature ISFLDP_060. Ibid. Interview with Genowefa Nózækowska, signature ISFLDP_040. Interview with Kazimiera Kosonowska, signature ISFLDP_002. Interview with Emilia Barteczko, signature ISFLDP_044. Interview with Kazimiera Woz;niak, signature ISFLDP_048. Interview with Kazimiera Kosonowska, signature ISFLDP_002. See the video-interview with Mieczysław S:witalski, signature ISFLDP_051. Interview with Zdzisław Dominiak, signature ISFLDP_038. Interview with Bogusław Skarzæyn;ski, signature ISFLDP_034. Interview with Stefan Kulesza, ISFLDP_012. We encountered this rejection of the term several times, even at the stage of the initial telephone contact, and we therefore decided to avoid presenting the project to interviewees in terms of slave labour. Interview with Lucjan Palut, signature ISFLDP_011. Interview with Tadeusz Brzeczko, signature ISFLDP_009. Interview with Urszula Grinn, signature ISFLDP_052.

6

THE FATE OF POLISH SLAVE AND FORCED LABOURERS FROM ŁÓDZ; Ewa Czerwiakowski and Gisela Wenzel

Łódz;/Litzmannstadt: A Focus of National Socialist Polish Policy

At the beginning of the Second World War, Łódz; had 668,000 inhabitants; it was Poland’s second largest city and one of the largest industrial centres in the Second Republic. ‘The textile factories were located in the south of the city. That was where the “city of a thousand smokestacks” was located, a Polish Manchester … , which doesn’t exist anymore,’ recalls our interviewee Bolesław Z. Some 50 per cent of inhabitants were of Polish origin (334,000), 35 per cent were Jewish (233,800) and approximately 10 per cent were of German origin (67,000). According to Slawomir N., ‘Here in Łódz; there was a real symbiosis of many nationalities. … It was most noticeable at school. No one said “You’re Jewish and you’re German”, no one was better or worse than anyone else.’ With the German occupation, this ethnic diversity, with all its languages, religions and cultures coexisting and interacting in relative harmony, came to an abrupt end. Bolesław Z. remembers having mixed feelings when German troops arrived in the city on 8 September 1939: Swastika flags were already hanging on all German buildings. … First came the advance guard, then the tanks and large units of the German infantry. There was singing and a positive sense of getting down to business. There was no battle. It was as if they were going to a dance, they were singing on their trucks. Notes for this chapter begin on page 97.

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Two months later, the future Gauleiter Greiser, one of the most fanatical advocates of extermination, proclaimed: ‘The principle that only one nation should live in this region is an unwritten rule. This nation is the Germans, and where there are Germans, there is no room for other nations.’ One month later, after the country had capitulated, the break-up of the Polish state was sealed. The region of Łódz; was annexed by the German Reich as a part of Reichsgau Wartheland. The ‘annexed territories’ were subjected to a regime of permanent occupation, and a policy of Germanisation was implemented. The only conurbation in central Poland with a significant German minority was intended to serve as a model of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in support of the Germans’ Lebensraum ambitions in the East. For the Jewish population, the policy of expulsion meant a period of bleak isolation in the Litzmannstadt ghetto1 and ultimately, despite fleeting hopes of being saved through slave labour, transfer to extermination camps. In the context of these plans, the Poles were, at best, tolerated as a primitive race that could provide labour for the Germans. Łódz; became a model German city. The Polish language disappeared from public life, and all streets and squares were given German names. Polish newspapers, theatres and concerts were banned, few Polish church services were permitted and all Polish higher education establishments and universities were closed. Eventually, on 11 April 1940, the city was renamed Litzmannstadt after the German General Karl Litzmann (1850– 1936), who had been stationed on the eastern front in Polish territory during the First World War and later became a member of the NSDAP. All factories and businesses owned by Poles or Jews were either closed or taken over by the Trustee Office East. During the war, the number of industrial firms fell to almost a third of the prewar figure, from 2,600 to 884.2 Much of the manufacturing industry was retooled to meet the demands of the German Wehrmacht. Renowned Berlin arms manufacturers (AEG and Telefunken, Krupp, Askania and BMW-Flugmotoren)3 moved into the empty factory buildings and profited from the local source of cheap forced labour. During the occupation of Łódz;, 230,000 Poles were forced to relocate within the city. When they began to be evacuated to the Government General in a concerted campaign at the end of 1939 and early 1940, people became afraid. At the same time, the ghetto was being set up and becoming increasingly isolated. These twin measures revealed for the first time the criminal intent of the occupation regime. The first to be resettled were the wealthier Łódz; citizens and their families. Their apartments and houses were evacuated for ethnic Germans arriving from the Baltic states, Bessarabia and Galicia. Sławomir N. recalls his experience of the campaign:

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It happened in the night of 14 to 15 January [1940]. Three men, two civilians and a policeman, appeared at every door … They were very rude, and gave us fifteen minutes to pack our essential belongings. This meant clothes and a little food. You weren’t allowed to take anything else, no valuables, no money. … The army had completely surrounded the whole area, so that no one could escape. Women and children were loaded into trucks, the men had to line up in fours and were led under guard to the resettlement camp.

The entire area was evacuated of its 4,000 residents overnight. Throughout the occupation period, a total of 33,369 Łódz; inhabitants were affected by these resettlement measures. One of the first measures introduced by the German occupation authorities in October 1939 was that of general compulsory labour for all Poles, initially those aged between 16 and 60. The minimum age was later lowered to 14 and then to 10. After the German employment offices had registered all Polish workers, the Germans began in 1941/42 to recruit young Poles, an entire year cohort at a time, for forced labour in the Reich. The employment offices, which had followed the advancing front in occupied Poland, soon became one of the most feared and hated authorities in the country. They had far more repressive powers than those in the Reich. Their records detail punishments ranging from simple fines to the handing over of disruptive individuals to the Gestapo for transfer to a concentration camp. At first, it was the unemployed and underemployed who were required (under threat of losing their ration cards) to volunteer for work in Germany. The next step was to weed out all the businesses that did not contribute to the German war economy. In accordance with the demands of Fritz Sauckel, who occupied the post of General Plenipotentiary for Labour Allocation (GBA) as of 1942,4 the occupation authorities imposed fixed quotas on regions, districts and municipalities for supplying labourers to meet the requirements of the German arms industry. The priority requirement was for young people of either sex without family ties, and this particularly affected those born between 1923 and 1927. During the course of the war, approximately three million Poles (not including concentration camp prisoners) – two million men (including 400,000 prisoners of war) and one million women – were deported for forced labour in the Reich. Of these, 723,500 came from the ‘annexed western Polish territories’, 200,000 from the region of Łódz; alone. In Germany, the Polish forced labourers were considered to be members of an ‘inferior’ (Slavic) ‘race’ and seen as ‘enemies of the Reich’. This meant that they were subjected to particularly discriminatory special police regulations, which were designed to systematically isolate them from the German population. These ‘Polish decrees’ issued by the Reich Main

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Security Office (RSHA) in March 1940 represented a complex, graduated system of bans and discrimination that largely succeeded in its aims. All Poles deported to the Reich for forced labour had to undergo a ‘racial biology’ examination to verify whether they were suitable for Germanisation. During the ‘orphanage campaign’ instigated by Himmler in his role as Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of German Nationhood, the Lebensborn organisation was instrumental in deporting over 300 Polish babies and young children from Warthegau. The state youth welfare system was responsible for reeducating the Polish children, who had been selected according to the principles of National Socialist racial theory.5 The children were forced to assume German names and were adopted by German foster parents. Special detention centres and children’s homes were set up to assist their gradual Germanisation. Polish academics estimate that up to 200,000 Polish children fell victim to these racial measures.6 Older children were often exploited by their German foster parents in much the same way as civilian forced labourers.

Interview Selection and Brief Biographies of Interviewees We confined our search for interviewees to local and historically relevant witnesses – Polish survivors of forced and slave labour whose life stories were linked with the Polish city of Łódz;. Unfortunately, we were unable to include an important victim group, the Polish Jews from Łódz;, in our interviews, as we could not trace a single survivor of the ghetto in Łódz; itself. In contrast, we had no difficulty whatsoever finding candidates for our civilian forced labourer victim group, as we had access to a complete network of social and personal contacts through the Berlin History Workshop from previous projects.7 As one contact led to another, we gradually found the concentration camp prisoners we needed for our sample. We also broadened our selection of victim groups to include ‘forced evacuees’ and ‘Germanised children’ since these groups are also pertinent to the theme of Polish collective repression (particularly in Łódz;). It was also an opportunity to give a voice to people whose stories of persecution have been largely overlooked. All eleven interviews were conducted during 2005 in an atmosphere of trust. With one exception, the victim groups comprised people of a generation that had completed at least four years of primary school before the outbreak of war, but had to complete their schooling and professional training after the war. At the time of interview, they were around eighty years old. All returned home at the end of the war and, again with one exception, all now live in Łódz;.

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Victim Group: Civilian Forced Labourers Bolesław Z., born in 1923, is from a lower middle-class background. Though still a minor, he was deported in January 1940 and forced to work in the coal mines of the Ruhr region as a punishment for his political activity in the Polish Boy Scouts. Following an accident at work, he returned to Łódz; in mid 1942 and continued to work until the end of the war as a forced labourer in the AEG arms factories in Łódz;, Berlin and Klodzko (Lower Silesia). He was married for a short while, but had no children. He now devotes his time to volunteering as a ‘memory worker’ and helping former forced labourers in his hometown. Janina M., born in 1923, was born to well-off parents with a family business. She was employed as a forced labourer between October 1943 and May 1945 for the Brandenburg armaments firm Metallwarenfabrik Treuenbrietzen GmbH. She became relatively adept at coping with the living conditions of forced labour in Germany, partly through her knowledge of German and the food parcels she regularly received from home. The worst aspect was being separated from her family, as she recorded in her diary. Now divorced, she lives with her daughter and grandson. Barbara M., born in 1925, grew up in a working-class family. Between October 1943 and May 1945, she was used for forced labour at the armaments plant Dreilinden Maschinenbau GmbH in Kleinmachnow near Berlin. Unlike other interviewees, she was inwardly sympathetic to the plight of other persecuted foreigners (Italians, Ukrainians and Soviet POWs). Despite restricted freedom of movement and the threat of police fines, she sometimes went out with friends to the cinema or to explore Berlin. After the war, Barbara M. studied part-time alongside her professional work. She never married, has no children and lived with her parents for many years. Janina Halina G., born in 1926, is from a lower middle-class family who lived in Łódz;. Between March 1943 and May 1945 she was forced to do labour for the armaments firm AEG in Hennigsdorf near Berlin. She was extremely sensitive to the harassment meted out to her fellow Poles. Even after the war, she continued to detest all things German (including the language) and managed to overcome her hatred only many years later. After returning home, she studied part-time while working and rose to a midlevel white-collar position. In her retirement, she worked for many years on the committee of the Association of Forced Labourers, of which she is a founding member. She has suffered considerable ill health owing to the delayed effects of forced labour. Genowefa G., born in 1928, comes from a farming family who lived near the Germany-Poland border. Her family was resettled and made to work on an estate in Rosen, Lower Silesia. Between March 1942 and

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May 1945, Genowefa G. did forced labour as a domestic and nanny. Her employers encouraged her personal development and today she remains grateful for this period of her life. After the war, she studied and became a teacher. She was married, has two children and several grandchildren. Since retiring, she has done voluntary educational work for the Łódz; Association of Forced Labourers.

Victim Group: Concentration Camp Prisoners (Slave Labourers) This victim group8 is represented by three women and their life stories. For these women, what dominated their experience of persecution was not so much the forced labour but the human suffering, having to confront mass death, being completely at the mercy of others and the ruthless fight for survival in the concentration camps, particularly Auschwitz. The brutal repression and inhumanity that characterised their everyday lives in the camps contrasts sharply with the experience of the civilian forced labourers and the other victim groups. However, there are some qualitative differences among the everyday experiences of the concentration camp prisoners themselves. Zofia B., born in 1923, grew up in a family of skilled manual workers in Łódz;. She was arrested in September 1943 for her resistance activities and was incarcerated for three months in the women’s prison in Łódz;. She was then transferred to Auschwitz, where she endured the worst eight months of her life. In her opinion, the living conditions in the other concentration camps were better by far. In 1944, she was transported, via the Ravensbrück concentration camp, to Helmbrechts, one of the Flossenbürg concentration camps in Upper Franconia (Bavaria), where she did forced labour for the Nuremberg armaments firm Neumeyer. After a death march, she was liberated by the Americans and returned to Łódz;. She married and worked as a university secretary, had two daughters and now has four grandchildren. She has lived alone since the death of her husband. For many years, she has been meeting up with her former fellow prisoners on the anniversary of their liberation. Helena B.-S., born in 1928, was from an assimilated and Polonised German-Jewish family in Bialystok. She was racially persecuted. Her Jewish half-sister was murdered, and her mother survived by hiding in her husband’s apartment. In April 1944, Helena B.-S. was taken prisoner for reasons that are obscure, and soon after was admitted as an ‘anti-social’ to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. To her relief, on being transferred to the Helmbrechts subcamp she was assigned to the category of political prisoners. This is how she met Zofia B., who is still a friend today, and joined the Łódz; group. After an eventful journey, she returned initially to Bialystok before relocating to Łódz; with her parents. There,

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she studied at the State University for Art. In the 1950s, her muchloved father committed suicide as a result of Stalinist repression. She left Poland in 1968 and established herself as an art teacher in Berlin, where she still lives today. Helena B.-S. married three times. She has no children. Zofia Ł., born in 1927, came from a large farming family from the region of Zamos;c;. In 1942, her family was forced to resettle as part of the Generalplan Ost (General Plan for the East) and transferred to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Of the five members of the family to which she was closest, three were killed – only she and her older sister survived the hellish conditions. As a concentration camp prisoner, Zofia Ł. was transferred to a labour camp in Lorraine, then to the Ravensbrück camp, and finally to the subcamp in Berlin-Köpenick. She did forced labour in a cable factory that we were able to identify during her visit to Berlin as AEG-KWO. From the Sachsenhausen concentration camp she went on a death march and was liberated by the Red Army near Schwerin. She returned to Poland and married a former concentration camp prisoner. After the war, they found work together at the national memorial in Os;wieícim/Auschwitz. Twice married, Zofia Ł. has three children and several grandchildren. She lives in Łódz;, where she does voluntary work for the Association of Political Prisoners.

Other Victim Groups Our series of interviews is completed by the stories of a victim of forced evacuation and two victims of Germanisation. Sławomir N., born in 1928, is from a middle-class background and comes from Łódz;. As a child, he and his whole family were forced to resettle in January 1940 after a nighttime evacuation campaign, and were deported to the Government General, where they endured inhumane camp conditions. The forced evacuees were then left to their fate with no means for survival and only managed to subsist with the help of a Polish relief action committee and local farmers. Slawomir N. worked as a farm hand on a Polish estate that had been seized by the Germans. He witnessed the hounding of Jews in the local community. His father was arrested by the Gestapo as a suspected Jew and died as a result of his brutal interrogation. In January 1945 the area was taken by the Red Army, and the family returned to Łódz;. Sławomir N. resumed studies for his school-leaving exams, went to university and became a mathematics teacher. He lived with his mother until her death, and was married for a short time, although he has no children. Today, he works for the Association of Evacuees from Łódz; and Surrounding Area.

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Zdzisława W., born in 1927, comes from a working-class background. In 1940, she and her family were evacuated from the Bałuty ghetto. At fifteen, she was selected ‘on racial grounds’ as suitable for Germanisation and sent to Germany, where she was placed in a German family in Erkner, near Berlin, as a domestic and nanny. To escape the heavy air raids, she was evacuated with her German foster parents to Usedom, where she was liberated. In 1946, she returned to Łódz; and resumed her education, before working for many years as a cultural official in adult education. She now lives with her second husband, has no children and is vice-chairperson of the Association of Polish Children Germanised by the Nazi Regime. Barbara P., born in 1938, lost her mother at the start of the war and then lived with her grandmother in Łódz;. At the age of three, she was selected for Germanisation because she had lost one parent. After passing through numerous children’s homes in Warthegau, she was finally sent to a Lebensborn home in Germany. Her appalling childhood improved greatly when she was taken in as a foster child by a German family in Lemgo, Westphalia, where she was made to feel part of a loving family for the first time in her life. After the war, the International Tracing Service sent her back to a Polish children’s home, against her will, where she was ‘socialised’ from a Polish perspective. She completed her studies in graphic design in Łódz;, married and had two children. The twin losses of identity in her childhood had a lasting effect on her personality development. After a special organisation for victims was set up following the collapse of communism, she made concerted efforts to find out more about the fate of this group of people.

The Topography of Forced Labour in Łódz; The interviews read like a map of the topography of terror in Łódz;. They abound with the names of places that symbolise the horror of life under the Nazis in their city: the Gestapo headquarters and prisons, the auxiliary police jail, and the train station, where heart-rending scenes of farewell were played out under the watchful eye of the police. Above all, it is the names of three assembly and transit camps that are seared into the interviewees’ memories, being the first stop on their journey to Germany. The events of over sixty years ago are commemorated at nearly all these landmarks by plaques or memorials, the majority of which were erected after the fall of communism at the instigation of local victim associations. However, the majority of the city’s inhabitants are unaware of these memorials, which are also absent from every city guide.

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Individual Methods of Dealing with Persecution Did our interviewees perceive forced labour as an instrument of persecution? There are various answers to this question, depending on the specific circumstances. After the experience of imprisonment and overcrowded concentration camps, those prisoners who were moved to a subcamp were inclined to see their regulated industrial work as a meaningful activity, if only temporarily. The knowledge that they were being held prisoner and working for the enemy conflicted with the need to be useful and to be appreciated and acknowledged by their employers. Thus their relationship to their work fluctuated between conscientious and reliable commitment on the one hand, and attempted shirking and sabotage, where possible without too great a risk, on the other. What dominates the negative memories of the civilian forced labourers is not so much their experience of economic exploitation for the German war economy. They are not especially critical of either the big arms manufacturers or the smaller commercial and agricultural employers. Rather, their most stressful and painful memories are associated with the experience of being treated in a degrading and humiliating manner and of being denied the most basic of human rights. The following aspects in particular are revealed: the loss of childhood feelings of security, the feeling of helplessness and having no rights, the fear of entering the unknown, the shock of sudden and forcible separation from family and friends, being completely at the mercy of others in a foreign country, the conditions in the assembly, transit and labour camps, which were unfit for human habitation, and – in hindsight – the feeling of having lost a period of their lives, of having lost their childhood. Even in the postwar period, different patterns of coping with war and persecution experiences become apparent. Those who had only just survived concentration and extermination camps were so physically and mentally weak that their health was restored only after lengthy courses of treatment and hospital stays. Seeing no way of conveying what was incomprehensible, they kept quiet and suppressed the past. With a renewed thirst for life and the need to recover, they threw themselves into their new existence.

Patterns of Coping in the Context of the Polish Culture of Commemoration From the Polish perspective, forced labour and evacuation were an integral part of National Socialist Polish policy, which was intended to smash the state, nation and culture and exploit the country’s resources and people for its own ends, while completely ignoring the fate of individuals.

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Forced labour and evacuation were part of everyday Polish life during the war and were directed at the entire population. Virtually every family was affected. Compared with the fate of those hundreds of thousands who were killed in mass shootings, or arrested by the Gestapo, tortured and held prisoner in concentration camps, the experience of being deported for forced labour or evacuated from home was considered less harsh; at least lives were spared. Unlike in the Soviet Union, these topics were not taboo after the war; many personal memory reports were written immediately after the conflict as part of historical competitions and published in newspapers. Yet forced labour never became an important field of historical research in Poland. The official culture of commemoration of socialist Poland was defined in black and white, involving just aggressors (Hitler’s henchmen) and victims (Poles); there was no room for grey areas, for discrepancies of memory. This instrumentalised memory was accompanied by a sustained period of silence about the Holocaust (and Polish antiSemitism). The rituals of the official culture of commemoration were characterised by national pathos and were designed to strengthen a kind of patriotism embodied by two models: victim (martyr) and hero. The official status of victim and survivor was reserved for concentration camp prisoners alone, although in 1956, after a period of political relaxation, this status was also conditionally accorded to fighters of noncommunist partisan groups and the ‘Home Army’. In the main, the historical reassessment of forced labour remained anchored within the conventional version of national history. A key motive for becoming involved in memory work was to be awarded the status of victim, while forced labour associations also focus on the suffering and martyrdom of the Polish people. Honouring the dead lies at the heart of remembrance (sacralisation). It is no coincidence that, today, former civilian forced labourers have chosen the ‘P’ sign, once used to stigmatise them, to symbolise their remembrance groups – rather like the former concentration camp prisoners who wear blue and white striped neck scarves at all ceremonies to identify themselves. This is how they highlight their collective fate and their officially recognised membership of a victim group.

Independent Victim Organisations and Compensation In the postwar communist period there was only one official victim organisation, the Association of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy. This body represented all victims of National Socialism and held a monopoly on the official landscape of commemoration. The subject of forced la-

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bour barely figured in the Polish culture of commemoration until the late 1980s. Under the conditions of the state-regulated system for the press and organisations, most victims of National Socialism had no opportunity either to sue for their individual and collective rights, or to make the public aware of their individual fate as victims. It was only following the efforts of ordinary Poles to achieve democracy in 1989 that the state-supported Association of Polish Victims of the Third Reich was founded as a pressure group for civilian forced labourers. The impetus for this was both social and international. The task of the association was to ‘achieve moral and material restitution for the forced labour carried out in the Third Reich during the Second World War in the form of compensation’. With over half a million members, it quickly grew into one of the largest social organisations in Poland. Under the umbrella of this pressure group, many smaller self-help groups were established on the basis of former works and camp associations. They arranged social events and group outings to fend off the potential loneliness of old age and actively engaged in memory work to ensure that society would not forget. Apart from the Łódz; branch of this association, during our search for contemporary witnesses we came into contact with three other victim organisations founded after 1989: the Association of Former Political Prisoners, the Association of Polish Children Germanised by the Nazi Regime, and the Association of Evacuees from Łódz; and Surrounding Area. Through their voluntary and support work in these associations, some of our interviewees have found meaningful employment in their retirement years. Others have used their free time to trace other survivors who shared fates similar to their own, to organise them and fight for their official status as victims. Most of our interviewees are satisfied with the payment of compensation, however late it was in coming, although for the majority the satisfaction is tinged with criticism of the bureaucratic process and mistrust of corrupt association officials and ‘freeloaders’. This criticism is directed more at their own associations and the partner organisation of the ‘Remembrance, Responsibility and Future’ foundation in Warsaw than against the German organisations involved. Although it is widely felt that the gesture came too late, that the payment process took much too long and that only some of the former forced labourers have truly benefited, at no time did we sense any outright opposition. The historical memory work carried out by both sides to ensure that the fate of the victims of National Socialism is not forgotten is seen by most as a chance for final reconciliation between Poland and Germany. Halina G. says: In my opinion, the money we received from the Polish-German Reconciliation Foundation and the ‘Remembrance, Responsibility and Future’

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foundation was not compensation. Why? Compensation would have been a reimbursement for damages. Material damage could perhaps have been easier to quantify, but no one did that. But is it possible to put a value on the other damage, damage that I, for instance, had to suffer? The longing for home, the fear of bombs? Dealing with vermin? The hunger? … I accepted the payments because I felt as if someone was holding out their hand to me. What was more important to me than this symbolic gesture and more important than the money was the fact that many Germans were now aware of the subject.

NOTES 1. The Łódz;/Litzmannstadt ghetto was probably the third largest ghetto, after Warsaw and Cracow, to be created by the Nazis. By May 1940, 157,000 Jews from Łódz; and the surrounding area had been completely shut off from the outside world in an area of four square kilometres. In October 1941, another 20,000 Jews arrived from Western Europe along with 5,000 Sinti and Roma. A huge labour camp with appalling conditions was created, and many of its inmates died of emaciation, the immense workload or illness, as reported by survivors (see e.g. interview with Karl Broszigk by the Institute of History and Biography at the Fernuniversität Hagen; half of his family died in the ghetto before he himself was deported to Auschwitz). The ghetto in Łódz;/Litzmannstadt was, for the majority of those who survived it, the last stop on the way to the extermination camps, particularly Chelmno and Auschwitz. 2. Krystyna Radziszewkiew (ed.), Tonaíca Łódz; (lata 1939–1945) (Łódz; 2002), 200. 3. Ibid., 201. 4. Fritz Sauckel was sentenced to death in 1946 at the Nuremberg Trials and executed. 5. Georg Lilienthal, ‘Kinder als Beute des Rassenkrieges: Der Lebensborn e.V. und die Eindeutschung von Kindern aus Polen, der Tschechoslowakei und Jugoslawien’, Dachauer Hefte (9), Die Verfolgung von Kindern und Jugendlichen (November 1993): 181–196. 6. Ibid., 182. 7. The Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt (BGW, Berlin History Workshop) was founded as a non-profit organisation in 1981. Its various exhibition and literary projects are dedicated in particular to suppressed and forgotten topics in connection with Berlin’s National Socialist and everyday history (including ‘Zwangsarbeit in Berlin 1940–1945: Erinnerungsberichte aus Polen, der Ukraine und Weißrussland. Berlin 2000’). A project team made contact with former forced labourers in Łódz; during the period 1997–2000. This project, based on letters from the forced labourers, resulted in the documentation of 250 memory reports and numerous contemporary records and photographs in the BGW’s archive. Between 2002 and 2004, the organisation compiled interviews with former Polish forced labourers and edited them into short video portraits for educational purposes. See

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also . Our Polish partner in this project is the Verband der durch das Dritte Reich geschädigten Polen (Association of Polish Victims of the Third Reich) in Łódz;, and we thank its chairman, M. Olejniczak, for his support. 8. Workers who, as defined by the German Compensation Act, were forced to live and work in concentration or similar camps or who were loaned or sold as slaves.

7

INTERVIEWS WITH POLISH ROMA A Report of My Experiences

Artur Podgorski

Everything in it which may seem implausible is true according to the Gypsy way —Jerzy Ficowski

Introductory Remarks

T

he project I carried out in Poland aimed to find five former slave and forced labourers among Polish Roma with whom I could carry out lifehistory interviews in the context of the documentation project. This task was far from easy, as I was soon to find out. From identifying appropriate interview partners, through making first contact and setting up an appointment for an interview, to actually conducting the interview, the project proved to be a real challenge characterised by the experience of significant cultural differences and by my own efforts to find common ground with my interview partners. This was a process that more than once confronted me with my limitations, and I was often not really satisfied with its results. In view of these problems, and also of the very limited material that I was able to produce in the end – three audio and two video interviews conducted at Andrychowo, Szczecinek and Legnica – my report is nothing more than an initial exploration reflecting my own perspective, which Notes for this chapter begin on page 111.

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often expresses itself as frustration and irritation. The question of how far my observations might be typical or even representative for the Roma population in Poland beyond these five individual informants must remain unanswered for the time being. That said, when reading relevant studies by the Polish gypsiologist Jerzy Ficowski, who was the first in Poland to do research on the history and destruction of the Polish gypsies,1 I found many parallels with regard to non-gypsies perceiving gypsies, which suggest that it might be possible to generalise my experience. In each case, however, the very awareness of difference and strangeness provoked by this encounter – in respect of the individual’s relationship to the group, of behaviour towards strangers, of dealing with the past, of language and social codes – made it possible to see forms of experience that had remained largely beyond the purview of historians.

The Choice of Interview Partners I had hoped that the Polnisch-Deutsche Aussöhnung (Polish-German Reconciliation) foundation would be able to help me make contact with possible interview partners. However, this proved impossible for reasons of data protection. The foundation is provided with the addresses of all Poles who have applied for compensation from the funds of the German foundation ‘Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft’, but handing these addresses over to me would have involved lengthy formalities that would probably have been an obstacle to making direct contact with former victims and to their willingness to be interviewed. Instead, I directly approached Roma associations2 that in many cases had supported Roma in their applications for compensation and had ‘represented’ them in the course of the application process, so that they also possessed addresses of potential interview partners. Unfortunately, a closer look made clear that only a few of the Polish Roma who were imprisoned in ghettos and/ or camps or had experienced the Second World War at all are still alive today. An advertisement I circulated via the various information services on the persecution and history of Roma produced no response. After several weeks of searching I was able to find only eight people throughout Poland – six women and two men – who were worthy of consideration for an interview. The difficulty of finding interview partners considerably delayed the start of the project. In my opinion, one important reason for these difficulties was the indifference that representatives of Polish Roma associations showed towards my request – and thus towards the entire documentation project. But among potential interviewees, too, I encountered a general distaste for being interviewed – without pay, after all; a fundamental lack

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of trust in me as a non-Roma; negative experiences with the application procedure and the compensation; but also negative experiences with earlier interviews, which the interviewees sometimes remembered as a kind of interrogation and in the context of which they and their documents had not been treated with due care (e.g. borrowed photographs were not returned). I also had the impression that it would be difficult to make the potential interviewees understand just what the logic of the interviews was, and the importance of recalling past injustices as exactly as possible, with details of place and time, perpetrators and victims. Thus, I faced a double barrier: on the one hand mistrust on the part of the largest and most influential Roma associations, and on the other hand the resistance of potential interviewees. Typical of the behaviour of association representatives was refusal to permit me to make any contact with one of the suggested people by myself. During the preliminary interviews, when I asked about year of birth, period of detention in a ghetto/ camp, the conditions of imprisonment and the place where forced labour had been carried out, a representative of the organisation was always present. In the event, the substantive interviews were conducted in the interviewees’ homes. Apart from issues of good practice, the fact that I was not prepared to use the premises of the Roma associations played a role in this decision, since that would certainly have meant that one of the associations’ representatives would have been present throughout. One almost inevitable question, whose answer the associations considered a sine qua non for any contact with their ‘protegés’, was the question of the amount of payment.3 In fact, the prospect of payment proved to be an important tool to persuade people to take part in an interview – even if the interviewees did not know until the end of the conversation how much they would receive or whether they would be paid at all. As a matter of fact, in most cases I paid a fee of (50 on production of a receipt, and in the end I think this was quite appropriate as a kind of symbolic gesture of compensation. We have to consider that in most cases an interview such as this involves an effort of many kinds for the interview partners: from the use of professional equipment such as Beta-cameras, through having to answer sometimes very detailed questions about their own biography and the history of the family, to the possible use of the interview for expositions or publications. Despite the limited number of interviews, I wanted to take the widest possible variety of people and problems into consideration. Starting with written reports by former inmates of ghettos, labour camps and concentration camps, but also by former forced labourers in agriculture, I wanted the interviews to depict the various forms of persecution and in this context to explain the specific nature of forced labour done by gypsies and its influence on both their individual lives and the community

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during the time of occupation and after the war. Another aspect was age. Since as far as possible those being interviewed were supposed to have experienced the events they were describing themselves, I tried to find interview partners who had been at least fourteen at the beginning of the war. Here I was successful in only three out of five cases. Two interview partners – Maria S. and Jan C. – were born in or around 1939, while the other three were adolescents during the time of occupation.4 The following information about potential interview partners, which I was able to glean in the course of my research, prompted me to select them for an interview. Of Apolonia K. I knew that she was forced to dig irrigation ditches and that she wanted to talk about her experiences during the war. Maria S. attracted my attention quite by accident with her concise and interesting way of telling her story as well as her frank views on Polish gypsies, particularly after 1945. Born in 1939, she was theoretically too young for the project, but given her eloquence and favourable logistic circumstances I nevertheless decided to make a video interview with her. Alfreda M. was suggested to me by the Association of Polish Roma at Szczecinek as an inmate of the former Jewish ghetto of Lublin. From her I hoped to learn something about the conditions of imprisonment, forms of labour and persecution of gypsies in the Lublin ghetto, for she was the only gypsy woman who was said to have been in the Lublin ghetto. I also placed great hopes in a conversation with Stefania O. because it was in speaking to her that I heard for the first time about gypsies interned and carrying out forced labour in the concentration camp of Krakow-Plaszów. A report by Stefania O. would have been the first one on this topic. Although she was born in 1932 and was thus quite young during the war, there was the prospect of a rare and precious story, so I decided on an audio recording. The last partner with whom I made an audio interview was Jan C., who had been taken prisoner in a wood along with other Roma with whom he was travelling and had spent several months in the Warsaw ghetto. I was eager to see whether his report on the Warsaw ghetto would be different from Alfreda M.’s report on the ghetto in Lublin in respect of the conditions of internment, punishment and behaviour of imprisoned Roma, and of whether interned Jews and gypsies had been treated differently and been subject to different kinds of labour.

The Interviews In all the interviews, what stands out most is the interviewees’ frequent use of plural forms (‘we’, ‘the family’). Their focus is on the history of the family, behind which their own personal histories take second place. At the same time it was often difficult to identify a clear time frame or

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to see exactly what was meant when they referred to particular events. The process of remembering was marked by ambivalence. On the one hand, the interviewees seemed to struggle against memories arising from the past and actually tried to avoid talking about their experiences. If they nevertheless confronted their memories, there was a very strong emotional element to their narratives; that is, they were clearly in pain, sometimes shedding tears when they spoke about such events as shootings and other acts of murder. Often I could not identify a chronology in their reports. Again and again the narrative trailed off into accounts of minor events that came to the interviewees’ minds apparently at random. Then they often lost the thread and their reports came to a halt. On the one hand this narrative practice is probably an expression of a particular relation to time or of a way of thinking that takes limited account of causal relationships; on the other hand it may also reflect limited language skills or articulacy, which could be partly explained by the speaker’s very low level of education.5 Sometimes the three interview partners with the lowest level of education answered only in half sentences, sometimes with a barely disguised dislike of my questions, and in this context I was not always sure how far they had understood the questions. The fact that a single interview partner could remember a single situation in various, sometimes contradictory ways makes the interpretation of their statements difficult. For example, Alfreda M. characterised a certain event first as a deportation, then as a flight, and finally as but another stage of the family’s normal travelling history. In her narrative it was also often unclear whether somebody belonged to the family or whether they were a distant relation, or even just an occasional travelling companion. In the end, I found it difficult not to lose my bearings amid the life stories of my interview partners, and I never achieved the insight into what structured their interpretations that would have allowed me to formulate questions that would have elicited further information. In practice, my questions often came to nothing. Sometimes I really had the impression that my interview partners, who maybe were simply not willing to tell me about certain things, were consciously deceiving me. For example, my questions about toys or the ‘black sheep’ of the family only provoked loud, even mocking laughter and comments that seemed calculated to expose my naiveté and ignorance. Clearly, I did not always succeed in communicating the meaning of such questions and getting serious answers. More often the interviewees only answered my questions in a formal sense while actually using their ‘answer’ to change the subject. Whether this was because they had not understood the questions or whether it was a conscious conversational strategy must remain an open question in most cases.

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Three of my interview partners even reacted with a certain degree of resistance to my questions. On the one hand, they communicated a clear interest in putting an end to the interview as soon as possible; on the other hand they displayed an inability to formulate an independent narrative, so that I had to pose further questions. This contradiction sometimes generated a tense atmosphere. Although in the case of Apolonia K. the period of free narration lasted for forty minutes, she then fell silent for several minutes, and my efforts to renew the dialogue were not successful, so that I had to put an end to the interview. Stefania O. had told me even before her interview started that she did not feel well and that the interview was therefore very inconvenient for her. During the interview, too, she repeatedly reminded me that she was indisposed. Particularly during my detailed questioning about the Krakow-Plaszów camp she became increasingly impatient and urged me to put an end to the interview. Alfreda M., too, wanted to get the interview over with quickly. After about half an hour she declared that now she had told her entire life story and there was nothing more to say. In response to my follow-up questions she repeated this observation several times. To many questions she did not react at all, instead returning time and again to memories of tragic events – in particular a shooting – that she had already told and retold, and which thus became recurring motifs. At the same time she made it difficult for me to bring the conversation back to a point where my questions could be answered. It seemed to me that she was pursuing a strategy of telling me the dates and facts of her biography as rapidly and concisely as possible so as to then be able to declare the interview over. The atmosphere of this interview was also problematic. Alfreda M. avoided any eye contact and kept staring in front of her. All five interviews were similar in respect of the narrative topoi and the fragmentary narrative style. Journeys, for example, obviously played a major role, but without the place (in most cases simply ‘woods’) or time being defined in detail. Similarly, only a fragmentary account of any persecution experience can be reconstructed from these narratives. The interviewees recounted a number of incidents of forced labour or of fleeing from Germans or Ukrainians, but the concrete conditions in which these took place remain vague. Tragic moments of family life are given particular emphasis, but the context of the narratives is obscure. The details necessary for understanding are often missing. Meanwhile, the relaxed approach to chronology also impeded comprehension. Thus shooting incidents are related in varying degrees of detail, and in some cases quite extensive stories about the postwar period are introduced into the account without any clear rationale or their being expressly marked by the narrator.

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One reason for this imprecise way of narrating or the fragmentary quality of reported memories might be that the reports are based to some extent on other people’s memories. From Jan C.’s report it does not become clear whether the family escaped from the Warsaw ghetto or from Gesibork. He remarks that persecution spread but gives no details. As he himself says, the bulk of his information comes from third parties. Maria S.’s memories, too, may be supposed to be mostly based on what she was told by her mother or her sister, as far as the period of the Second World War is concerned. At least, it is surprising how detailed her childhood memories are, given that she was only three or four years old. Furthermore, it is noticeable that single events are often juxtaposed without any connection. There is clearly little interest in making connections, drawing parallels and looking for explanations of one’s own fate. Accordingly, it is difficult to assess Apolonia K.’s narrative because she barely refers at all to the historical context in general and the situation of gypsies during the Second World War in particular. In the case of Alfreda M. the free narrative part of the interview lasted for about half an hour. Her answers to my further questions remained largely incomprehensible to me. My interest in her stay in the Lublin ghetto was to no avail, as she dealt with this time in a few words, without giving even the approximate duration of her period of internment and forced labour, so that her story can hardly be chronologically and topically organised. Unfortunately, I did not gain the differentiated insights on the camp of Plaszów that I had hoped for from Stefania O. All that can be said after the interview is that the image she presents is definitely different from what is told by Jewish prisoners or is generally known from the relevant literature. Remarkable is the wilful attitude that Jan C. and Alfreda M display towards (forced) labour and particularly camp discipline. If they found the work boring and their stay at the camp too difficult, they fled to the woods together with their families, regardless of the danger. They treat paid work and forced labour equally, as a laborious imposition on their daily lives, something that a gypsy should rather avoid. Two out of the five interviewees (Stefania O. and Alfreda M.) report quite briefly, using really meaningless formulations, so that it is not possible to make even the most basic connections and both the chronology of events and the interviewees’ biographies remain largely unclear. When some key terms are not entirely unambiguous even after repeated questioning (for example, sometimes ‘brother’ refers to a relative, sometimes to any other gypsy; the terms ‘deportation’ and ‘flight’ appear as synonyms) the result is bound to be faulty information. The interviewees do not situate their own history in the context of the persecution of Polish Roma during the Second World War. There

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are no names of places or families; there are no dates, such as the year of deportation or imprisonment. My direct questions about these points remained unanswered, so that it was hardly possible to discuss certain topics in greater detail. The sometimes very restricted vocabulary of the interviewees and their sometimes limited readiness to speak about their experiences at greater length further impeded a longer interview that might have dealt with the topic in any kind of depth. Nevertheless, although – or maybe precisely because – several of my expectations of the interviews were frustrated, the interviewees in their own way quite impressively communicated very intense experiences of persecution. All the interviewees remember situations very well when their lives were threatened, whether by Germans or by ‘Russians’ (usually meaning Ukrainians). They emphasise the tragic meaning of this experience, for while they themselves survived, often all other members of their families were killed. Jan C. tells very movingly how his whole family (his mother and two brothers) was captured in a roundup and interned in the Warsaw ghetto, and also about the preparations for shooting them all. Fixed most firmly in his memory is that ‘as a child you were always only seeing corpses, most of all Jews … their faces … their eyes still open’. Alfreda M.’s narrative, too, is dominated by the shooting of her family. In a positive sense, too, parents – especially mothers – are very important in all accounts. Typical is Stefania O., who tells of travelling with her mother and the latter’s efforts to keep her children fed and to protect them from danger. Even more painful is the loss of parents or of the mother. With almost all interviewees, their great longing for their lost relatives is palpable. On the other hand, in some answers it becomes obvious that the interviewees do not really like to talk about certain things with regard to their late relatives, particularly their own parents.6 For example, the topic of their parents’ education or vocational training and that of their own children seems to be awkward for them, whereas they speak of their material possessions with undisguised pride. Their own childhood receives little mention in most cases, not least because the situation in those days did not allow much space to experience childhood. Alfreda M. marks the end of her childhood strikingly, with the shooting of her parents. Jan. C. remembers his childhood as living in the gypsy camp and not having a fixed abode. In the accounts of my interviewees the topic of forced labour plays a distinctly minor role, which resulted in some confusion on both sides. As a matter of fact, none of them classify their own experiences under German occupation as forced labour. Equally, they do not consider themselves forced labourers. They fundamentally consider work – even paid

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work – a kind of repression and a threat to their freedom that even in the ghetto or the camp was always to be avoided. Apparently no Roma worked in the usual sectors of the German war economy – uniform workshops and arms workshops. In the card file of the Deutsch-Polnische Versöhnung foundation there is not a single hint of a gypsy doing forced labour in the armaments industry. Rather, they were given mostly uncomplicated tasks, as the interviewees also report for themselves and other family members. Apolonia K dug irrigation ditches, Maria S.’s brother dug trenches or anti-tank ditches, Alfreda M. cleaned windows. None of the interviewees speaks of forced labour as a kind of exploitation or a means of annihilating the gypsy population. They did not consider themselves citizens of an occupied state. In their memories and reports this topic occupies little space, and they have little knowledge of this problem. None of the interviewees and no members of their families were deported to Germany for work. Nor does (forced) labour appear to have played a role at their places of internment, for example in a labour camp. In the account of Stefania O., for instance, who states that she was in the labour camp of Plaszów, forced labour does not take place. None of the five people was able to give a detailed description of the work they had to do or was able to say what it was good for. Rather, they were astonished by my detailed questions about the exact conditions, nature, duration and place of their work. Some mention that they worked on the orders of a village mayor, whereas others voluntarily reported to the ‘employment office’ – apparently because, like Alfreda M., they believed working for Germans would protect them from deportation and would mean ‘postponing death’. However, in these accounts it is not at all clear that this work was forced labour because details such as the date of internment of the interviewees themselves or their parents and the duration of forced labour are missing. In some cases – such as that of Maria S. – there are indications that it might have been a relatively voluntary form of occupation. Their statements on ‘perpetrators’ cover a broad spectrum. The interviewees’ opinions range from hatred towards Germans and Russians to surprisingly positive judgments of Germans in general and gratitude for small acts of help from their side, as for example in the case of Alfreda M. On the other hand, her particularly harsh judgment of Ukrainian soldiers is based on rumour. Stefania O. accuses neither Germans nor Russians but emphasises the particular brutality of Ukrainians. Jan C.’s memories express rage and anger towards Germans, but this has declined over the years and today is practically nonexistent. Apolonia K. repeatedly emphasises troubles she experienced both from the German and the Russian

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side. She is particularly angry at the Germans and gives emphasis to her anger with appropriate expletives. On the whole and particularly in the light of their experiences, the memories of the five interviewees are surprisingly free of accusations against particular national groups. Instead, suffering and death dominate their accounts, and these have no names. For most of them, returning to their homes after the war meant looking for relatives and again taking up their travelling way of life. In only one case (Maria S.) had the family laid the foundations of a sedentary existence; all other interviewees returned to their old seasonal journeying and to their same occupations after the war, if they had been interrupted at all. Jan C. regularly went to the GDR with his extended family to engage in trade. Stefania O. stayed twice in Berlin (GDR) as well as in Dortmund and Holzminden (FRG) to, as she puts it, be granted ‘political asylum’. She is not able to say when and for how long. After 1945 Apolonia K.’s relatives were deported to Siberia; she herself was ‘abducted’ by her future husband, as was the custom. Only two of the interviewees – the youngest ones – attended school after the war; the others remained illiterate. All interviewees remember the repressions of the 1950s and 1960s in the People’s Republic of Poland, when gypsies were forced to abandon their itinerant way of life and to send their children to state schools.

Collective and Individual Patterns of Remembrance and Coming to Terms with the Past Polish gypsies did not confront their own history until the early 1990s. In most cases the survivors tried to suppress their wartime experiences. At the same time they wanted to commemorate the victims and preserve the places where their relatives had been executed. Since then, magazines published by Roma associations have also published scholarly texts on the history of Roma during the war, texts that concur in their details and serve to transport a shared narrative. Remarkably, up to now no text has dealt with the topic of forced labour.7 Rather, Polish Roma are offered narratives of the history of their persecution that borrow inappropriately from the history of German and Slovak Roma. The five interviews presented here suggest that in Poland there exist two ‘histories’ of the persecution and murder of Polish Roma: official history, as it is shaped and circulated by influential Roma associations, and individual or family-based ‘people’s history’, which is told among relatives and close friends and is continuously enriched with new elements – not without influence from the associations – drawn from written sources and the family or clan’s oral traditions, sometimes taking on the quality of a legend.8 As already indicated, until the early 1990s knowledge of

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the persecution of Polish Roma during the Second World War was based mostly on oral tradition and to very limited extent on research and publications by Jerzy Ficowski. Up to now, there has been no published edition of sources and no history of the persecution of Polish Roma that is anywhere near complete, so that a fixed canon of knowledge, such as is possessed by other peoples or minorities, hardly exists yet. In the immediate postwar period the main commission investigating Nazi crimes in Poland, which was established in Warsaw, identified 180 places in the country where gypsies had been shot. By ceremoniously celebrating the anniversary of the liquidation of the camp for gypsy families in Auschwitz on 22 August 1944, and since 1993 with an annual pilgrimage (‘Caravan of Memory’) that starts at one mass murder site, Sczuczurowa (near Tarnow), and visits various other sites, the Polish Roma themselves present only part of their history (of suffering) to the public.9

On Compensation The Deutsch-Polnische Versöhnung foundation has funded compensation for 2,029 Roma on the grounds of racial persecution.10 But not a single Rom or Romni has made an application based on forced or slave labour. Each of the five people I interviewed had received compensation for having been racially persecuted. For three of them, who were illiterate, the family or the Roma association had carried out the application formalities. Maria S. was the only one of the interviewees who had been able to apply for compensation herself. She was able to name the foundation that had made the grant of compensation and the grounds on which she had been compensated (racial persecution). The remaining four interview partners had only a rough idea of why they had received compensation and where the foundation was located. They spent the money on daily needs, such as household appliances, renovating their flats or paying unpaid rent, or they distributed it among their children. All of them emphasised strongly that their compensation payments had not been high enough. I was not able to ascertain in the course of the interviews whether this referred to the amount of individual payments or whether it was a comment on a fundamental problem of any kind of financial compensation.

Concluding Remarks Finally, I would like to emphasise two aspects again. One, and this was very surprising for me, concerns the interviewees’ readiness to forgive

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their former tormentors, despite extreme experiences of suffering. Maria S. and Jan S., who travelled with their extended families as children, were forced to witness shootings on several occasions; Jan S. and Alfreda M. were imprisoned in camps or ghettos. How can their readiness to forgive in spite of all this be explained? My impression is that subsequent experiences, particularly with members of those national groups to which their persecutors had belonged, have quite considerably changed their judgment of earlier experiences. And in my opinion another reason seems to be the distinct religiosity of my interview partners. As practising Catholics, they really feel obliged to forgive the perpetrators. But the compensation scheme may be another significant point: it meant real financial help for the interviewees, and perhaps because of this Germans, as the originators of the scheme, appear in a different, somewhat more positive light. The second aspect concerns quite fundamentally the substance of the interviews or my doubts in this regard. One obvious problem in this context is of course the age of the interviewees – that is, their relative youth at the time of the events. The two youngest ones, Jan C. and Maria S., both born in 1939, emphasised several times that their knowledge was based on stories told by adults among the family, but also on reports by other Roma, non-family members, reports they had heard after the war. Jan C. may also have got his knowledge from newspapers and magazines. More fundamental than the uncertain origin of the information is its contradictory nature. Often, when I returned in the course of an interview to statements made earlier, I found that now the events were told in a different way. Sometimes I could not resist the impression that my interview partners were giving just any place and date and that they dealt with names and events promiscuously – a considerable problem for the reconstruction of their biographies and the histories of their persecution. In this context, one experience made me particularly thoughtful: some time after my interview with Alfreda M. I read in the press that on 17 October 2006, the president of the Republic of Poland had awarded this very Alfreda M. the Commander’s Cross with the Star of the Order of Polonia Restituta. According to the press report, she received this award for particular merit in the context of saving people during the Second World War because she had rescued some dozens of children, Roma and Jews, from death. After the interview with Alfreda M. in May 2006 I had had the impression that I had learned at least the basics of her biography, but this information was completely new for me. Despite my sense that I had gained her trust and that we had had an open conversation, Alfreda M. had not mentioned any conspiratorial activity or this act of heroism that was now being acknowledged. The fact that she did not relate this impor-

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tant detail of her biography makes me question how much I got to know at all about her life. In the end, this feeling of insecurity also extends to my other interview partners. Thus, even more than at the end of any other project, one must probably say that the result is more questions than answers.

NOTES 1. Jerzy Ficowski, Demony cudzego strachu [Demons of Foreign Fear] (Warsaw 1986), 89: ‘Thus, the reports I recorded in 1949 are the only evidence on Gypsies from these years, a memory of those who succeeded in saving their lives. Basically, it is a number of memories I was told by different Gypsies.’ The epigraph of this essay also comes from Ficowski’s book (p. 9). The persecution of Polish Roma remains a relatively underresearched aspect of the history of Nazi genocide; see also Piotr Kaszyca, ‘Die Morde an Sinti und Roma im Generalgouvernement 1939–1945’ [The Murder of Sinti and Roma in the General Government 1939–1945], in Wadaw Dlugoborski (ed.), Sinti und Roma im KL Auschwitz-Birkenau 1943–44 (Auschwitz 1998); Michael Zimmermann, Rassenutopie und Genozid: Die nationalsozialistische ‘Lösung der Zigeunerfrage’ (Hamburg 1996), 277–283. 2. In this essay I use the term (Polish) gypsies for Roma in Poland, but for the Roma associations I use their respective official names. 3. In this context, the Roma association at Legnica was the only exception. 4. Jan C., born on 22 March 1939 or 1944; Aplonia K., born in 1921 or 1924; Alfreda M., born in 1926 (?), who received her first ID card in 1966; Stefania O, born around 1932; and Maria S., who was the only one to give a certain date of birth, 15 May 1939. 5. On the collective forms of identity construction and the culture-specific tendency to treat the historical past as irrelevant to identity, and their consequences for narrative practice among the Roma, see above all Paloma Gay y Blasco, ‘“We don’t know our descent”: How the Gitanos of Jarana Manage the Past’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 7 (2001): 631–647; also Michael Stewart, The Time of the Gypsies (Boulder 1997), 58–60, which also analyses the attitude towards ‘work’ as it developed among (Hungarian) Roma under socialism up to the early 1990s. Observations on the problem of interviewing surviving Sinti (German ‘gypsies’) are offered by Michael Zimmermann, ‘“Jetzt” und “damals” als imaginäre Einheit. Erfahrungen in einem lebensgeschichtlichen Projekt über die nationalsozialistische Verfolgung von Sinti und Roma’, BIOS 4(2) (1991): 225–242. 6. See Gay y Blasco, ‘“We don’t know our descent”’, 633: ‘Similarly, a whole complex of practices, which include name avoidance and the destruction of the deceased’s belongings, ensure that no individuals become part of the communal memory despite the fact that they are emotionally and elaborately memorialised by their close relatives.’ 7. On this see Rrom p-o Drom: Cygan na drodze [The Roma on the Road], a bimonthly magazine published in Bialystok since 1990 and edited by S. Stankiewicz.

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The first Roma magazine in Poland, it is issued by the International Association of Roma both in the Polish language and gypsy dialects. Dialog-Pheniben, a quarterly cultural magazine published in Os;wieç cim (Auschwitz) since 1995, edited by M.G. Gierlich, is issued by the Association of Roma in Poland in the Polish language. 8. Ficowski, Demony cudzego strachu, 24. 9. Slawomir Kapralski, ‘Ritual of Memory in Constructing the Modern Identity of Eastern European Romanies’, in Nicholas Saul and Susan Tebbutt (eds), The Role of the Romanies (Liverpool 2005), 208–225; Adam Bartosz, ‘The Gypsy Caravan of Memory’, http://www.muzeum.tarnow.pl/wydawnictwa/czytelnia/artykuly/ tabor_eng.pdf. 10. N.a., ‘Zapomniany Holokaust’ [The Forgotten Holocaust], Dialog-Pheniben 8 (August 2004): 8.

8

THE FRENCH EXPERIENCE STO, a Memory to Collect, a History to Write

Anne-Marie Granet-Abisset

T

he present study focuses on a particular category of forced labour: ‘labour deportees’.1 The vast majority of these workers, known in France by the acronym STO (Service du Travail Obligatoire)2, were men who were conscripted and sent to Germany between March 1943 and July 1945. The passage of the war years saw a strengthening of economic collaboration, one of the aspects of the collaboration organised and desired by the Vichy regime. Effective from the outset through the requisitioning of a large part of the country’s agricultural and industrial production for Germany,3 starting in 1941 it was also implemented in the form of this forced labour. The first version, called la Relève (the Relief), and its slogan ‘three workers to replace a prisoner’, appealed for volunteers. Active propaganda campaigns promised wages, training and pleasant living conditions, as well as participation in the construction of a strong Europe. In view of the very low level of success of this campaign, the Nazi authorities demanded that the Vichy government, like the governments of the other occupied countries, provide it with contingents of men to replace the German soldiers mobilised on the eastern front. By a decree of 16 February 1943 the Vichy government instituted compulsory labour service for men born between 1 January 1920 and 31 December 1922.4 Our choice of this category corresponded to two objectives. First, unlike political or racial deportees, the STO workers are a group that has received little attention. Over the past thirty and especially twenty years in Notes for this chapter begin on page 122.

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France, the former have been the topic of numerous studies and their testimonies have already been collected many times.5 These have been used either for individual or collective university research (for instance, interviews with former inmates of Auschwitz, Ravensbrück or Mauthausen), for research undertaken by associations in an academic context or for museums or by the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Déportation.6 We now have a huge number of testimonies collected, recorded and preserved in audio or video form. By comparison, the STOs (like the prisoners of war) have almost been forgotten. Yet during the months of their mobilisation, about 600,000 Frenchmen left to work under these conditions. Theirs was one of the largest contingents of forced labourers in Germany, after those from the Soviet Union. Some books do exist on the subject, but most of them are autobiographical, written by former STOs and published in the past ten years.7 The memoirs of this group have very seldom been collected by institutions or for academic research. While conferences and books on the Second World War period have given extensive coverage to political and racial deportees, the same cannot be said for the STOs. In short, apart from the attractions of uncovering a new subject, it is the content and character of this memory as such that explains my choice. It is a particular memory, one whose silence is notable. This silence not only reflects the lack of interest on the part of researchers or ‘entrepreneurs’ of memory, but also bespeaks other realities, including guilt or even shame. These I glimpsed in the extracts of interviews collected by two of my students.8 Thus, rather than proposing yet another collection of testimonies of (racial or political) deportees, I thought it important and interesting to pursue a dual project: opening up a forgotten category, and examining it through the prism of guilt. The aim of this essay is simply to propose, at the end of this series of interviews, the first elements of an analysis that warrants more in-depth and detailed work, especially through the collection of other testimonies and their comparison with written archives and private documents. It is intended to be an introductory and relatively succinct review of the work on the French project, along with some comments that draw on the interview transcripts.

Disjointed Life Stories: The Difficulty of Talking Without going too far into the material details of the French project, it seems important to recall the context in which it was undertaken, which affected the result and challenged our ability to produce an in-depth analysis of the data. Administrative deadlock arising from a point of law

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delayed the signing of the research convention.9 Since the programme convention was due to terminate at the end of August 2006, the convention was finally signed in February 2006, thanks to the Association des Amis du Musée de la Résistance et de la Déportation de l’Isère, to its president, P. Estadès, and to the curator of the museum, J.C. Duclos. Because of the respective professional commitments of the members of the team, the actual collection and recording of testimonies began only in May 2006, although we had started with some preliminary inquiries in May 2005. These preliminary inquiries actually proved to be crucial for understanding the subject and arranging subsequent interviews. In short, the collection of data was concentrated in a short period of time, which had its advantages. It would nevertheless have been far more comfortable (especially for the translation) had we been able to carry it out in the autumn or at least the winter of 2005. Similarly, we would have had time to refine further the subsequent analyses of the interviews. Our first observation relates to the great difficulty in finding witnesses. This was due not only to the death of a large proportion of those concerned (born in 1920–1922) but above all to the difficulty of tracing witnesses who were prepared to talk. As is often the case, but even more so than for other kinds of interview projects, referral by third parties was essential. Most of these witnesses did not wish to talk about this experience, and many had never spoken about it before. We first followed the recommendations of certain students (5 of the interviewees were their grandparents or neighbours) and of friends or acquaintances of the grandparents of J. Montredon (4 interviewees). From there we were referred to others, and in this way more subjects were found (9). Yet the number of refusals was far greater than in other projects. At a certain point (when we had received over 15 refusals from an initial list of people who had been suggested to us) we started to wonder why this might be. In any case this fact is significant evidence of the difficulty that people have in talking about or even contemplating recounting this experience. Of course the age (and illness or fatigue) of potential interviewees complicated matters. However, we suspected that the number of refusals stemmed more from their relationship to this element of their past and the way in which it is spoken about or viewed in the present. This strengthened our hypothesis that theirs is a memory tainted by shame, a memory of guilt and, finally, a painful memory; the interviews confirmed it. We were able to find one group of potential interviewees through an organisation we were made aware of during the first project seminar in Berlin: the association of the friends of Georges Brassens, a very wellknown French singer who was sent to the Basdorf camp for STO.10 Via this association we were able to record two of our subjects. Although they

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both belonged to the same association, the experiences of P. Onténiente and V. Laville concerned very different sectors and places, and they were not interned in the same camp. We chose only two members of this association because we wanted to ensure that our interviews represented a variety of social backgrounds and life trajectories. Associations of former labour deportees afforded an obvious point of entry and were naturally one of the options that we investigated. However, here again some of the members we contacted did not want to be interviewed or showed no real interest in our request. More precisely, they seemed highly reluctant to talk about their experience. A final surprise was that the people whom we had met during the May and June 2005 surveys refused to talk to us again. This is regrettable because some of their testimonies are very rich. Even though we have these recordings, we cannot use them in the present corpus because the interviews did not comply with the programme standards. The preliminary inquiries have nevertheless been essential for the collection as a whole and especially for our understanding of this field of memory and its difficulties. A minority of the witnesses did agree enthusiastically to talk to us. They wanted to express their feelings of frustration, if not bitterness, about their position since the end of the war. As early as 1946 and especially since the 1960s, they had the feeling of being excluded from this history. Testifying became a form of recognition for them, a way of gaining legitimacy in the eyes of society and of rehabilitating their identity. Our second observation stems directly from the preceding comments. The fact that witnesses found it difficult to talk is evident in their accounts. On the whole they were brief; very few of their accounts (3 out of 20) lasted for the requested four or five hours. Most lasted two to three hours, and a small minority took only an hour and a half. We took certain precautions, and at the time of the initial contact as well as the beginning of each interview we tried to explain the purpose of the collection and the wish to situate this experience within their life story. In spite of this, most of the interviewees focused their account on the STO period. In apparent contradiction with what I have just said, they had all carefully prepared what they wanted to say. Documents or photos were set out on the table, in the case of the most motivated interviewees, or were close at hand. Written accounts were produced or entries read from a notebook kept during the period of deportation, to support the testimony and ensure that the speakers did not make a mistake. Our witnesses said that they had never really shown these to their children or grandchildren, and as noted above, many of them had never spoken about the subject before. It was a testimony that they dreaded giving although they were actually pleased to be able to do so, in spite of everything. This was attested to by the willingness of many of them to provide the information we requested

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in writing, and by their offers to continue the account another time. By contrast, some of them gave the impression of having nothing else to say and of not wanting to talk about it anymore. Either way, it was the account of their experience that they agreed to share. The accounts were sometimes rich and precise, sometimes so brief and halting that they had to be prompted with questions, as if the speakers had the impression that what they had to say was unimportant and that this two-year parenthesis was not worth spending any time on. But this attitude changed when they came to certain more significant passages, such as the bombardments to which they were subjected and the intense fear, or the difficulties after their return and when their experience was under scrutiny. All of them nevertheless had great difficulty recounting their lives before and after this experience, perhaps even more the post-STO period than the pre-STO one. They often ended with ‘I married in … and I had X children and X grandchildren’. Since these were men who were at least eighty-four years old, it was difficult for both J. Montredon and myself, and perhaps especially for me, to stick to the questionnaire. We endeavoured to follow the instructions as far as possible, but the questions on relatives, on the family and on experiences at school received quick, evasive answers. I was unable – usually through modesty, I admit – to address all the subjects proposed in the grid, and to do so explicitly. Moreover, since I work on other research on the silence of the memory, I tend to identify these silences, that are fundamental for subsequent analysis, rather than systematically pointing them out or highlighting them through my questions. As we listen to some of the testimony, it appears that for some subjects the coverage is too partial or superficial, and that a second interview would have been necessary had we not been short of time. In the next few months I nevertheless intend to interview some of the witnesses again since the dual project that I propose remains interesting and stimulating. For most of the ten men whom I interviewed, talking about their parents was always painful. The subject triggered strong emotions in these aged men, which prompted me to be very silent and to ask my questions with discretion. Consider an example that arose every time with a greater or lesser degree of intensity, but always significantly, even with subjects whose emotion was tightly contained or whose detachment seemed the most apparent. It is especially visible on the video of G. Foriel. At the mention of his father and then his mother, this man, who has a strong sense of humour and a direct way of talking, started weeping silently but painfully, so that the cameraman stopped filming. Because of the large number of people from this rural area in Ardèche who were killed and wounded, the experience of the First World War was still felt with intensity eighty-six years later. Its memory and the way that it weighed on the

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family and on the speaker himself during his childhood were expressed directly. But all of this was also expressed implicitly, with much restraint, in a deliberate silence. In fact, one of the general characteristics of this memory is to produce an implicit discourse, beyond the commonplaces apparent in the lived experience of STO and daily life in the camps. This difficulty of getting my interviewees to talk was sometimes very destabilising for me because it was new. One is faced with problems of a different kind when collecting the memories of painful and inexpressible experiences of racial or political deportees, like those of Mauthausen or other survivors of the Shoah with whom I have also worked extensively.11 For example, I ended up deciding not to select for the programme the testimony of one of the first witnesses I had met in April 2006, due to the extreme difficulty of the interview. This man, a member of an association, had prepared the interview. He had read to me passages from his diary written in a tiny notebook, a passionately interesting document from which he read only the least interesting passages. He spoke very slowly and hesitantly, as if he were reluctant. Eventually his wife spoke for him. After this experience I was very worried about the choice of subjects for the videos. I hesitated often, collected information and made initial contact to try to find people who could produce an account that was not too disjointed but also interesting and reflected the full variety of experiences. As a result the videos were only produced between 13 June and 10 July, which left very little time for the translations. Apart from the deadline, the translators said that one of the main difficulties was the fact of having to translate oral speech that had not been ‘tidied up’, and for which it was not easy to find equivalents in the German language. This was another obstacle in carrying out the project. Finally, the nature and content of the testimonies make their collection complex and complicated in a different way from that of racial deportees, for example. I will return to this point. The third observation is relative, since at this stage it is valid only for our relatively small corpus (26, counting the preliminary interviews): our witnesses were primarily from the lower middle or working classes. This is an important fact to take into account in analysing both the discourse and the reality of this type of forced worker who, in France, also represented those who had not joined the Resistance. Clearly, most of them hardly had a choice; all of them stressed the fear of reprisals on their families; many, from large families, said they were the one who had to go in order to prevent others from having to leave or from having problems. For one of them, who supported the family financially, STO seemed a way of helping his mother, whereas joining the Resistance like his cousins would mean a loss of wages. There is a social reading of STO that deserves closer analysis and further research.

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On the whole, the pattern and structure of the interviews is an intrinsic feature of the memory work that will have to be taken into account in their analysis. Leaving aside the technical failings of the interviewers – not reacting during the testimony and not checking back afterwards, forgetting certain questions or feeling uncomfortable about others – the difficulties we encountered are a lesson in themselves. They reflect the reality of STO, of what it meant in individuals’ lives, and of what the experience of STO constitutes as a painful or even shameful memory for these witnesses and sometimes even for their families.

STO: The Example of a Shameful Memory It is still too early to analyse these testimonies fully since our time until now has been spent on the transcription of interviews and the finalisation of the report. The transcription work has nevertheless already enabled us to grasp, confirm or invalidate the impressions we were left with after the interviews. First impression: both the extreme ordinariness and the wide diversity of the trajectories. At first sight this history is marked by ordinariness because the matrix is always the same: youth projects, call-up (with confiscation of identity documents and supply cards) and almost immediate departure for Germany; the essential role of comrades; relations with the Germans, which on the whole were not bad; return long after liberation by the Americans or Russians, depending on where one was; resumption of work immediately upon returning home. Once home, most of these men spoke very little about their experience and forgot about that period, though nearly all of them joined associations of former labour deportees, with varying degrees of engagement. The account is often fairly anecdotal, even if it provides concrete facts on life in Germany in the camps where the STOs encountered other nationalities, workers of different status and especially prisoners and deportees, all undergoing different treatment and conditions. In some factories where political or racial deportees were taken to work during the day, their account shows the implementation of racial segregation and the Nazi social order through work and everyday markers of difference, referring to the hardest jobs in the foundries or mines, the ‘slave labourers’ under the constant control of the Kapos responsible for watching them, the prohibition on talking to one another or even communicating by signs, and even a separation materialised by lines within factories (staircase). On the other hand in these mines there was a lot of water, it was the Russian prisoners who were at the bottom who dug the hole. There were one or two French who went down, but because they were on mainte-

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nance, like a colleague from Lyon who was a fitter at Berliet, to adjust the pumps … In fact there were no French, at the bottom, there it was the Russian prisoners. … Another anecdote too, on the work site there were wounded of course but there was also a house that was nur für Deutsch, nur für Auslander, nur für Jude: they didn’t mix the sheep and the goats! So sometimes the Jews tried to slip through towards us to try to barter something or chat … If the Kapo noticed he’d come across, open the door and the guy would get a beating on the way out.12

Depending on the case, the testimonies are sometimes precise as regards the work (if it was identical to that done in France) or conditions, especially everything concerning the camp and the food. Even though they all recognised that unlike the other deportees they were able to supplement their meagre rations by buying in shops or bartering, most of them complained of hunger. To the question on relations with the Germans, the answer given by R. Echinard echoes what all the witnesses said: It depends which. There were the bastards. With them we knew what to expect, we’d spotted them from the first day. They were Nazis through and through, those who arrived in the morning, in clean clothes. Their first job … in all the workshops there was a huge big photo of Hitler. And every morning they’d go and salute Hitler. And every day there were some who’d bring flowers to put on the photo of the Führer. And then afterwards they’d go and change and they’d start working. Those we’d watch out for like the plague. And then there were the poor guys, the guys who had no choice but to be there and who weren’t Nazis. We’d also spotted them right away but they couldn’t say anything. We had a supervisor who’d been a prisoner of war in France, during the Great War. So he liked to come and chat to us … But with advice, he showed us [makes a sign to be quiet]: ‘don’t talk’. So we were all right with those.

Also of interest are the notes taken on the organisation of the German economic system, which at the time struck some of the interviewees as disorganised, underneath the appearance of rigour and order. Other comments concerned the diversity of German attitudes to the Nazi system and the events and foreigners in their country. Finally, in many of the accounts a key passage concerns the liberation and the end of their stay. The arrival of the Russians and especially the bombings were times when all of them acknowledged having felt afraid, especially when this was compounded by being in a besieged town like Breslau. When the bombing started everyone was scared. Until you’ve known fear you aren’t scared, even of bombs, you don’t know what it is. But when you’ve seen it next to you, when you’ve seen the dead, when you’ve seen the ruins, when you’ve seen the planes coming down, shot by the antiaircraft defence, it takes a while, a plane, to come down, it turns, and then

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there were some that left, they were smoking! They were losing altitude, they jumped with parachutes, one after the other, it was the summer of ‘44.13

The second characteristic is the diversity of these accounts from the point of view of their form and content: playing down the conditions and simplifying the testimony for some; details and descriptions for others. The differences in the ways they told their story and the kinds of problems they encountered in speaking stemmed partly from shared traumatic experiences but also from their personal situations before and after the war. These variations are among the most surprising results, for they allowed us to see differences among testimonies that were otherwise similar. Finally, many of the witnesses dotted their accounts with more general thoughts on the meaning they gave to the events and experiences of their lives; it was like a new reading of that period at the end of their lives. These few cases enable us to understand better why certain men of that age left for Germany while others chose to go underground and to join the Resistance. The chronology seems important: some emphasised the fact that they were part of the first convoys and were unaware of the reality of what STO implied. We can see their motivations, their reasons and the personal and family situations that caused them to obey the orders of the Vichy government. All noted that they went in order to avoid reprisals on their families, and some presented themselves as the ‘sacrificed’ sibling. Almost all of them insisted on the absence of any alternative once their papers had been confiscated, but the financial aspect was probably one of the main factors, along with the political motivations that immediately come to mind. In the testimonies there is much discretion concerning their political positions. Although they belonged to the more modest social classes, they had no particular political stamp or ‘education’. There is an essential theme that is worth bearing in mind in our reading of these testimonies: the way in which STO fitted into the course of the interviewees’ lives at the time of the war but especially afterwards and, even more so, in the past few years. The significance of STO for the wider course of their lives is revealed in the way they speak about their life in Germany, and their relations with the Germans and with the other prisoners, deportees and forced labourers, French and especially foreign. It is also present in the way in which they describe – or refuse to describe – their return home and their reintegration into liberated postwar France. We see it, too, in what they tell us about how they reconsidered that period as their lives unfolded and in the light of changing public discourses on the history and memory of that period. From these mostly disjointed accounts we see that the former STOs who left in 1943 have a particular position in this war memory. Officially

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recognised as deportees in the immediate postwar period, by a provisional government that wanted to reconstruct France very quickly by avoiding social and civil tensions, they were soon excluded from the title when it was decided that only victims of political or racial persecution could legitimately be called deportees. As the memory of the Second World War was gradually constructed, most of the former STOs, who had not experienced the same tragedies or been subjected to the same unbearable living conditions as the (officially recognised) deportees, permanently stopped talking about that period. They consciously or subconsciously understood the ambiguity of their situation. For those who attempted to be active in deportee organisations, tensions with ‘real’ deportees simply reinforced that ambiguity and the choice of silence or withdrawal. Few have spoken about their experience or agreed to do so now, especially since the collective memory of that period in history has overlooked it, placing it on the dark side of the anti-heroes, or at best of those who had made (or been forced into?) the wrong choice or, more precisely, had failed to choose the right path. This is clearly what can be called a shameful memory or, more exactly, a memory of guilt, neither spoken about nor revealed explicitly, instead becoming evident in its silences. These elements need to be analysed in detail if I am to go beyond these conclusions and address the question of guilt. Since the subject is complex in both human and analytic terms, another stage in the work will be needed to produce more robust analyses and conclusions. While we have worked on the silences of memory, we have focused less on the memories of silence, as P. Laborie put it. Of these memories, those related to guilt have received little attention, especially where they are manifested in collective memory. The idea is to avoid the over-simplistic distinction between victimiser and victim and come to an understanding of individual and collective actions at a particular time and in a specific context, thus illuminating the individual and collective choices of that and subsequent periods. This project of collecting and analysing interviews should also be seen as shedding new light on the period in question.

NOTES 1. The members of the team carrying out the project are Anne-Marie GranetAbisset (team leader as well as 5 video surveys and 5 audio surveys and transcriptions), Michel Szempruch (cameraman), Julia Montredon (10 surveys and

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

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transcriptions), Nicole Wronski (transcriptions) and, for the translations into German, Martine Favier, Barbara Brutscher and Waltrud Fumex. STO = Service du Travail Obligatoire, forced labour instituted by the Nazis during the Second World War. This is a topic that is starting to be studied by researchers working on business history. See for example the conference ‘Les entreprises françaises sous l’Occupation’ organized in Besançon on 12 and 13 October 2006 by the Groupe de Recherche 2539 du Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). This followed the first conscriptions of qualified workers, initiated in September 1942. The decree was issued three months after the end of the partitioning of France, with the abolition of the demarcation line and the end of the theoretical free zone in the south. The bibliography on the subject is rich. Among many others, the reader is referred to: A. Wieviorka, Déportation et genocide: Entre la mémoire et l’oubli (Paris, 1992); A. Wieviorka, L’ère du témoin (Paris 2002); J.-M. Guillon and P.Laborie (eds), Histoire et mémoire: La Résistance (Toulouse 1995); Musée de la Résistance et de la Déportation de l’Isère, Mémoires de Déportés: 1945–1995 (Grenoble 1995); C. Vegh, Je ne lui pas dit au revoir: Des déportés parlent (Paris 1979); M. Pollak, L’expérience concentrationnnaire: Essai sur le maintien de l’identité sociale (Paris 2000); L. Douzou, La Résistance française: une histoire périlleuse (Paris 2005); D. Peschanski, La France des camps (1938–1946) (Paris 2002); H-R. Kedward, A la recherche du Maquis: La Résistance dans la France du Sud 1942–1944 (Paris 1999). For instance, the collection of the Musée de la Résistance et de la Déportation de l’Isère, the Maison d’Izieu, the Musée de la Résistance de Besançon, or the Centre d’Histoire de la Résistance et de la Déportation de Lyon. For the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Déportation: www.fondationshoah.org. If we briefly consider the 68 books on the subject recorded by the French national library, one third have been published since 2000, and the majority since 1990. Most of them are testimonies rewritten with the help of a journalist or author. An example is R. Iskin, Dans un camp. Basdorf 1943: Georges Brassens et moi avions 22 ans. Histoire de René Iskin écrit par J.-Y. Vincent, ed. D. Carpentier (Paris, 2005). This work was part of a course on the collection of memories as a historical source, for the BA in ‘Histoire et Mémoire’ at the University of Grenoble 2. This stems from the CNRS, which requires under the law that any contract in force in French-speaking communities (francophonie) has to be drawn up in French, though it may also be expressed in another language or languages. This was not provided for by the convention of the foundation, which is understandable; it is a European programme under the direction of a German research centre and for a German foundation. This was the case with other celebrities in France, including the writer Cavanna and the comedian R. Devos. Julia Montredon, who also participated in the Mauthausen programme, felt and experienced things in the same way. See, in particular, A.-M. Granet-Abisset, ‘Témoins et témoignages en situation limite’, in A. Wievioka and C. Mouchard (eds), La Shoa: œuvres et témoignages (Paris 1999), 189–202. M. Bejat, Lyon (video). G. Foriel (Ardèche) (video).

9

THE EXPERIENCES OF HUNGARIAN SLAVE AND FORCED LABOURERS Éva Kovács

The Historical Context

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ne in ten victims of the Shoah, and one in three victims in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, was Hungarian.1 Between 1938 and 1945, one in fifteen Hungarians (in total, one million Jews and Roma) were the victims of discrimination.2 A particular feature of the Hungarian Shoah was the Labour Service System – an idea conceived as early as 1920 to control the ‘unreliable social strata’ within the parameters of a public labour service. Following the First World War, Jews were also included among the ‘unreliable’. In 1939, the Labour Service System was reorganised as part of a new Hungarian armaments programme.This reorganisation enforced anti-Semitic principles, which extended to the terms of military service: although Jewish soldiers could initially still be conscripted, they were no longer authorised to serve as officers.3 Sixty companies of Jewish workers had been established by the summer of 1940. All Jewish soldiers were eventually disarmed in the spring of 1941. The situation of these forced labourers became particularly arduous after June 1941, when they were sent with the Second Hungarian Army to the eastern front in Ukraine. Both the physical conditions and the social relations were brutal; thousands of the total of 50,000 forced labourers died or were killed by Hungarian or Soviet troops. Legislation was further tightened so that the forced labourers were defined as members of Notes for this chapter begin on page 135.

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the occupation forces.4 The Hungarian forced labourers were sent to Bor (Yugoslavia), where they were forced to work in copper mines.5 Following the German occupation of Hungary, further companies of forced labourers (approximately 50,000 people) were created for the German Reich; at the same time, the formation of ghettos and the deportation of Jews from rural areas began. Between the German occupation on 19 March 19446 and the putsch of the Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross movement on 15 October 1944, the Labour Service System paradoxically offered the persecuted a haven of refuge since, during this period, they were not deported as forced labourers. However, under the fascist Szálasi government, doing labour service once again became dangerous. In many towns and villages, members of the Arrow Cross movement massacred thousands of forced labourers. The Szálasi government ‘loaned’ the German authorities a proportion of male workers between the ages of 16 and 60 and female workers between the ages of 16 and 40. Between the autumn and the end of 1944, these men and women were taken, some on foot as part of the ‘death marches’, to Hungary’s western border, where they were handed over to the Germans to dig trenches for the construction of the so-called Südostwall (Southeast Wall).7 Those forced labourers who did not die here were later deported to Mauthausen, Gunskirchen and other concentration camps and executed.

The Sample In choosing our interviewees, we wanted to represent not only the general history of slave and forced labour in the ‘Third Reich’ but also the specifically Hungarian history. Our interviewees are women forced to work in German concentration camps and men who survived the Hungarian Labour Service System. For the purposes of this project, we conducted nineteen interviews in the Hungarian language. Six of the interviews were recorded on video (five on BETA SP, one on Mini DV); all of the interviews were recorded on audiocassette. Seven interviewees were identified with the help of the Claims Conference and two with the help of the Mauthausen Documentation Project; ten interviewees were found through personal contacts. The group consisted of ten men and nine women – eleven former members of the Labour Service System and eight concentration camp detainees or slave workers. Fifteen interviews were conducted with people currently living in Hungary; four interviewees currently live in Slovakia. All of the interviewees were persecuted as Jews.8

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Life-history Accounts of Slave Labour and Forced Labour In this chapter, we present a selection of project interviews and identify not only the typical features of the experience of forced and slave labourers, but also those which can be characterised as specifically Hungarian. Since we have been conducting life-history interviews with Shoah survivors for twenty years, we attempt to analyse not only common historical experiences but also changes and consistencies in individual and collective memories. Our sample reflects five typical kinds of experience: men’s forced labour in Hungary, men’s slave labour in Germany, women’s forced labour in Hungary, women’s slave labour in Germany and women’s slave labour in Austria.

Men’s Forced Labour in Hungary Dr János Wessely was born in 1918 to a nonreligious Jewish family in Budapest. His parents were doctors. As a result of the so-called ‘Jewish Laws’, he could not enrol in university in 1938. Following a brief spell working for a car company, he later began an apprenticeship as an engineering fitter-machinist. In autumn 1942, he entered the Labour Service System in Budapest (company number 101/64), Domony and Szentkirályszabadja. In the same year, he lost his older brother, György, who had been forced to work in Voronezh (Soviet Union). In January 1943, he was drafted to Bor to work in the copper mines. However, he remained in Szentkirályszabadja, where he was assigned to a new forced labour company (101/12) to do building works. Following three months’ leave in Budapest in the spring of 1943, he was reconscripted to the Labour Service System and sent to Transylvania and soon afterwards to Galicia. Here, the forced labourers endured the meaningless and humiliating task of replanting forests and undertook front-line duties, chiefly the burying of corpses of Hungarian and German soldiers. Even at this stage, the forced labourers received very little to eat. In August 1944, he broke his leg, was admitted to hospital and thus returned to Hungary. In hospital, he was supported by a Catholic priest. Following his convalescence, he had to return to the Tattersaal barracks in Budapest, from where he fled during the winter of 1944– 45 and eventually found his mother, father and younger brother. Budapest was liberated by the Soviet army in February 1945. In the same year, János Wessely, by now 27, enrolled at the medical university in Budapest.

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Men’s Slave Labour in Germany Ede Zádor was born in 1924 to a religious Jewish family in Apc. His father worked as a bank clerk. In 1942, he passed his school leaving examination. With the assistance of the Hungarian Israelite Crafts and Agricultural Association (MIKÉFE), he became an apprentice mechanic. In 1943, the male members of the family moved to Budapest, where the father worked in a leather factory. Here, they experienced the German occupation together on the streets of Budapest. MIKÉFE was banned in April 1943. At this time, Ede Zádor lived with a friend. He was recruited for the Labour Service System (company 106/304). His mother and his sister were transported to the Bácsalmás ghetto and later deported to Strasshof, where they had to work in the forests. In April 1945, they were deported to Mauthausen and Gunskirchen. On 9 June 1944, Ede Zádor’s unit was deported, together with detainees from the Budapest ghetto, via Hatvan to Miskolc. With the help of his lieutenant, his company was freed from its railway carriage and sent back to Salgótarján. His father, by contrast, was deported to Auschwitz and murdered. Between August and October 1944, Ede Zádor was forced to work at the Ferencváros railway station in Budapest, and later at an aircraft factory in Szigetszentmiklós. For the most part, he worked clearing bombed ruins. On 15 October, he had to march on foot to Mosonmagyaróvár. On 4 November, his unit was taken over by the SS and deported to Dachau/ Türkheim, where they were detained in the concentration camp and forced to undertake building work. For his part, Ede Zádor worked as a mechanic. His identification number was 122212. In mid-December 1944, the unit was reassigned to the aircraft factory in Leumberg (presumably Leonberg) close to Stuttgart, where Ede Zádor again worked as a mechanic. He caught meningitis and was therefore sent to the medical unit, where he was subjected to pseudo-medical experiments and also contracted typhus. In April 1945, the occupants of the medical unit were transported to Kaufering and Landsberg, where they were liberated by the US army at the end of the month. In May and June 1945, he received treatment for his heart, lung and stomach pains in a hospital in Bad Wörishofen. In July of the same year, as his mother and sister returned to Jánoshalma from Gunskirchen, he was still in an American military hospital in Kempten. In September, he was transferred, together with twenty other former detainees, to the international displaced persons camp in Munich. He was flown from Munich via Prague and Bratislava to Budapest. From here, he continued his journey alone to rejoin his mother in Jánossomorja. The family soon relocated to

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Budapest, where he began to work in the Ferrotechnika factory. Owing to an acute case of tuberculosis, he had to spend nine months in a sanatorium in 1946. Following the death of his mother in April 1947, Ede Zádor, now aged 23, began his studies at the technical university in Budapest.

Women’s Forced Labour in Hungary Vera Varga (née Erdo…s) was born in 1920 to a religious Jewish family. Her father was the president of the Jewish community in Ko…bánya-Budapest and worked at the Anglo-Hungarian Bank as an international trade correspondent. After passing her school leaving examination at the Jewish grammar school, Vera Erdo…s undertook a Montessori apprenticeship and opened a nursery in her flat in 1941. In 1943, her younger brother was conscripted for forced labour. He did not return from the war alive. Her older brother joined the illegal Communist Party and emigrated via France to Bolivia. On 23 October 1944, Vera Erdo…s was herself called up for forced labour. Together with her unit, she was led on foot from the KISOK (Középiskolai Sportkörök Országos Központja – National Centre of the Sports Clubs of Secondary Grammar Schools) sports field to Szentendre Island, where she was forced to dig trenches. Because she had taken him to Szentendre by boat a few times, her commandant later reassigned her to work in the supply unit. In December 1944, the group was transported back to Budapest to work in a brick factory. From there, she was sent to the large synagogue in Dohány Street and later to a so-called safe house. While she was working in the uniform of a Red Cross nurse in a Jewish orphanage, the orphanage was attacked by an Arrow Cross unit and most of the children were killed. On 24 December 1944, the Arrow Cross took them to jail and then to the Budapest ghetto, where Vera Erdo…s was able to hide together with some eight or ten children. Following the liberation of Hungary, she returned the children to the orphanage. She then returned home on foot to Ko…bánya, where she found her parents living on the street because their house was now occupied by Soviet troops. They were able to communicate with these soldiers in French. Her father reorganised the Jewish community, and Vera Erdo…s became the director of a nursery.

Women’s Slave Labour in Germany Éva Harmat (née Fürst) was born in 1924 to a religious family in Nagykanizsa. Her father was a cattle dealer. After passing her school leaving examination in 1942, Éva Fürst began an apprenticeship as a dressmaker in Lenti. Her father was called up for forced labour in 1941.

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On 31 May 1944, they had to move to the ghetto in Zalaegerszeg. Six weeks after their arrival, they were deported to Auschwitz, where her mother and sister were selected and killed. Miss Fürst’s identification number was 55866. In Auschwitz, she first worked in the scarlet fever unit in camp B and later in camp C. In March 1945, she was one of 500 occupants transported to Nürnberg-Froschenburg, where she was put to work – sometimes even during the bombardments – together with her codetainees in a factory owned by Siemens-Stuckwelz. In the same month the unit was divided in two, and Éva Fürst was moved with her group to another Siemens factory in Holisov. In addition to working in the factory, she cleaned the flat of a supervisor, who in return gave her additional food; she also worked in the factory’s tailoring and shoemaking departments. In the factory, she had to produce the component parts for time bombs. When Hungary was liberated in May 1945, she was in Holisov; at the same time, her father was freed from the Mauthausen concentration camp. In June 1945, she organised a group of thirty-eight women, including eight Romanians, to facilitate their journey home. She first travelled to an uncle in Budapest and three days later continued her journey to another uncle in Zalabaksa. In Zalaegerszeg, she met her future husband, Gyula Harmat, and they married in the summer of 1945. In the same year, she found a job as a secretary for a forestry company.

Female Slave Labour in Austria Mária Kallós was born in 1929 to a religious family in Debrecen. In 1933, her uncle – her mother’s younger brother – emigrated to Palestine; his older brother followed him in 1938. In 1939, she was no longer allowed to attend the grammar school and was subsequently able to complete only two years of study at the secondary school in Hatvan, where it was not possible for her to qualify for university study. In 1940, her father was drafted for forced labour. In 1943, she enrolled at the Jewish grammar school in Debrecen. In February 1944, her mother became pregnant. In March 1944, she was transferred with her family to the Debrecen ghetto, from where she was deported to Strasshof. Later, she was detained in camps in Vienna – first in the twelfth and subsequently in the tenth district. At first, her whole family, including her mother and her grandparents, was able to stay together. They lived in a school and were forced to work for the Schindler construction company. Each day, they travelled to work on the Badener Bahn tramway from Vösendorf to Siebenhirten. Even her grandmother had to work as a roofer, while her grandfather was able to continue working as a plumber. Her brother was born in Vienna’s Jewish hospital on 9 October 1944. Mária Kallós, then fifteen years old, removed the yellow star from her

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clothing and went on foot from Meidling to Leopoldstadt to visit her mother in hospital. Later, the mother and her son were moved to a children’s home, where the mother had to perform domestic work. The third brother of her mother disappeared while carrying out forced labour in Hungary. His wife and two children were killed in Auschwitz. They were freed on 5 May 1945 and taken to Strasshof, from where they attempted to return home on foot. Since her mother and grandmother were ill, they spent a week in Bratislava. They finally made it back to Hatvan in June 1945. Their father was waiting for them in Debrecen. Reunited, the family reassumed their earlier religious way of life. Although the grandfather’s storage cellars had been looted during the war, the father was able to return to his job at the Anglo-Hungarian Bank. In 1947, Mária Kallós passed her school leaving examination and began her studies at the medical university.

Typical Narrative Representations of ‘Working Through’ the Shoah In the following section, we use our interviews as a basis for outlining the typical ways in which Shoah survivors work through their experiences.9 The examples used are taken from the interview sample of this project, and the typology used to classify the ways in which survivors deal with their experiences is drawn from our earlier interviews conducted as part of the Mauthausen project.10 On the basis of the hundred interviews conducted for that project, it is possible to differentiate between four narrative types: traumatised accounts, production of individual memory, integration of individual memory into the ‘grand narrative’, challenging the collective memory and historiography of the Shoah.

Traumatised Accounts Our first type is well established in both the Hungarian and the international literature.11 Accounts of this type illustrate that victims have not been able to work through the trauma of the Shoah. Feelings of guilt towards the dead frequently occupy central positions in these life stories. For example, Mr A. stresses in his accounts of forced labour that he was always very lucky: He did not have to march to Bor; he broke his leg in Galicia and was therefore – again, luckily – sent back to Hungary. When he was healthy again, he fled the barracks and – luckily – found his family. His greatest sadness was and remains his brother who disappeared very early in 1942 while working as a forced labourer in Voronezh. This brother was and still is his idol, and Mr A. today still harbours consider-

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able feelings of guilt, especially because he – unlike his brother – is still alive. The Shoah story of Mrs B. is similar. Central to her account is the tragedy that befell her shortly before her liberation. When fleeing the Stutthof concentration camp in January 1945, she was badly injured by a German soldier; her sister and one of her friends were killed. Her arm was injured and never healed properly. Her trauma came back to her throughout her life in the image of an incurable wound. Following numerous operations, her arm was operated on once again in the mid 1990s. Some interviewees who were unable to deal with their traumatic experiences attempted to repress their bad memories and gloss over the dark episodes, in order to control the fears with which they still have to cope today. Mrs C., for example, recounts from the National Socialist period only stories with positive endings, stories that attest to human kindness or helpfulness and above all to the ‘simple Austrian women’ that she met during her period of forced labour in Vienna. She even ascribes the Austrian captain a positive role since he gave her yarn that she could knit and later exchange for food. By contrast, she presents some of the smallholders in her village in a rather negative light; although they spoke to her and showed sympathy when she returned after the war, in the period before the deportations they crossed over the road so as not to have to meet her. Mrs C. did not want to dwell on her negative experiences: she therefore recounted her bad experiences only briefly or not at all. Instead, Mrs C. spoke in the interview largely about the beauty of life and about the trust that she had placed in people.

The Production of Individualised Memory At the other end of the spectrum of working through the past, we find individual memories that are reflexively produced. This means that the person has undertaken active, very painful memory work to achieve a coherent and complex biographical account that serves their identity construction. This was achieved principally by deliberately treating the Shoah experiences as a taboo.12 This strategy is characteristic of young people who started their own family after the Shoah and did not want to confront their children with their own tragedy. They produced apparently coherent life stories from which the Shoah was erased. During her interview, Mrs D. stressed that she was not very healthy and therefore recounted her war experiences only very rarely. It was also very important for her not to cry. She said that her daughter and her son were not at all interested in the history of deportation and war. She wanted to make the Shoah a family taboo to protect the children from racial discrimination. However, she was able to recount very vividly the

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story about the time her children were first confronted with the topics of ‘Jewishness’ and the Shoah. She was also entirely understanding about the fact that her children lived with non-Jewish partners. Another way of working through the Shoah experience to produce an individual memory often resembles psychoanalysis. In our research project, this particular ideal type was represented by one interviewee who had undertaken several years of therapy. At the start of his interview, Mr E. explained that he had conducted a six-hour interview with the Shoah Foundation in 1995; he would gladly show us this interview. He then proceeded to tell his life history as a professional narrator. In the first two hours, he recounted his life up to 1945. During a second interview, we asked him about the biographical milestones (such as his childhood) that he had mentioned but not explained. He then spoke at length about his psychoanalysis during the 1970s. We then proceeded to ask questions that we had drawn up following our first meeting. The interviewee recounted detailed stories about his school, his period of forced labour, etc. up to 1945. His account was full of intensity, accusations and individual stories that revealed the persecution of a Hungarian Jew from separation to prison and finally to the concentration camp in Mauthausen and Gunskirchen. During a third interview, he continued his life history up to 1956. The fourth interview focused on the period between 1956 and 1965. He was very friendly and seemed to be at ease with the interview situation, which he considered similar to a therapy session. These last nine years that he recalled could be summarised as a sequence of acts of passive resistance against the communist regime. During our fifth meeting, he began for the first time to ask us questions – that is to say, he wanted to turn the interview situation around. During this interview, he mentioned his literary ambitions to put down on paper the best episodes of his life. He then recounted his life story between 1965 and 1976. He began our sixth meeting by focusing on the interview situation, which he perceived to be an intimate conversation. With the aid of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytical categories, he was also able to recount his relationship to his wife, other women and his daughter. The key category of his analysis was ‘working through’. We conducted a total of seven interviews with Mr E. During the last two interviews, he used psychoanalytical categories – which he had introduced in earlier discussions – quite naturally and spontaneously to assess his life.

The Integration of Individual Memory into a Wider Narrative Collective narratives of the Shoah, which in Central Europe have developed largely on foreign models, have helped individuals to express their own experiences in canonical terms. The ‘grand narrative’ of the Shoah en-

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ables victims to recall a generalised story instead of recounting the painful memories of their own experiences. This has often resulted in a condensed life story that uses external references to safeguard its authenticity. Mrs F. recounted a compressed history of the Shoah that she illustrated with her own personal experiences. She made frequent use of external references, such as photographs, documents and books. In this way, Mrs F. referred – sometimes critically, sometimes very positively – to the film Fateless,13 to the memorial on the banks of the Danube in Budapest and to the Auschwitz exhibition. An extreme example of this type is the so-called ‘professional narrator’ who not only publishes in scholarly journals but also frequently appears on television. Such people give the impression of having ‘perfectly’ worked through their past traumas and can fluently recount the Shoah. However, following the analysis of these interviews, we reached the conclusion that these people have encapsulated their tragedies and are unable to incorporate the Nazi period into their life stories. Mr G. did not agree to be interviewed at home. He arrived, sat himself down abruptly in a chair and immediately began to recount his history, before we were even able to switch on the recording equipment and explain to him the interview situation. In addition, he also explicitly explained that he could devote only two hours to us and could be interviewed only once. In the first twenty minutes, he gave a short account of his life story from the perspective of the Shoah. On occasion, he opened his briefcase and quickly showed us his own documents or relics; he gave us no opportunity to touch or read his possessions. The interview was very short and not at all detailed. It appeared as if he only meant to deliver this short report and did not want to recount further events from his private life. The documents and other relics had a legitimising function for his life story: they were used to demonstrate that he was an important person and that many other journalists and academics had visited him to hear the truth. Only when we had switched off our recording equipment was he willing to show us his documents. These included audio-cassette recordings, video cassettes, books, letters and four copies of a memoir (three copies for his children and one for himself) in which he had written – almost to the letter – the story that he had recounted to us. We asked whether his children were pleased that he had given them the memoir. ‘Not particularly,’ he answered.

Challenging the Collective Memory and Historiography of the Shoah Conversely, in some cases the ‘grand narrative’ can interfere with individual memory. This occurs not only when the narrative seems inau-

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thentic to those who lived through the events themselves, but also when individual survivors have to deal with practical difficulties, such as arise when they seek to claim compensation. There is a widespread if mild disappointment with the official policy towards history and Shoah commemoration. These negative experiences in the present can lead to interferences in entire life stories. Mrs H. had ‘prepared’ everything for our interview. On the sofa, she had placed folders containing various documents and albums. Until the end of our third meeting, she maintained the habit of illustrating her story with documents and photographs. We saw the reason for this attempt at legitimisation in the bad experiences that she recounted to us. In the mid 1990s, she had written to the Polish Historical Commission for information about her detention in Auschwitz; she included her identification number in her letter. The commission replied that a Polish citizen was entered in their records under this particular number. Although she was later able to prove her ‘existence’ and the accuracy of her identification number, this news made her ill – all the more so since she had had a similar experience with the Hungarian Claims Conference. Here, she explained that she had worked for six weeks in a temporary scarlet fever unit in Auschwitz. The official claimed that no such unit had ever existed in Auschwitz because Randolph Braham had never mentioned it in his book The Politics of Genocide. Both stories destabilised Mrs H.’s identity and produced in her a constant quest for legitimacy. An even more critical and distanced attitude is illustrated by the following example, which directly expounds the problems of our documentation project. At the start of Mr I.’s interview, he criticised our letter for asking him to recount for us his ‘painful memories’. During the interview, he frequently returned to our choice of words. Our research, he maintained, reflected the public’s stereotypes of the Second World War and the Shoah. From the perspective of a survivor, these stereotypes were not acceptable. In the opinion of Mr I., only those people who had not survived the Shoah could have painful memories. The Shoah survivors, by contrast, should feel lucky (see also our first example with Mr A.) He repeated this idea on numerous occasions during his interview. He held our letter in his hand during the entire course of the interview and recounted some episodes of his life directly to the letter in front of him. For example: ‘Painful memories are not always painful memories. You could also count on your luck and our own, our own – cleverness. … I’m just saying this because not all memories are painful. There was also some humour.’ During our second meeting, he returned again to this theme to criticise our project explicitly: ‘The people it would have been worthwhile to interview are no longer alive. The ones who were burnt, frozen, beaten to death – it would have been worthwhile with them.’ He also broached the

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subject of his memoirs. To some of our questions, he replied that we would find the answers in his memoirs or in other books on his bookshelf.

Future Prospects The regime change of 1989 presented Hungary with an opportunity finally to tell the story of the Shoah survivors in public and acknowledge the victims.14 However, in the struggle for memory, this group of victims was marginalised. A few years later, when the victims of the 1956 revolution too had been politically discredited, the memory of National Socialism and the memory of Communism faced each other alone on the battlefield, competing for new commemoration days, the creation of museums (such as the Auschwitz exhibition, the House of Terror or the Holocaust Museum) and parliamentary interpellations. The memory of the Shoah was still rarely accepted as part of the collective memory of the Hungarian nation, even though it is more or less present in the new Holocaust museum as a state-recognised place of remembrance. The victims were left to devise their own ways of working through the Shoah – they received very little assistance from Hungarian society and historical discourse. We have missed our last chance to produce a common narrative in their lifetime. In his new book, James E. Young asks how the memory of the Shoah can be kept alive in memorials, films or works of art after the last survivors have died, without the memory simply becoming institutionalised.15 Time will tell whether this will create a new ethics of memory and greater distance in its historiography or a more creative take on the Shoah, or whether it will lead to a more sensitive collective memory or, indeed, collective amnesia.

NOTES 1. On the history of anti-Semitism in Hungary, see Rolf Fischer, Entwicklungsstufen des Antisemitismus in Ungarn 1867–1939 (Munich 1988); Vera Ránki, The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion: Jews and Nationalism in Hungary (New York and London 1999); Tamás Ungvári, The “Jewish Question” in Europe: The Case of Hungary (Boulder and New York 2000). 2. For a definitive account of the Holocaust in Hungary, see Randolph L Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, vol. 1.2 (New York 1981). For detailed statistics on victims, based on the latest research, see Tamás Stark,

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4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

Éva Kovács

Zsidóság a vészkorszakban és a felszabadulás után 1939–1955 [Jewry in the Holocaust and after the Liberation] (Budapest 1995); Tamás Stark, ‘Kísérlet a zsidó népesség számának behatárolására 1945 és 2000 között’ [Measuring the Number of the Jewish Population between 1945 and 2000], in András Kovács (ed.), Zsidók a mai Magyarországon [Jewry in Contemporary Hungary] (Budapest 2002), 101– 127; Brigitte Mihok (ed.), Ungarn und der Holocaust: Kollaboration, Rettung und Trauma (Berlin 2005); Jeno… Lévai, Zsidósors Magyarországon: Az üldözések kora [The Fate of the Jewry in Hungary: The Age of Persecution] (Budapest 1948), English edition: Black Book in the Martyrdom of Hungarian Jewry (Zurich 1948). Karsai Elek (ed.), “Fegyvertelen álltak az aknamezo…kön ...” Dokumentumok a munkaszolgálat történetéhez Magyarországon 1–2 [“Weaponless on the Mine Field…” Documents of the History of Forced Labourers in Hungary] (Budapest 1962); Randolph L. Braham, ‘The Hungarian Labor Service System 1939–1945’, East European Quarterly distributed by Columbia University Press (Boulder and New York 1977); Szita Halálero…d Szabolcs, A munkaszolgálat és a hadimunka történetéhez 1944–1945 [Death Fortress: On the History of Labour Service] (Budapest1989); Szita Szabolcs, Munkaszolgálat Magyarország nyugati határán: A Birodalmi Védo… állás építése 1944–1945 [Labour Service at the Western Border of Hungary: The Building of the Reichschutzwall 1944–1945] (Budapest 1989); Szita Szabolcs, Iratok a kisegíto… munkaszolgálat, a zsidóüldözés történetéhez [Documents on the History of Labour Service and Persecution of Jews] (Budapest 2002). 1942: XIV. Law. Randolph L. Braham, The Hungarian Labor Service System 1938–1945, East European Quarterly, Boulder, New York 1977; Tomislav Pajic, Zbornik Radova. In: Ilija Jankovic, Muzeja rudarstva i metalurgije u Boru. Bor 1982, pp. 221–231. György Ránki, 1944: március 19. Magyarország német megszállása [The German Occupation of Hungary] (Budapest 1968; 2nd ed. 1978). Abridged German version: Unternehmen Margarethe: Die deutsche Besetzung Ungarns (Budapest, Graz and Vienna 1984). The massacres continued on the Austrian side of the border – often with the help of the Austrian population. See Udo Fellner, ‘Bittere Heimatgeschichte: Das Schicksal der jüdischen Zwangsarbeiter in Krottendorf und Kalch’, in Gerhard Baumgartner, Eva Müllner and Rainer Münz (eds), Identität und Lebenswelt: Ethnische, religiöse und kulturelle Vielfalt in Österreich (Eisenstadt 1989), 128–132; Eva Holpfer, Der Umgang der burgenländischen Nachkriegsgesellschaft mit NS-Verbrechen bis 1955: Am Beispiel der wegen der Massaker von Deutsch-Schützen und Rechnitz geführten Volksgerichtsprozesse, graduate thesis, Vienna 1998, abridged version in Italian ‘Il massacro di Rechnitz’, in: Storia e DocumentiNr. 6, Semestrale dell´ Istituto Storico della Resistenza e dell´ Età Contemporanea di Parma, Numero doppio 2001, 205–221. As in our previous interview projects, we attempted, unsuccessfully, to find persecuted Roma or Jehovah’s Witnesses for these interviews. Both historical research and the Pharrajmos/Porrajmos interview groups testify that Hungarian Roma were rarely recruited for the Labour Service System or deported to the Reich for the purposes of slave labour. It should be noted that, as is always the case with this method of analysis, mixed types of narrative accounts were observed in the individual interviews. We have conducted a total of more than 100 life-history interviews with Shoah survivors. For Hungary, see Teréz Virág, ‘Children of the Holocaust and their Children’s Children: Working through Current Trauma in the Psychotherapeutic Process,

Hungarian Slave and Forced Labourers

12.

13. 14.

15.

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Dynamic Psychotherapy’, The Journal of the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health 2(1) (1984), 47–61. See Ferenc Ero…s, András Kovács and Katalin Lévai: ‘“Hogyan jöttem rá, hogy zsidó vagyok”’ [“How did I realize my Jewishness”], Medvetánc 2–3 (1985): 129– 144; Éva Kovács and Júlia Vajda, Mutatkozás: Zsidó Identitás Történetek [Presence: Life Stories on Jewish Identity] (Budapest 2002). Sorstalanság [Fateless], 2005. Director: Lajos Koltai. Screenwriter: Imre Kertész. For information on collective memory, see Andrew Handler and Susan V. Meschel, Red Star, Blue Star: The Lives of Jewish Students in Communist Hungary 1948–1955 (New York 1997). For information on intergenerational variants of Jewish identity, see the empirical study Ferenc Ero…s, Júlia Vajda and Éva Kovács, ‘Intergenerational Responses to Social and Political Change: Transformation of Jewish Identity in Hungary’, in Yael Danieli (ed.), Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma: An International Handbook (New York and London 1998), 315–326. For information on sociological aspects to this question, see András Kovács (ed.), Zsidók a mai Magyarországon: Az 1999-ben végzett szociológiai felmérés eredményeinek elemzése [Jews in Contemporary Hungary: Analysing the Results of an 1999 Survey] (Budapest 2002); Viktor Karády, Túlélo…k és újrakezdo…k: Fejezetek a magyar zsidóság szociológiájából 1945 után [Survivors and New Beginners. Chapters of the Sociology of the Hungarian Jewry after 1945] (Budapest 2002). James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven and London 2004).

 10 

‘MOTHER, ARE THE APPLES AT HOME RIPE YET?’ Slovenian Forced and Slave Labourers during the Second World War

Monika Kokalj Koc=evar

W

ith the attack of German, Italian and Hungarian army units on 6 April 1941, Slovenian territory, a part of the kingdom of Yugoslavia known as Drava ban’s domain, was very quickly dismembered into three territorial units. New borders were decided by Adolf Hitler himself 1 and gave the ‘Third Reich’ the biggest, northern part – Styria, Upper Carniola and a small part of Carinthia with about 798,000 inhabitants (10,261km²). The southern part, later known as Ljubljana Province, with over 336,000 inhabitants (4,544km²), belonged to Italy, which annexed the territory at the beginning of May 1941. The smallest, eastern part, with 102,000 inhabitants (997km²), was allotted to and in December 1941 annexed by Hungary. Some villages in the southeast of Slovenia belonged to the Independent State of Croatia. All the occupiers embarked on concerted policies of Germanisation, Italianisation and Hungarisation respectively. In this article we focus only on activities within the German-occupied territory. For Styria und Upper Carniola Hitler chose the same occupation system as for Alsatia, Lorraine, Western Poland and Luxembourg. After a short period of military administration the Germans introduced a civil administration and established two temporary administrative provinces. Dr Siegfried Uiberreither, previously the provincial leader of the NSDAP Notes for this chapter begin on page 149.

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in Austrian Styria, and Franc Kutschera, who was appointed for Carinthia, were the chiefs of civil administration and commissioners for reinforcing Germanhood. Germans disbanded Slovenian political, professional, cultural and other organisations, prohibited the use of the Slovenian language and introduced German or Germanised names and surnames, names of towns and even mountain peaks. Prewar associations were dissolved, Slovenian schools were closed down, the printing of Slovenian books and magazines was prohibited, many libraries and archives were destroyed, piles of Slovenian books were burnt and as early as August 1941 German teachers came to Slovenia to organise German language courses. The property of the Catholic Church and of the former Drava ban’s domain was confiscated and placed at the disposal of the Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of Germanism. In the summer of 1941 the majority of priests and monks in monastic orders were expelled to Croatia. The Germans intensively exploited factories, ironworks and coalmines. Newly established political organisations, the Styrian Homeland Association and Carinthian People’s Association (Steirischer Heimatbund and Kärntner Volksbund), were part of the denationalisation system in which more than 90 per cent of the population enrolled out of fear of repression. The German authorities wanted to annex the occupied regions, but – initially due to administrative problems and later because of the activities of strong partisan groups – the annexation was postponed to the period after the war. National liberation organisations and first partisan groups were set up as early as in summer 1941. By the end of the war, partisan units fighting against the occupiers and Slovenian anti-communist formations counted well over 40,000 people. As a step towards denationalisation the German authorities intended to expel up to 260,000 Slovenians in a few months and to settle up to 100,000 German farmers. The first group of expellees included the intelligentsia and anti-fascists. In the second, the immigrants who came from the territory of the Slovenian Littoral after 1914 and from the territory that had been annexed by Italy in 1920 would go. The third group comprised people from an area stretching 100 km along the borders to Croatia and Italy, respectively, and ranging 20 km into German territory, and in the fourth group were those who would not join the Steirischer Heimatbund or Kärntner Volksbund. From April to September 1941 migration commissions had carried out racial and political screenings of the population. Together with political gradings Slovenians received final gradings that decided their fate: E to expel, V to stay at home, A to move to Altreich, U-St to be expelled to Upper Styria, O to denote a citizen of foreign country with which the Third Reich has a good relationship and S to mark special cases.

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People who were destined for expulsion were brought to transit camps by police units and gendarmerie. In Styria they were mainly brought to the Maribor relocation camp and later to the Rajhenburg camp which was organised in the castle’s stables. The land and property that was left behind was put into the hands of the DAG (Deutsche Ansiedlungsgesellschaft, German Settlement Society) to be maintained until German families could settle there. In winter 1941 the farmhouses in Styria along the Sava River territory were taken over by 13,000 Koc=evje Germans.2 The first relocation camp in Upper Carniola was set up in Šentvid near Ljubljana and then in the village of Goric=ane, in a former bishop’s manor, about 10 km from Ljubljana. The first expellees were sent to Serbia and Croatia from June 1941 to September 1941. Most of them stayed with Serbian families and shared their destiny. In October 1941 Heinrich Himmler decreed that expelled Slovenians would be sent to Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (VoMi) camps in Germany.3 Responsibility for them was taken by the Eleventh Bureau in the Headquarters of VoMi in Berlin under the leadership of Hermann Ellermeier.4 The offices managing the expulsion were headed by the commanders of the Security Service (SD) and Security Police (Sipo). From October 1941 on the expellees were sent from transit camps in Slovenia to Germany. The majority of them, except for elderly people and very young children, were subjected to forced labour. Problems with transports, housing of the expelled, the resistance of the national liberation movement and the lack of a workforce meant that in 1942 the Germans decided to postpone the expulsion until after the war and continued to expel only the relatives of partisans. Nevertheless, about 7,500 were sent to Serbia, 10,000 to the Independent State of Croatia, and around 45,000 to Germany. Another 17,000 fled to Italian territory and thus escaped expulsion, so that all together 80,000 Slovenes were forced from their homes.5 Among them there were over 20,000 children. The civil administration granted provisional citizenship on probation to the majority of Slovenians in spring 1942. The precondition for this was membership in Heimatbund or Volksbund. Citizens on probation were treated as German citizens and called to do military service and state labour service. Lower Styria and Upper Carniola were militarily subordinated to the Eighteenth Military District in Salzburg. Conscripts were threatened that if they did not respond to the call-up, they would lose citizenship and their family members would be excluded from political organisations and sent to concentration camps. Nearly 90,0006 Slovenians born between 1906 and 1927 were forcibly called up to the German army this way. In some cases, those who had been expelled to Germany and worked there as forced labourers were forced to join the German army.

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In addition to this, the population at large had to join other military and paramilitary troops and to do forms of compulsory labour. The labour service to which German citizens were subject was extended to Slovenians, including unmarried women, lasting for 3 to 5 months for men and for 6 to 12 months for women. Volunteer military and civil defence formations including Volkssturm, Wehrmannschaft, and anti-aircraft gun units (Flakhelfer- and Helferinnenkorps) were also set up, as were branches of the Organisation Todt. From March 1945 onwards masses of people from different military formations crossed Slovenian territory. On 10 May 1945 the German General Alexander von Löhr, the supreme commander for Southeast Europe, signed the surrender of the German army in Slovenian Carinthia, but fighting went on until 15 May 1945. The occupation was characterised by a range of crimes against the civilian population. As early as the spring of 1941 over 500 mentally retarded and disabled people from Slovenian Styria were sent for ‘euthanasia’ to Castle Hartheim near Linz in Austria. In April 1942, 228 Slovenian families comprising 1,149 individuals who lived in Austrian Carinthia were expelled from their homes; they returned after the war. As early as 1942 the Germans burnt and demolished twelve villages in Upper Carnolia, and in four years of war 217 villages were burnt down in the whole occupied area. Nearly 3,000 hostages were executed during the war. The fate of 100 hostages who were hanged from apple trees in February 1945 in Stranice near Frankolovo in Styria in revenge for a murdered German official is still widely remembered. But the most tragic story took place in August 1942, when a group of around 1,200 people, mostly relatives of partisans or people already in prison, were brought to Celje. All the children, nearly 600 of them, were separated by force from their parents and sent to a camp in Frohnleiten near Graz and then by the Organisation Lebensborn to camps in Bavaria, where many of them were offered to German families for adoption.7 Most of their parents were killed in Auschwitz. Only around 400 children were found and came back home after the war. The total number of victims of the Second World War in Slovenia is over 89,000, which represents nearly 6 per cent of the population.8

The Interviews The topic of forced and slave labourers has been quite well researched and studied in Slovenian historiography. Over fifty books have been written about their fate in the Second World War.9 But the practice of collecting and taping oral history testimonies has only just started to develop.

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A group from the National Museum of Contemporary History of Slovenia carried out 20 interviews for the Slave and Forced Labourers Documentation Project. Thirteen are audio interviews and 7 are video interviews. Of the audio testimonies 11 are from forced labourers and 2 from slave labourers, whereas among the video interviews there are 5 with slave labourers and 2 with forced labourers. We contacted veterans’ organisations and also asked eyewitnesses who had collaborated with us in the past to find new names. During preparations for the interviews we called many former slave and forced labourers and very quickly got consent from twenty people, but many more people phoned us and wished to tell their life stories. Out of twenty interviewees only two had been interviewed before. Some family members expressed the wish to be close to the interviewee to listen to the story. And in some cases neighbours who had shared the same fate came by. We tried to find a group of interviewees that was as diverse as possible. The selection includes forced labourers who were expelled to Germany as early as 1941 as well as relatives of partisans who were expelled later. We interviewed a Slovene who served in the Italian army and was sent by Germans from Greece to a German forced labour camp, where he met an Ostarbeiterin. Together they went to Slovenia at the end of war and got married. The second group were men and women who had been in concentration camps. The age of our interviewees – thirteen men and seven women – ranges from 71 to 92 years. Eleven interviewees were only children (6 to 11 years old) during the war. But they do remember a lot.10 The interviewees who were in concentration camps were already of student age at the beginning of the war; one, Mr Dušan Stefanc=ic=, was only 16. The great majority of interviewees come from the rural area that forms the border on the Italian-occupied territory where the bulk of expulsions took place. Interviewees sent to concentration camps were living in cities and bigger towns, and were predominantly arrested there by the anticommunist Home Guard police and handed over to the Gestapo. Most of the people who were expelled from their homes and sent to Germany to work as forced labourers were not politically active but nationally minded, and were expelled on the basis of the final gradings assigned them by the German commissions in the process of Germanisation. Fifteen of the twenty interviewees were from farm families with up to eight children. Very often grandparents were also forced to join the expelled family. Slave labourers, who in our case were either students or white-collar workers, were predominantly sent to concentration camps because of their political activities or collaboration with partisans. Many were sent first to prisons in Slovenia and then, in transports, to concentration camps. In the early years of the war it was not generally known

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what concentration camps really were. Thus it was very much appreciated when a brochure written by our interviewee Cvetko Kobal, who had escaped from a forced labour camp and had previously been in the concentration camp of Dachau, was issued in 1944 by the Partisan printing houses. Forced labourers interviewed spent up to four years in labour camps, whereas slave workers survived between one and a half and three years in concentration camps. Mr Cvetko Kobal, mentioned above, joined a partisan unit in Slovenia in 1944. Slovenian forced labourers were settled in more than 300 VoMi camps. During their stay our interviewees were on average in three different camps, depending on the need for workforce. The Blas family was also in a camp in Siessen that had the status of penal camp. In some camps (such as Bloönried) Slovenians lived together with other forced labourers – Poles, Czechs and French people. Only a few knew in advance that they were going to be expelled, though some gathered that they would soon have to leave their homes from the fact that the neighbouring villages had already been expelled. Nobody knew where they were going; the gendarmes and members of police who came to expel them just said that they would be sent to Germany. The children still have the most painful memories. Mr Alojz Zorko remembers: On the fourth of January when it was still dark, at around five o’clock, we heard a rattling at the door. Aufstehen, schnell! We had to get up and prepare luggage. Our dog, Tiger, escorted us to the church. We passed by our stable and our cows and ox were mooing. Father chased our dog away, but he did not want to go. He just sat down and whimpered. Mother turned towards our house and cried. Maybe she felt that she would never see it again.11

Those expelled from Styria were mainly brought to the Rajhenburg transit camp. They were registered and got their camp number, which they wore for the entire four years. Usually it was an oval of sheet metal that every member of the family had to wear around his or her neck. Mr Janez Blas12 remembers: ’Number 10031 was made for us, and each digit was made separately. The whole family had the same number. We got also a string and we wore it around our necks like dogs, and from then one we were no longer the Blas family but a number. Nummer Zehntausendeinunddreißig, Achtung, Achtung!’ When the expellees arrived in Germany (to Württemberg, Baden, Silesia, Saxony, Bavaria), they were housed in various VoMi camps that were organised in old castles, convents, administration houses, youth hostels and so on. Our respondents named camps in Untermarchtal, Marbach, Bamberg, Baumgarten, Altoetting, Rosenheim, Waltersheim,

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Hann. Münden, Gieboidehausen, Blönried, Reuthingen, Rreute, Siessen, Wroclaw, Burghausen, Herten and Großwartenburg, among others. Several families shared a room. There was no privacy, and people were happy if they could arrange a space exclusively for themselves. The camps usually had a commander (Lagerführer), administration and some German people who either helped in the kitchen or with supplies. Some camps also had a nurse. The interviewees mostly remember Lagerführer as bad men. Mr Janez Blas remembers a Lagerführer from Siessen: ‘As a punishment he locked us, four or five young boys, in an open enclosure with police dogs nearby.’ He still suffers from the trauma of this. There was never enough of the food – black coffee or some liquid resembling coffee and a piece of bread in the morning and evening, and some soup for lunch. Very often families were separated: the father got a job somewhere else and the mother stayed with the little children, or they were even left alone in the camp during the day. Children also worked in the camp, clearing snow from the paths and fetching wood and coal for heating. There was no time for children’s games. Sometimes children were taken away from parents by force and sent to other camps to work. Mrs Marija Škofic told us: One day I was called to the camp office in Bamberg. The head told me to go with a Gestapo man. I asked her where I was going. She told me that the man would tell me everything. I thought I was going for a day. We travelled by train and I started crying and asked when I would come back to my family. He told me that I was not coming back again. ‘You are going to the youth camp in Neumarkt’, he said. Then I started crying severely: ‘Why didn’t you tell me? I would have said goodbye to my Mummy and Daddy!’

Mrs Škofic worked in a camp in Neumarkt in the armaments factory, together with Polish and Slovenian girls and boys aged nine to sixteen, until the end of the war. She did not have any contact with her family. The interviewees worked in box factories, envelope factories, bakeries and boat factories, in the forests, in the fields, as carpenters, as roofers, as an electrician, for SS families, in armaments factories, in military hospitals. The working conditions varied. In factories the working conditions sometimes resembled slavery. In some German families, especially on the farms where there was a shortage of male labour, the forced labourers were regarded as family members, while in other cases they were treated as second-class citizens. Mr Jože Bogovic=, who was working on a farm, remembers: ‘I was shunned, even at meals. I had to sit in the entrance hall, and not with the family. In spite of many empty rooms, I had to sleep in a store.’ Still, some interviewees think that they were in some cases treated better than Polish families.

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In factories where the forced labourers worked they did not associate much with the Germans. Some interviewees reported that towards the end of the war many German women started to show more sympathy for the foreign labourers after they had received letters telling them that their husbands, sons or relatives had been killed. In some cases, good friendships developed between Germans and Slovenians that have lasted until today. The interviewees provided details about life in the labour camps. They were always short of clothes, especially the children who were growing very quickly. Interviewees remember that the camp authorities gave them clothes that were still spattered with blood. Many stories spread about those deported to concentration camps. Mr Repše remembers: ‘We got some clothes which we suspected belonged to dead Jews who had been executed in Auschwitz in gas chambers. Mother found some money sewn into the lining of the jacket.’ There was always a lack of information, with the adults trying to stay in contact with home and to learn what was happening there. They wrote letters to friends in other camps and also sent letters to relatives who were not expelled. In some camps the expellees were allowed to go to church, and interviewees still keep the photos of their confirmation. In general, only those who had documents could leave the camp. Some children attended German classes in the camp, some went to school in the village and some received no education at all during the war. Their schoolmates mocked them because they were in ragged clothes and did not speak German. They often heard terms of abuse like ‘gypsy’ or ‘Russian’. Around 1,200 Slovenians died in German labour camps, predominantly older people and small children. Two mothers and a father and a sister of our interviewees died. And some children were born in the camps. One interviewee also married in the camp and gave birth to two children, and two other interviewees had brothers and sisters born in a camp. Slave labourers whom we interviewed were interned in concentration camps at Dachau (where there were 3,969 Slovenian internees all together), Neuengamme (7,509 Slovenians), St. Marie aux Mines, Natzweiler (824 Slovenians), Mauthausen (4,153 Slovenians), Gusen I, Gusen II, Auschwitz (2,324 Slovenians) and Ravensbrück. They worked in a quarry, draining fields, in carpenter workshops, in disinfectant departments, in armaments and airplane production, at a salt bath, and in an infirmary. Two were also victims of medical experiments. The situation in the concentration camps was not comparable to that in the labour camps. The people in concentration camps fought for survival every day. In some cases Slovenians believe that knowledge of the German language saved their lives. This helped them, for example, to get

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better positions in the concentration camp hierarchy. Extreme solidarity and mutual support prevailed. Especially in Dachau the Slovenians were well organised. Mr Stane Šinkovec remembers: ‘We organised around twenty groups. We also had our own newspaper. It was on paper from a school notebook, I think there were four pages. It was in only one copy and I am sorry it was lost. Three issues were made and the fourth after the liberation. And there is also something we brought back – the whole card index of Barrack 24.’13 It was also important to conserve one’s energy while working. About the Mauthausen concentration camp, Mr Cvetko Kobal said: ‘The key thing in the camp is saving energy. In Mauthausen in the quarry we carried stones up those steep stairs into the camp. The heaviest was a square stone, the easiest the plate. You had to carry the plate so that the SS man saw it from the side.’ But all internees agree that anyone who started to think about dying actually died. People who lost the desire to live very often died. The best example to explain the view of death in the camp was given by Mr Cvetko Kobal: In that situation death is something different. It’s an individual death if you die at home. The other one is collective death. When every day you see only dead bodies. … In some way you envy those who were burnt there, in the morning they simply did not wake up and were burnt alive. You could shake him as much as you wanted, but he never awoke again. You knew that he was alive but he did not wake up again. That psychosis of death is different in such a collective atmosphere, it was nothing special if someone died.

The Allies received an especially warm welcome in the labour and concentration camps in the days of liberation. Soon after, the ‘return home’ began. Before going home the expellees or internees had to report to the Slovenian representative bodies abroad,14 and only with their consent could people go home. Then they were to go to central assembly points in Germany where they were put on a list for repatriation. Sometimes they waited for months, and even then the journey could take more than a month. An extreme case was the fate of Mr Bogovic=’s family: it took them seven months to get home. Usually, between 500 and 800 people were sent back to Slovenia on each train. The first to arrive were slave labourers from Dachau, at the beginning of June 1945. The peak of repatriation was reached in the summer months of 1945. The last repatriates arrived in late 1946. From the bases in Germany the repatriates travelled home via Vienna and Czechoslovakia; from the regions occupied by the US army, transport columns went via Jesenice and Vienna and Maribor. The Ministry for Social Welfare established a Board for Repatriation as early as 12 May 1945 and gave orders for organising the return at the Slovenian end. There were over forty repatriation centres in Slovenia.

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The biggest ones were in Ljubljana, Celje, Gozd Martuljk, Jesenice, Kamnik, Maribor and Radovljica. When they arrived at the centre in Slovenia all the repatriates were bathed, disinfected and medically examined and had their hair cut. At the same time, registration was carried out. Each repatriate got his or her own document indicating which centre they had come from. This was also a personal document, valid until the person got an ID card. Repatriates stayed in the centres for up to six days. The Red Cross also took part in the repatriation process. From June 1945 until May 1946 it issued a special news bulletin, ‘vestnik’, which was devoted especially to inquiries for the missing, and each day a Ljubljana radio broadcast announced the names of those who had returned from the camps. Some interviewees remember that when they arrived near the Yugoslav border, people on the Austrian side warned them not to go back to their homeland with its new socialist system. Only a month or two earlier, at the end of May 1945, British soldiers had handed over to Yugoslav partisans a large group of Slovenian anti-communist Home Guards and their families, who had retreated together with the German army to Austrian Carinthia at the end of the war. Over 12,000 of them were murdered without any trial.15 When the expellees came home they found their farmhouses empty, often even demolished or burnt down. They were practically left without anything. In many cases they had to beg for bread. Mr Bogovic= remembers: At about twelve o’clock we arrived at our home. Mother was crying, father was crying, the children did not know what to feel. The house was without door, windows, the stable was empty, no supplies, nothing living at all. And autumn was coming. Then our father said: ‘Children, mother, it is as it is, we should be thankful that we are at home.’ And so we started to get used to being under our own roof. Our neighbours, who had come home before us, planted some potatoes for us. And we lived from the kindness and mercy of our neighbours.

They had to start from scratch. Many felt that they were not welcome when they returned. Some were also reproached for having gone to Germany voluntarily. The following year they were required to deliver goods for purchase by the state. The Local People’s Committees decided upon everybody’s fate. Very quickly they all had to adapt to the new system. A particular unease prevailed among the former slave labourers when a big ‘Dachau trial’ took place in 1948–49. Thirty-one internees who had survived Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps were brought before the court for alleged collaboration with the Gestapo, war crimes and illegitimate postwar activities between 1946 and 1949. In this show trial, eleven of the accused were sentenced to death in May 1948 and twenty were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.16 Some doubts

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about the strength of the accusations were expressed even during the investigation, but this had no influence on the final proceedings. Many children of forced labourers did not go to school after the war but had to work at home, primarily because of the difficult economic situation and poverty after the war. For some, the few years of schooling they had completed before the war remained their only education. Eight of our interviewees went on to university education after the war, others went directly to work and some acquired more education through private study or their own talents. Not until the Independent Republic of Slovenia was proclaimed in 1991 did the expellees organise their own association. In the early 1990s they were recognised as victims of war, terror and violence, and their financial compensation was fixed. In 2001 and later, compensation was gained from German and Austrian agencies. In Slovenia there are now two associations of expellees: Društvo izgnancev (Association of Expellees) and Združenje žrtev okupatorjev 1941–1945 Kranj (Association of the Victims of Occupiers 1941–1945 Kranj). To date, the Association of Expellees has collected data on 12,180 forced labourers. Of all the people who were expelled to Serbia, the Independent State of Croatia and Germany, around 19,000 are still alive. The concentration camps committees continue to operate within the framework of the Union of Partisan Associations. Many former forced and slave labourers still have an attitude towards Germans that is marked by their experiences; they do not want to travel to Germany, even to revisit the places where they were during the Second World War. The horrors of the war they survived are somehow still present. They live with their past. But how they deal with the past is important. Many people who have spoken openly to their relatives or spouses about their wartime experiences are able to think about the war without disturbing their peace of mind. They have established their own perspective on wartime events, reworked the experience and taken control of their own memories, and feel that they are able to answer all the questions connected to the war. This has proved to be an effective way to come to terms with the horrors they survived. Sometimes they retain some evidence of their trauma – documents, photos, suitcases, camp number tags. Some interviewees return to wartime sites with the veterans’ organisations and are active in campaigning for their role to be recognised and not to be forgotten by society. But at the same time they feel a loss. Many speak of their lost childhood. This remains and will always be a difficult topic to talk about. On the basis of our interviews with our subjects, most of whom were young people during the war, we can provide the following summary of

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their key experiences. Leaving their home was the first shock. The next one was the process of depersonalisation they suffered in the camps, when they lost their family names and became only numbers. In the camps they suffered the trauma of disastrous living conditions, the multiple shocks of being repeatedly separated from their families, the disappointment of not being supported by their German workmates and the lasting wound of incomplete education. In all their stories the image of the mother dominates: brave mothers, trying their best to look after the family. Also there were the traumatic deaths of friends and relatives, and even after their return the shock of abandoned and demolished homes and the negative attitude of society. For those who had been in concentration camps, the trauma of being surrounded by death and the threat of death predominated. Each person had an individual fate, and individuals build the whole. The interviewees provided an in-depth insight into wartime events, and their personal testimonies allow us a new level of understanding of the war and its consequences.

NOTES 1. Adolf Hitler came to Maribor on 26 April 1941 to get a picture of the progress setting up of new authorities. 2. The Koc=evje Germans had lived on the territory of Koc=evje in southern Slovenia since the fifteenth century. Some left their homes voluntarily because the Koc=evje region had been handed over to Italy. 3. Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle was an organisation founded as early as in 1936 by the Nazi Party. It organised migrations to the Third Reich. 4. Tone Ferenc, Nacionalistic=na raznarodovalna politika v Sloveniji v letih 1941–1945 (Maribor 1968), 475. 5. Janko Prunk, Slovenski izgnanci (1941–1945) (Ljubljana 1999). 6. Studies of the number of men who were forcibly mobilised are still ongoing. 7. Drago Hribar et al., Taborišcˇniki, ukradeni otroci (Celje 2002), 58. 8. Research into the number of victims of the Second World War in Slovenia is still going on, but it is estimated that in addition to the 80,000 expellees, over 80,000 people were sent to prison and 58,522 people were sent to concentration camps in Italy, Germany (21,234) and Hungary. In addition to those in prison and camps, 19,824 people had been in confinement or were POWs. 2,949 people were killed as hostages in Slovenia. 90,000 men were forcibly called up to the German army, 15,000 of whom died in combat. 12,360 people died in concentration camps (9,863 in German camps). See Milan Filipc=ic= et al., Bili so uporni: zaprti, izgnani, ubiti, na suženjskem delu, v koncentracijskih taborišcˇih (Ljubljana 2002); Mojca Šorn and Mateja Tominšek, Žrtve druge svetovne vojne in zaradi nje, v: Kolo nasilja (Ljubljana 2004), 116. 1,500 died in VoMi camps as forced labour-

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9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

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ers. See Zdenka Kaplan et al., Slovenski izgnanci in begunci 1941–1945 umrli v izgnanstvu in begunstvu med drugo svetovno vojno (Ljubljana 2001). Most of the research to date has been done by the historian Prof Dr Tone Ferenc. In his books on Germanisation he has used, among other things, the documents of the American Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, especially the material concerning deportation and Germanisation of Slovenian children, Himmler’s decrees in Der Menscheneinsatz, official gazettes for Styria and Upper Carnolia, newspapers and archival material of the chiefs of administration, Commander of SD and SIPO for Styria and Upper Carniola, and office of the Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of Germanism, in various archives. I believe that these children present a special group that requires more scholarly attention in the future. Mr Zorko’s mother died in a labour camp. Seven-year-old Janez Blas kept repeating the question ‘Mother, are the apples at home ripe yet?’ in the labour camp. Apples reminded him of his lost home. Mr Šinkovec also wrote some books on the Dachau concentration camp and the Begunje prison in Slovenia, from where the majority of prisoners were sent to Dachau. Written applications were sent to the Home Office of the People’s Republic of Slovenia. In about twenty-five words each applicant had to provide date and place of birth, address in Slovenia, the date since which he or she had been living abroad and the exact address abroad. Mitja Ferenc, Prikrito in ocˇem zakrito (Celje 2005). 8,263 Slovenians were sent to Slovenia, and others were captured on Slovenian territory. Only in 1986 were the accused finally politically rehabilitated after long years of political and scientific investigations and research into circumstances, courses of events and their consequences. See n.a., Dachavski procesi (Ljubljana 1990).

 11 

OF SILENCE AND REMEMBRANCE Forced Labour and the NDH, and the History of their Remembrance

Christian Schölzel

Najteže je ostati bez uspomena. (The most difficult thing is not having memories.) — Jakov Gaon

This chapter discusses interviews held with twelve survivors

1

from the former Ustaše state known as NDH (Nezavisna država Hrvatska, Independent State of Croatia) who arrived in Germany between 1941 and 1945 to perform slave or forced labour.2 Conducted with forced labourers, Jews, non-Jews, communist civilians, farmers, manual workers, intellectuals and a government minister, the interviews show that the lives touched by the experience of forced labour were many and varied. The same applies to those persecuted in German, Italian and Croatian prisons, assembly camps, internment camps and concentration camps. A rich mine of biographical information supported by credible new sources, the interviews shed new light on the history of forced labour and the NDH – a field that has until recently been the subject of little research. It has nevertheless proven difficult to reach any general conclusions on the basis of this material, mainly because of the small number of interviewees. However, access to additional interviews with concentration camp survivors from various regions of former Yugoslavia has allowed us to ask questions about general structures such as the long-established and still Notes for this chapter begin on page 163.

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functioning ‘remembrance groups’. These questions can be answered, but only provisionally and with caution, given emerging trends.3 This essay begins with an historical overview and then summarises the history of remembrance relating to forced labour and the NDH. It concludes by examining the recorded memories in the wider context of an attempt to categorise the patterns of remembrance of Yugoslav survivors.

Forced Labour in the NDH: Historical Events Long before the German invasion of Yugoslavia on 6 April 1941, the country had already been the subject of attempted conquests by Germany, Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria.4 Initially non-military, the German approach was in line with a foreign economic policy based on the concept of Ergänzungswirtschaftsraum or ‘supplementary economic space’, which demoted Belgrade to a dependent ‘junior partner’ – a supplier of raw materials and labour. After the attempted coup d’état in Belgrade on 27 March 1941 by members of the army, government and clergy opposed to the country’s formally joining the Axis, the National Socialists were forced to improvise. They wanted to attack Greece in order to support the faltering advance of the Italians there, and were already considering invading the USSR. Yugoslavia was likely to join the Allies, so Germany needed to act fast. The country was invaded on 6 April 1941, in what was a quickly planned and implemented attack designed to make Croatia a German satellite state. Germany wanted to pacify Yugoslavia in order to keep its occupation forces to a minimum, so on 10 April 1941 it formed the Nezavisna država Hrvatska, a puppet state recognised by only the Axis powers. Five days later, the leader of the Ustaše movement, Ante Pavelic;, was made leader of the NDH, with Germany’s and, initially, Italy’s blessing. By May, Bulgaria, Hungary and Italy had taken parts of Yugoslavia. Italy also occupied parts of Slovenia, including the capital Ljubljana and, despite Pavelic;’s resistance, Dalmatia and the Boka Kotorska. With the fall of Fascist Italy in September 1943 and the weakening military position of the Germans in the Balkans, the economically ailing NDH also collapsed, long before war was over. Without having any particularly well-defined objectives, the Ustaše launched a programme characterised by extreme nationalism and racism, with the aim of establishing a Croatia that was both exclusively Catholic and populated by a pure Croatian race.5 This led to the radical persecution of Serbs, Jews (approx. 30,000–40,000, according to Sundhaussen), Roma (approx. 30,000) and communists. Persecution of the most brutal kind, robbery, forced baptism, forced labour and mass extermination were now commonplace. To this end, various types of camps were used

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in Croatia, supplemented by assembly and labour camps in the parts of Bosnia that belonged to the NDH. These included Danica/Koprivnica, Jadovno, Kerestinec, Slano on Pag Island (which later fell into Italian hands), Krušcˇica/Bosnia, Tenje, Djakovo, Samobor, Daruvar, Loborgrad, Lepoglava, Virovitica, Vinkovci, Kostajnica, Hrvatska Dubica, Donji Miholjac, Procide, Zemun, Gornja Rijeka, Jastrebarsko, Slavonska Požega, Sisak and Stara Gradiška, along with many others. The largest concentration camp in the NDH was also involved: established in July 1941, Jasenovac had six subcamps – Versajev/Brocˇice, Krapje, Cigana, Kožara, Ciganski and Mlaka. Across the entire NDH, there were more than thirty camps.6 There were various groups of labourers in the NDH, and both slave and forced labour were used.7 Those who were forced to do labour in the NDH included ethnic Croats (e.g. Mirko Dumic;), Serbs from Croatia (e.g. Uroš Majstorovic;), Serbs and Slovenes forcibly deported during the Second World War and Jews (e.g. Branko Polic;). Others did forced labour in the German Reich (i.e. including Austria), Italy, Norway8 and other countries. Finally, it is important to remember the slave and forced labourers (including Dragica Vajnberger and Regina Kamhi) who must have worked in the parts of Croatia occupied by Italy. Here, different Italian occupation zones existed at different times, with varying degrees of concurrent German/Croatian control. In addition, the Italian army, together with C+etnik units, created ‘protected’ sites and transport routes for forced labour, such as the bauxite mines near Mostar (under the control of the Organisation Todt), the Vereinigte Aluminiumwerke and Hansa-Leichtmetall. Fiat was granted a licence to mine at Ervenik. The Trepc=a mines in Kosovo were also involved.9 The recruitment of people from Croatia for the German economy and ensuing emigration of Croats to Germany had roots in the late nineteenth century. In 1933, National Socialist Germany imposed a freeze on recruitment from Yugoslavia, in order to utilise its own labour force. However, by 1937 demand for workers to assist with the manufacture of arms as part of war preparations had grown to such an extent that Yugoslavs were once more encouraged to come to the Reich. In 1937, the figure was around 2,500 people, but by 1939 it had risen to 20,000. Between 1933 and 1941, some 100,000 Yugoslavs were living in the Reich, including illegal immigrants and those living in Austria. As time went on, the German Reich increasingly attempted to outsource orders to Croatia, thus freeing up its own workforce to concentrate on further production. Only a few days after the conclusion of the Yugoslav campaign on 17 April 1941, Croatian workers were requisitioned for the Reich by German field headquarters. Jews were also deported on an ad hoc basis for forced labour.10 At this time, 44,000 Yugoslav workers had already come

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to the German Reich voluntarily. Added to these were the ‘new recruits’, Yugoslav prisoners of war: while the Croats among them were released, some 35,000 Serbs were forced to work for the Germans.11 Jakov Gaon was one such prisoner, as he explains in his interview. At around the same time, between 2 and 8 May 1941, German and Croatian government representatives met in Zagreb to negotiate the deployment of Croatian workers in the Reich. They were to be employed chiefly in the mines, as well as in forestry and agriculture. For the remainder of 1941, the two parties agreed on a target of 54,500 people.12 These were to be recruited for one year’s labour in Germany and would enjoy the same working conditions, social security benefits and health and safety standards as their German colleagues. Soon after, the ‘Croatia Office’ was established; as of 1942 this office was under the control of the General Plenipotentiary for Labour Allocation. It had regional recruitment offices across the NDH. Until 1944, the Germans attempted to acquire more and more labourers from NDH authorities, albeit with dwindling success after 1942. According to German plans, 150,000 people from Croatia should have been working in the Reich by the end of 1941; 77,500 were actually recruited. Added to these were the 35,000 Serbian POWs already mentioned (NDH citizens), 6,500 people from East Syrmia (Srem), which was still under German control, as yet unreleased Croatian POWs, illegal recruits and those already working in the Reich before the war. Overrecruitment and arbitrary actions by German agencies led to conflict between the Croatian and German authorities. As a result, individual Wehrmacht town headquarters took it upon themselves to recruit Croatian labourers for the General Plenipotentiary. By the end of the war, over 200,000 people (volunteers and nonvolunteers) from Croatia were working in the Reich. Some 153,000 of these are estimated to have been voluntarily recruited from Croatia to work in Germany. However, the word ‘voluntary’ needs to be treated with caution. As early as July 1941, labourers were refusing to work. Croatian workers thought they were being too poorly paid, were unhappy with the working conditions and struggled to send sufficient money back to their families in Croatia. Although the NDH introduced subsidies to help offset the galloping inflation of the kuna and thus halt the devaluation of the money sent from Germany, the initiative was not completely successful. Many recruits could be kept in Germany only by forcing them to stay after their contractually agreed year had expired, so that those who had originally gone voluntarily became forced labourers. Moreover, mass deportations of ‘suspected partisans’ increased during the war, although some of them were still declared to be ‘recruits’.

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From 1942 onwards, a number of categories of detainees and deportees swelled the number of forced and slave labourers. In the spring of that year, the Germans and Croats started to collaborate more closely on the mass killing of Jews and their transfer to Germany and extermination camps in the East.13 Starting in mid 1942, the Germans obtained the majority of their recruits from among Serbs detained in Croatian assembly camps who were officially labelled ‘refugees’. These included around 10,000 Serbs who, for reasons of ethnic discrimination, were not allowed to serve in the Croatian army. In addition, those taken prisoner during operations in West Bosnia in mid 1942 were eventually deployed for forced labour in Germany or Norway after an interim period in the Zemun or Stara Gradiška concentration camps. During the transportation process, anyone considered ‘unfit for work’ was transferred to a German concentration camp. Increasingly, the concentration camps in Croatia were also a source of labour. In November, an arrangement was drawn up detailing a procedure that already existed in practice to a certain extent. Under the arrangement, any civilian detained by the German Wehrmacht or Croatian army and considered ‘unsuspicious’ was sent by the General Plenipotentiary for Labour Allocation to the Reich to do forced labour; ‘suspicious’ persons were rounded up for forced labour by the Higher SS and Police Leader in Belgrade. At the end of May 1942, Higher SS and Police Leader August Meyszner and Croatian State Secretary for Security Eugen Dido Kvaternik reached an agreement on the deportation of ‘unwanted’ Serbs and Croats from the NDH to do forced labour in Norway. By mid June, 1,300 partisans had been deported using this method, including ethnic Serb Uroš Majstorovic; from Croatia, who was deported from the Sajmište camp near Belgrade to Norway to do forced labour. He explains in his interview: ‘The Ustaše … transported us to Jasenovac … and handed us over to the Germans. I was … under a German detachment … as soon as we got to Zemun, the German detachment took charge of us.’14 However, the Sicherheitspolizei (security police) stopped this procedure as the Ustaše were increasingly using it in an attempt to ‘offload’ children and old people who were ‘unfit for work’ onto the Germans. The increasing influence of German security forces in the NDH during the first half of 194315 onwards, along with the growing need for labour to support German industry, prompted Adolf Hitler to issue an order to German troops in Croatia at the end of July 1943. He decreed that detained partisans should no longer be shot but – provided they were aged between 16 and 50 – should be made available for forced labour. The Wehrmacht classified them as ‘transferred to the Reich for labour’ or ‘handed over to the General Plenipotentiary’. The number of people forced to

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do labour via this route is unknown. Finally, research has revealed that the SS Head Office, or more specifically, the southeast replacement detachment of the Waffen-SS, introduced its own recruitment measures. In 1943, volunteers for the Waffen-SS considered ineligible for military service were arbitrarily forced against their will to work. These included a high number of Serbs with Croatian nationality. In all, it is estimated that between 1941 and 1945, some 3.8 per cent of the total population of the NDH, or 7.5 per cent of those fit for work, went from Croatia to work in the Reich.16 Compared to other European countries, this was a very high percentage. While the exploitation of supplementary labour benefited the German war economy, this migration soon led to a shortage of skilled workers in Croatia itself. Wages were paid to the workers employed in Germany via clearing accounts used in foreign trade, which initially only served to fuel inflation in the country. This was effectively a kind of ‘enforced credit’ that had to be paid to the German Reich by all Croatian citizens. The situation was quite different, and often in some regions very different, for those (particularly Jews in the coastal areas) who had to undergo sporadic periods of German and Croatian, and until September 1943, Italian control. This primarily concerned people in the Italian camps and internment sites around Dubrovnik and on the islands of Korc=ula, Pag, Hvar, Brac=, Lopud and Rab. Although Jews were not, in the main, sent to these camps for extermination or for slave labour, the largely atrocious conditions in the camps revealed a blatant disregard for their very existence. It was the norm for the Italian guards to steal and torture. Regina Kamhi and Dragica Vajnberger provide detailed accounts on this subject in their interviews. To deport Jews for slave or forced labour, as ordered by the Gestapo in Dubrovnik in November 1942, it was necessary to obtain the agreement of the Italians, which was nearly always refused.17 As Jakov Gaon points out in his interview: ‘I was taken prisoner, my mother, sister and her husband fled from Sarajevo to Mostar. There, the Italians treated Jews very fairly.’18 This is consistent with the stance taken by some of the Italians towards Jews (including those from other areas of former Yugoslavia), and in certain cases towards Orthodox Serbs and other persecuted groups. Their efforts to avoid killing these people, and on occasion even to allow them to escape, were usually politically motivated – that is, instead of being acts of humanity, they were intended to signal Italy’s political independence from Germany and the NDH.19 Italians held prisoners as political pawns to be used against other powers in the region. Slave labour featured only in the Rab camp. While Slovenes were forced to work there, Jews were permitted to work in the camp to improve their paltry food allowance.20

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With the fall of Fascist Italy, the internees sometimes found themselves with no guards in the camps. Regina Kamhi describes how this happened at the Kampor camp on Rab Island: After the capitulation, in 1943, when Italy capitulated, this colonel fled, they caught him and killed him. We concentrated on forming the Rab Brigade … Nurses took courses. I had young children and helped where I could. Then the Rab Brigade was formed. They began [to fight alongside] the partisans … and we partisans got together and held a big meeting there … at the cemetery and said: ‘If you want to go to the liberated zone, then come with us. If you don’t want to, then go wherever you choose.’ Some went to Bari. Elderly people who didn’t have the strength to leave stayed behind … The Germans arrived, and killed all the old people.21

All of the forced labourers are likely to have encountered some form of violence, even though their experiences may have been quite different. One example is given by Jakov Atias, who described his experiences as a Jew in the Krapje subcamp of the Jasenovac concentration camp: ‘You couldn’t get away from the torture. In the morning we went to work and when we came back, they beat us. I was bayoneted .’22 In spite of the ‘dog-eat-dog’ regime implemented in the most brutal way by the Germans, Austrians, Croats, Serbs and Italians, the interviewees nonetheless experienced a sense of solidarity and community as a group resisting a common enemy. Milivoj Lalin, a member of the partisan movement, was arrested in Italian-occupied Split. He was later handed over to the Germans. After doing forced labour in Buchenwald, he worked on the production of missile parts at the Dora-Mittelbau camp. His account of the acts of sabotage undertaken there draws on classic anti-fascist topoi, referring to the communist resistance organisation in both camps and their self-liberation from Buchenwald.23 Mirjana Gross, who was deported to Germany to do forced labour for being Jewish and a Communist, spoke on a more personal level about the solidarity between the women in the Ravensbrück concentration camp: There was a German woman who was classed as a ‘criminal’. She wore the green triangle. … When we arrived at the camp in ’44, our group of ten women had some food that we had received in Buchenwald. And we shared this food with the others. But this woman was wearing a green triangle, and my fellow partisans said, ‘We don’t want to give this “criminal” any food.’ I said: ‘We’re all equal in the camp. What’s happened before is in the past …’ and we gave her some food, and she never forgot it.24

The interviewees rarely mention friction within the camp community. Of the interviewees, Mirjana Gross, a historian, is most emphatic on the subject of the ill-health suffered by all the survivors:

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[A]nd then afterwards it was very hard. I was ill but still wanted to have a life and studied history. I took my exams during a long stay in a sanatorium. There was no other way of recovering from tuberculosis back then. I wanted to learn while I was in the sanatorium, then I had permission from the doctor to go to Zagreb to take my exams. I actually completed my studies in the sanatorium. I have always worked hard – it’s still what keeps me going. I want to live, even though it has been terribly difficult … It was a difficult time, a hard life. And the memories were awful. I finished my studies, and after a while I became an assistant in the philosophy department, to the chair of history. Then I was promoted to lecturer, then to professor and then to full professor.25

Music journalist Branko Polic;, who was persecuted for being Jewish, describes his nightmares: ‘I don’t know … nowadays I don’t like to think of terrible things, how many people aren’t alive anymore and worse things, bad dreams, and I can’t sleep at night.’26 These words show that remembering can be a very ambivalent and threatening as well as enlightening process for survivors. The interview with the last Communist minister of justice of Croatia, Ivan Fumic;, also reveals that the fear of opening a Pandora’s box of painful personal memories can exist alongside a desire to increase public awareness of the atrocities of forced labour.

The Long Silence From 1945 onwards, the Yugoslav anti-fascist struggle, used to legitimise the founding of Communist Yugoslavia, played a major role in shaping public remembrance of slave and forced labourers. It also influenced events such as witness statements in trials and everyday forms of remembrance. Concentration camp confinement, slave and forced labour and the work of the partisans – everything was subsumed under the notion of the ‘struggle for national liberation’. This was also reflected in the definition and implementation of compensation rights. There was seldom any scope for assessing the experiences of forced labour on a personal level. Jakov Atias refers to this briefly when speaking about the creation of the Jasenovac memorial in 1963, which involved extensive re-landscaping of the original site by Bogdan Bogdanovic; and the construction of a huge stone flower: ‘I don’t like the idea … the camp is represented by a monumental flower, which dominates … Bogdanovic; has designed a flower … And when they come to Jasenovac to see what’s there … I say: ‘no’ … can I explain to them [children] what the camp is?’27 It was not only the homogenisation of remembrance, but also its arbitrary instrumentalisation that led even staunch Communists to doubt the official view of history. In 1949, alongside normal judicial proceedings, Yugoslavia also staged show trials of concentration camp survivors who

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were accused of collaboration, following the Stalinist example. Milivoj Lalin, who met Tito in person shortly afterwards, discussed these ‘Dachau trials’ in Ljubljana: I said: ‘Comrade Marshal, I was in the concentration camp, in prison in Italy, we fought against the Italians, we fought with SS soldiers, against them … against the army together, and when we came back, we had to face the Dachau trials. We were punished, suspected. I ask you, comrade Marshal, why?’ ‘But I know, I know, I know, I know all about that,’ he said, ‘but be patient, the comrades in this area will decide on this.’ Nothing [laughs] was ever decided.28

A kind of forced collectivisation of remembrance under national auspices could also be found among the nationalistically inclined Croatian emigrants living around the world, whose view of history did not recognise victims of racism and exploitation, at least not as represented by communist ideology. When Croatia became independent in 1990–91, political history was reinterpreted in the Tud–man era. Now there were attempts to reclassify the perpetrators as victims, with a vague notion of ‘unity in death’ being postulated from official quarters. Death was decontextualised so that the perpetrators could be retrospectively placed on an equal moral footing with their victims (‘Wasn’t everyone a victim of a futile war?’). While the official view was that perpetrators and victims should be treated as equal, there was again little room for an individualised remembrance of forced labour. However, since the founding of the Republic of Croatia in the aftermath of the 1990s war and the death of the first Croatian head of state, such interpretations are once again being called into question.

Compensation Issues The access of Yugoslav survivors to compensation from the ‘perpetrator states’ was very limited. In the case of West Germany, the principle of territoriality enshrined in German compensation law (which is based on spatial boundaries as opposed to the victim’s nationality as defined by legal precedent) meant that most claims by victims living outside Germany were excluded. Foreign civilian forced labourers and concentration camp prisoners were completely left out in the cold. Legally, compensation for POWs was not up for discussion. Pressure from the Allies resulted in the signing of the London Debt Agreement in 1953, bilateral agreements from 1958 onwards and agreements with Western European and some Eastern European states. The resulting payments amounted to around one billion marks in total, which was little more than a drop in the ocean. West Germany made one-off payments to Belgrade in 1961 and 1963

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to compensate victims of medical experiments. Following the policy of détente, in 1972 and 1974 Yugoslavia received loans worth one billion marks, which were seen as a form of compensation payment. Yugoslavia had already initiated this process in 1963. As a result, compensation claims made by Yugoslavs against the German pension fund Deutsche Pensionskasse AG, which underwrites the pension schemes of German private enterprises, were considered null and void.29 This meant that any Croats/Yugoslavs who sought help from the Federal Republic of Germany were advised to apply to their own government with reference to the London Agreement. The government would then be obliged to pay out the small amount received through bilateral agreements. The renunciation of reparation payments from the German Democratic Republic by the Soviet Union and Poland in 1953–54 meant that the GDR compensated only its own citizens and refused restitution.30 There was no compensation from the Italians to Croats who had to work in Italian camps. In Communist Yugoslavia, victims of slave and forced labour in camps were considered on a par with partisans, as fighters in the ‘war of national liberation’,31 which gives an indication of the position accorded to former slave and forced labourers in society (consider the use of the term Alliance of Associations of Veterans of the War of National Liberation [SUBNOR] for an umbrella organisation of survivor groups). Depending on the degree of medically diagnosed ill-health, they were awarded a special pension, special health care arrangements, employment with special protection, special child benefits, free use of local public transport, help with finding somewhere to live, partial exemption from car tax and children’s school fees, reimbursement of burial costs plus payment of a lump sum to family members in the event of a death, and social care for family members of camp detainees who had died or of partisans who were killed in action. Within this framework, special rules applied to war veterans with the highest military decorations and the 1941 partisan remembrance medal, even if they had no disability.32 In addition, war veterans and disabled ex-servicemen were given preferential treatment when it came to the allocation of social housing and land. In independent Croatia after 1990, the principle of ‘anti-fascist pensions’ (see above) was adopted in modified form. In his interview, Ivan Fumic; speaks resentfully of the fact that the compensation does not apply to periods of detainment in Ustaše camps. The lack of public debate on this subject has another dimension: to date, no academic work has been produced that focuses exclusively on the history of forced labour and the NDH. In German-speaking countries, forced labour did not surface as a topic for academic study until the 1980s. The unique problems of Southeast Europe also required specialist language skills. The subject has suffered a similar lack of attention in

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the Anglo-American world. The Italians were undoubtedly reluctant to confront the issue for fear that their role in the Dalmatian camps would undermine the prevailing myth of the Italian Resistenza. In the new countries of former Yugoslavia, historical research frequently lingered all too long on the ‘struggle for national liberation’.

Collective Remembrance in Former Yugoslavia The work of French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs and the historian Dan Diner suggests that memories have a tendency to develop collectively. These memories find form in narrative structures, which can be divided into types. To what extent multiple adherents of congruent narrative types form a ‘memory collective’ (Dan Diner) is a question that will be dealt with later. With reference to the memories of Holocaust survivors from former Yugoslavia, at least six broad types of memory narrative have been derived from an analysis of the numerous interviews and reports provided by Yugoslav survivors of Dachau and Buchenwald or their subcamps.33 1. Anti-fascist memory narrative: the story of survival is recalled in the framework of the ‘struggle for national liberation’ and is relatively depersonalised. 2. Jewish memory narrative: in the context of Yugoslavia, this narrative pattern tends to focus on the cultural aspects, on a secular version of Jewry. As such, Jewish identity is often not felt until it is the subject of discrimination and persecution. 3. Confessional memory narrative: religious convictions, such as those of Christian clergymen, can play a key role in the memory of the Holocaust. 4. Artistic memory narrative: for some survivors, the only way to articulate remembered experiences is through artistic expression. 5. Ethnic memory narrative: some former persecutees from the period of the Holocaust form their memories within a strictly ethnic frame of reference. It was not ‘Yugoslavs’ who were persecuted, but ‘particularly’ Croats, Serbs, and so on. 6. Global memory narrative: in this approach to remembering, an individual’s own experience is placed in the context of general human nature or global history, a frame of reference commonly maintained by members of the educated middle class. Aspects of some of these memory types can be identified in the interviews conducted for this project, although the narrative styles show that

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individual accounts never match the empirical model narratives exactly, and that one account can combine different styles. Milivoj Lalin, Srec;ko Ozretic; and Andrija Bubalo from Split all recalled their deportation within the context of the ‘struggle for national liberation’. They adhered to the myth of the ‘self-liberation’ of Buchenwald by armed communist resistance fighters from among the prisoners, and they emphasised the special solidarity between communist-minded camp inmates, who regarded themselves as far from helpless in this idealised view of their resistance. At the same time, Milivoj Lalin questioned the communist memory – consider his conversation with Tito quoted above. And Ivan Fumic; adopted a similar approach. Although he presented his memories in a comparable form, he also interrupted his narrative with the observation that antifascism, whether past, present or future, is a good idea, but it has yet to be satisfactorily put into practice. These three interviewees from Split have a special little ‘memory collective’ of their own. They knew each other before the war. During the war years, they met again in various prisons and camps, and all returned to the Dalmatian city after the war. Narrative structures that underline the interviewee’s own Jewishness can be found in the interviews with Dragica Vajnberger, Regina Kamhi and Branko Polic;. Whether they were of Sephardic or Ashkenazi origin made no difference here. While Ms Vajnberger’s account tended towards an intellectual, worldly reflection of Jewry from a communist perspective, Ms Kamhi, for instance, emphasised how she turned to Zionism in the 1960s. Contrary to expectations, hardly anyone chose an ethnic frame of reference for their narrative. Mr Atias, who married a Serb, and Ms Vajnberger, who lived for a long time in Belgrade, provide Yugoslav life stories that, because of a mixture of ethnic influences, and maybe also because of the ‘brotherhood and unity’ message formerly instilled by Tito, allowed no ethnic differentiations to filter into their narrative. In contrast, Mr Dumic; stressed that he was ‘not one of them’, presumably referring to Serbs or Jews. Mr Polic; asserted that there was more anti-Semitism in Serbia than Croatia, and that any statement to the contrary was propaganda from ‘Belgrade’. He defined himself as a Croat, not a Jew. Both Branko Polic; and Mirjana Gross without doubt chose a global memory narrative for their detailed, intellectual reflections. Mr Gaon, who reflected on the human propensity for evil as the source of the Holocaust, chose an anthropologically universal framework in which to organise and express his experiences. Ivan Fumic;’s thoughts on anti-fascism as a moral foundation for a better Europe tended to be based on a communist body of thought rather than a middle-class perspective. While the interviewees went into great detail about the plight of the victims, they did not dwell on the perpetrators. None of the survivors

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spoke of revenge. Sometimes personal experiences played a role in differentiating between perpetrators. For instance, Mr Fumic; stressed that it was the Croats who had murdered most of his family, and that he therefore tended to hate the Ustaše rather than the Germans. In their descriptions of perpetrators, some interviewees may have been influenced by a desire to be polite to the German interviewer, or by feelings of guilt. However, this is only a very general assumption.

End the Silence: Preserve the Memories The ‘International Slave and Forced Labourers Documentation Project’ is an extremely worthy initiative. But in some cases it was all too late in coming. Because of their age, many survivors found it very difficult to give interviews, and other potential interview partners had already died. Nonetheless, this part of the project has gone a long way towards ending the silence on the subject of forced labour and the NDH.

NOTES 1. Epigraph quoted from Jakov Gaon, interview transcript, 3, from the project material located at the Institute for History and Biography at the Fernuniversität Hagen and at Culture and More, Munich. 2. For their help in conducting the interviews and completing follow-up work, I would especially like to thank the contemporary witnesses who confronted their memories once more, and also Prof Dr Ivo Goldstein, Zagreb; Dr Anna-Maria Grünfelder, Zagreb; Peter Wentzler, Braunschweig; Dr Vlatka C:izmic;, Munich, Cornelia Kästner, Leipzig and the project team at the University of Hagen in Lüdenscheid. 3. See Christian Schölzel, ‘Kollektivierungen von Erinnerungen oder: Wieviele Holocauste existieren? Annäherungen’, in Dirk Fischer (ed.), Transformation des Rechts in Ost und West: Festschrift für Prof. Dr Herwig Roggemann zum 70. Geburtstag (Berlin 2005), 353–367, and the sources cited there. 4. For what follows, see Holm Sundhaussen, Geschichte Jugoslawiens 1918–1980 (Stuttgart 1982), 106–136. 5. Petar Požar (ed.), Ustaša: Dokumenti o ustaškom pokretu (Zagreb 1995), 149ff., 155ff., 160ff., 191, 195ff., 267. 6. See Narcisa Lengel Krizman, ‘Logori za Židove u NDH’, in Židovska opc;ina Zagreb (ed.), Antisemitizam, Holokaust, Antifašizam (Zagreb 1996), 91–103; in the same volume, Mihael Sobolevski, ‘Židovi u koncentracijskog logora Jasenovac’, 104–119; Muzej Vojvodine, Novi Sad; Muzej žrtava genocida, Beograd (ed.), Izložba Jasenovac: Sistem ustaških logora smrti (Belgrade 1997), 50f.; Nataša

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7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

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Mataušic; (ed.), Koncentracioni logor Jasenovac: Izložba o poc=ecima logorskog sustava. Kolovoz 1941. – Veljac=a 1942 (Zagreb 2002), 4; cf. Nataša Mataušic;, Jasenovac 1941–1945: Logor smrti i radni logor (Zagreb 2003). Holm Sundhaussen, ‘Südosteuropa in der nationalsozialistischen Kriegswirtschaft am Beispiel des “Unabhängigen Staates Kroatien”’, Südost-Forschungen 32 (1973): 233–266; Holm Sundhaussen, Wirtschaftsgeschichte Kroatiens im nationalsozialistischen Großraum 1941–1945: Das Scheitern einer Ausbeutungsstrategie (Stuttgart 1983), 179–190. For plans in the German Reich relating to forced labour in the Yugoslav territory in general, see Milan D. Ristovic;, Nemac=ki novi poredak i jugoistoc=na evropa 1940/41–1944/45 (Belgrade 1991), 248ff., according to which Fritz Sauckel and Albert Speer persuaded representatives of the War Economy and Armaments Office to transport mainly unqualified forced labourers to the Reich from Yugoslavia. Ljubo Mladjenovic;, Pod šifrom viking (Belgrade 1991). Slobodan D. Miloševic;, Nemac=ko-italjanski odnosi na terrtoriji okupirane Jugoslavije 1941–1943 (Belgrade 1991), es 98f., 101ff. See e.g. Ivo Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu (Zagreb 2001), 256. Ristovic;, Nemac=ki novi poredak, 266. Ibid., 260f. Lengel Krizman, Logori za Židove, 95f. Uroš Majstorovic;, interview transcript, 3 Miloševic;, Nemac=ko-italjanski odnosi, 122ff. Cf. Ristovic;, Nemac=ki novi poredak, 269; the German assessment was that there were few labour sources left to exploit on Yugoslav territory. Ivo Goldstein, Croatia: A History, 2d ed. (London 2001), 139 puts the number at more than 200,000. Emilio Tolentino, ‘Fašistic=ka okupacija Dubrovnika 1941–1945 i rješavanje “Jevrejskog pitanja”’, in Jevrejski istorijski muzej (ed.), Zbornik, vol. 1 (Belgrade 1971), 201–208. Jakov Gaon, interview transcript, 1. Duško Kec=kemet, ‘Židovski sabirni logori na podruc=ju pod talijanskom okupacijom’, in Židovska opc;ina Zagreb, Antisemitizam, Holokaust, Antifašizam, 120–132; Jonathan Steinberg, Deutsche, Italiener und Juden: Der italienische Widerstand gegen den Holocaust (Göttingen 1992); Miloševic;, Nemac=ko-italjanski odnosi, 130f., 164–169; Marco Aurelio Rivelli, Le Génocide occulté: État indépendant de Croatie 1941–1945 (Lausanne 1998), 114ff.; Miloš Hamovic;, ‘O razlikama u odnosu i tretmanu ustaške Nezavisne države Hrvatske i italijanskog okupatora prema Jevrejima u Bosni i Hercegovini 1941–1945: Komparacija’, in Jevrejski istorijski muzej (ed.), Zbornik, vol. 7 (Belgrade 1997), 198–209; Jaša Romano, ‘Jevreji u logoru na Rabu i njihovo ukluc=ivanje u Narodnooslobodilac=ki rat’, in Jevrejski istorijski muzej (ed.), Zbornik, vol. 2 (Belgrade 1973), 1–72. Cf. Vladislav Rotbart, Jugosloveni u mad–arskim zatvorima i logorima 1941–1945 (Novi Sad 1988), 265. Kec=kemet, Židovski sabirni logori, 128f. Regina Kamhi, interview transcript, 4. The Rab Brigade was a group of Jewish survivors from Rab who joined the partisans under Tito in 1943. Jakov Atias, interview transcript, 2. Milivoj Lalin, interview transcript, 5, 7. Mirjana Gross, interview transcript, 6. Ibid., 9. Branko Polic;, interview transcript, 24. Jakov Atias, interview transcript, 16.

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28. Milivoj Lalin, interview transcript, 16. 29. Hans Günter Hockerts, ‘Wiedergutmachung in Deutschland: Eine historische Bilanz 1945–2000’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 49(2) (2001): 195–197. 30. Hockerts, Wiedergutmachung, 204ff. 31. This also applied to fighters of the Balkan wars and the First World War, as well as former members of the Royal Yugoslav Army, but not to soldiers and officers in C+etnik units. 32. Borislav T. Blagojevic; (ed.), The Status of War Veterans and Victims of War (Belgrade 1964). 33. For details, see Schölzel, Kollektivierungen.

 12 

‘IF YOU LOSE YOUR FREEDOM, YOU LOSE EVERYTHING.’ The Experiences and Memories of Serbian Forced Labourers

Barbara N. Wiesinger

The Forced Labour of Serbs under German Domination

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o date, there has been little research into the forced labour imposed on Serbs/Serbians by the ‘Third Reich’.1 Not only is the number of people involved unknown, but there is also little information available about their concrete working and living conditions. I therefore begin by outlining the background and scale of the deployment of Serbs/Serbians in forced labour. Between 1941 and 1944, 161,000 ‘foreign labourers’ were recruited in the military occupation zone of Serbia – many of them political prisoners or hostages. However, not all were transported to Germany. In the ‘Independent State of Croatia’ (Nezavisna država Hrvatska, NDH), 153,000 foreign labourers were recruited; according to a German source, 62 per cent of them were ethnic Serbs.2 Originally, they were treated on a par with other Southeast European foreign labourers, but by the end of 1942, the Reich Main Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA) had assigned them to the lowest-status group.3 In practice, this meant barracks accommodation, poor nutrition, ill-treatment in the event of insubordination and relegation to corrective labour camps (‘Arbeitserziehungslager’) or concentration camps in the event of Notes for this chapter begin on page 174.

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‘breaches of the employment contract’.4 For breaches of the regulations prohibiting sexual contact between foreign workers and German women, the men were subject to ‘special treatment’, that is, execution, while the women were incarcerated in prisons or concentration camps.5 Serbs were explicitly excluded from applying for reprieves that were otherwise sometimes granted in the event of positive ‘racial evaluations’.6 Captured soldiers provided another source of labour. Some 35,000 ethnic Serbs from the NDH and 108,000 prisoners of war (POWs) from the military occupation zone of Serbia were deported for forced labour. The NDH army also made Serb conscripts available for ‘labour service’ in Germany.7 On the orders of the Wehrmacht High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, OKW), the POWs were subjected to particularly harsh treatment and did not receive the protection to which they were entitled under the Geneva Convention.8 Finally, political and ‘racial’ enemies increased the numbers. In July 1943, Hitler ordered that resistance members aged between sixteen and fifty be subject to forced labour. Some 4,300 partisans had already been shipped to Norway in 1942, where they worked for the Organisation Todt (OT). Refugees from the ‘anti-partisan operations zones’ were also deported to Germany.9 In the military occupation zone of Serbia itself, Jews and Roma were the first to be subjected to compulsory labour, before falling victim to Nazi genocide.10 By 1944, another 128,000 people had been enrolled as forced labourers within Serbia.11

The Sample The ten subjects were interviewed between March and August 2005.12 Some names were provided by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and some interviewees subsequently put us in touch with other subjects.13 The five women and five men were born between 1920 and 1933. They are, by their own definition, ethnic Serbs. Their (former) membership of the Serbian Orthodox Church contributes to this sense of identity, which persecution in the NDH served to enhance. When the persecution began, six of the interviewees lived in the NDH, three in Hungarian-occupied territory and one in the military occupation zone of Serbia.14 Three of the interviewees have a rural background.15 The others worked in industry or trades or were dependent on the waged work of family members. Some were already working at the beginning of the war; four were still at school.16 Four interviewees finished primary school, four went on to secondary schools, and two completed university degrees.17 Apart from Julijana Pokrajac, all interviewees were employed after 1945; Milan Pantovic; and

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Ružica Nedeljkovic; retired early because of health problems resulting from the period of forced labour. Andrija Maric=ic;, Ružica Nedeljkovic; and Julijana Pokrajac were persecuted because of their religious affiliation and related ethnic identity. Stjepan Pištignjat was taken prisoner as a partisan. Radoslavka Stojkovic;, Kristina Šepšei, Marija Kranjec and Milan Pantovic; were also arrested for their resistance activities. Milan Dragojlovic; was arrested during a roundup. Radomir Batric;evic; came to Germany as a POW; consequently, he is the only interviewee to have received no compensation. Following the compensation law’s definition of slave labour as work carried out under extremely harsh and inhumane conditions, Marija Kranjec, Stjepan Pištignjat, Radoslavka Stojkovic;, Kristina Šepšei, and probably also Milan Dragojlovic; can be considered slave labourers.

The Stories of Persecution Arrest and Deportation All the interviewees clearly remember how their persecution began. Nada Jurišic;, Andrija Maric=ic;, Ružica Nedeljkovic; and Julijana Pokrajac were arrested by the Ustaše and deported with their families to the Jasenovac or Stara Gradiška concentration camps. Marija Kranjec, Radoslavka Stojkovic; and Kristina Šepšei were arrested by the Hungarian police and tortured. Stjepan Pištignjat, Milan Dragojlovic; and Milan Pantovic; were arrested by the collaborating native authorities and maltreated. Their stories bear witness to the German strategy to turn the authorities of allied or occupied countries into accomplices of National Socialist policy – a strategy that in the NDH especially intensified the conflict between Serbs and Croats engendered by the installation of the Ustaša regime. This conflict is reflected in several life stories through portrayals of the Ustaše as the epitome of evil, usually in contrast to the depiction of Germans as helpful or fair-minded.18 Many of the interviewees witnessed acts of violence against their fellow prisoners. Such events are remembered clearly, as they are often associated with major low points in their life stories, such as being deported or registered at a concentration camp.19 For example, Marija Kranjec recalled her arrival in Ravensbrück as follows: Soldiers, women in uniform, dogs, noise, shouting: ‘Come on, get a move on!’ I see a woman with long grey hair … That’s when I remember my mother … And it was perhaps one of my most painful [emphasised] moments, when I saw what happened. She can’t walk, she falls, they set a dog on her. But they keep moving us along, we have to go, I can’t see what

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happens to her. But I thought: ‘What if my mother were here now, what would I do, could I do anything to save her from such things?’

In their biographical accounts, the interviewees only indirectly describe the brutality that they themselves were exposed to. Apparently, they can more easily communicate the violence they witnessed against others than the violence they suffered themselves. The conditions in the concentration camps (Jasenovac, Stara Gradiška, Sajmište/Semlin) in which nine of the interviewees were recruited were so atrocious that forced labour seemed to many of them (or their family members) a lesser evil.20 However, the manner in which they were deported, often in overcrowded cattle wagons with insufficient provisions, soon alerted them to the reality of what lay ahead.21

Labour Deployment Most of the interviewees worked in industry. Marija Kranjec, Radoslavka Stojkovic; and Kristina Šepšei were sent to the Deutsche Industriewerke AG (DIWAG) in Spandau and Ružica Nedeljkovic; worked in textile factories in Leipzig and Vienna, while Milan Pantovic; was sent to the Bor mine (Serbia). Andrija Maric=ic; started off in a public house in Wiener Neudorf, then went to a Berlin aircraft factory. Stjepan Pištignjat worked in road and railway construction in Norway, while Milan Dragojlovic; was engaged in excavation and building work in Silesia. Radomir Batric;evic; worked on a farm in Germany, Julijana Pokrajac in Austria. Only Milan Pantovic; and Milan Dragojlovic; worked a regular eighthour day; the others toiled every day from morning until night. The agricultural labourers had a lunch break at which they ate with the farmers; Julijana Pokrajac even had some free time on Sundays. Every second week the DIWAG workers could take twenty-four hours off, but they had to work two shifts the following week to compensate. Attitudes toward the work itself differed between those deployed in agriculture and the other interviewees. Both Julijana Pokrajac and Radomir Batric;evic; highlighted their diligence, which secured them the goodwill of the farmers. This indicates how important it was for the interviewees to be seen as willing and able workers, a trait they probably owed to their farming background. Possibly, the reason this work ethic continued under conditions of forced labour was that the ‘employers’ worked with the labourers and did not maltreat them.22 While the POW emphasised the injustice of the forced labour, J. Pokrajac justified (!) it by citing the shortage of manpower in Germany caused by military enlistment: ‘All those fit for service went to the front … Which only really left the women, and

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you had to make an effort and work and not … At the end of the day, you were there to work.’ Munitions workers Marija Kranjec, Radoslavka Stojkovic; and Kristina Šepšei, on the other hand, sabotaged production not only to give themselves breaks, but also to help shorten the war. They would give lack of training as an excuse for mistakes and damage to machinery.23 To be sure, Marija Kranjec was once accused of wasting time (‘Arbeitsbummelei’), but luckily she escaped punishment. The other interviewees’ accounts of their work related mainly to their chances of survival. For instance, Milan Pantovic; made a point of working diligently in a relatively easy job in order to avoid being relegated to more arduous tasks. Andrija Maric=ic; focused on the physical strains of the forced labour, which permanently damaged his health.

Accommodation, Diet and Health Most of the interviewees lived in camps. Milan Pantovic; and Milan Dragojlovic; were not kept under guard and could go out into the local community after work. The food was monotonous but sufficient, and because they received wages, albeit minimal ones, they could barter for extra items or buy them. Like Andrija Maric=ic; and his family, Ružica Nedeljkovic; and her mother lived in guarded camps. Enduring frequent bombing, the women were once even buried alive. Ružica Nedeljkovic; believes that they have a saint to thank for the fact that they were able to pull themselves free. The slave labourers at DIWAG slept in an unheated bombed-out factory building. To withstand the cold, two women shared a bunk bed and two thin blankets. They had to survive on a daily ration of one slice of bread, one portion of swede soup and some coffee substitute. Kristina Šepšei recalled how their captors would torment them at mealtimes. The women would rush for more when a second helping was offered, only to have cold water poured on them from the pots. To assuage their hunger, they ate kitchen scraps. They also ‘organised’ extra vegetables for fellow labourers who were sick; on occasion, a German civilian would slip them some food.24 Radomir Batric;evic; was housed in a room in the village tavern with twenty-one other POWs: The room was five by five [metres], with four windows, bars on the windows, a bench, a door, and a padlock on the door. In the corner of the sleeping area … a bucket. … The beds were just boards … and a strawfilled mattress. And a blanket. If you had a blanket, you had it good. … But what we went through there was our worst nightmare, such things, the bucket, the stench, what can I say? … It was degrading to human beings.

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Stjepan Pištignjat and his fellow prisoners even slept out in the open on bare earth some weeks, plagued by pouring rain and mosquitoes and living under the constant threat of arbitrary shootings. They too were fed on bread and cabbage soup. Norwegian civilians gave them additional provisions until the Red Cross started sending relief parcels.25 Only Julijana Pokrajac and Nada Jurišic; were accommodated in private households: the former had her own bed, the latter and her family slept in a farm outbuilding. If any of the interviewees fell ill, they were treated by doctors who happened to be imprisoned with them.26 The miserable living conditions hindered their recovery, and long periods of incapacity also increased their risk of being killed. Stjepan Pištignjat experienced this for himself in dramatic fashion, after shattering his leg in a work-related accident: And then it was … clear to me that they were going to shoot me immediately, because if you slightly injure yourself … you can’t work [and then] they’ll get rid of you straight away. … And they dragged me down the hill, … carried me over to the mass grave, and just at that moment, the commandant walked past, the vilest person I’ve ever met, a Major Doll. … I fully expected him to say: ‘Throw him in the grave, into the grave with him, shoot him and be done with it!’ But he said: ‘Can the …’ Oh yes, he called the doctor, we had a Yugoslav doctor in the camp. The doctor came and the commandant said: ‘Can the leg be healed?’ The doctor had a look. … He said: ‘Yes.’ So he said: ‘Take him to the barracks and do something with it.’ That was the first time he’d done that.

This incident clearly shows once again the extent to which the forced labourers were at the mercy of their captors.

Relationships with Germans and Other Forced Labourers To the interviewees, the Germans and Austrians were little more than upholders of the forced labour system, dictating their living conditions and thus their chances of survival. Accounts of them are usually negative (see below), but a few show them to be protective and helpful.27 In one instance, a personal relationship was even established: Julijana Pokrajac went as far as to describe the farmers she worked for as her ‘second parents’. While the male interviewees spoke little of their relationship with other forced labourers, it was a subject close to the hearts of the women. This is especially true of Marija Kranjec, Kristina Šepšei and Radoslavka Stojkovic;, who felt a kinship with their fellow labourers because of their shared origins, political orientation and imprisonment in Hungary. They showed their solidarity not just by sharing rations and helping the sick, but also by offering emotional support to one another. The three women

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have stayed in contact to this day, and in 2005 they visited the Ravensbrück memorial together.

Reprisals and Punishment The reprisals taken against the interviewees for (perceived) infringements ranged from beatings and removal to corrective labour camps or concentration camps to death threats.28 For Kristina Šepšei, it was her sympathy with Soviet fellow-prisoners that proved her undoing: And we, we were in a miserable and wretched state but what they had to go through, you just can’t put it into words [emphasised]. They clung to the wire, to the fence and begged and pleaded. I remember taking a few carrots and throwing them to them. An SS woman saw me and beat me so hard, … I thought I was going to die of the pain.

Simply being aware of or witnessing violence to others also served as a deterrent, as Radomir Batric;evic; recalls: And we had to keep quiet and be very careful about everything, to make sure we didn’t do anything wrong, so we didn’t have to face the consequences, like when someone tried to escape and then was punished for it, you know. He was put in a concrete bunker, specially designed for this purpose, for four [emphasised] days and four [emphasised] nights, as punishment.

As the living conditions endured by slave labourers in Norway were already the harshest imaginable, Stjepan Pištignjat recalls that only murder was left as a ‘punishment’ for ‘transgressions’. For instance, soon after they arrived in Norway, prisoners considered ‘work-shy’ were shot by their German guards: They asked if anyone wasn’t feeling well. The ones who weren’t well [enough] to work should go over to these barracks, where they would be given better food to eat until they got better. … Many raised their hands. … And as they went over there … , German soldiers stood there with wire, and fenced them in with the wire. … And the shooting began that very day. As soon as anyone came out of these barracks, which were isolated, … he was killed immediately. They announced that there was an outbreak of typhoid in the camp, and that’s how they covered up the fact that they killed people there. … On 17 and 18 July 1942, they killed about two, three hundred [people].

Escape, Liberation and Homecoming Radomir Batric;evic;, Andrija Maric=ic;, Ružica Nedeljkovic;, Stjepan Pištignjat and Julijana Pokrajac were freed by Allied troops. The men de-

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scribed the event positively, including Andrija Maric=ic;, who described how he experienced it as a child: Suddenly I saw a house [emphasised] moving across the street and … ran into the camp and said to my mum: ‘Mummy, a house is driving … down the road!’ Or was it? In fact, it was an American tank … In half an hour, this six-metre-high wall had fallen to the ground, and we went outside, to our freedom. I climbed up onto more than two hundred tanks and greeted the liberators, the Americans.

But R. Nedeljkovic; painted a more negative picture: ‘Then later, the Russians came and freed us. It was awful.’ She and her mother walked back to Yugoslavia. On her way home, the interviewee barely escaped being raped by a Red Army soldier: ‘He called to me: “Hey, come with me!” and my mother said: “Don’t touch her, I’ll go with you.” So off my mother went and they raped her.’ Because of her fondness for her ‘employers’, J. Pokrajac was also dismissive of the liberators, especially because they arrested the farmer for being a member of the Nazi Party (NSDAP, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, National Socialist German Workers’ Party). Milan Pantovic; escaped from Bor in 1944 and joined the partisans. Milan Dragojlovic;, who had been released as unfit for work because of a successfully feigned illness, also fought in the partisan army. Marija Kranjec, Radoslavka Stojkovic; and Kristina Šepšei made their break for freedom in April 1945 and completed the arduous journey to Yugoslavia without assistance. Apart from Nada Jurišic;, Ružica Nedeljkovic; and Radomir Batric;evic;, all the interviewees returned to their hometowns. Although the former forced labourers were not persecuted in what was now Communist Yugoslavia, they did not receive any help either. The interviewees rebuilt their lives on their own and appear to have tried to put the experiences of the war years behind them. In this way, they adapted to life in a society that concentrated on ‘building a better future’ under the aegis of the Yugoslav Communist Party (KPJ, Komunistic=ka partija Jugoslavije).

Memories of Forced Labour: Collective and Individual Patterns of Interpretation During the communist era, the ‘partisan myth’ – the assertion that the peoples of Yugoslavia had been united in the fight against fascism and for socialism under the leadership of the KPJ – dominated the collective memory of the Second World War. Only those interviewees who had been persecuted on political grounds were able to fit their individual

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experiences into this narrative, by stressing their resistance activism and communist convictions.29 The memories of those interviewees who had suffered religious/ethnic persecution in the NDH, on the other hand, had no place in public discourse, as their experiences were too obviously at odds with the myth of Yugoslav ‘brotherhood and unity’. In the mid 1980s, the rise of radical nationalisms in Yugoslavia altered the public memory of the Second World War. In Serbia, the victims of the Ustaše became a focal point of the newly constructed national memory; past atrocities were reinterpreted to justify current ones.30 Even if the interviewees concerned did not go this far, some of them still made a connection between their earlier experiences and the conflicts of the 1990s, emphasising the victimisation of Serbs in both wars.31 Over and above such collective patterns of interpreting the past, however, the recollections recorded in our project shed light on a fundamental experience shared by all the former forced labourers, namely the violation of their human dignity by the forced labour, the indiscriminate violence and the loss of freedom. Stjepan Pištignjat summed up the injustice suffered in a nutshell: ‘The hardest thing for human beings to endure is to be deprived of their freedom. If you lose your freedom, you lose everything.’

CITED INTERVIEWS Interview with Radomir Batric;evic; (b. 1923), 1.8.2005. Interview with Milan Dragojlovic; (b. 1925), 28.7. 2005. Interview with Nada Jurišic;, née Mijatovic; (b. 1935), 25.7.2005. Interview with Marija Kranjec, née Kolarski (b. 1925), 26.7.2005. Interview with Andrija Maric=ic; (b. 1933), 29.7.2005. Interview with Ružica Nedeljkovic;, née Balac; (b. 1929), 24.3.2005. Interview with Milan Pantovic; (b. 1921), 24.3.2005. Interview with Stjepan Pištignjat (b. 1924), 23.7.2005. Interview with Julijana Pokrajac, née Kojic; (b. 1926), 27 and 28.3.2005. Interview with Radoslavka Stojkovic;, née Skandarski (b. 1920), 27.7.2005. Interview with Kristina Šepšei, née Švind (b. 1920), 27.7.2005.

NOTES 1. See Ulrich Herbert, ‘Zwangsarbeit im “Dritten Reich”: Kenntnisstand, offene Fragen, Forschungsprobleme’, in Wilfried Reininghaus and Norbert Reimann

‘If you lose your freedom, you lose everything.’

2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

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(eds), Zwangsarbeit in Deutschland 1939–1945: Archiv- und Sammlungsgut, Topographie und Erschließungsstrategien (Bielefeld 2001), 16–37, 24. ‘Serbs’ here means ethnic Serbs, while ‘Serbians’ is used to refer to inhabitants of Serbia regardless of ethnicity. Usually, context will make clear which group is referred to. See Holm Sundhaussen, Wirtschaftsgeschichte Kroatiens im nationalsozialistischen Großraum 1941–1945: Das Scheitern einer Ausbeutungsstrategie (Stuttgart 1983), 183, 189f.; Karl-Heinz Schlarp, Wirtschaft und Besatzung in Serbien 1941–1944: Ein Beitrag zur nationalsozialistischen Wirtschaftspolitik in Südosteuropa (Wiesbaden 1986), 212. Schlarp, Wirtschaft, 212; Ulrich Herbert, Fremdarbeiter: Politik und Praxis des ‘Ausländer-Einsatzes’ in der Kriegswirtschaft des Dritten Reiches (Bonn 1985), 189. I refer to the Polish and Soviet Worker Edicts; see Herbert, Fremdarbeiter, 74ff. and 154ff. Herbert, Fremdarbeiter, 79ff. and 127ff. Matthias Hamann, ‘Erwünscht und unerwünscht: Die rassenpsychologische Selektion der Ausländer’, in Götz Aly et al. (eds), Herrenmensch und Arbeitsvölker: Ausländische Arbeiter und Deutsche 1939–1945 (Berlin 1989), 143–180, 155. Sundhaussen, Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 181, 186f. The highest number of deportations from the military occupation zone was reached in spring 1942; see Schlarp, Wirtschaft, 207. Hagen Fleischer, ‘NS-Besatzungsherrschaft im Vergleich: Versuch einer Synopse’, in Wolfgang Benz et al. (eds), Anpassung Kollaboration Widerstand. Kollektive Reaktionen auf die Okkupation (Berlin 1996), 257–301, 270; Mark Spoerer, Zwangsarbeit unter dem Hakenkreuz: Ausländische Zivilarbeiter, Kriegsgefangene und Häftlinge im Deutschen Reich und im besetzten Europa 1939–1945 (Stuttgart and Munich 2001), 99, 102. Sundhaussen, Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 187f.; Schlarp, Wirtschaft, 209f. Martin Seckendorf et al. (eds), Die Okkupationspolitik des deutschen Faschismus in Jugoslawien, Griechenland, Albanien, Italien und Ungarn (1941–1945) (Berlin and Heidelberg 1992), 148f.; Christopher R. Browning, Fateful Months: Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution (New York and London 1985); Walter Manoschek, ‘Serbien ist judenfrei’: Militärische Besatzungspolitik und Judenvernichtung in Serbien 1941/42 (Munich 1993). Schlarp, Wirtschaft, 214ff. The Serbia project was carried out in the Department of History and Political Science at the University of Salzburg in 2005–2006. The author was assisted by Karl Rothauer (camera, sound) and Aleksandar Trklja (transcriptions) on this project. Section III also includes data gained from an interview with Nada Jurišic;, but she does not count as one of the sample since strictly speaking she does not belong to the target group. I thank Marie-Agnes Heine (International Organization for Migration, Geneva) for her valuable help. A. and V. Maric=ic; referred me to R. Batric;evic;, K. Šepšei to M. Kranjec. NDH: R. Batric;evic;, M. Dragojlovic;, A. Maric=ic;, R. Nedeljkovic;, J. Pokrajac and S. Pištignjat; Hungarian-occupied Vojvodina: M. Kranjec, R. Stojkovic; and K. Šepšei; military occupation zone Serbia: M. Pantovic;. R. Batric;evic;, R. Nedeljkovic; and J. Pokrajac. J. Pokrajac worked on her parents’ farm, R. Stojkovic; and K. Šepšei in a textile factory, M. Dragojlovic; and M. Pantovic; as tailors, R. Batric;evic; as a shop assistant. Primary: R. Batric;evic;, M. Dragojlovic;, M. Pantovic; and J. Pokrajac; secondary: M. Kranjec, R. Nedeljkovic;, R. Stojkovic; and K. Šepšei; university: A. Maric=ic; and S. Pištignjat.

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18. See the interviews with N. Jurišic;, A. Maric=ic; and J. Pokrajac; on helpful Germans also interviews with M. Dragojlovic;, R. Nedeljkovic;, R. Stojkovic;, K. Šepšei. 19. Deportation: interviews with M. Dragojlovic;, K. Šepšei, M. Kranjec; registration: interview with N. Jurišic;. 20. Interviews with M. Dragojlovic;, N. Jurišic;, A. Maric=ic;, R. Nedeljkovic;, S. Pištignjat, J. Pokrajac and R. Stojkovic;. 21. Interviews with M. Kranjec, A. Maric=ic;, R. Nedeljkovic;, R. Stojkovic;, K. Šepšei and S. Pištignjat. 22. For a similar interpretation, see Ela Hornung et al., Zwangsarbeit in der Landwirtschaft in Niederösterreich und dem nördlichen Burgenland (Vienna and Munich 2005), 261, 265f. 23. Interviews with M. Kranjec and R. Stojkovic;. 24. Interview with R. Stojkovic;. 25. See interview with S. Pištignjat. 26. See interviews with M. Kranjec and R. Stojkovic;. 27. Interviews with M. Pantovic;, M. Dragojlovic;, R. Nedeljkovic; and R. Stojkovic;. 28. Beatings: interviews with M. Kranjec and A. Maric=ic;. R. Nedeljkovic;’s mother spent some months in a corrective labour camp; M. Dragojlovic; was imprisoned in Auschwitz after attempting to escape. 29. Interviews with M. Pantovic; and R. Stojkovic;. 30. Cf. Wolfgang Höpken, ‘Krieg und historische Erinnerung auf dem Balkan’, in Eva Behring et al. (eds), Geschichtliche Mythen in den Literaturen und Kulturen Ostmittel- und Südosteuropas (Stuttgart 1999), 371–379, 376f. 31. Interviews with N. Jurišic;, R. Nedeljkovic; and J. Pokrajac.

 13 

THEY SURVIVED TWO WARS Bosnian Roma as Civil War Refugees in Germany

Birgit Mair

F

rom May to December 2005, the Institut für sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung, Bildung und Beratung e.V. (ISFBB), directed eight life history interviews with Roma from Bosnia. The interviews were conducted by Lazar Dimic in Romani and filmed by Harald Jantschke and Joanna Maxellon. The project team was led by the author, who has extensive experience in interviewing concentration camp survivors.1 The interviews took place in Berlin, where most of the former forced labourers have lived as refugees since the early 1990s. We questioned five women and three men who identify themselves as Bosnian Roma of the Muslim faith. The interviewees were born in the former kingdom of Yugoslavia between 1926 and 1936. From 1941 until 1945 they were interned in Croatian concentration camps because they were Roma.

Bosnian Muslims in the Crossfire of Political Power Interests (1941–1945) What follows is a short overview of the history of the region in which the interviewees lived during the Second World War. From 1463 until its annexation by Austria-Hungary, Bosnia-Herzegovina belonged to the Ottoman Empire; this explains the large proportion of Muslims in its population.2 After the First World War the kingdom of Yugoslavia was esNotes for this chapter begin on page 187.

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tablished under the regency of King Alexander, uniting Croats, Serbs and Slovenians. But the integrity of this state was always under threat. Acute social and political polarisation, compounded by permanent economic crisis, prevented an orderly process of integration. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that the royal house was of Serb descent and that the military was Serb-dominated, producing the impression that the new formation was a state of and for the Serbs. Finally, the monarchical dictatorship established in 1929 suppressed all opposition. The ultra-Catholic and fascistic Ustaše movement, which fought for a greater Croatian state, was involved in the assassination of King Alexander in 1934. On 6 April 1941 German, Italian, Hungarian and Bulgarian troops attacked Yugoslavia and divided it amongst themselves. The Independent State of Croatia was proclaimed shortly thereafter under the protection of Germany and Italy.3 Leadership was assumed by the extreme nationalist Ante Pavelic; (1889–1959), who modelled his rule on the example of his fascist allies. The Ustaše movement became the sole legal political party, and parallel to the establishment of a regular conscript army the Ustaše militia was developed as the regime’s praetorian guard, modelled after the SS. German and Italian occupation forces stayed in the area and often operated without regard to the ‘government bodies’ of the officially independent puppet government. After the German invasion, Bosnia was annexed to the new Greater Croatia. This was the part of Yugslavia in which ‘the most brutal conflicts and massacres’ of the civil war took place. At the same time, it was home to the most active organised resistance against the fascist occupation; the mountainous districts of Bosnia were well adapted to guerrilla warfare.4 In Bosnia the situation escalated in a specific way as Pavelic; tried to rally the Muslim population behind him. According to Croatian myth, they were Croats converted to Islam and therefore, in a way, ‘blood-brothers’. Although the bulk of Bosnian Muslims did not see it this way, some Bosnian politicians took up Ustaše’s offer of cooperation. An additional factor was that it was fascist Muslim squads that carried out the expulsions and mass murders of Jews, Roma and Serbs.5 At the beginning of 1943, a Bosnian Muslim SS division was formed under direct German command.6 As a consequence the Muslim Bosnians became a particular target of the Serb nationalist insurgents, especially the Chetniks. The Chetniks had begun fighting the occupying forces (in particular the Germans and Italians) immediately after the German invasion. Their allegiance was to the royal family in exile in Britain. But in their conflict with their main competitors, Tito’s Communist partisans, the Chetniks often formed tactical alliances with the occupiers, and for considerable periods they devoted their energy exclusively to fighting the Communists. They were responsible for numerous massacres in which they targeted Croat and Muslim civilians

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as such.7 Muslims were displaced by the hundreds of thousands and held in camps. Thousands were murdered. These circumstances eventually fostered the drive for a Bosnia and Herzegovina independent of Croatia. This in turn led to the repression of the Muslim population by Croatia. After the German attack on the Soviet Union, Tito’s Communist partisans sent out the call for resistance against the occupying powers. They finally set up their headquarters in Bosnia, near Sarajevo. The fascist occupation, the Croatian terror, and the partisans’ political vision, which was explicitly open to members of all ethnic and religious groups, swelled the ranks of Tito’s multinational liberation movement. In this war, Tito’s partisans were the only military force that could claim to have committed no racially or ethnically motivated massacres against civilians. In June of 1941 a meeting took place between Pavelic; and Hitler, at which Hitler outlined a series of ‘racial policy’ measures; in fact, Pavelic; had been preparing such measures since the previous April.8 Laws enacted after the German model legitimised the murders of approximately two million innocent people; these included the Law for the Protection of Aryan Blood and the Honour of the Croatian People of 30 April 1941. The mass murder of Serbs, Jews and Roma in all of Yugoslavia was carried out in 1941 and 1942 in a horrifically methodical and expeditious way, and their exclusion of daily life and internment and/or deportation were complete before Germany implemented the Auschwitz Decree against ‘Gypsy half-castes and Balkan Gypsies’.9 All eight of our interviewees were more than just Muslims caught in the crossfire of political interests. As Roma (so-called gypsies), along with Serbians and Jews, they became victims of the ‘politics of death’ carried out by the Croatian government.

Report on Displacement, Forced Labour and Concentration Camps (Jasenovac and Stara Gradiška) The Jasenovac concentration camp was opened at the beginning of September 1941 about a hundred kilometres (60 miles) south of the Croatian capital Zagreb; it covered a total area of 240 square kilometres (ca. 93 square miles). At least 500,000 people died in this camp, of whom approximately 30,000 were Roma, 20,000 Jews and at least 300,000 Serbs.10 Jasenovac and the accompanying concentration camp Stara Gradiška were under Croatian control. (Until the capitulation of Italy in September 1943 they were under Italian control, too.11) Dervisa Ahmetovic; experienced the inferno of Jasenovac as a sevenyear-old child. In her home town of Bronzani Majdan near Banja Luka she was dragged onto a truck along with her brother. During the trip her

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brother suffered a fatal heart attack brought on by ‘extreme fear’. The soldiers threw his corpse from the moving truck. The story of her brother who died on the truck was a central theme during the whole talk. She kept coming back in tears to her lost brother and the circumstances of his death. Mrs Ahmetovic;, now seventy, was deported to the Jasenovac concentration camp. To start the interview, she recalled in tears the fate of the inmates from the seven trucks that reached the camp before hers: ‘People were lined up, cut open by the soldiers and killed. … Dead children lay on their dead mothers; the soldiers were covered in blood. The nearby river flowed red with all this blood. The lifeless bodies of women and children lay partially on land, partially in the river.’ ‘River’ here refers to the Save and two others. Together the three rivers effectively surrounded the camp and cut it off from the outside world. Mrs Ahmetovic; compared the eagerness with which the soldiers carried out their work with the way a butcher slaughters and butchers livestock. She said she would never forget those cries and pleas. She survived because just as her truck was to join the line, an officer ordered an end to the mass murder. After telling this story she was so agitated that the interview had to be continued on the next day. During the night she suffered from nightmares and fears. In the following interview, she told us how she was taken from Jasenovac to the nearby concentration camp of Stara Gradiška and lastly to the concentration camp Pilan near Banja Luka, where she had to clean a school and do agricultural work. Of her seven siblings only three survived. Her parents died in a concentration camp. The 73-year-old widower Osman Hasimovic;, who has lived alone in Berlin since the death of his wife, reported on the events of the winter of 1942–43. That was in 1942. Our whole town had been set on fire; we had to flee. I was very small at that time. My grandfather was hacked up and thrown in the flames. … I hid behind our house where I could see everything happening. … At ten years old I came to a concentration camp [Jasenovac]. My father and I were put in a concentration camp at the same time. … I had to work as a water carrier. I was supposed to distribute buckets of water to the other inmates but unfortunately I never managed to do it because the buckets were randomly kicked over by the soldiers’ feet again and again. … Some of the people were killed, the rest had to perform forced labour. We had to help with the construction of a railway where we had to dig. We also had to perform menial work digging – building the sewer system as well as road construction. During the work gun barrels were shoved against our backs. … We had to transport bags of cement and dig up a trench kilometres long for the sewer. We also had to dig bunkers for the Wehrmacht as well as build power and water mains. Everyone had to perform forced labour. … I was beaten there although I was still

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just a child. My father was literally beaten black and blue there. I still feel the consequences. … Few managed to escape, my father for example. He managed to hide in the woods. … Later as we came back home we found our houses completely burnt out. The Chetniks [Serbian insurgents] had destroyed them.

Mr Hasimovic; groaned as he reported the tortures that a captured escapee had to face. One had to do push ups until he was exhausted, after which he was killed in front of the others. A shot in the head awaited anybody who was sick because there were no doctors there. Nights were spent under the stars on a little hay. In the winter there was one blanket and for food only salted water. Radojka Rahimic;, who was nine years old in 1941, came from a Roma family with a Croatian Catholic mother and a Bosnian Muslim father. One day in 1941 when she wanted to go to the local school in Kukunjevac (in the Croatian part of Yugoslavia) as on every other morning, she was sent back home. Shortly before that, Ustaše soldiers had surrounded the town. Her 38-year-old father and 750 other men were gathered together in front of the town hall, transported to Rupaca and killed there. Women and children were deported to concentration camps where they were later separated. The 73-year-old told of being displaced from her home town and transported in a cattle car. One young woman couldn’t go on because of overwhelming exhaustion. She leaned against a wall. A soldier came, beheaded her and drank her blood. The soldiers walked to the left and to the right, we walked in the middle. Anyone who didn’t walk as they liked was kicked, hit or beheaded. … She was eighteen and was beheaded because she was so exhausted she couldn’t go on. My mother also couldn’t go on. She was kicked and punched. I screamed and cried. Someone pulled me away and locked me in a cattle car. We could barely breathe because there were too many people there and there were no windows where air could come in. Many suffocated or were trampled to death. Pregnant women gave birth amongst the mass of people. We were tormented on the way to the concentration camp, and had to walk most of the way. But the real nightmare was waiting for us after we arrived at the camp. We didn’t get water or bread and had to walk around half naked. In spite of this we survived. … In the concentration camp we had to sleep outside on the ground in the eleventh month, which is in November. The guards on the watchtowers were just waiting for someone to move suspiciously or too fast so that they could shoot you. That was a catastrophe and pure agony, but despite it we stayed alive. Maybe it might have been better if they had just killed us then right away in the concentration camp. For me this interview is pure agony. I want to stop now.

In the concentration camps Stara Gradiška, Jasenovac and Sisak, Radojka was still together with her mother. She spoke of the mass extermination in Jasenovac:

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There the Roma were thrown into pits filled with quicklime. I saw with my own eyes how a beautiful girl sat with her doll and her parents on a yoked farm cart. A soldier deliberately hit the horses and the little girl, her parents and the cart crashed into the pits filled with quicklime. This went on for a few hours. We kids stood in a column in the Jasenovac freight yard. The Jasenovac concentration camp was only about twenty steps from the Jasenovac freight yard from where we children could see everything. … We also stood in the column and waited for our deaths. If a soldier or officer, I don’t know exactly anymore, hadn’t ordered a stop, we also would have been murdered. I was personally at the Jasenovac freight yard and also should have been killed, but fortunately fate wanted something different. From there we were deported right away in a freight car to Sisak where we stayed for a week. We got almost nothing to eat. Only for a short time, about one week, I was back together with my mother in the Sisak concentration camp. During this time she always gave me her food ration. She didn’t eat anything. Then we were selected. Children to the right, mothers to the left. We kids were transported to Zagreb.

In the Sisak concentration camp Radojka’s mother had to clean the soldiers’ barracks. After a few days she and her six-year-old sister were separated from their mother and brought to an assembly point of the Red Cross in Zagreb. There the little children were made to drink poisoned milk, from which her sister died. She remembers: All the children who had drunk the milk came down with a high fever with vomiting in the early evening. My little sister as well. I’ll never be able to forget how I had to leave her, crying and in death pangs. We bigger children were taken away. … I and the other remaining children came to Ubbreg [Croatia]. There we were put on display before the town hall. … I was adopted by a childless Croatian couple. They just took me away without any information about the whereabouts of the rest of my family.

Radojka was ‘adopted’ by a married Catholic couple from ZagorjeLudbreg (Croatia). In the two years she was held there she was not allowed to go to school or work; however, she was required to attend church regularly. One day she used money that was intended for the collection plate to buy a postcard and sent it to her Croatian godmother with a plea to send it on to her mother. Thereupon her mother picked up her now twelve-year-old daughter, resisting the bribery attempts of the ‘adoptive’ parents, and they went home. On the way home we had to hide in the woods because we were continually being attacked by troops. In my eagerness to escape I fell into a lake. My mother dried me as well as she could with leaves. I got pneumonia. We had to hide in the woods till the end of the war. We searched for our house, but it wasn’t there anymore where it once stood. They had completely destroyed it. My mother cried bitterly. ‘Where are we supposed to go now? Where are we supposed to sleep?’ She begged a woman to take us in temporarily which she did.

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At seventy-nine, Mr Omer Alimanovic; was the oldest concentration camp survivor we interviewed. He came from Bijeljina, where he went to school for five years. At fifteen he was deported to the Stara Gradiška concentration camp where he was made to do road construction and agricultural work. In his estimation about 500 people were selected before he was saved. He suspects these people were shot and their bodies thrown in the Save. In this life-threatening situation a former neighbour emerged who had the title of ‘captain’ (Kapo?). Upon his order, about twenty Roma, including our witness, were taken to a ‘safe’ camp. Mr Alimanovic; did not want to divulge the name of his saviour. In the ‘safe’ camp he and the others chosen were still poorly fed and made to do work. However, while his former neighbour was in charge no torture took place. Later he escaped captivity but was accosted and again taken back to forced labour. In 1943 he returned to Bijeljina, which meant the end of persecution for him. Mr Alimanovic;, who was hard of hearing, provided a special kind of evidence of how the memory of suffering has stayed with him. In the course of the interview he brought out a three-page, handwritten list of approximately eighty names. It was a list of friends and acquaintances who were murdered in both wars in Bosnia (six of them in the Second World War). He said he was afraid of the consequences for his family and did not want to be more specific. Jusuf Beganovic;, born in 1936 in Teocak near Ugljevik (Bosnia), said he had been unlucky since he was a child. For as long as he could remember he had never experienced a good day. He didn’t know anything specific about his time in the Stara Gradiška concentration camp. He claims to have been too young to remember anything: ‘It’s like there’s a curtain in front of my eyes. … As an eight-year-old I had to work as a cattle driver. I think it was Croats. … There I was treated badly. I got almost nothing to eat and had to work a lot.’ Five weeks later we filmed his sister Zejfa Beganovic;, eight years his senior, without knowing they were related. From her we learned that Mr Beganovic; had died three weeks after the interview. The two siblings, who both lived in Berlin, had almost no contact with one another. While her younger brother could not even remember the names of his murdered parents any more, we learned far more about their common roots from this illiterate woman. Zejfa Beganovic;, born in 1928, was the daughter of Millija and Rascho Beganovic; in Teocak. She is the oldest of five children including Jusuf. Mrs Beganovic; told us her parents died in a concentration camp when she was twelve. Her account of her mental condition was similar to her brother’s: ‘Ever since I can remember my soul has ached. I hurt everywhere, especially I have strong headaches.’ She said it was a terrible time and for that reason she cannot remember exactly. She performed forced agricultural labour.

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Hanifa Beganovic;, who happens to share the same last name, was born in 1932 in Teocak. In 1941 she and her family were interned in Stara Gradiška concentration camp. At ten years old in Jasenje near Banja Luka she began four years of forced labour doing agricultural work and road construction. During our exploratory interview Hanifa Beganovic; informed us of her poor health, but we could not have guessed exactly how bad it really was. After a few minutes she began to scream and threw her fists wildly in the air. Thereafter at times Mrs Beganovic; was unable speak, but wept aloud and struck herself with her hands. After being liberated most of the survivors returned to their home towns, many as orphans. Their family homes had been destroyed or were occupied by other families. Some of the orphans found shelter with relatives. Some of them had to rely on themselves and worked as day labourers in the fields.

Establishing a Family under Tito During the war, Tito’s partisans, who represented a ‘multi-ethnic concept of equality of all ethnicities and confessions’,12 had already had some success. In 1943 a provisional government was formed under Tito, and two years later the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia was founded, largely independent of the USSR. This Yugoslavia was now home to our witnesses.13 Osman Hasimovic; said of the postwar period: ‘Both parents died, from hunger, that is, which was rampant after the war. When they were released from the concentration camps the fight against hunger started. There was virtually nothing to eat. First my mother died, then my father.’ After his parents died Osman lived with his uncle. He was the only interviewee who attended school after the war. After a year of agricultural work he was drafted into the army and later worked as a ‘hawker’. The other interviewees worked mostly as day labourers on farms. All the interviewees married in the 1950s and 1960s. The women perceived this as an improvement in their status. Busy with day labour, housework and raising between four and eight children, they never returned to school. According to a 1990 report, more than half of the Roma in Yugoslavia were still illiterate more than a generation after the war because children were needed to support the family. The interviewees confirmed this point. Even before the war broke out Osman Hasimovic; had had to leave school after two years because his family needed him to work in the corn harvest. Because eight years of schooling were mandatory to enter the job market, many Yugoslav Roma could not get further professional qualifications.14 Radojka Rahimic; reports on the postwar period:

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When we were released from the concentration camp after surviving hell, we went from house to house and eked out a living doing odd jobs. We lived hand to mouth. We couldn’t expect help from our relatives, because we barely had any anymore. I was only of help to my mother after I married. … After my mother was released from the concentration camp she worked as a day labourer in the fields, to be able to pay the rent and to feed us. My mother and I didn’t manage to rebuild our ruined house. That’s why we had to pay rent. … When I was fourteen under communism I took part in a work project. We were all young volunteers who worked for three months. Instead of pay, we received social benefits every month. With that we could live a little better for a while. After I had rested a little I went to work for another three months, this time when the ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ motorway was being built. After the task was accomplished I went to Zemun near Belgrade for another three months’ work. For this volunteer work my children received free school books and uniforms as well as social insurance. My mother was also insured through me. Later she died. Then I switched to agricultural day labour, because only that way could I feed us and build a house. I couldn’t do anything else. My children and I experienced tough times. In Bac[ka Palanka [Serbia] they had to do hard labour in the fields as thirteen- and fourteenyear-olds. … The children’s labour was a great financial help.

Others report a relatively successful postwar integration. Osman Hasimovic; recounted how he, like all Roma displaced from Ugljevik during the war, received ‘a house and 4.5 duluma [4,500 square metres of farmland]’ as compensation from the Yugoslav government. He summarised his time in the Socialist Federal Republic, as Yugoslavia was called under Tito after 1963, as follows: ‘In happy and peaceful times I earned good money. I worked as a hawker selling handmade tablecloths in all of Yugoslavia. These were most popular in Zagreb. I always had enough money for a modest life.’ Omer Alimanovic; emphasised that he was able to feed his wife and eight children and was very well regarded in his home community. But the only interviewee who possessed a small pension was Jusuf Beganovic;, who moved to Germany in 1969 and worked underground as a miner.

The Consequences of the War and Reparations In the Second World War 1.7 million of the 15.4 million inhabitants of the Yugoslavian territories died.15 Ninety thousand of the dead were Roma.16 Some of those persecuted were compensated after the war by the Yugoslavian state for their material losses. Houses and farmland were made available to them. For their concentration camp detention and forced labour seven of the interviewees received compensation through IOM Geneva.

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Some losses could not be compensated. For some their schooling was violently ended by their captivity. Mrs Rahimic; sums up the situation with education: The war was the reason that I only finished one grade. I was born in 1932 and the war began in 1941, just as I was about to enter the second grade. … After the war there were no schools. … Whoever experienced the Second World War with their own body knows how it was. With education there was nothing you could do, you fought just for simple survival.

Five of the eight interviewees were orphaned by the wartime events. Half of the interviewees married partners who had also been in concentration camps. Osman Hasimovic;’s marriage remained childless. He told us the reason for this at the end of the interview after the camera had already been packed up: in the concentration camp his scrotum had been smashed. The interviewees found their forced labour extremely hard and complained of health problems, back pain and intense headaches. According to Hanifa Beganovic;; the headaches she has suffered from since childhood were a consequence of her mistreatment in the concentration camp. She also said she has recurring nightmares and still hears the howling of an airplane that dived down and attacked her. Pictures of a river flooded with blood keep appearing in her mind. Radojka Rahimic; also cannot forget that time: ‘Although I was just nine then and already more than sixty years have passed I’ll never be able to forget the Second World War and 1941. I still feel the fear from then. … It’s as though these horrible things had happened today.’

Flight from Yugoslavia: A Second Victimisation and a New Challenge With the exception of Jusuf Beganovic;, who had already lived in Germany for some time, all the interviewees fled to the West in 1991 or 1992. Aged at least fifty-five at the time of the Yugoslavian civil war, they have something in common: during this war their families were once again robbed of their property, and many lost their houses. Osman Hasimovic; reported: ‘Just as life began to get better we were mistreated and tormented, reduced to begging. … I saw with my own eyes people wrenched from their doorsteps and sliced open. Because I saw that with my own eyes I had to leave behind my belongings and get out as fast as I could.’ In the light of this second trauma, the interviewees used their contact with us to assert their residency rights. They demanded an abiding right to stay in Germany. Some threatened suicide if faced with deportation to

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Bosnia. According to a UNHCR report, many Roma returning to Bosnia can only look forward to ‘half destroyed houses and building provisional shacks on community land. As a result many families live without access to clean water, electricity or heat.’17

NOTES 1. Birgit Mair, Überlebensberichte von Josef Jakubowicz: Eine biographische Analyse (Nuremberg 2006). 2. Walter Leisering, Historischer Weltatlas (Berlin 2004), 169. 3. Hannes Hofbauer (ed.), Balkankrieg: Die Zerstörung Jugoslawiens (Vienna 1999), 37. 4. Catherine Samary, Die Zerstörung Jugoslawiens: Ein europäischer Krieg (Cologne 1995), 44f. 5. Samary, Die Zerstörung Jugoslawiens, 44. 6. Marie-Janine Calic, Der Krieg in Bosnien-Herzegowina: Ursachen, Konfliktstrukturen, Lösungsversuche (Frankfurt am Main 1995), 50. 7. Samary, Die Zerstörung Jugoslawiens, 45. 8. Oki Goni, Odessa – Die Wahre Geschichte: Fluchthilfe für NS-Kriegsverbrecher (Berlin 2006), 197. 9. Katrin Reemtsma, ‘Minderheiten ohne Zukunft? Roma in Jugoslawien’, Report on Human Rights No. 2 by the Society for Threatened Peoples (Göttingen 1990), 9. 10. See: www.shoa.de/holocaust/konzentrationslager/231-das-kroatische-kz-jasenovac.html, retrieved March 19, 2010. For the rate of killed Roma see Katrin Reemtsma as cited in Vladimir Dedijer, Jasenovac: Das jugoslawische Auschwitz und der Vatikan (Freiburg 1988) and Wolfgang Benz, Hermann Graml and Hermann Weiß (eds), Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus (Munich 1997), 531. 11. Wolfgang Benz and Barbara Distel, Der Ort des Terrors: Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager. Band 1: Die Organisation des Terrors (Munich 2005), 16. 12. Hofbauer, Balkankrieg, 38. 13. Leisering, Historischer Weltatlas, 184. 14. Reemtsma, ‘Minderheiten ohne Zukunft?’ 12. 15. Till Bastian, Sinti und Roma im Dritten Reich: Geschichte einer Verfolgung (Munich 2001), 74. 16. Israel Gutman (ed.), Enzyklopädie des Holocaust: Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden, Band III (Munich 1998), 1633. 17. UNHCR, Das Gesundheitswesen in Bosnien und Herzegowina im Kontext der Rückkehr von Flüchtlingen und Vertriebenen (Berlin 2001), 4.

 14 

FORCED LABOUR IN BULGARIA 1941–1944 Tracing the Memories

Ana Luleva

Introduction

In respect of the imposition of forced labour during the Second World War, Bulgaria is a special case. This country was one of Germany’s allies (from 1 March 1941 to 5 September 1944), and Bulgarian citizens were not sent to German labour or concentration camps. Only Bulgarian students in Germany and Slovakia who were imprisoned in German concentration camps after September 1944 were victims of forced labour in the ‘Third Reich’. The fact that no Bulgarian citizens were sent to Germany as forced labourers, however, does not mean that they were not victims of forced labour during the war. Forced labour was extensively imposed by the pro-German government in Bulgaria in the period between 1941 and 1944. On 1 March 1941, Bulgaria officially joined the Tripartite Pact. The Bulgarian government made great efforts to prove itself a loyal ally. Following the German example, anti-democratic laws were passed. Two of them were of particular importance as repressive measures. One of these was the Act for Protection of the State, directed against opponents of the government’s pro-German policy, and the other was the anti-Jewish Act for Protection of the Nation (January 1941). This law, which was passed Notes for this chapter begin on page 198.

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by the people’s assembly and signed by Tsar Boris III despite sharp criticism from the democratic opposition in the parliament and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, restricted Bulgarian Jews’ civil rights.1 A ban on Jews serving in the regular army (which had been normal up to then) was introduced; they could henceforth serve only in labour corps.2

The Groups of Victims In 1942, 1943 and 1944 all Jewish males between twenty and forty-six years of age were mobilised. They were assigned labour groups (100 to 300 persons) that were incorporated into larger units – so-called battalions, of which there were twelve.3 Bulgarian men who were liable to military service and were considered a potential danger to the Bulgarian army because of their left-wing political views (supporters of the Communist or the Agrarian Reform parties) were conscripted to other labour groups. They were interned in labour camps and also brought in for building roads and infrastructure. There were camps of this kind at Belene (on the bank of the Danube) and in the Sandanski region.4 A third group of victims of forced labour were the prisoners in the concentration camps. They were opponents of the regime – democrats, Communists, participants in anti-military and subversive actions directed against the government, Bulgarians and Jews. These concentration camps were not meant for the physical extinction of the prisoners but for their complete isolation from society and their deployment in hard labour, which was imposed on them as a punishment. At one of the biggest concentration camps, Eniköy in Aegean Thrace, 500 to 600 people were imprisoned in 1942. Others were on the Danube, on the island of Sv. Anastasija near Burgas, and near Asenovgrad (men and women) among others.5 It must be emphasised that no data on the total number of prisoners in labour and concentration camps and their political affiliation could be found for the period between 1941 and 1944. This might be explained by the fact that the subject of forced labour was excluded from historical discourse during the socialist period and was only incompletely discussed after 1989. Until 1989 the history of the Second World War was dealt with mainly in terms of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) and its anti-fascist struggle. From that point of view, it is only logical that only the number of Communist prisoners in camps was of interest. All the ‘others’ – those who belonged to no party, members of the Agrarian Reform Party (which was very influential in Bulgarian society at the time), democrats imprisoned in labour and concentration camps – were excluded from the official historical narrative.

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In addition to those already mentioned, Turks and gypsies were mobilised for the so-called regular labour groups. A considerable proportion of the Roma in Bulgaria was not subject to forced labour. It was imposed mainly on Roma in the large cities living in so-called mahallas, who made up about a third of all Bulgarian Roma. The nomadic Roma succeeded in avoiding forced labour. In the regular labour groups the conditions were easier than in the labour and concentration camps, and the groups were dissolved during the winter because there was no work to do. Those who were mobilised on this basis often succeeded in escaping or reducing their period of detention.6 The investigations we carried out in the context of this project7 have shown that there are no surviving Roma in the country who were victims of forced labour during the Second World War. The fifth group of victims of forced labour consisted of Bulgarians who spent the war in Germany or Slovakia. These were mainly Bulgarian students with left-wing views who happened to have been sent to German concentration camps. Only a few of them survived, and at the end of the war they succeeded in returning to Bulgaria. During our work on this project we traced only three living witnesses from this group and conducted interviews with two of them.

The Interviewees The nine interviews of our subproject were carried out with representatives of four of the five groups: German concentration camp inmates (two video interviews), Bulgarian concentration camp inmates (one audio interview), Jewish labour camp inmates (one video and three audio interviews), Bulgarian labour camp inmates (one audio interview), and one ‘special’ case of labour in Germany (audio interview). The interviewees were chosen after we had made contact with various groups of victims with the help of an organisation of the former ‘fighters against fascism and capitalism’ (Bulgarian Anti-Fascist Union of War Veterans, BAU) and institutions of the Jewish community (the ‘Shalom’ association and the Hebrew Historical Museum), as well as through personal contacts. We applied the ‘snowball’ and ‘gatekeeper’ methods. The BAU is the successor organisation of the Committee of Fighters against Fascism and Capitalism, which was founded in 1959 and whose members were Communists who had been awarded the title ‘Active Fighter against Fascism and Capitalism’. Their privileges, which increased over time in parallel with the growth in the numbers of ‘active fighters against fascism and capitalism’, resulted in a devaluation of the symbolic value of the title and, after 1989, in a negative public image of the ‘active fighters’ as a Communist oligarchy. At the beginning of the 1990s

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all privileges were revoked and the committee was dissolved. The BAU, which was newly founded in 1990, was an association of former members and emphasised the idea of anti-fascism in its activities. The BAU is closely connected to the Union of War Veterans, and both are supported by the Bulgarian Socialist Party (successor to the BCP), which is currently in power. When asked for their contribution, the BAU activists (40–50-year-olds) knew almost nothing about forced labour during the Second World War, even though in Bulgaria most of its victims had come from the political left (followers of the Communist Party and its youth wing, the Young Workers’ Association or YWA). This is in keeping with the widespread understanding, propagated by socialist historiography, that the ‘victims’ in that period were the ‘victims of struggle’ – political prisoners, prisoners in concentration camps and fallen partisans associated with the Communist Party. Other kinds of violence and other kinds of victims are invisible and unacknowledged. The BAU activists were nevertheless very accommodating and ready to help us make contact with the various groups of camp inmates, because they saw our project as an opportunity to rehabilitate the values of ‘anti-fascist struggle’, which had become very controversial and considerably devalued in public discourse after 1989 because of their association with Communism. During the period just before the general elections (parliamentary elections were due in June 2006), there was also a wish to resurrect the heroic past of the BCP (1941–1944). Access to the Jewish community was facilitated by the Hebrew Historical Museum in Sofia, which is run by Bulgaria’s biggest Jewish organisation, Shalom, and by private individuals. Some of those involved in Shalom are familiar with the museum’s activity of collecting family histories and biographies. For them, being invited for an interview was a privilege and participating in it a fulfilment of their duty to the memory of the community – all the more so as the wartime labour camps in Bulgaria have been a fundamental topic in the oral history of the Jewish community during the past few years. The interviewees were born between 1912 (Boris Angelakov) and 1928 (Hristo Dec=ev). Aron Behar and David Cohen (Koen) were born in 1919, Karl Kandulkov in 1920, Poli Pinkas in 1921, and three of them (Minc=o Todorov, Boris Nešev and Josif Kiuc=ukov) in 1922. Four of them – three men and one woman – are Jews; the other five are non-Jewish Bulgarians. Six of them are university graduates with high social status: Josif Kiuc=ukov, an engineer, studied in Sofia and became a professor and Bulgaria’s representative at UNESCO; Boris Angelakov, also an engineer, studied in Bratislava and became director of building works for the city of Sofia; Karl Kandulkov, an architect who gained his diploma in Dresden, was for many years the mayor and also an honorary citizen of Gabrovo; Minc=o Todorov, another

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engineer, was awarded his diploma in Sofia and for many years served as the director of the state industrial association for the food industry; David Cohen (Koen), an economist with a PhD in history, was a research officer at the Central National Archives and the Archives of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences; Boris Nešev became a physician. Poli Pinkas did not receive a university degree, but she graduated from a well-known American secondary school (gymnasium) and worked as a journalist for the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency. Aron Behar and Christo Dec=ev completed primary school education. The former worked as a tradesman, the latter as a chauffeur. All of them, with the exception of Poli Pinkas, are on the political left: six are members of the BCP; four (Angelakov; K. Kandulkov, J. Kiuc=ukov and M. Todorov) have been officially recognised as ‘Active Fighters against Fascism and Capitalism’.

The Story/ies They Tell The stories of the Jews are all similar in that they emphasise the memory of the discriminatory practices that were introduced with the passage of the Act for Protection of the Nation. It is noteworthy that the measures imposed by this law, such as curfew, wearing the Star of David, forced changes of names, restricted access to the inner city, bans on working in parents’ professions and deportation from Sofia, are remembered as much more traumatic experiences than mobilisation for the Jewish labour groups. All witnesses worked on building roads and railway tracks at places in the Balkans that were strategically important for military purposes. During the coldest winter months they were on leave, and after two or three months they were again mobilised for new projects. Compared to the concentration camps, where political opponents of the regime were imprisoned, conditions in the Jewish labour groups were less strict. Three of the interviewees (Aron Behar, David Cohen (Koen) and Josif Kiuc=ukov) remember with respect Bulgarian commandants who behaved humanely towards the camp prisoners and treated them as though they were Bulgarian soldiers in spite of their inferior status. Mincho Todorov and Boris Nešev, who were subject to regular military service, were sent to a labour and concentration camp because of their left-wing political views and their connections to the YWA. In these camps – as with the Jewish groups – hard labour was imposed building roads and railways and straightening riverbeds, but unlike the mobilised Jews the camp inmates were treated as prisoners, and leave during the winter months was unimaginable. Similarly, Karl Kandulkov and Boris Angelakov came to be interned in German concentration camps (Buchenwald and Dachau). After 9 Sep-

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tember 1944, Bulgaria declared war on Germany. In Vienna a Bulgarian government in exile was founded that did not accept the new regime in Sofia and wanted to mobilise Bulgarian students to form a military unit under German military command. Those students who resisted this initiative and expressed left-wing (pro-Soviet) views were banned from universities, arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in concentration camps. Karl Kandulkov, who was a student at Dresden Polytechnic University, was sent to Radeberg and from there to Buchenwald (2 May 1945). Boris Angelakov, who was studying at the Polytechnic University of Bratislava, was sent to Dachau (from December 1944 to April 1945). It is evident from their stories about what they endured in the concentration camps that they went through hell. Physical suffering dominates their memories. Both tell about their physical agony (total exhaustion, disease) and the fight for physical survival. Against this background, forced labour was not the biggest source of suffering. At Radeberg, Karl Kandulkov worked in the Eschenbach factory, and at Buchenwald he worked in the quarry. Boris Angelakov was sent to a labour camp at Allach. He was assigned to a group working in a BMW aeroplane factory. In best military order – just like the Germans – the wagons [carrying components] are whizzing past … the guard is walking on walkways high above. We are working further down. And everybody knows what they are checking with the callipers, with his work. And they thought we were smart people, students, who were able to check everything about the planes … We were working, and they wanted us to work without a break – like a machine. No place to sit down, no room to look around, to talk. Anybody who talks can expect something bad to happen – the dog. The man who’s walking around and watching will let the dog go. The dog [jumps] at you and a fight starts.

Boris Angelakov thinks that conditions were worse for camp inmates from Eastern Europe, the Slavs, than for those from Western Europe. The latter were supplied with food by the International Red Cross. At their workplaces all the concentration camp prisoners encountered compassionate gestures from ordinary German workers. Karl Kandulkov attaches extraordinary significance for his life and identity to his period of study in Germany. He has been marked by both the fact that he was a student of architecture in Dresden, studied there with well-known professors and experienced the highest values of German culture, which distinguishes him from the ordinary architect, and the fact that for political reasons he was a prisoner in Buchenwald. It is the political reasons that he emphasises several times when telling about why he was arrested and about his time in Buchenwald, and also about the lack of understanding he later experienced in Bulgaria.

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Postwar Biographies of Victims of Forced Labour After the camp was liberated, Kandulkov was treated for typhoid, completed his education in Dresden and in 1946 went back to Bulgaria. He began a successful career as an architect and started a family. However, he felt unfamiliar with the new party (and state) elite, which in his opinion was mostly of a low cultural level, uneducated and primitive. He became a member of the BCP relatively late and in 1968 was recognised as an ‘Active Fighter against Fascism and Capitalism’, but he found it difficult to adjust to the dictates of the party. About himself and some Bulgarians from Buchenwald who are still alive, he says: Our other comrades were also modest. We didn’t fight for money, or for reputation. We are patriots of the people. … My father died and the party at Sevlievo wrote on his gravestone: ‘Dimitar Kandulkov, a true son of the party and the people’. That’s how I am. … We weren’t pickpockets sent to Buchenwald for theft, what nonsense. Even today, our comrades’ attitude towards us is not a positive one. As prisoners in foreign camps in a foreign country, we didn’t have the strength to organise ourselves. Here, they even thought, ‘They claim to have been in the camps – after all they were in Germany, [so] they are fascists.’ That’s the way things are.

Kandulkov feels he has not received full credit as a fighter against fascism – a feeling that sometimes turns into anger over his contemporaries’ ignorance and their unwillingness to hear the ‘truth’ about the Buchenwald prisoners. His anger is directed not just against the party activists who, since the end of the war, have shaped the public understanding of the anti-fascist struggle, but also against the work of the Buchenwald museum, which in his opinion misrepresents the facts. For him, the memory of the victims (a synonym for ‘heroes’) – those who died during the war and the fight against fascism – is an important topic of his work as an architect and a city developer. (‘I saw to it that many memorials were erected in Gabrovo.’) He counts the victims from Buchenwald among those ‘national heroes’ who are or should be canonised in national memory. Guided by this opinion and by the wish to show that there was anti-fascist resistance not only within the country but also among Bulgarians abroad, he arranged for a memorial plate for Block 45 to be sent to the camp memorial site in 1969 and has published his memories of the camp under the title The Road through Buchenwald (1988). In this sense, he perceives our interview as an opportunity to tell the ‘truth’, to insist that the victims of German concentration camps be nationally accepted, to smash what he sees as the narrow frame of the official narrative of anti-fascist resistance. Boris Angelakov approached the interview with less emotional engagement. His story shows a much stronger influence of the official his-

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torical narrative and remains within its terms. He has not published his memories, but it became clear that he has told his experiences to students and work collectives on several occasions. Angelakov returned to Bulgaria in July 1945, so ill and exhausted that he was practically disabled. He received medical treatment, completed his university education and started to work for the municipal council of the capital city. Unlike Kandulkov, he does not feel that he is not accepted. He was awarded the titles ‘Active Fighter against Fascism and Capitalism’ and ‘Preeminent Builder of the Republic’. He is entitled to wear the Order of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria in silver and in gold and the Georgi Dimitroff Order in gold, and has been made an honorary citizen of Sofia. He emphasises that he belongs to the heroic generation that changed Bulgaria. (‘A generation which – I think we gave what we could. And we received all that was possible.’). After 9 September 1944, when the camps were dissolved and the victims of forced labour returned to their homes, their life courses took different paths. Most of those who had participated in anti-fascist resistance, members of the BCP or the YWA, became part of the party and state elite. As left-wing resistance activists they were awarded the title ‘Active Fighter against Fascism and Capitalism’. Dr Boris Neshev is one the rare exceptions for reasons that remained unclear: he refused to speak about it. For all of them, ‘the fight’ and not ‘forced labour’ is the politically important event of their lives. In the revolutionary situation after 9 September 1944, ‘the fighters’ came to the fore – members of the partisan movement, ‘jataci’ (civilians who actively aided the partisans), political prisoners and concentration camp inmates involved in the activities of the BCP and YWA. All other forms of resistance and all forms of suffering as such were politically unimportant.

Forced Labour and the Culture of Memory The official historical discourse after 1944 marginalised the topic of forced labour in the labour camps during the war. The Communist Party and the state attached great importance to the politics of memory. The official project was to create a national, socialist, anti-fascist memory culture that glorified the heroes (partisans, ‘jataci’, concentration camp prisoners) – at the expense of excluding everybody else. As already mentioned, this policy found its expression in the formal recognition of individuals as active fighters and in the privileges connected to this; it lay behind the creation of the myth of the partisans, culminating in the campaign ‘The People’s Memory Speaks’. The campaign of collecting and writing down memories and autobiographical stories was initiated by a March 1972

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resolution of the Central Committee of the BCP ‘on further improving and publishing memory literature [and] increasing its influence on patriotic and internationalist education’.8 The result was the recording of more than 9,000 autobiographical accounts of ‘fighters’; there developed a canon of oral and written memories of the anti-fascist fight. Elements of this socialist master narrative can be traced in our interviews. The memories we recorded also reveal the influence of current public discussions. Since 1989, people have begun to ‘remember’ the fate of the Bulgarian Jews during the period of the Second World War. Before that (during the socialist period) the research some historians carried out on this subject found little public resonance; in keeping with the dominant ideology, the prevailing thesis was that the BCP, in particular its Secretary General Teodor Shivkov, was primarily responsible for saving the Bulgarian Jews. In the past few years, however, a number of studies and volumes of documents have been published, and a new memory culture has developed around the rescue of the Bulgarian Jews.9 Moreover, there have been different interpretations of the events: according to some, Tsar Boris III was mainly responsible for saving the Jews, while according to others it was the deputy chairman of the people’s assembly, Dimitar Peshev, the Bulgarian parliament, the democratic opposition, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church or the public. This discourse also makes reference to forced labour during the war. During the past few years an Israeli foundation has made payments to the victims of forced labour in Bulgarian camps. They have thus been recognised as victims of the war, and at the same time the past has been acknowledged, something that is brought to bear in their memories of forced labour. The act of recognition and the show of interest in their experience (on the part of the Hebrew Historical Museum, and on our part in the course of the project) give new significance to this period in their lives. As David Cohen (Koen) said in our initial conversation: ‘We were not conscious of becoming heroes of history.’ It is surprising that the first meeting of former camp prisoners was held as late as 2004, on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the closure of the Jewish labour camps. The witnesses were confronted with several interpretations of the events by the mass media and the history books. For example, several of our interviewees expressed their disapproval of the thesis that Tsar Boris had come up with the idea of labour camps in order to save the Bulgarian Jews from deportation. The Jews and the two survivors of German concentration camps received compensation; they have relationships to the museums (the Hebrew one in Sofia and/or that of Buchenwald), participate in memorial celebrations and feel they belong to a community – that of the victims of war and Nazism. Others who experienced the Bulgarian labour camps

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feel rejected by Bulgarian society today. This feeling is increased by the devaluation of the title ‘Active Fighter against Fascism and Capitalism’ in the new political context and by the withdrawal of all the privileges connected to it. In this sense, the former camp inmates (‘fighters’) feel they are today’s victims. Like recognition, the denial or refusal of recognition influences the construction of collective identities and collective memories. During the postsocialist period a process of reconstructing memory can be observed in Bulgaria that questions some of the national antifascist myths created during the period of socialism. After 1989 people started to remember things that had been taboo up to then, such as the terror after 9 September 1944 and the concentration camps of 1944– 1959, tellingly called ‘homes for labour and reeducation’. In parallel with the organisations of anti-fascists, those who were repressed by the Communist system now have their own organisations as well. The dispute between the two groups of victims (of fascism and communism) in the public sphere is irreconcilable. This conflict of memories demonstrates the fragmentation of the monolithic historical narrative and of the national memory into group memories10 and thus also the legitimate existence of different versions of history. It is remarkable that despite the pluralisation of memory the topic of forced labour during the period of the Second World War continues to be excluded from Bulgarian public discourse, except as a subtheme in the fate of the Bulgarian Jews. What is not asked is the question about recognition (and compensation) of the victims of this labour in Bulgarian labour and concentration camps. This is probably because the notions of freedom, force and labour inherited from the socialist period have yet to be confronted critically.

LIST OF INTERVIEWEES Aron Behar (b. 1919) Boris Angelakov (b. 1912) Boris Nešev (b. 1922) Christo Dec=ev (b. 1928) David Cohen (Koen) (b. 1919) Josif Kjuc=ukov (b. 1922) Karl Kandulkov (b. 1920) Minc=o Todorov (b. 1922) Poli Pinkas (b. 1921)

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NOTES 1. David Koen, Ocelyavaneto (Sofia 1995), 12–18; Vladimir Paunovski and Josif Iliel, The Jews in Bulgaria between the Holocaust and the Rescue (Sofia 2000), 20–26. 2. One interesting detail of the Bulgarian history of labour corps is the fact that they were not first created in the Second World War. Their creation was connected to the ‘obligatory labour service’ scheme that was introduced by the left-wing government of the agrarian-reformist People’s Union after the end of the First World War (1920). The period of obligatory labour service was twelve months for young men and six months for women. Their labour was used primarily for building roads, railroad lines and public buildings, as well as in mines, factories and similar projects. Later the conditions of obligatory labour service were relaxed, and the so-called labour corps were established. Young men from ethnic minorities – Turks and gypsies – as well as politically ‘unreliable elements’ were recruited to these rather than to the regular army. 3. Paunovski and Iliel, The Jews in Bulgaria, 41–43; David Koen, ‘Evreyskite trudovi lageri v Bulgaria’, Evreyski vesti no. 18, 24 September 2004, 8. 4. Ivan Peykov et al. (eds), C+ervenite c=ernokapci (Sofia 2001). 5. Dimitar Doc=ev, Monarchofaschizma srestu narodnata suprotiva (Sofia 1983); Žak Natan, Byahme v Eniköy (Sofia 1967). 6. Elena Marushiakova and Vesselin Popov, ‘How To Research Past Experiences Of Suffering’, in Johannes-Dieter Steinert and Inge Weber-Newth (eds), Beyond Camps and Forced Labour: Current International Research on Survivors of Nazi Persecution (London and Osnabrück 2008). 7. The subproject ‘Bulgaria’ was carried out at the Ethnographic Institute and Museum at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS) in 2005–2006. Dr Ana Luleva, Dr Evgenia Troeva-Grigorova, Dr Tsvetana Bonceva, Julina Dadova (The Hebrew Historical Museum – Sofia), and Dr Birgit Igla (translator) contributed to the work. 8. Yordan Krastev (ed.), Die Volkserinnerung erzählt (Sofia 1986), 19. 9. Nir Baruh, Otkupat: Zar Boris i spasenieto na bulgarskite evrei (Sofia 2001); Koen, Ocelyavaneto; Mihael Bar-Zoar, Izvan hvatkata na Hitler (Sofia 1999); Paunovski and Iliel, The Jews in Bulgaria. 10. Ana Luleva, ‘Pamet za socializma i avtobiografic=no razkazvane’, in Dragan Radojicic; Zorica Divac (eds), Svakodnevna kultura u postsocijalistic=kom periodu u Srbiji i Bugarskoj (Belgrade 2006), 173–185. See as well Barbara Misztal, ‘The Sacralization of Memory’, European Journal of Social Theory 7(1) (2004): 67–84. On Germany see Alexander von Plato, ‘Opferkonkurrenten? Die Verfolgten des NS-Regimes und der sowjetischen Besatzungsmacht im Kalten Krieg und in der Entspannungszeit’, in Elisabeth Domansky and Harald Welzer (eds), Eine offene Geschichte: Zur kommunikativen Tradierung der nationalsozialistischen Vergangenheit (Tübingen 1999), 74–92.

 15 

LITHUANIA 1941–1944 Slave and Forced Labourers Remember

Rose Lerer Cohen

In 2006 we interviewed eight survivors who had been forced and slave labourers for the Third Reich between 1941 and 1945; the interviews took place in Lithuania. The sample consisted of three Jews (two women and one man), one Roma woman and four non-Jewish Lithuanians (two men and two women). This chapter focuses on a range of aspects relating to the historical background, memory and commemoration, emigration and reintegration and our own observations and interpretations.

Historical Background The earliest written mention of Lithuania is in the Annales Quedlinburgenses of 1009, and the first Lithuanian state was established by the Grand Duke Mindaugas in 1230. Lithuania reached its height under the Grand Duke Vytautas the Great, who ruled from 1392 to 1430. In the Union of Lublin in 1569, the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom was formally merged into a commonwealth headed by a monarch. At the end of the eighteenth century the Lithuanian-Polish union came under threat from Prussia, Austria and Russia. After the defeat of Russia and Germany in the First World War, the Lithuanian state was reestablished in 1918. Trade and industry flourished. But beginning in 1919, following heavy fighting between Poland, Russia Notes for this chapter begin on page 210.

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and Lithuania, Poland annexed Vilnius, forcing Lithuania to transfer its capital to Kaunas. On 23 August 1939, Hitler and Stalin signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression treaty. Under the treaty’s ‘secret protocol’, Lithuania became the only Baltic state under German hegemony because it had belonged to Prussia under the previous partition of Poland. Later, on 28 September, the German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty and its secret protocol placed Lithuania under Soviet hegemony like the other Baltic states. The Soviet army took control of Lithuania on 15 June 1940, and after official annexation in early August, the provisional Lithuanian government was replaced by the Soviet People’s Commission of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic (LSSR).1 Operation Barbarossa, the surprise attack on the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany that began on 22 June 1941, set the Holocaust in Lithuania in motion. Lithuania became part of the Reich Commissariat Ostland. Following the German occupation of Lithuania approximately 30,000 Lithuanians were sent to Germany as forced labourers.

The Jewish Population Jews have lived in Lithuania since the fourteenth century and once formed a significant group in the country. The capital, Vilnius, was known as ‘Lithuania’s Jerusalem’ because of its large Jewish community. Following Operation Barbarossa the majority of the Lithuanian Jews were murdered. The implementation of the ‘final solution’ in Lithuania can be divided into three periods. The first stage was that of indiscriminate murder, as the invasion of Lithuania marked the beginning of a new phase in Nazi policy toward Jews. This was the stage of total extermination. Mass murders were carried out, the victims usually shot at the edge of open pits by the Einsatzgruppen and units of the SS, often with the active assistance of the local populations. By the end of 1941, only 43,000 of the 220–225,000 Jews of Lithuania were still alive. This number includes the Jews of the Vilnius area, which in 1941 was part of Lithuania. In November 1941 discussion began regarding the halting of indiscriminate killing in Lithuania. This was an outcome of high-level discussion within the Nazi administration about whether to wipe out Lithuanian Jewry or spare those who were employed in German industrial plants, army installations and other kinds of work of use to the military. The remaining surviving 43,000 Jews in the larger towns were incarcerated in the ghettos of Siauliai, Vilnius and Kaunas, and the ghettos were sealed. The ghetto in Svencionys was liquidated.

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This second period saw a lull in the killing and an increased demand for manpower for the German war industry. On 7 November 1941 Hermann Göring promulgated an order for the utilisation of manpower in the eastern occupied territories. Following this, Rosenberg, the minister for the eastern occupied territories, issued an order on 19 December 1941 making labour service compulsory for all persons aged eighteen to fortyfive. The plan for manpower utilisation was fully implemented starting in the spring of 1942, when it became clear to the leaders of the Reich that the war would last longer than anticipated. Orders were published to draft 30,000 Lithuanians to work in the war industries in Germany. In Lithuania, in the ghettos of Siauliai, Vilnius and Kaunas, Jewish labourers were forced to work in peat cutting, tree felling and seasonal agricultural labour. Large workshops were also opened in the ghettos using Jewish forced labourers from the ghettos. Jewish forced labourers from the ghettos were also deployed in factories and establishments outside the ghetto. The number of workers rose steadily as women and youths aged sixteen were enlisted to work. The third phase of the implementation of the ‘final solution’ in Lithuania began in August 1943 and continued to July 1944, when Himmler ordered the liquidation of the ghettos. The deterioration of the military situation in the second half of 1943, the lifting of the siege of Leningrad, the military threat in Ostland, and the urgent need for manpower in Estonia were among the factors leading to the promulgation of the order and its timing. The practical implication was the transfer of the ghetto inmates from Lithuania to camps in Estonia and Latvia. However, the Civil Administration of Ostland had no desire to hand over Jewish workers to the camps and set up small concentration camps on the sites of the former ghettos. The products of Jewish labour were a significant source of income to and helped to consolidate the position of the civilian administration, especially after the liquidation of the ghettos in the eastern regions. Following Himmler’s order to liquidate the ghettos of Lithuania, the Vilnius ghetto was closed on 23 September 1943. Those who were not deported to Estonia and Latvia were transported to Majdanek, apart from some who were murdered in Ponar, a forest outside Vilnius. The Jews from Kaunas and Siauliai were deported by train, and some 3,000 were sent by boat to the Stutthof concentration camp. A large number of the women remained in Stutthof, which served as a transit camp for Lithuanian men. Women with children and the elderly were sent directly to Auschwitz and murdered there. The men and some women were transferred to Landsberg, a subcamp of Dachau, Dachau itself, Buchenwald and Dora-Mittelbau, Mauthausen, Natzweiler, Neuengamme, Ravensbrück, Tilsit (non-Jews) and also Flossenbürg. Those who worked at

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Dora contributed to the production of the V2 rocket. In Natzweiler they worked in oil shale. The women who remained in Stutthof worked in the factories surrounding the camp. AEG, for instance, had a very large factory there. Two testimonies document the experiences of the Jewish population: Shabsai Holem, according to his passport, was born in Kaunas (Lithuania) in 1925, but his birth certificate shows that he was born in 1926 and his name was Elija or Ilya. He took on the birth year of his older brother Shabsai, who was killed by the Nazis in 1941 in Kaunas IX Fort.2 His parents were originally from Vilnius but moved to Kaunas in 1920 as the economic situation in Vilnius was extremely difficult. He had a sister who died when she was very young. His father was a stove maker and his mother a housewife. They lived in the poorer area of Kaunas, and life was extremely difficult. On 22 June 1941 he was in secondary school; the outbreak of war left him unable to complete his schooling. In 1941 the Germans seized him together with his father and brother and brought them to the Kaunas Forts. He was released with his father but never saw his brother again. In August 1941 he was forced into the ghetto with his mother and aunt. In the ghetto he worked in the workshops or was forced to work at the airport. He worked together with his father. In 1943 the family was moved to a camp in Sanciai (a suburb of Kaunas) where they worked in construction. In the summer of 1944 the family was deported to the Stutthof concentration camp, where he and his father were separated from his mother and aunt. He never saw his mother again, but his aunt survived. He was deported with his father to Landsberg, a satellite camp of Dachau, where they built an underground factory. In April-May of 1945 the camp was liquidated and they were taken to the mountains, where liberation came. Prior to deportation he and his father promised one another that if they survived the war, they would return to Kaunas. Shabsai did not want to fulfil this promise, but his father, who had survived, wanted to go back. They returned to Kaunas in 1946, but soon afterwards went to Vilnius, where he lives to the present day. He married only in 1995 and is a member of the Jewish Community of Lithuania and of the Society of Ghetto Prisoners. Recently he visited Dachau to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the liquidation. Eta Cukerman (nee Chernova) was born to a religious family in 1928 in Smorgonj. They lived in Di Karke, a suburb of Smorgonj. Her father was the rabbi of Di Karke and her mother was a housewife. She had six brothers and sisters, all older than she. During this period, the area of Smorgonj was part of Belarus (USSR). At the end of June 1941 Smorgonj was occupied by Nazis. The Jews of the area were herded into two ghettos, one in Smorgonj and one in

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Di Karke. In 1942, the Di Karke ghetto where Eta and her family were incarcerated was liquidated and its inmates were sent to the Smorgonj ghetto. Later that same year the Smorgonj ghetto was liquidated, and from July 1942 till April 1943 the Cukerman family were prisoners in the ghetto in Oshmyany (Belarus). In April of 1943 a group of Oshmyany ghetto prisoners, among them the Cukerman family, were sent to a labour camp at Zhezhmariai (Lithuania) to build a road between Vilnius and Kaunas. After the building works were finished, all the Zhezhmariai inmates were sent to the Kaunas ghetto, where the Cukermans remained until its liquidation. While in the ghetto, Eta and her sister Masha worked in a rubber goods factory. When the Kaunas ghetto was liquidated the Cukerman family was separated; her father was transported to Auschwitz. Eta and her mother and sister were deported to Stutthof and worked in heavy building works in one of its subcamps. She and her sister survived and returned to their native town of Smorgonj. Having learned there that the family members who had survived were in Vilnius, she was reunited with her family. She resumed and completed her education and married. Eta Cukerman and Shabsai Holem were not the only Jewish interviewees who resumed their lives after the war. Upon returning to Lithuania, a number of them continued their education. The survivors married and had families and are a part of the postwar Jewish community, which includes Lithuanian Jews who returned after the war and Russian Jews who settled there after 1945. The majority of the Jewish population today lives in Vilnius, with smaller Jewish communities in Kaunas, Klaipeda and Siauliai. They are well integrated into Lithuanian society. Memory and commemoration of the Nazi persecution has become an integral part of their lives and is very important to them.

The Roma Population It is thought that the Roma first arrived in Lithuania at the end of fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. They were nomadic until the Second World War. Some of them worked as blacksmiths or sold horses. As early as 1557 the first anti-gypsy laws were introduced in Lithuania, ordering that Roma be expelled and threatening sanctions against anyone who harboured Roma on their lands. For the German occupiers in wartime Lithuania, gypsies constituted an undesirable element that was to be annihilated. They were regarded as both useless and dangerous, and their fate was to be similar to that of the Jews. In particular, the Lithuanian Roma who lacked a permanent place of residence were considered anti-social, politically unreliable and

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socially useless elements and, as such, were to be isolated from society. A typical example of the German policy towards the Roma in Lithuania is the following statement from a document on ‘The Roma Problem’, currently in the Lithuanian State Archives. It was issued by Jedicke, Major General (Police) and SS Gruppenfuehrer, on 12 January 1942: ‘The Reichskommissar has resolved that nomadic Roma, because they spread contagious diseases, especially spotted fever, and in addition represent an unreliable element, refusing to follow the orders of the German authorities and unwilling to occupy themselves with productive work, must be treated as Jews. I request of you that the necessary measures be taken in every case.’3 Active repression against the Roma was initiated after the mass shooting of Jews had already taken place, though there were villages near the German border where Roma were shot during the first weeks of the war. Most of the Roma were executed at the Pravieniskes camp. It has now been determined that in one action alone, fifty Roma – small children and old people – were gunned down as unfit for physical work. There were also killing places in the Salcininkai region and the Kirtimai district of Vilnius. The killing of the Roma took place at Fort IX in Kaunas and Paneri as well. An estimated total of 500 Roma were killed during the Nazi occupation of Lithuania. The greatest responsibility for the persecution, deportation and mass annihilation of the Roma people (the gypsies) falls on the National Socialist occupation regime in Lithuania, above all on the SS and SD. But the Roma were arrested, gathered at detention points and escorted by Lithuanian auxiliary police. Mass arrests began in the summer and fall of 1942. The Roma to be deported were lodged temporarily at police detention cells or prisons, and then sent to the Pravieniskes labour camp, which served as a distribution point. In the course of the war approximately a thousand Roma were deported from Lithuania to Germany and occupied France. They were transported to work in the Stutthof and Buchenwald concentration camps, the Brandenburg airplane factory in Germany and the Boiling, Faring and Versailles camps in France. The gypsies arrested around December 1942 were taken into police custody and then transferred to wooden barracks or concentration camps situated near military factories. Towards the end of the war some of the Roma were sent to extermination camps in occupied Europe. The following official report illustrates how the Reichskommisar’s anti-Roma order of 12 January 1942 was now put into effect: ‘A request has been received from the Head of the Employment Office to transfer all Roma in the Zarasai District and their family members … to the Dugailiai concentration camp with all their property.’4 The story of Katerina Badganovitch (nee Taracinska) is characteristic of the experiences of the Roma community. She was born in 1933 in

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Vilnius, which belonged to Poland between the two world wars. She had two brothers and five sisters. The entire family, her parents as well as her brothers and sisters, are uneducated, having never attended school. They lived under very poor conditions. Her parents used to go begging. Under Soviet rule the family was not persecuted or repressed. Following the German occupation, the Roma community was forced to work. The family moved to find work in Grigiskes, a town outside Vilnius, as they knew that the Germans were killing families that were out of work. In 1942 she and her sister began to work in the paper-cellulose production factory in Grigiskes. The factory was guarded by Germans, but inside it they could move freely. Katerina remembers that some high-ranking German official used to control the situation at the factory and camp. Her father delivered timber by horse-drawn cart. They lived outside the town in a tent camp near the woods. Her mother did not work. In this case, it appears that the family took up work that they otherwise would not have done to avoid worse treatment. After the war the Soviet regime offered the family permanent settlement facilities, but they were devoted to their customs and preferred to stay outside the city to have the possibility to move around. During the Soviet period they began begging again. In 1953 Katerina married. She has two sons, two daughters and many grandchildren. In 1959 her husband was killed in an accident; he is buried at the Rasu cemetery in Vilnius. After a fire destroyed the temporary accommodation in the Roma area of Vilnius’s Kirtimai district where she lived, she received a flat, a part of a house where she lives to this day. She raised her children in very poor conditions but was able to get support from local people. Today she is very ill and survives on a small pension. Her grandparents, five of her grandfather’s brothers and two of her own brothers were murdered by the Nazis in Pabrade. Today, approximately 790 Roma live in Vilnius and its vicinity. About 450 of them live in the Roma settlement in the Kirtimai district, where they have lived for over sixty years, while others are scattered throughout Vilnius in apartments or private houses. It is estimated that there are approximately sixty living survivors of the persecution of the Lithuanian Roma that took place under the German occupation. Because of the small number of Roma in Lithuania, their problems have not acquired a high degree of public urgency.

The Non-Jewish and Non-Roma Victims According to the report of the International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithu-

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ania established in 1998 by then President Adamkus, ‘repression by the occupation authorities of the non-Jewish and non- Roma local population (in particular ethnic Lithuanians) was relatively limited in nature’. The number of non-Jewish people who perished during the Nazi occupation (1941–1944) has been exaggerated in the historiography to date. The resistance of the Red Army and alleged attacks by the local people against the German army in June 1941 caused or were a pretext for the murder of up to 500 civilians perpetrated by German soldiers in Ablinga, Alytus and other locations. The largest category of non-Jewish victims of the Nazi occupation consisted of 2,000–3,000 Soviet party activists (Communists, members of the Komsomol, Soviet officials and farmers who were given land by the Soviet authorities). In response to subversion and sabotage by the Soviet partisans, the occupiers, applying the principle of ‘collective responsibility’, burnt fifteen villages and slaughtered several hundred civilians, including the residents of the village of Pirciupiai, who were burnt alive. As punishment for resistance and support of the Polish underground (Armia Krajowa) the Nazis and their local collaborators killed about 1,000 Polish civilians. Furthermore, the occupation authorities killed mentally disabled people and people with incurable diseases. But forced labour and its consequences were a source of wartime trauma in its own right for this group of Lithuanians. Two testimonies document the experiences of the non-Jewish and non-Roma victims. Regina Stanislava Simkuniene (nee Livaite) was born in 1928 in Sanciai, Kaunas, Republic of Lithuania. On the day of 5 January 1944 she went to the cinema, and after the film ended the Germans surrounded the cinema, took all the people captive and delivered them to the Gestapo. They were kept there for a few days and after selection, and then she and about forty other young people were transported from one point to another with stops on the way for about two months. At many of the stopping points they had to dig pits. Eventually they arrived at the camp in Pillau (today the Baltijsk-Kaliningrad area) in Eastern Prussia. There was a special labour camp there; the men and boys were separated from woman and children. She lived in a barracks together with some 400 women and children. The conditions were very bad. There were no toilets and no facilities for bathing and cleaning. The work was very hard, digging in the fields. On the morning of 13 April 1944 the prisoners realised that the Germans had left the camp, and on the same day a few Soviet soldiers came in. After liberation Regina and five other girls went for a walk and came to a former Lithuanian-German border at Kybartai where the Soviets had established a checkpoint for citizens of the USSR. The soldiers called them names, for instance, ‘German-lovers’. Regina described cases of rape and violence. After being questioned, Regina was allowed to go to

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Kaunas. Having arrived in Kaunas in July 1945, she met her mother on the street in Sanciai. Her parents had had no information about her during the course of the war. She married in 1946 and has two children. She had to work and was not able to study. She was not harassed or imprisoned by the Soviet authorities for ‘betrayal of the fatherland’. Her husband and son are deceased, and she lives with her daughter’s family in Sanciai, where she was born. Georgij Glushko was born into a family of farmers on 3 May 1926 in the village of Sokirinci (today Ukraine) in the Sribne region of the Chernigov oblast. His parents separated soon after his birth. His father moved away and remarried, and was subsequently arrested and imprisoned for socalled anti-Soviet activities; he died in the Gulag in 1942. Because there was no communication or support from his father during his childhood, Georgij Glushko had to start working at a very young age. In 1940, his mother, Anna Glushko, took ill and died, leaving him orphaned. The local authorities sent him to local collective farm, ‘Chipayev’, which took care of him. After seven years of studies he graduated from the Sokirensk secondary school and entered the agricultural college of Sokirensk. In 1942, his studies were interrupted by the German occupation when he was sent to Germany to work, together with a group of young people from the Srebiyansk region of the Chernigov oblast. At first he was in a camp near the town of Bydgoscz (formerly Bromberg); from there he was sent to dig anti-tank trenches. It was difficult for him, a teenager, to do this hard work. The camp was strictly guarded by the Germans, but he remembers some of the employers were local Poles who used to give them bread and other food, thus helping them to survive. He worked in this camp for fifteen months, and his health was badly affected as he reached the limits of his strength. Following this period, he was among twenty teenagers selected to work on farms. At first he worked on a large estate guarded by German soldiers. In the winter of 1943 he began to work on the farm of a local farmer. Two Poles, a man and woman, also worked on this farm. Local police controlled his presence as well as that of the of the farmer’s family. In December 1944 he escaped from the farm with the Polish man, and they hid with local Poles and in the woods. He was liberated by Soviet troops in January 1945. After being screened by the Soviet security agency, he joined the Soviet army and ended the war in Berlin. He served in the army of the USSR from May 1945 to November 1950. Following his army service, he returned to his native village of Sokirensk in 1950 and learned to drive, thus acquiring an occupation. He began working on the construction site of the Volga-Don canal and worked in different places in the USSR building electric power stations. He ended his career in Lithuania, where he decided to settle after 1991.

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This group of victims settled down after their forced labour experiences, and a number of them continued their education after the war. They all married and had families. Commemoration and memory has become an integral part of their lives.

Memory and Commemoration In the summer of 1944, while the Second World War was still raging, the first and for many years the only Jewish museum in the Soviet Union was established in Vilnius. Jewish survivors who had returned to the city founded the museum shortly after the withdrawal of Nazi troops. Its activities were not typical for a museum. Apart from collecting and preserving elements of the Jewish cultural heritage, the museum also kept a list of the addresses of returning Jewish survivors. The museum received numerous letters from the Soviet Union and from abroad enquiring about relatives and acquaintances, most of whom were victims of the war. The museum became the spiritual and cultural centre for Vilnius Jews, where all problems facing the community were discussed. However, the Jewish Museum was closed by Soviet authorities in 1948, because throughout the Soviet period the existence of a Jewish museum or any Jewish institution in Soviet Lithuania was politically unacceptable. Only the Paneriai and Kaunas Fort IX memorials made vague reference to the Jews as victims of the Holocaust. Jewish history and heritage seemed doomed to total obliteration. The situation changed with the perestroika reforms in the late 1980s. On 6 September 1989, the government of Soviet Lithuania passed Resolution No. 177p, which permitted the reopening of the Jewish Museum after fifty years of non-existence. Governmental Resolution No. 56p, dated 13 February 1991, authorised the return of most of the artefacts from storage to the re-established Jewish State Museum of Lithuania. In 1998 President Adamkus established the International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania, which was committed to commemorating the Holocaust, combating anti-Semitism and bringing Nazi war criminals and collaborators to justice. This international commission investigated the fate of Jews, Roma and other victims. At the National Memorial Day for Holocaust Victims ceremony on 23 September 1999 (the anniversary of the liquidation of the Vilnius ghetto), and in an April 2000 speech to the Seimas (Lithuanian parliament), President Adamkus reaffirmed Lithuania’s commitment to bringing war criminals to justice and to combating all forms of anti-Semitism. Prime Minister Brazauskas addressed the 2001 Litvak Congress, emphasising

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that the voice of the Jewish community would be heard and answered. The Seimas dedicated its September 2001 session to commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the beginning of the Holocaust in Lithuania.

Observations The aim of the Nazi occupiers of Lithuania was to make the country ‘Judenfrei’ – to cleanse Lithuania of its Jews through a process of mass murder. On closer examination of the Jewish forced labour experience in Lithuania, it could be concluded that the fate of the Jews in Lithuania and their usefulness for work were inextricably linked. Decisions made regarding the fate of the Jews were guided by the need for labour. This was an important factor in the survival of the prisoners. Those who were fit for work were not put to death, but useless individuals such as women and children were murdered. The destinations of deportees were influenced by the labour needs of the Wehrmacht. The movements of the prisoners described by the interviewees illustrate this fact. It was also the occupiers’ intention to annihilate the Roma population. Unlike the Jews, the Roma were seen as useless members of the society, and their work capacity was not highly esteemed. This did not prevent their deportations to areas where their labour was necessary. As with the Jews, a large number of those Roma who were unfit for work were murdered. The Roma were incarcerated in makeshift camps. The non-Jewish and non-Roma victims were seized for work as deemed necessary. They too were deported to where labour was needed. Their living conditions were extremely difficult, but they were not incarcerated in ghettos and concentration camps as in the case of the Jews, where the aim was annihilation. The varied sample of interviewees included in this project provides overview of a cross-section of the present-day population of Lithuania. It not only illustrates the way in which the Jews, Roma and other victims were affected by the German occupation between the years 1941 and 1945 and their use in forced and slave labour, but also opens up avenues for further research. The different population groups could be compared on a number of axes relating to narrative, memory and commemoration, and their experiences following their slave labour ordeals. We could extend the comparison to a study of the impact of differing cultural contexts on the survivors by comparing Eastern European survivors who later emigrated to the West with those who remained in the East. The interviews also invite an interdisciplinary approach to their analysis, using the methods of psychology, sociology, history and/or anthropology, and thus provide opportunities for a range of new research projects.

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NOTES 1. Rose Lerer Cohen and Saul Issroff, The Holocaust in Lithuania 1941–1945: A Book of Remembrance (Jerusalem 2002). 2. The Kaunas IX Fort is located on the northwest outskirts of the town of Kaunas, and is one of a series of forts built by the Russians. Between 1941 and 1944 the Nazis murdered about 50,000 people in the Kaunas IX Fort. These included 30,000 prisoners from the Kaunas ghetto and 10,000 Jews from France, Germany and Czechoslovakia. 3. Lithuanian State Central Archives (LCVA), f.659 ap.1, b.1, 1.22. 4. LCVA, f.11206 ap. 1. b. 56, 1.189.

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BELARUSIAN FORCED LABOURERS Types and Recruitment Methods

Alexander Dalhouski

Like German workers, foreign workers ‘of the brain and the fist’ will provide labour for the Greater German Reich, helping to rebuild Europe and fighting for the conditions essential for a positive future and the welfare of the people within Europe. Foreign workers must always be conscious of this task and distinction. Their employment, performance and attitude will be based on this concept. —General Plenipotentiary for Labour Allocation Foreword from the Foreign Labourers’ Work Book

Introduction

T

he study of forced labour in Belarus during the Second World War gives rise to various research-related problems.1 The central problem is that historians in both Western and Eastern Europe often base their work on the German administrative divisions defined during the occupation period 1941–44 and therefore examine only the General Commissariat (GC) White Ruthenia. The other parts of the country, which were either occupied by the military or belonged to the Reich Commissariat (RC) of Ukraine, the GC of Lithuania or Bialystok district in East Prussia, are rarely mentioned. The result of this approach is that the GC White Ruthenia is regarded as representative of all Belarusian regions, which is Notes for this chapter begin on page 223.

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clearly erroneous.2 To date, there has been no attempt to compare the two major types of administration – military administration (such as the rear zone of Heeresgruppe Mitte, Army Group Centre) and civil administration (such as the GC White Ruthenia). A further problem is that many studies do little justice to the forced labourers working in Belarus for the military and civil administrations, and instead concentrate exclusively on the so-called Ostarbeiter. The oral history project Documentation of Life Stories of Former Forced and Slave Labourers provides a basis for resolving these research issues. In the context of this project, forty life story interviews were held in different parts of Belarus. Since, in the course of the project, only one contemporary witness was interviewed from the part of Belarus annexed to the administrative region of Bialystok and the GC of Lithuania during the Second World War, and since the southern regions of Belarus were also under the civil administration of the RC Ukraine, I will focus on the two principal administrative units: the GC White Ruthenia and the rear zone of the Army Group Centre. This study focuses on forced labourers who were deployed locally and on the methods used by the German authorities in the military and civil administrations to recruit Ostarbeiter to work in the German Reich. It does not include details of their transportation or living conditions, as these experiences have been the subject of several recent studies.3 By analysing the interviews and numerous sources compiled during the project, the following core questions can be addressed. How did the military and civil authorities implement their labour policy? What were the typical methods deployed by the two types of administration? And given recent findings, is it possible to distinguish between different types of forced labour?

Forced Labour in the Rear Zone of Army Group Centre At the beginning of July 1941, the Wehrmacht established the rear zone of Army Group Centre in the eastern half of Belarus. Covering 107,550 km² in mid 1943, it accounted for around half of the entire Belarusian territory.4 Until the beginning of July 1943, the commander-in-chief of the rear zone was General Max von Schenkendorf. His successor, who held the position until the Germans retreated in the autumn of 1943, was General Ludwig Kübler. Reporting to the commander-in-chief of Army Group Centre, von Schenkendorf commanded the rear zone with the support of security divisions and a network of field headquarters, town headquarters and some garrison headquarters.5 The Wirtschaftsstab Ost (Economic

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Staff East)6 under the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW, Armed Forces High Command) was responsible for economic administration in the rear zone. It established the Wirtschaftsinspektion Mitte (Economic Inspectorate Centre) for the zone. This economic inspectorate was divided into Wirtschaftskommandos (economic detachments), which in 1942 comprised three to five employment offices, each of which had a maximum of one sub-office. These offices were staffed by personnel from the German Labour Administration, which from 1942 onwards was under the management of Fritz Sauckel, the General Plenipotentiary for Labour Allocation.7

The Reich Commissariat Ostland (Baltic States, Belarus and Eastern Poland) and the Rear Zone of Army Group Centre on 1 May 1942 Colonel Heinz Heinrich Klose was one of the officers who worked in the Economic Inspectorate. Born in Basel in 1898, he led the economic detachment in Orscha from November 1941 to January 1943, when he took over Economic Detachment 208 in Bobruisk. At the same time, he was in charge of the economic affairs of the 9th Army. The staff of the economic detachment, which handled economic affairs, was under the command of both the 9th Army and the Economic Inspectorate Centre headquartered in Borissow, later Minsk. Clearly, there were close links between army and economic units. The staff of Economic Detachment 208 passed on the orders of the 9th Army and Economic Inspectorate Centre to the eight units of the detachment, which included agriculture, general economic affairs, trade, mineral oils and allocation of manpower, and monitored their execution.8 The initial objectives of establishing the rear zone were to supply provisions to the front, exploit the local economy and procure labour for local deployment. From late 1941 to early 1942, there was another aim: to mobilise labour for the Reich. We conducted nine life history interviews with former forced labourers who had been recruited in the rear zone of Army Group Centre and transported to the German Reich. Only two of these worked exclusively for the Wehrmacht. The focus of the project was thus on interviewing civilians who had worked in the Reich, rather than those who had laboured under the military administration in Belarus. The subject of local labour deployment was discussed in relatively few of the interviews. Yet the forced labourers from Belarus who were transported to work in the Reich constituted only a third of the total number of Belarusian forced labourers. The project participants therefore represent a ‘forced labour elite’ that is unrepresentative of the overall situation of Belarusian forced labourers.

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The Reich Commissariat Ostland, subject to mandatory exit permits, on 1 May 1942.

Jewish Slave Labourers The first type of forced labour came into being during the initial months of the war, before the first Ostarbeiter decrees.9 This primarily affected the Jewish population, which was rounded up in 1941 and subjected to selec-

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tion procedures. Jewish forced labourers were imprisoned in ghettos, and their family members were murdered.10 Brutal crimes were committed in the rear zone of Army Group Centre. Wladimir Semenowitsch Swerdlow, who was just ten years old in 1941, told of how his parents sent him to the sanatorium near Krynki, in the district of Ossipowitschi, a few days before war broke out. In August, 140 Jewish children were singled out from the rest. In September and early October, these children were forced to do agricultural work in a nearby field. In the winter of 1941–42, more than 50 children died of starvation, illness and the cold. In April 1942, 82 Jewish children, including 15 aged between one and three, were taken into the forest to be shot. On the way, Wladimir managed to escape.11 The Belarusian Roma also had to endure persecution, forced labour and extermination.

Forced Labourers Deployed Locally The Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) were at the mercy of army officers, who would let them die of starvation and illness. Those who were physically able to work had a small chance of survival.12 Members of the Belarusian civilian population were also recruited by Wehrmacht units for forced labour.13 These civilians performed tasks such as building and maintaining roads and clearing snow and rubble. Each Wehrmacht office and unit had its own plumbers, electricians, stokers, metalworkers, stove fitters, bricklayers and so on.14 It should be stressed that unemployment was high during this period (summer 1941 to winter 1942) and that civilians very often saw forced labour as a chance of survival. By autumn 1942, the labour situation had changed dramatically, with a ‘dire shortage’ of ‘human beings’ being declared,15 a state of affairs that the socalled ‘Sauckel Commissions’ had helped to create. These commissions wanted the best labourers to work for the Reich, but the Wehrmacht units were reluctant to let their workers go. Unfortunately, only a few contemporary witnesses were found who were required to do forced labour in the rear zone in 1941–42 or who were shipped off from this area to the Reich. Most of the interviewees in the project were not called up for forced labour until early 1943. As the war proceeded, this type of forced labourer became prevalent in the rear army zone, particularly during the German retreat in 1943–44. At the end of 1943, the deployment of forced labourers for the Wehrmacht in Army Group Centre was regulated by a single authority for the first time. The Zivilarbeitsdienstabteilungen (ZADA, civil labour service departments) were formed, in which civilians were employed for tasks such as construction of field positions, road construction, felling and peat extraction. The forced labourers were arrested by members of

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the Wehrmacht and guarded. The object of this campaign was to seize and lock up any civilians who were fit for work and to use them for forced labour for the Wehrmacht.16 In October 1943, for instance, sixteen-year-old Wladimir Parfirewitsch Schakutin and his friends were arrested at his neighbours’ house by a Wehrmacht officer and two soldiers, and taken to the camp at Orechi, where they were forced to work on defensive fortifications at night. There was also a burial detachment there, to which Wladimir was seconded for a while. At the beginning of 1944, the inmates of the camp were taken to Vitebsk, where they dug trenches on the outskirts of the town. According to Wladimir, the camp was located on the territory of the 5th Railway Regiment. He reports that forced labourers from this camp were taken to the advanced front line to build field fortifications. After around three months, Wladimir was taken, along with the other civilians, to another village where he continued to dig trenches. He escaped on 22 June 1944. Thousands of civilians were recruited for forced labour in a similar way. Leonid Efimowitsch Pranota describes how in the winter of 1944, all civilians from the village of Wojewitschi were taken to Bobruisk, incarcerated in a camp and taken each day to the trench works. At that time, there were several labour camps in the area covered by Economic Detachment 208. The forestry department, for instance, had four labour camps where up to four thousand civilians worked. One camp was in Bobruisk, two were located to the northwest of the town and one was in Shlobin. The camp inmates prepared building material for the defensive zone. The civilians lived in underground shelters. There was a fence around the camp, which was guarded by the 460th and 468th security battalions. The labourers worked for nine hours a day. The conditions in the camps were particularly harsh; forced labourers lived on soup and bread twice a day.17 The establishment of civil labour service departments marked a new phase of forced labour deployment in the rear zone of Army Group Centre. Use of military force was increased. It is interesting to note, however, that such measures were implemented only by Army Group Centre.18

Ostarbeiter In Economic Inspectorate Centre as well as in the GC White Ruthenia, the recruitment of Ostarbeiter19 began in December 1941. In early 1942, Thuringian Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel held the office of the General Plenipotentiary for Labour Allocation. Sauckel was charged with solving the crisis on the labour market.20 The programmes he introduced greatly increased the number of people deported. This clearly shows that Berlin was principally responsible for seizing forced labourers for deployment in

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the Reich. However, we should not attach too much importance to this, as at that time the military organisations of the rear zone were already well experienced in recruiting forced labourers for their own purposes. Several so-called ‘pilot projects’ were drawn up with the aim of procuring labour, eliminating the unemployment that prevailed during the early years of the war and solving food supply problems. As early as summer 1942, the Economic Staff East came to the conclusion that the use of force was the only way to mobilise workers in the rear zone of Army Group Centre.21 At the beginning of November 1942, Reich Leader of the SS Heinrich Himmler gave the order to send anyone apprehended in punitive campaigns (normally in reprisal for antiGerman actions) to Germany to work. This opened up new opportunities for mobilising civilians. Soon the main objective of these campaigns was to round up people for labour purposes. It was not just men who were detained – their families were seized too. Before long, they had amassed a huge number of civilians who were transported to the Reich because they were allegedly ‘suspected of being partisans’. At his interrogation on 10 March 1949, Colonel Klose reported that the instructions for implementing the anti-partisan operations had come from the commander of the rear zone of the 9th Army, General Bernhard. Both the security divisions and the employees of Economic Detachment 208 took part in these operations. A total of six operations were completed in the periods November-December 1943 and March-May 1944 in the area of Bobruisk, during which over 1,000 civilians were taken to the Reich as forced labourers. During this period, Army Group Centre developed many new ideas and proposals. For example, in March 1942 the Chefgruppe Arbeit (Chief Group for Work) of the Economic Inspectorate Centre began to recruit children under the age of fifteen for labour in the Reich, even though this contravened Berlin’s policy.22 And in supplement 4 to the 9 July 1943 special directive of the commander-in-chief of Army Group Centre concerning the order to deliver Ostarbeiter to the Reich, the following entry appears: ‘The commander-in-chief of the Army Group proposes that the stipulation that pregnant women be excluded from labour deployment in the Reich be removed to prevent females from evading labour in the Reich for that reason.’23 Our interview subjects had experienced two of the abovementioned types of forced labour. On 5 January 1944, Nikolaj Adamowitsch Turow, who like many others was hiding in the woods at that time, was arrested on his way to the village. In January and February 1944, he carried out forced labour first in the Oktjabrskij district in Gomel, where he built roads. Afterwards he was taken with other forced labourers to the camp in Bobruisk and from there via Wolkowysk to Recklinghausen.

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The unscrupulousness of the military administration knew no bounds. In March 1944, the 9th Army of Army Group Centre deported some 50,000 civilians – so-called ‘useless eaters’. During this operation, thousands of civilians were selected for forced labour or in the Wehrmacht. Family members, aged relatives, women with several small children and typhoid victims were singled out as being unfit for work and taken to a camp complex near Ozaritschi not far from the main German front. These camps were later liberated by Soviet troops after they had reclaimed the front.24 When relocating people for forced labour, no account was taken of family ties, as the example of Matriona Kirillowna Koschewenko shows. On 21 January 1944, following an anti-partisan operation, the forest camp near Koschewitschi where Matriona lived with her family in the last few months of the war was destroyed. Her father was shot for being a partisan, her sister was deported to the Reich and Matriona herself was taken to the children’s camp at Skoborovka. At the time, her aunt was working for the Wehrmacht as a forced labourer in Koschewitschi. This example comes from the GC White Ruthenia. Although there was intensive collaboration between the military and civil administrations during this period, it was the approach of the military administration that held sway. On analysing the recruitment methods used by Army Group Centre as revealed by the interviews, it is clear that in 1943, police raids and anti-partisan operations, often geared towards procuring labour at this time, were the dominant methods. In 1944 (or the end of 1943 in the eastern regions of Belarus), many more forced labourers were recruited as the Wehrmacht retreated.

Forced Labour in the General Commissariat White Ruthenia Both occupation and economic exploitation were characterised by the sort of chaotic conditions typical of the ‘Third Reich’, in which departments, plenipotentiaries and competing civil and military institutions were in disarray. The establishment of a civil administration in the occupied Soviet Union did not begin until relatively late, since the Wehrmacht was aiming for a purely military administration. However, Hitler decided otherwise and appointed Alfred Rosenberg as head of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories on 17 July 1941.25 Referred to as the Ostministerium, the ministry’s first task was to establish the civil administration and divide the occupied Soviet territories into Reich Commissariats. Four such Reich Commissariats were originally planned, but only the RC Ostland based in Riga and the RC Ukraine based in Rowno were actually created. The zone of Belarus that was placed under civil administration was annexed to the two Reich Commissariats,

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the larger part to the RC Ostland under Reich Commissioner Heinrich Lohse and a smaller strip in the south to the RC Ukraine. Within the Reich Commissariats, the occupied territory was divided into General Commissariats and these were subdivided into District Commissariats. The largest area of the Belarusian region was administered by General Commissioner Wilhelm Kube in the GC White Ruthenia. After Kube was attacked and killed in September 1943, he was replaced by SS Group Leader Kurt von Gottberg, who had previously been Higher SS and Police Leader in Central Russia and White Ruthenia. The GC covered an area of 60,000 km² and included the District Commissariats of Baranowitschi, Borissow, Glubokoe, Gantsewitschi, Lida, Minsk city, Minsk region, Nowogrudok, Slonim and Vilejka. At the beginning of 1944, the General Commissariat was extended to include the regions of Kobryn, Pinsk and Brest, which had previously belonged to the RC Ukraine.26 We conducted interviews with twenty former forced labourers who had either worked in the GC White Ruthenia or who were transported from this area to work in the Reich.

Jewish Slave Labourers The Jewish population in this region suffered a similarly appalling fate to that of Jews in the rear zone of Army Group Centre. Michail Gerschenowitsch Gordon told of how a ghetto was established in Mjadel in August 1941. The men, including Michail’s father and uncle, were sent to work on road construction sites each day. One day after work, the Jews were taken out of the group of workers (forced labourers from Poznan) and shot. His father, however, managed to hide among the Polish forced labourers. Afterwards, he spent four weeks in the woods and then lived briefly with relatives in Dolginowo, before returning home in September. At the end of the month, Michail started to do agricultural work with his father as instructed by the Judenrat (Jewish Council). After escaping from the ghetto in September 1942, his parents and his younger brother were killed by a German ‘punishment squad’ near the village of Kamenno in Vilejka, along with other Jewish families.

Forced Labourers Deployed Locally During the first few months of the war, when this part of Belarus was still under military administration, it was typical for forced labourers to be put to work in the local area. Civilians were used for short periods to maintain roads or clear rubble, or had to build roads. The camp at Drozdy in the Minsk region, for instance, was established at the end of June 1941. The camp inmates included POWs and civilians aged between fifteen

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and sixty, numbering around 30,000 people in total. At the end of July, some of the POWs and the civilians were used in road construction and renewal. The other POWs were transferred to POW camp Stalag 352.27 The creation of the GC White Ruthenia marked a new phase of forced labour under civil administration. From the outset, the civil administration had to ensure that the right kind of manpower was available and that work was performed on schedule. The first step was to create a network of employment offices. Initially, employment exchanges were set up in the cities, followed by the employment offices from the end of summer 1941. In early 1942, the network of employment offices was complete. In the territory under civil administration, such offices could be found in many large cities of White Ruthenia, such as Minsk, Slonim, Baranowitschi and Lida.28 Before long, the first labour camps were introduced, where civilians had to perform forced labour under the civil administration. In March 1942, for instance, a camp was established in the village of Koldytschewo, in the region of Baranowitschi, where the inmates worked on peat extraction.29 An important feature of the employment offices was that the Belarusian staff carried out most of their duties on their own initiative. The employment offices had no executive bodies. Such bodies belonged to the regional administrations under the aegis of the mayor. Under instructions to make available any labourers they received from the employment offices, the mayors arranged for the civilians to be taken to the camp, with the assistance of the Belarusian auxiliary police.30 The auxiliary police often meted out brutal treatment.31 This was confirmed by many contemporary witnesses who were recruited for forced labour in the GC White Ruthenia and in the rear zone of Army Group Centre.

Ostarbeiter The GC White Ruthenia was unique in that the civil administration tried to solve labour-related problems with the help of a local civil organisation, the White Ruthenian Selbsthilfewerk (WSW, mutual assistance organisation).32 General Commissioner Wilhelm Kube was convinced that the WSW was capable of helping to recruit civilians for labour deployment in the German Reich. Ivan Ermac=enko, head of the WSW, demanded that each administrative region draw up a list of at least 120 people. On 21 November 1942, Ermac=enko sent two general notifications to all branches of the WSW. One of these messages instructed the branches to round up civilians for labour deployment in the German Reich. The quotas were soon increased to 1,000. WSW employees worked with the police to recruit the labourers.33 In March 1943, the final reports from the regional leaders were sent to the head of the WSW in Minsk. They stated that the forced labourer quotas could not be met.

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Analysis of the interviews with the contemporary witnesses who were mobilised in the GC White Ruthenia and deported to the German Reich for forced labour purposes reveals that from 1943 to early 1944, civilians were chiefly recruited via police raids or anti-partisan operations34 carried out under the joint command of the military and civil administrations. In 1944, after the retreat of the Wehrmacht, the civil and military infrastructures were amalgamated, with the military officers retaining the upper hand. This was followed by the Wehrmacht’s evacuation programmes, during which the new labourers were recruited. Of course, these were not the only methods at the disposal of the civil administration. There was a whole range of them: compulsory service for all people of a particular age, creaming off workers from industrial enterprises, raids, and the simple act of stamping identity cards. On this subject, the following appeared in the labour deployment report in Mstisch for 20–23 June 1943: ‘I can now report some success, having resorted to the best method so far, the stamping of identity cards. Using this method a total of … 2,221 people have been seized, of which 307 have been made available to the Reich.’35 Sofija Bronislawowna Turtschinskaja said that in May 1943, young people had to go to the regional capital of Gorodistsche to have their identity cards stamped. She too went to Gorodistsche and was detained. Later she was taken to the receiving camp near the railway station in Baranowitschi. She was joined by other civilians from the administrative regions of Novaya Mysh and Stalowitschi who were detained in the same way. The GC White Ruthenia project collapsed in summer 1944. Constant attempts to strike a balance between the interests of the military and those of the ‘Sauckel Commissions’ while fulfilling the GC’s own workforce requirements had severe political and military consequences. This is clearly illustrated by the order dated 5 May 1944 from the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories36 to the Reich Commissioner for Ostland37 and the General Commissioner for White Ruthenia38 regarding the improper use of force to ‘recruit’ labourers: As I have already repeatedly explained in my decrees, the recruitment of workers for labour in Germany is an urgent matter for all departments involved. In the past, however, methods have occasionally been used that created severe political strain. As a result of inadequate propagandist preparation, thousands of recruits have, for fear of being forcibly deported, either escaped or jumped from moving trains and joined partisan groups. The use of these recruitment methods has therefore significantly aggravated the partisan situation.39

This order highlights the impotence of the civil administration: by summer 1942, voluntary recruitment had already been superseded by forcible recruitment, with few exceptions.

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Summary During 1941–44, two different administrations, military and civil, came into being on the territory of Belarus. These administrations tended to use three types of forced labourers: Jewish slave workers, forced labourers used locally and Ostarbeiter. Sometimes these categories overlapped, as in the case of forced labourers initially deployed locally by either the military or civil administration before being transported to the Reich as Ostarbeiter. However, analysis of the interviews shows that the interviewees themselves perceived little difference between the military and civil administrations. This finding clearly indicates that the two administrations used similar recruitment methods and that the bodies applying these methods were the same in both regions, i.e. the recruitment committees, employment offices, police forces and Wehrmacht. From the beginning, army officers provided the highest number of forced labourers both for their own use and for the use of the Reich. The figures for labourers sent to the Reich in 1942 were as follows: Economic Inspectorate Centre, 114,706; GC White Ruthenia approximately 32,000. In 1943, the numbers were 91,195 and approximately 60,000 respectively. But the army officers were at their most efficient during the period from January to the summer of 1944, when 137,864 people were deported following the blanket evacuation and recruitment in the wake of the Wehrmacht retreat. Comparatively fewer (24,000) forced labourers were recruited from the GC White Ruthenia. The army were thus winners of the competition for workers. By the end, the Economic Inspectorate Centre had recruited 343,765,40 whereas the GC White Ruthenia’s recruitment totalled 116,082.41 According to estimates by Christian Gerlach, the number of forced labourers deployed locally was almost three times as high.42 Forced labour among the Belarusian population determined the fate of those directly or indirectly affected for the rest of their lives. This experience is one that the Belarusians share with the inhabitants of other former Soviet states. After they were liberated, many were accused of treason or collaboration. The majority were interrogated in what were called filtering camps, some of them being immediately conscripted to the Red Army, others deported to penal camps; still more ended up being reenlisted for forced labour. The result was that for almost all their lives, many former forced labourers kept quiet about their suffering under Nazi rule for fear of being persecuted again. The tragic fate of forced labourers in the postwar years is illustrated by the case of Ostarbeiterin Ekaterina Nikolaewna Korobzowa. After returning home from Brandenburg, where she had worked in a steelworks, Eka-

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terina could no longer resume her former position in a school because she had lost an eye doing forced labour. The doctors advised her to abandon any form of career in order to preserve what sight she had. Her husband also left her: faced with a choice between living with a ‘traitor’ or remaining in the Communist Party, he chose the latter. Even after the Soviet Union collapsed and Belarus became independent, the fate of forced labourers and their treatment after 1945 in the Soviet Union did not even merit a mention in the official view of events, let alone recognition or an apology. It is only thanks to the compensation offered by the German Foundation ‘Remembrance, Responsibility and Future’ that Belarusian forced labourers have finally been recognised as victims of the Second World War and achieved equal status with war veterans. This has meant that, over fifty years after the event, many family members and work colleagues have only just learned of the terrible suffering endured by their relatives and friends under Nazi rule.

NOTES 1. I would like to thank Professor Dr. Paul Thomes of the Department of Economic and Social History at RWTH Aachen for his support of the project. I would also like to thank Dr. Christoph Rass for his valuable suggestions, and Peter M. Quadflieg and Florian Wöltering for their help with proofreading. 2. See Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde (Hamburg 1999), 13. 3. Including Mark Spoerer, Zwangsarbeit unter dem Hakenkreuz: Ausländische Zivilarbeiter, Kriegsgefangene und Häftlinge im Deutschen Reich und im besetzten Europa 1939–1945 (Stuttgart and Munich 2001); Ulrich Herbert, Geschichte der Ausländerpolitik in Deutschland: Saisonarbeiter, Zwangsarbeiter, Gastarbeiter, Flüchtlinge (Munich 2001). 4. See the following map (National Archives of the Republic of Belarus (NARB), F. 393, L. 1, file 1, 70). Belarus today occupies an area of 207,595 km². 5. Cf. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 135–136. 6. Norbert Müller, Die faschistische Okkupationspolitik in den zeitweilig besetzten Gebieten der Sowjetunion (1941–1944) (Berlin 1991), 621, plate 8. 7. Cf. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 134 and 450. 8. NARB, F. 1363, L. 1, file 1279, 2–9. 9. Ulrich Herbert, Fremdarbeiter: Politik und Praxis des ‘Ausländer-Einsatzes’ in der Kriegswirtschaft des Dritten Reiches (Bonn 1985), 178–182. 10. Wolfgang Benz, Konrad Kwiet and Jürgen Matthäus (eds), Einsatz im ‘Reichskommissariat Ostland’: Dokumente zum Völkermord im Baltikum und in Weißrussland 1941–1945 (Berlin 1998), 32–66. 11. All interviews referred to in this essay are held by the Institute for History and Biography at the Distance University of Hagen.

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12. Rolf-Dieter Müller, ‘Das Scheitern der wirtschaftlichen “Blitzkriegsstrategie”’, in Horst Boog et al. (eds), Das deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, Vol. 4: Der Angriff auf die Sowjetunion (Stuttgart 1983), 1015–1022. 13. Christoph Rass, ‘Menschenmaterial’: Deutsche Soldaten an der Ostfront. Innenansichten einer Infanteriedivision 1939–1945 (Paderborn 2003), 360–378. 14. Cf. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 485. 15. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 456. 16. Cf. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 496. 17. NARB, F. 1363, L. 1, file 1279, 11–12. 18. Cf. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 497. 19. This type of forced labour has been documented in far more depth, with numerous studies published in Germany and the post-Soviet states since the late 1990s. The main impetus for this has been the compensation provided by the German Foundation ‘Remembrance, Responsibility and Future’. See Günther Saathoff, ‘Die politischen Auseinandersetzungen über die Entschädigung von NS-Zwangsarbeit im Deutschen Bundestag: politische und rechtliche Aspekte’, in Klaus Barwig, Günter Saathoff and Nicole Weyde (eds.), Entschädigung für NS-Zwangsarbeit: Rechtliche, historische und politische Aspekte (Baden-Baden 1998), 49–64. 20. Cf. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 463. 21. Cf. Galina Knat´ko, ‘Die Verschleppung weißrussischer ‘Ostarbeiter’ zur Zwangsarbeit ins Deutsche Reich 1941–1944’, in Ludwig Boltzmann-Institut für Kriegsfolgen-Forschung, Nationalarchiv der Republik Weißrussland and Weißrussischer Republikanischer Fond Verständigung und Aussöhnung (eds), ‘Ostarbeiter’: ‘Остарбайтеры’, Weißrussische Zwangsarbeiter in Österreich, special volume 2 (Graz and Minsk 2003), 8. 22. Cf. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 474–475. 23. NARB, F. 4, L. 33a, file 444, 60–62; F. 3500, L. 2, file 38, 335f., in Ludwig Boltzmann-Institut für Kriegsfolgen-Forschung et al. (eds) ‘Ostarbeiter’, 158. 24. Cf. Christoph Rass, ‘Ozaritschi 1944: Entscheidungs- und Handlungsebenen eines Kriegsverbrechens’, in Timm C. Richter (ed), Krieg und Verbrechen (Munich 2006), 197. 25. Cf. Bernhard Chiari, Alltag hinter der Front: Besatzung, Kollaboration und Widerstand in Weißrussland 1941–1944 (Düsseldorf 1998), 51. 26. Cf. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 157–162. 27. NARB, F. 845, L. 1, file 62, 49–50; file 11, 34–35; State Archives of the Russian Federation (GARF), F. 7021, L. 87, file 123, part 2, in n.a., Nachschlagebuch über deutsch-faschistische Lager, Ghettos und andere Verhaftungsorte auf dem besetzten Territorium Weißrusslands während des Großen Vaterländischen Krieges 1941–1945 (n.p., n.y.), 45. 28. Cf. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 449–450. 29. NARB, F. 861, L. 1, file 1, 2–4, 9; F. 845, L. 1, file 6, 19, 22, 23, 25, 31; Archive in Baranowitschi, F. 616, L. 1, file 70, 73; GARF, F. 7021, L. 1, file 102, 3, 4, 27, in n.a., Nachschlagebuch, 7. 30. Chiari, Alltag hinter der Front, 160–194. 31. Cf. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 450–451. 32. Chiari, Alltag hinter der Front, 114–123. 33. Cf. Knat´ko, ‘Die Verschleppung weißrussischer “Ostarbeiter”’, 10. 34. Benz, Kwiet and Matthäus, Einsatz im ‘Reichskommissariat Ostland’, 236–250. 35. NARB, F. 397, L. 1, file 1, 1. 36. Alfred Rosenberg. 37. Heinrich Lohse.

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38. Kurt von Gottberg. 39. NARB, microfilm archive no. 241, K. 000144, 000145, in n.a., ‘Ostarbeiter’, 206. 40. The figures for the numbers deported from the rear zone of Army Group Centre include the territory it occupied in both Belarus and Russia, because at the end of November 1942 the front ran through the administrative regions of Velikie Luki, Rshew and Orel. In September 1943, the front ran through the administrative regions of Vitebsk, Orscha, Mogilew and Mozyr. 41. Cf. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 460. 42. Cf. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 481–482.

 17 

FORCED AND SLAVE LABOUR IN BELARUS Experiences, Coping Strategies and Personal Accounts

Imke Hansen and Alesja Belanovich

In Belarus during the Second World War, some 380,000 people were deported for forced labour, of whom around 53 per cent were women and 47 per cent were men. These figures do not include those Belarusians who were forced to work for the Germans in occupied Belarus or those who were taken to concentration camps and subjected to the policy of ‘extermination through labour’. Many of the deportees were very young – children or adolescents – and many lost their families, friends and whole frame of reference as a result of the war and the use of systematic extermination methods. In Belarus, the fate of forced and slave labourers, unlike that of partisans and veterans, was never considered an issue, so the state has never offered any support to help them cope with these experiences. Local and national groups and meetings organised by the labourers themselves have helped to provide a framework for dealing with their experiences and the impact of those experiences on their lives to date. It is thanks to the existence of such organisations that we have been able to interview forced and slave labourers in Belarus. This article will present some of the results of these interviews, identify the different patterns of experience and interpretation of the war years and analyse them from three perspectives: the perception of Germans, trauma and coping strategies, and constructions of fate and self-portrayal.

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Life in Occupied Belarus and as a Forced Labourer During the Second World War, the interviewees were affected not just by their exploitation as forced labourers, but also by the fact of living in an occupied country, which was experienced in different ways. While little changed in the smaller villages, the inhabitants of towns and cities had to face the fact that Jewish and, in some cases, non-Jewish populations were being exterminated nearby, and that restrictions were placed on their social interaction. Despite this distinction, some interviewees from villages reported that extermination measures were also used there. Nona Teplakova says: They forced them to dig a pit and lined them up and shot them, while others looked on. It didn’t matter whether they were injured or dead, they all fell into this pit. … And the children from the village, they were with the cows in the forest and all this happened in front of their eyes, how their parents were shot. But they carried on, and the next day they came to us in the village, because their uncles, aunts and grandparents lived here. And they went to their relatives. And they said that they could see movement in the pit for twenty-four hours, because many were still alive.

The stories of the interviewees who were deported from villages were often very similar. They were often deported with several relatives, their entire family or even with the whole village. It was different for those who did not know any of the other deportees. The shock of being separated from people they could relate to and being placed with unfamiliar faces made them feel unsettled and isolated, whereas being with families or acquaintances created a sense of security and eased communication, all of which often helped the labourers cope better with fear, pain and insecurity. The experience of forced labour evoked different feelings. For many, work, fear and an uncertain future dominated their emotions, yet some forced labourers also described pleasant experiences. Almost all mentioned social contact with other forced labourers, such as sharing food parcels from home or the Red Cross with the Ostarbeiter who did not receive any. Michail Burin, who was employed at the age of twelve in the metalworking shop at IG Farben, said that the children could move about freely in the camp and even leave it. Their favourite pastime was riding on public transport. Despite the difficult living conditions, the forced and slave labourers developed their own ideas and strategies to improve their situation, exploiting the slightest loophole and taking risks. Some interviewees, such as Raisa Bulanova, told of how they would sneak out of the camp to obtain food supplies: ‘And when we were moved to wooden barracks, after

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two years, they gave us these cast-iron stoves, square stoves. … And when we dug up potatoes from German fields, we cut them into slices and laid them on the hot stove.’ Several interviewees mentioned illicitly leaving the barracks to go singing and dancing with other forced labourers. Michail Burin made a sledge for his younger sister in the metalworking shop at IG Farben and left the camp with her to try it out. Raisa Bulanova used the army postal service to send a letter to her sister. Iosif Graifer crawled under the fence of the Minsk ghetto on the non-Jewish side to smuggle in food, medication and weapons. Boris Karpov, who had to clean components using benzene in the concentration camp, took the opportunity to clean his own lice-ridden jacket, which wasn’t allowed. The stories reveal not a passive toleration of the situation but active attempts to improve it. In the camps, social and family relationships were extremely important. This became clear from interviews with labourers who were able to retain a stable network of relationships in the camp with parents, siblings, friends, fellow workers and supervisors, even while enduring forced labour. Compared to those who lived with less social support or none at all, these labourers tended to find their experience of forced labour less stressful and to recall positive experiences as well as negative ones when assessing this period in their lives. There was also a significant difference between forced labour in industry and in agriculture, as evidenced by the accounts of Nona Teplakova and Nina Meleschko, who described how farmers would arrive at the camp at the weekend to fetch workers for one day. According to them, everyone would fight to go with the farmers, even those who could barely work, because this kind of employment meant that they would eat very well. The interview with Iosif Graifer revealed how brutal forced labour in the ghetto could be. On the one hand, the labourers lived in constant fear for their own lives: ‘The idea, of course, was to kill everyone, and I wasn’t actually supposed to live either. … They picked out twenty people at random, I don’t know why, took them to a fence, any fence, the German soldiers stood there, and then came the order to shoot. … The shots rang out, and after that I don’t remember any more. I came round and found myself lying under these corpses.’ On the other hand, they had to witness violence towards others: ‘Then there was the pogrom, there was a pit on Melnikajte Street, and Kube came there, small children under five years of age were singled out, and there was a pit, they laid them in this pit and covered them with sand and that was it, they placed a guard over it. They stood there for three or four days, until there was no more movement. You couldn’t go in, you couldn’t help.’ In the accounts of liberation and repatriation, the Americans were described very positively, unlike the Soviet soldiers, who were mostly por-

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trayed in a negative way. Musa Ivanova endured extreme trauma during liberation when she was confronted with units comprising former Russian prisoners in Königsberg: And they asked: Are there any Russians here? I replied: ‘I’m Russian.’ … And so they said: ‘Now, we must kill these Russians, they speak Russian. Stand up with your legs apart.’ Schurka and I stood with our legs apart and they blindfolded us. And they didn’t shoot us, they wanted to frighten us, they shot between our legs. But we didn’t know that. When they fired, we both fell over in fright, both of us. … This German woman [called out]: ‘Oh, my little daughter, my little daughter, my God, my little daughter.’ They thought they’d killed me. … One soldier grabbed Schura and dragged her into the bedroom, he was going to rape her and she shouted: ‘Lena, help me, Lena, help me, Lena, help me.’ But what could I do? And the Germans just sat in the corner. And they wanted to rape their own people in front of the Germans. Do you see? We had waited so long for Russians and then these Russians came.

Perception of Germans in the Occupied Areas One particularly complex and controversial aspect of the interviews is the forced labourers’ perception of Germans. While in many respects the relationship was typified by loathing and fear, personal attachments were also established. Just comparing reports of the labourers’ first contact with Germans reveals significantly different opinions, which presumably were shaped by subsequent experiences and the overall image they then formed of the Germans. Raisa Bulanova says of the German invasion: It was such a beautiful evening, when the Germans marched in, at the front was the horse artillery, the enormous cannons and such horses – well-fed, fattened … The soldiers walked alongside and the world, the whole town was like a demonstration, from one side of the street and from the other, everyone ran out and stared open-mouthed, as the Germans marched by. … All Soviet people who had been brought up to believe that we would tear them from limb to limb and finish them off.

Musa Ivanova, who was later persecuted, describes the same situation quite differently. She jumps from describing her first contact with Germans to the crimes committed by them: And when I saw the Germans for the first time, they were marching into the village in formation. … I’ve never forgotten it. These hairy legs, it’s all open here, and this hairy chest. You know? And I screamed so loudly. And these women hid me. Well, what if he shot? … And then soon the followup troops arrived, and started purging the village of Komsomol members, of Party members. They killed, shot, burned, raped, it all happened so quickly. That’s why I’m not surprised; I’m not surprised that our soldiers did the same in Germany, because they had been through it all as well.

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For Ivanova, this first contact represents in hindsight the beginning of the reign of terror and persecution. She closes the loop by using the crimes of the Germans to explain the subsequent behaviour of Russian soldiers at the time of liberation in Germany. Raisa Bulanova, whose later experiences of Germans were positive, was impressed by her first encounter with them, but displays some ambivalence. When asked whether she liked the German soldiers, she replied: ‘Well, we were young. Young people like everything. And why not? They were like us, young people. And they were young. Of course I liked them. And why not?’ But on the other hand, she also said: ‘But the Germans behaved very badly, they shot, hanged people, and everyone shouted “partisans” at the slightest thing.’ She seems to have two separate images of Germans in her mind: one abstract and negative, and one positive, shaped by personal experience, particularly with the billeted soldiers. She may have developed this dual view of the occupation because she was unable to equate the friendly soldiers, with whom she went dancing, with murderous criminals. Most of the interviewees distinguished between different types of people and stressed that there was good and bad everywhere. Several interviewees said they had positive relationships with Germans during their forced labour, particularly with supervisors and fellow labourers. Michail Bajnorowitsch formed a close attachment to a German soldier called Lorenz: He shouted at the others, as loud as he could, but never at me. He was completely different with me, one day, he sits down on the wagon, sings a song, the poor thing, cries, puts his arms round me. … He showed me a photo: ‘That’s my family. When the war is over, I’ll take you with me. You’ll be my son.’ I don’t know, you know, he loved me, and I respected him, I respected him as a very decent person.

Iosif Graifer described a more unusual case of contact between German soldiers and Jews. At the radio station in the Minsk camp, German soldiers came to his barracks in the evenings to sit with the Jewish families: ‘They came, brought a piece of bread, and said: “We want to sit with families, it’s nicer for us to be with families than in the barracks.” It didn’t matter what kind of family.’ He also said that there was a captain at the radio station who was like Oskar Schindler: ‘The same thing happened at our station. He didn’t betray anyone, including children, and even when they were taken to Germany to a concentration camp, he managed to get some people out of the camp again.’ These are isolated cases, however. The general attitude is probably best expressed by Wladimir Ratschkowskij, who, when asked what his feelings were when he first saw a German, answered:

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What do you think my feelings were? They imposed curfews so that we couldn’t go out in the evening, couldn’t go out, if anyone did they were punished, shot, shot. Many Russians were killed. Our neighbour went out to see to his horse, to tether it. They killed the neighbour for going to tether his horse, killed him. They killed people, everyone was frightened. And we were frightened of them, we were frightened. Everyone was afraid of dying, we were afraid, we hid.

Grigorij Hosid described his relationship with the Germans in the ghetto: You had to take your cap off in front of a German, and if the German was dressed in civilian clothes and you couldn’t tell the difference, he was allowed to beat you up and that’s what he did. Germans were rarely out and about without a whip. … I’m talking about the Germans who were here, they were like that at least. I’m not talking about what happened in Germany or anywhere else. That’s the way it was and some weren’t just beaten up, they were killed, killed for not taking their cap off to a German. Everything depended on his mood: if he wanted to, he could kill you. He was allowed to kill. It wasn’t actually his job to kill Jews.

This shows not only the range of possible relationships between Germans and Jews, but also that people were aware of how arbitrarily the Germans could behave. Iosif Graifer, who worked in Minsk until the liberation, noticed a change in the behaviour of German soldiers towards Jewish forced labourers: Many knew after Stalingrad that they were losing the war. That was a turning point. Many began to behave differently, even those who had been particularly nasty behaved differently. In other words, they understood that they were doomed. … They stopped shooting. There had been cases of people being shot within the territory of the radio station. After Stalingrad that stopped.

Perception of German Civilians in the Reich The forced labourers’ experiences with German civilians were much more positive than those with the German soldiers in occupied Belarus, although it should be noted that none of the interviewed Jews and only one of the interviewed Roma was deported to the Reich. Raisa Bulanova was impressed by Germany and the Germans, but particularly by German women and their qualities as housewives: ‘I can’t tell you how good the German housewives were. … I can clearly remember the importance they placed on cleanliness. In their houses, everywhere was clean. And every day after lunch, after everyone had finished eating, they would clean the kitchen floor. That’s how tidy they were.’ She stresses that it was not easy for Germans either: ‘No, life for the Germans was very, very hard. Many

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families received news of soldiers who had been killed. So many families were in mourning.’ Unlike Raisa, most interviewees referred specifically to those Germans with whom they had direct contact: foremen and fellow labourers in the factories or farm workers on the farms. Michail Burin had nothing but praise for his boss: ‘The foreman was called Ottoman, he was a good man. He taught me to work as a fitter, and I’m grateful to him for that now. He taught me to love working with iron. I still remember it today. You don’t forget the good things.’ He valued the training he received as a forced labourer more than the metalwork training he completed in Belarus and believes it is thanks to his ‘German’ training that he later managed to progress as far as he did. Almost all forced labourers who were employed in industry spoke of solidarity in the workplace: how they were helped, how food was secretly slipped to them and how they were praised. It was clear from their manner that these signs of recognition were very important to the interviewees. Typically in the interviews, personal, positive experiences contrast starkly with what was obviously considered the norm. Musa Ivanova says: ‘And back then, if you were ill – they just needed workers, workers – so if you were ill, you were sent to the camp, or I don’t know, to the death camp or somewhere else, I don’t know. I was very often ill. And they never complained to me or sent me anywhere … What can I say, when they treated me so well?’ Astonishingly, the interviewees all shared the same view of Germans in general, an opinion that seemed closely linked to the question of guilt. All the interviewees gave their opinion of ‘the German people’ without being prompted. Flying in the face of Soviet propaganda, they listed a series of arguments to absolve the Germans from blame. Boris Karpov in particular underlined the innocence of the Germans: ‘What did the Germans have to do with it? … It was Hitler’s gang that led the people astray, Himmler, Goebbels.’ Or: ‘The German people had nothing to do with it, it was fascism. The German people were not guilty. The German people were like us – hardworking, friendly.’ Wladimir Ratschkowskij also laid the blame firmly at Hitler’s door: This Hitler was a Nazi; he ordained that people should be killed because of their nationality, so that he could be Lord on Earth, one in Heaven, and him on Earth. That’s what Hitler wanted. And he, everywhere, when war broke out, Jews were taken out of Hamburg on trains. They were evacuated, the Hamburg Jews. They were rich, attractive, good. So he brought them here.

Iosif Graifer put it another way: ‘They were trained, trained to believe they had to kill, be abusive, do what they wanted. In a very short time, Hitler had re-educated the entire nation, a civilised nation, he made one

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of the most cultured nations in Europe into a nation of monsters. That’s how it was.’ Michail Burin’s line of argument also offered a possible explanation for his positive view of ‘the German people’ today: I don’t hold anything against the German people. Some were different, some were fascists and we also had communists, bad ones. And the Germans had bad people, different people. But the German people are good people. After all, the Germans have atoned for what happened and paid us compensation. That is also a help. So now some people say: Thank the Germans who have given us something for our old age.

Raisa Bulanova could not believe that the Germans wanted to go to war: ‘Do you think the Germans wanted the war? They didn’t want war either. And how many tears were cried there, how many Germans were killed?’ And Wladimir Ratschkowskij confirmed this from his own perspective: ‘They [the Germans] said: Get rid of Stalin, get rid of Hitler, Stalin no good, Hitler no good. They started the war, they said such things, and the German people didn’t want the war, the civilians. No one wanted the war. And the German soldiers didn’t want the war; they were forced to go to war.’

Trauma and Coping Strategies All the interviewees experienced things that affected their mental makeup and their life in general to some extent. As well as the hunger, cold and fear endured by all, certain events that occurred as a result of occupation or forced labour, or life in the ghettos and concentration camps, proved traumatic for the interviewees. Several cited the violence inflicted upon them by Germans, the loss of family members and air raids. Traumatic events were referred to explicitly, but they could also be inferred by the way in which the interviewees told their stories. Coping strategies and ways of dealing with the experiences were also revealed. Musa Ivanova appeared to relive the bombing as she talked about it. She quickly switched from past tense to present, spoke frantically as if out of breath, and didn’t finish her sentences: We ran and ran, faster and faster, as fast as we could. And nothing. The aeroplanes flew over, I remember, mum fell in the rye and I’m standing there, staring. Mum: ‘Get down, get down!’ And he, he was really very low. He can see lots of people lying in the rye. I didn’t really realise that. Mum: ‘Lie down!’ That’s all. Run faster, faster and faster.

It is clear from the way she relates the event that, for Musa, this part of her past is very tangible and vivid. And it is in this very context that she begins to talk about her night terrors:

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And I think that this fear stems from my childhood – the war. The people who stayed at home, they had their whole family and everything. That was somehow different. And for me, everything fell apart, I feel. And I was just a girl, a young girl and there was all this torture going on in the prison. I could hear it, the screaming, the torture. How they were sucking [sic], how they were raping, all in front of my eyes. That’s why I can’t forget it.

Musa Ivanova mentions two traumatic aspects here – being separated from her mother and her experiences in prison – and the consequences of this: the fear she suffers in the night. For Iosif Graifer, the traumatic experiences resurface in a different way: ‘Sometimes I dream about it at night, it’s not good. Sometimes I see things. I see in my dreams that I’m being killed, someone’s shooting. It’s been happening more and more often lately. I guess it gets more painful with age, the memories become more painful.’ After the interview, he explained that the dreams became more frequent and painful after he had a heart attack a year before. It seems reasonable to suppose that while Iosif Graifer was healthy and strong he was able to suppress his experiences, but now that his strength is fading the experiences are returning to him. This interpretation is supported by his explanation of how he dealt with his memories in the postwar years: ‘I worked and studied a lot. I left no room in my head for memories, it was the only thing I could do.’ As a result, Iosif Graifer found talking to us very difficult: ‘This is very painful for me. Our discussion is weighing heavily on my nerves and health, I don’t want to remember and bring things up I’d forgotten, but at the same time I understand that I must, that I must pass it all on to someone. That’s why I’m now tackling the subject.’ The expression ‘now tackling the subject’ indicates that Iosif Graifer had not done so before. It seems that, as another strategy for coping with these appalling events, he has separated his feelings from his memories. Iosif Graifer maintained his composure during the entire interview, and did not even show any emotion when describing atrocities. This changed, however, when he talked about his friend Günther Katzenstein: ‘And I was told by those who returned that they had seen him dead under a pile of corpses, and he was told that someone had seen me get shot. About five years ago, my friend called me and said: “Do you remember Günther Katzenstein?” I said: “Of course, I remember him. He died a long time ago.” “He’s sitting next to me.” [weeps] I nearly died.’ While he appeared to be able to switch off emotionally from horrific events, he could not help crying at this particular story. Where positive experiences are concerned, the link between memory and feeling functions, but it is obviously broken for negative ones. We observed something similar in our interview with Boris Karpov. He too remained completely composed, almost distant, when talking about his

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terrible experiences in several concentration camps. Yet he cried when he recalled the liberation and a second time when describing his repatriation, then again when answering a question about resistance in Buchenwald: ‘Buchenwald was the only camp to have resistance fighters. Perhaps you’ve heard the songs “Buchenwalder Walzer” [Buchenwald Waltz] and “Buchenwalder Sturmläuten” [Sounding the Alarm at Buchenwald]?’ Since he himself was never in Buchenwald and the subject of Buchenwald received great attention and was even mythologised in the Soviet Union, it is reasonable to suppose that he only emotionalised this topic after the war, under the influence of Soviet propaganda. Boris Karpov’s strategy for dealing with his experiences seems to have been to place them in a wider context. When we asked him about his life, he began by speaking at length about the course of the war. He said things like: ‘The heroic defence of Stalingrad lasted many days and nights, and we held out there.’ Although he was not in Stalingrad himself, he used the ‘we’ form – a sign that he identified strongly with the fighters and the warring Soviet Union. In addition, he kept referring to Soviet feature films during the interview, and it was not always clear whether he was talking about his own experiences or scenes from a film. His own story has been interwoven with Soviet propaganda and subsequent interpretations of history, his suffering subordinated to the ideology that gave it all meaning: ‘It doesn’t matter what happened or how it happened, I remained true to my fatherland, my people, true to what is ours.’ And in the context of his interrogation by the NKVD (Russian Secret Service): ‘How could anyone treat people like I was treated? After all, I wasn’t an enemy of the people, I was a martyr!’ Still, his ideological bias did not blind him to failures or inadequacies – he complained about shortcomings in government policy, dekulakisation and repression. The Soviet ideology, however, appears to have been the model for his socialisation as a young boy: ‘Although life was bad before the war, and everyone was poor, we still shouted “Hurrah”, “Hurrah Stalin, Hurrah Ezhow” and so on, because young people, all young people, they get infected, I was infected by this ideology then, I liked all that.’ And although he was critical of some aspects of the Soviet Union, he has retained the ideology to a certain extent as a kind of moral benchmark, a model for thought: ‘I wasn’t offended by being investigated fifteen times by the counterintelligence service, because behind our masks there were many traitors, enemies of the people, police officers masquerading as martyrs.’ Placing his own experiences in a broader historical context in this way and adapting his own fate and identity to Soviet ideology are two ways he found of dealing with traumatic events that accorded with his socialisation. Other interviewees gave evidence of their own coping strategies. Grigorij Hosid responded even more generally and said as little as possible

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about his own fate. Nevertheless, he is an avid reader of books about war and destruction and studies the subject in great depth on an intellectual level, almost obsessively. This is another coping strategy, one that is often observed. Valentina Kovko gave linguistic clues to her trauma: when she spoke of being separated from her mother, her otherwise vivid, detailed style of language became clipped and simple. The same happened when she reached the end of the war and described seeing her mother again. Afterwards, she resumed her previous style of speech. After the war, several interviewees spent little time or energy dealing with this period of their lives, as family and work became the focus of their attention. These individuals also had great difficulty in remembering the details of what the occupation and forced labour were like for them. Even if this is not a sign of conscious suppression or suppression caused by trauma, it would be safe to say that allowing these experiences to be eclipsed by other realities, tasks and problems is another approach to dealing with the past.

Self-perception and the Construction of Fate As well as revealing ways of dealing with traumatic situations, the interviews shed light on the different approaches the forced labourers adopted to interpret their own lives. Nina Meleschko, for instance, constructed a series of situations in which she almost died, which, in her opinion, she survived only because of a miracle. In this way, she imbues her life with a sense of fate. Raisa Bulanova immediately stands out because of her positive attitude towards Germans, which only makes sense when viewed in the overall context of her biographical account: her persecution by the NKVD and KGB, which followed the forced labour, is more vivid, more recent and, in hindsight, seen as much worse. She firmly identifies herself as a forced labourer and victim, although she does not distinguish clearly between those who caused her victimhood and the reasons behind it. Wladimir Ratschkowskij also clearly sees himself as a victim, frequently repeating: ‘That’s what my life is like, my life is worthless, we have no gas, I don’t know what will happen when it gets cold, how will we survive the winter? … We had nothing good, we had nothing good, to be honest. We were born in poverty and lived in poverty and we are still living in poverty.’ His life is dominated by poverty, illness and the loss of his son. He describes his survival as if he had nothing to do with it and thus constructs himself as an anti-hero, someone who is ultimately not even granted the privilege of dying: ‘I would love to die today, but death doesn’t take me. Death doesn’t take me. It is better not to live than to torture myself like this.’

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Musa Ivanova’s accounts are shaped by the basic trauma of never having been loved, a general state of mind in which war and forced labour are interleaved. While being disinfected in the showers, all the women thought they were going to be shot and started to panic. Musa said that the shock caused her to have her first period: ‘And when we were all brought out, and I was bleeding, a German walked past and said “Russian bitch”.’ After that, she never had another period, was unable to conceive and therefore could never have a family of her own, who would have loved her. Looking back on his life, Alexej Roschkow epitomises the concept of the ‘simple soldier’. For him, his life needed no explanation. His answers were brief and almost military in style. For example, when asked about his feelings, he replied: ‘Do you know what we felt? Hold your weapon and look straight ahead.’ His way of thinking becomes even clearer when we asked about friends in the army: ‘Well, what do you mean, friends? In the army, everyone is a friend. You see. Served together. Served, maintained discipline and so on.’ He refused to judge his commandants, even less give a political opinion: ‘If I were a higher rank, [pause] but I was a soldier. Hitler wants to take Russia. That’s all there was to it. He wants to take Russia and rule it.’ This is his answer to the question regarding what he had heard about Hitler. The way he has constructed his life was summed up in one final sentence: ‘And time passes, you get older and older. And I was a very aggressive person [laughs].’ Patterns of interpretation and presentation emerge in the narratives, particularly those that cover the labourers’ entire lives. The interviewees (re)construct, order and evaluate their life stories by selecting and connecting separate incidents, formulating key points and lessons learned, and using emphasis, omission, narrative style and topoi. The result is often a subjective construction – a tale of heroes, of surviving against all odds. Viewed from the outside, this is almost a label or badge; internally, it can be described as a pattern of thought through which experiences are categorised, accentuated, assimilated and evaluated. The contents of the interviews and the interpretation of individual aspects could only be touched on here. We have nevertheless attempted to give an idea of the richness, complexity and diversity of the interviews. The intention of this essay, therefore, is to invite readers to ask their own questions, to highlight issues that they consider important and to uncover aspects not yet considered here. The interviews are a valuable source for a range of research disciplines, whether individually or as part of a thematic, geographical or even gender-specific comparison. At the same time, a direct and personal study of the interviews enables the reader to become acquainted with fascinating people, their ways of life and their thoughts.

 18 

THE EXPERIENCE OF FORCED LABOURERS FROM GALICIAN UKRAINE Tetyana Lapan

In 1941 the German military leadership seized the territory of Ukraine, thereby destroying its territorial integrity. The western districts – Lviv (Lvov), Drogobych, Stanislav (present-day Ivano-Frankivsk) and Ternopil – were included into the Government General in August 1941 as a separate district under the name of ‘Galicia’, which also included Polish territory with Cracow at its centre. As an administrative unit entirely created by the occupying power, the Government General was distinctive from a demographic point of view as well as from a political one, since it included regions inhabited by ethnic Ukrainians such as Lemkivshchyna and parts of Posyannia, Kholmshchyna and Pidlyashshia. The regime that was established in the Government General (and accordingly in Galicia as well) was more liberal than what was introduced in the other Ukrainian territories occupied by Germans. Galicians had been citizens of the USSR for only a very short period of time, from September 1939 until the beginning of the German-Soviet War (June 1941). The German leadership gambled on the fact that Ukrainians from Galicia who had suffered under the Communist regime during this period would receive the German forces with enthusiasm, which is indeed what happened. Galicia had been part of the Austrian Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many Ukrainian historians and public Notes for this chapter begin on page 249.

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figures have argued that this was a key factor facilitating the exploitation of Galicia and Galician Ukrainians by the Germans. The distinguishing feature of the recruitment and deportation of Galician Ukrainians to forced labour in Germany lay in the establishment of a public institution whose purpose was to help the deportees. In the district of Galicia the German authorities permitted the legal existence of assistance committees; these were the only legal form of organisation available to all the national groups – Ukrainians, Poles or Jews. In July 1940 the Ukrainian Central Committee (UCC) was founded in Cracow. The UCC pursued a pragmatic policy, aiming to protect Ukrainians in the district of Galicia against any moves towards the excessive recruitment of slave labourers for the Reich as well as to assist Galicians already recruited as labourers. To guarantee a degree of regularity in the lives of Ukrainian workers from the district of Galicia and the Government General, each Ukrainian worker had to be provided with a document proving his Ukrainian nationality, which was recognised by the German authorities and granted the worker some privileges in Germany. Despite the fact that the UCC did not always achieve its aims because of the huge number of slave labourers who were hardly aware of the existence of the committee and because of the brutality of the German leadership, we should not underestimate the importance of this organisation. It was the only organisation of its kind on German-occupied Ukrainian territory. There was no opportunity to create a similar organisation in the Reich Commissariat Ukraine. The other differences between the situations of Ukrainians in different German-occupied zones relate to deportation methods. This issue is directly connected to one of the stereotypes of postwar Soviet historiography. According to this stereotype, the removal of Ukrainians to Nazi Germany for slave labour had an exceptionally violent character, and all work carried out in the ‘Third Reich’ was ‘forced labour’. Today it is difficult to determine which practices we can consider voluntary, and which were fundamentally forced. Therefore, in the rest of this account we have tried to spell out in detail whether the method of deportation under discussion was voluntary, forced or ‘hybrid’ (voluntary-forced) – as far as this is possible from a present-day perspective. At the beginning, the occupying power managed to recruit and transport members of the population of the Reich Commissariat Ukraine and the Government General to Nazi Germany voluntarily. The reasons for voluntary departure of Ukrainians included: the hope of acquiring a good profession or education, or of learning foreign languages; interest in the life of people abroad; the prospect of escaping the difficult living conditions in the German-occupied territories; the persuasiveness of German propaganda; and last but not least, the famine and unemployment artifi-

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cially created by the occupying power in Central, Eastern and Southern Ukraine. In the rest of the occupied territory of Ukraine the policy of voluntary recruitment was a failure from the very start. There were several reasons for the specific pattern in the Western Ukrainian districts, including the district of Galicia as part of the Government General. The first one was historical. Since the end of the nineteenth century the poorest section of the population had constituted a mobile workforce that even crossed the ocean looking for work opportunities. Thus, the ‘export’ of manpower was long since common in Galicia, which is why from the very beginning the Galician people reacted rather positively to the prospect of working in the ‘Third Reich’. The second reason was that in Galicia recruiting actions were less brutal than those carried out in other occupied Ukrainian territories. Therefore, until the beginning of mass raids in mid 1943, workers left Galicia voluntarily to work in the Reich. In the summer of 1943 the stream of people who left voluntarily and of so-called ‘forced voluntary’ workers ended. When the occupying forces did not manage to recruit as many workers as they had planned, they started to apply different kinds of recruitment measures in Galicia. But these measures were still not as brutal as in other parts of occupied Ukraine, and compulsion still remained the exception. During the war against Poland the Germans had taken captive about 420,000 Polish soldiers and officers, some of whom were of Ukrainian origin. The majority of the prisoners were directed into the agricultural sector; only 6 per cent of them went into German industry (lignite and metal mining industries). The other category of the Galician population who entered the Reich at the beginning of the war were people who had escaped from Galicia and Volhynia. They went first to the Government General and later (voluntarily or forcibly) moved on to Nazi Germany. Their situation was similar to that of foreign workers. By the beginning of June 1944 about 325,000 Galicians were working in Germany. Part of the population fit for work was involved in work of various kinds in the occupied territory itself. The population between seventeen and thirty-five years of age was subject to so-called ‘construction services’, organised and controlled by the German administration. On the initiative of the Ukrainian Regional Committee, labour camps for Ukrainians called ‘Ukrainian Service for the Motherland’ were organised. In these camps medical services, food and water were usually insufficient; there were no toilets, and the experience of transportation was coloured by the brutal attitude of transport guards and the bad conduct of Red Cross assistants. The mass social displacement and deportation of the population into captivity provoked a reaction from the national underground movement and the Greek-Catholic Church. In the district of Galicia the representa-

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tives of the Bandera branch of OUN-UPA (Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists [Orhanizatsiya Ukrayins’kykh Natsionalistiv] and Ukrainian Insurgent Army [Ukrainska povstanska armiia]) defended the population of Western Ukraine against labour mobilisation. The Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church negotiated with Pope Pius XII to extend its pastoral jurisdiction also to Galicians working in the Reich, although this was officially forbidden.1 There was nothing similar in the Reich Commissariat Ukraine. Thus, the historical differences among the Ukrainian territories that belonged to the USSR during the Second World War were reinforced by the administrative division of the occupied territories and by the deliberate policies of the German occupying forces towards their populations. This contributed significantly to the emergence of distinct experiences and social formations in the two subgroups of the Ukrainian population, both on home territory and in the Reich. The memories of the Ostarbeiter were never a component part of official war memories in Soviet society. In the official version of Soviet history, the memories of forced labour in Nazi Germany were not compatible with the triumphalist rhetoric of the Soviet people’s mass heroism and patriotism. Work on the enemy’s territory and for the enemy’s economy could not be justified from the Soviet regime’s point of view, not even by its compulsory character. Only one version could exist – the version of resistance, be it organised or spontaneous, or of deliberate sabotage, especially in industry. Soviet historians explained forced labour as one of the numerous crimes of Nazism in the occupied territories. The fear of the regime that developed in the postwar period caused the ‘destruction’ and ‘conscious forgetting’ of many episodes, preserving only an indistinct and general picture of the past. Most of our respondents mentioned that they could not speak freely about this period of their life even in the family circle or to their friends. Residual fear of the personal consequences of making their experience public has led to conscious suppression or downplaying of these and other events, or to efforts to leave them behind. This has resulted in the respondents’ accounts being convoluted or illogical in places. The selection of respondents was aimed at accessing the life stories of different groups of Ukrainian victims of Nazism. One group of respondents includes former concentration camp prisoners; another group includes civilian workers deported for forced labour in the ‘Third Reich’. Among the civilian workers we can distinguish two subgroups whose stories differ depending on the subjects of their stories: (1) workers in industry, and (2) workers in agriculture (this subgroup is strongly represented among the interviewees, as was the case among the entire contingent of Galicians who went to Nazi Germany).

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Most of the former forced labourers from Galicia were young adults during their deportation to the Reich (mainly born between 1922 and 1925). We also carried out some interviews with people who were children (eight to twelve years old) when they were in Germany and who were involved in different kinds of work. They were taken to forced labour together with their parents (as in the accounts of H. Mayevska, M. Ryapych and the Zamlynsky family). The respondents’ memories differ in key respects according to where they were born. Most of the Galicians interviewed were born and grew up at the time of the Polish occupation of Western Ukraine. Their memories of childhood are dominated by stories about their patriotic education, the growth of the national liberation movement in general and the spread of anti-Polish ideas and activities in Western Ukraine in particular. People from Eastern Ukraine who were transported to work in the Reich belonged to a generation that had been educated in Soviet times. They had been socialised in the values of the Soviet regime. All of our respondents (both Western and Eastern Ukrainians) spent the whole of their conscious lives in the Soviet Union. Even today, the respondents born in Eastern Ukraine do not reject Soviet myths and ideology. But by contrast, the respondents who were born, grew up and spent all their lives in Western Ukrainian districts (except for the period of labour in the Reich and in some cases of deportation under the Soviets) react painfully to everything (post-)Soviet – including Soviet ideas and even Soviet holidays. They call themselves Ukrainian patriots and identify themselves exclusively with Ukrainian national ideas and the Ukrainian national liberation movement. The common characteristic of the stories of forced labourers from Galicia and of Ostarbeiter is that they all described living in foreign parts as uniquely an experience of wartime. On the one hand the respondents talk about this in terms of the reciprocal dyad ‘our own/foreigners’, which constitutes the dominant feature of the recorded interviews; at the same time, the ‘foreigner’ appears as the one who helped them to survive the war. Almost all of the respondents (mainly men) noted that they could not even imagine how their life would be had they not been mobilised for work in the Reich. Respondents first of all associated slave or forced labour with separation from parents, family members, and friends, with forced deportation and new living conditions and economic circumstances. In oral accounts we have very often noticed the use of ‘we’, as if the speaker was subsuming his or her own experience within the collective experience of other people. In many respects, though, the memories of forced labourers from Galicia and those of Ostarbeiter differ. The first difference is that Galician people do not identify or describe themselves as ‘Ostarbeiter’. They

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emphasised this fact in their stories. ‘Osts’ in the Reich were only Ukrainians taken from Eastern Ukraine (or Russia or Belarus). We did record interviews with ‘real’ Ostarbeiter, i.e. Ukrainians deported from Eastern or Southwest Ukrainian territories (see the accounts of M. Mykhaylov, V. Poplavskyy, T. Kremlyovska, V. Materatska, M. Arsenyova). The second unique feature of Galician subjects’ accounts was their description of the dreadful experience of a double German invasion of Galicia. On 1 September 1939 the Germans attacked Poland, initiating the Second World War. Soon German troops were occupying the greater part of Western Galicia along the line Sokal – Lvov – Striy. In accordance with the secret agreement between Ribbentrop and Molotov, the Red Army occupied Western Volhynia and Galicia on 17 September 1939, and another Soviet-German agreement fixed the borders between Germany and the USSR along the rivers Sian and Bug on 28 September 1939. The Germans were accordingly expected to leave Galicia. In fact, as we know, the USSR and Germany went to war on 22 June 1941, which led to a second German invasion of Galicia. As a third characteristic element of their accounts, our respondents emphasised the Galician population’s loyal and even friendly reception of the German army. This happened because the Soviet regime had killed thousands of Ukrainian political prisoners during the preceding two years (1939–41) and because the Ukrainian national movement at first harboured hopes of the renewal of an independent Ukrainian state. However, right from the start German policy in Ukraine took on the character of a colonial occupation. The fourth very distinct difference lies in the attitudes towards the Second World War expressed by people from Western and Eastern Ukraine. For ‘Eastern Ukrainians’ the war has always been regarded as the Great Patriotic War, and they still celebrate ‘our’ victory today. Galicians have a very different attitude. They do not regard 9 May as Victory Day, because for them the war did not end until the 1950s, when the Soviet authorities completely defeated the national underground movement OUN-UPA. The fifth aspect is that some of the Galicians interviewed were arrested and sent to Soviet labour camps in Siberia or Kazakhstan after repatriation to Ukraine. The reasons for this varied. A person’s stay in Germany could be the reason for arrest and deportation (as was the case with respondent S. Tupis), as could participation in national underground organisations. It is interesting how those respondents who were sent to forced labour for two totalitarian regimes describe their experience today. Here we find two different positions. The respondent M. Mykhaylov (born in Southeast Ukraine, lives in Western Ukraine today) is convinced that the Soviet regime should be excused because they are ‘our people’, in

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contrast to the German occupiers. By contrast, all the respondents from Galicia explicitly acknowledge that both Soviet and German regimes imposed ordeals on them. There are neither ‘our’ nor ‘foreign’ regimes in their stories. Both regimes are alien to Western Ukrainians. It is important to note that differences in experience were related both to the kind and location of the work carried out in the Reich, and to where the respondents were living when they were mobilised. Those who represent urban (modern) and rural (traditional) cultures give rather different accounts. As most of the Galician respondents worked in agriculture in the Reich, we analysed this subgroup of interviewees in greater detail. The majority of the respondents who were assigned to farm work were themselves of rural origin. The process of recruiting the labour force in Galician villages had its peculiarities. We have already mentioned that the practice of distributing mobilisation plans was applied in villages. This action was implemented by volost (district) foremen, village headmen (viyt), representatives of public organisations (Ukrainian Krayovyy Committee, an integrated part of the UCC) and country priests. When voluntary recruitment was suspended among Galicians, the village headman (viyt), the local UCC officer and the local priests ‘found volunteers by methods well-known only to them’. The actions that constituted this ‘forced-voluntary’ process started with sending out call-up papers in the name of the village council. These instructed individuals that they must leave for work in the Reich. All our respondents mentioned how they got the call-up papers from the village council. The village administration first of all put orphans, children with only one parent, ‘unreliable elements’ of the village and members of families with many children on the list of those being mobilised. The consequence of this process was that the beginning of the war meant a progressive erosion of interpersonal relations in the occupied villages. The headmen (viyts) and policemen had been appointed; they were people who were familiar with all the members of the village community before the war. Later, they drew up their ‘own’ lists of people who had to go for work in the Reich. By contrast, in the cities the process of workforce mobilisation was undertaken by faceless employment offices. After the negative experiences of recruitment, transportation and selection by employers, the Galicians arrived on a farm headed by a German Bauer. Work on the farms was described as very familiar to the respondents. They compared with great interest the crops which were grown, the methods of cultivation and the organisation of agricultural work in general. The German agricultural machinery and the discipline applied in carrying out different kinds of work really amazed and fascinated the respondents. The second major subject of the accounts is the

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living conditions and the details of the daily routine. For Galicians who had been born and raised in the Ukrainian countryside, it was relatively easy to adapt and to perform agricultural labour in the Reich. This eased the crisis of identity, which was felt much more radically by forced labourers in industry. The accounts of Galicians who worked in industry (small private factories, coal mines) contrast sharply with those of agricultural workers. Their memories of transportation to Germany are essentially the same, but in respect of all other topics their reports are very different. The main problem for those who worked in industry, by their account, was hunger and the search for the means of survival. The main part of their stories is devoted to this theme. The second main feature of their stories is the description of living conditions, the details of private life, the workday schedule and the particularities of their work and leisure activities. These accounts also offer a particular evaluation of the German population, reflecting on the individuals who worked side by side with the respondents in factories and plants and in agriculture for many years. They remember very sympathetic, sometimes even friendly attitudes on the part of Germans. Their help, support and sometimes even solidarity in rejection of Nazism helped to construct an image of ‘foreigners’ as ‘ours, but different’. Although there are differences between respondents’ accounts in this as in other areas, Galicians very often remember the German population with affection. The image of German co-workers as sympathetic and supportive appears most often in connection with accounts of the catastrophic food situation. In the postwar Soviet Union the attitude towards the concentration camp prisoners was rather different from the one towards deported civilian workers. The two groups came to the Reich in the same way – that is, not on their own initiative. However, after the war only the prisoners’ memories, ‘reviewed’ according to Soviet ideology, were officially admitted, while the Ostarbeiter did not even get the right to preserve their own memories about the war events. The main place in the stories of former concentration camp prisoners is devoted to the description of hunger and the struggle to survive. While in the accounts of Ukrainian civilians who had worked in agriculture we can identify positive topoi associated with particular phrases, like ‘soup with turnip’, in the concentration camp prisoners’ memories the recurrent themes are negative: starvation, the torture of hard labour, death. Respondents stated that they had often thought about death. In the camps, death was everywhere, which is why none of the prisoners were afraid of it. The continuous hunger blunted even the possibility of thinking. Hunger killed not only physically but also morally and spiritu-

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ally. The half-starved existence led to a gradual ‘degeneration’ from the human to the inhuman. In the memories of this group we often hear the story of a saviour or saviours (from among fellow prisoners, usually compatriots) who helped them to survive at the beginning, when they were detained in the so-called quarantine barracks. In fact, the support they received in the first stages of their stay in a concentration camp was very important for prisoners. Another important part of respondents’ accounts is devoted to stories about their work, and, particularly impressive, to the description of the camp regime and the hierarchy of prisoners. They also include stories about relations between prisoners of different nationalities. The descriptions of frequent transfers of prisoners from one camp to another, which made it possible for respondents to compare the conditions in different camps, are also important elements of the narratives. The days of liberation are described very vividly by the respondents. Victory Day is not as important for them as the day of their release from the concentration camp (they remember the month, day and even the hour of release). The subject of the repatriation of Soviet citizens after the Second World War was completely dropped from the scholarly agenda of Soviet researchers and continued to be ignored during the 1990s. Unlike other countries, where people who had been displaced by the war returned voluntarily, the special system of repatriation that authorities in the USSR created to bring citizens home often used force. This system was created to ensure that the Soviet regime maintained complete control over the repatriation process. It was directed by government decrees and instructions and enacted in the USSR as well as abroad. The main policy towards Soviet repatriates was influenced by two factors: the desire to prevent a new wave of migration, which Stalin thought would promote anti-Soviet policies in the international sphere, and the hope of replacing population lost in the war with repatriates. Therefore, all the people removed from the USSR during the war had to return. For this purpose a special repatriation system was set up; it comprised authorities for repatriation from abroad that operated outside the USSR, and authorities for internal repatriation operating on Soviet territory. The overall proportion of people who returned either voluntarily or forcibly to the Soviet Union was about 84 per cent of all Soviet citizens recovered abroad after the war. This figure testifies to the success of the Communist regime’s repatriation policy. But when this percentage is compared with the figures concerning repatriation to Ukraine and the four Western Ukrainian oblasts (Galician region), the policy appears to have been less successful there: the share of those repatriates who returned was only 42 per cent of the total number of Galician people who found themselves abroad during the Second World War.

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The first disappointments awaited the former deportees just after their release. They were disappointed by the irresponsible attitude that the Soviet officers appointed by the repatriation authorities displayed towards their duties. Moreover, the material circumstances and living conditions in the repatriation camps were very unsatisfactory. Sometimes people had to stay outdoors even in the rain and did not receive food (even bread) or medical care. Transport shortages meant that the repatriates had to live under these conditions for two months or more. The main reason for the delay in returning Soviet citizens to their homes was the process of interrogation and control to which they were subjected by the Soviet security authorities. For every single repatriate a ‘filtration dossier’ was created; it contained, among other things, a registration card bearing the print of the repatriate’s right forefinger. In relation to the repatriates’ own emotional experience of their (voluntary or forced) return home, we should note that many of their accounts speak of repatriates who tried to evade any Soviet repatriation assembly camps and to make their own way home. This, of course, did not simplify their life after they returned, since in the end they still had to go through the ‘filtration’ process in order to get the papers that would allow them to proceed with their lives in the Soviet Union. Alongside the interrogations, the repatriates were also used as a source of free labour. They did civilian work in Soviet military units and provided manpower for military hospitals and for harvesting German fields. In all, we can divide the repatriate forced labourers into the following groups: (1) those returned to their former place of residence (these people did not suffer very severely under the Soviet system); (2) those assigned to labour battalions (who thus served the equivalent of a one- or two-year penitentiary term); (3) those called up into the Soviet army; (4) those used for work in Soviet military units and establishments; (5) those handed over to the NKVD (Soviet security agency). Recruitment for forced labour in Nazi Germany and repatriation to the USSR influenced the later lives of all these people. Fear of the regime, formed in postwar years, led to the ‘destruction’ of the memory of events of the Second World War. For most of them their postwar fate was very difficult. Having been taken from their native soil by one totalitarian state, upon returning home they were exploited, controlled and subjected to indoctrination by another equally ruthless state. Even in cases when repatriates happily returned to a peaceful life, they could not shake off the stigma of ‘unreliability’. Galicians anticipated this better than other Soviet citizens and most successfully resisted the return to Soviet domination. In the memory of the majority of Galicians, even the worst experience in Nazi Germany seems less negatively charged than their return and life in the USSR under Communism.

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Summary Conclusion After the occupation of Eastern Galicia in 1941 many Galicians wanted to go to Germany to work on a voluntary basis. They undertook this move as a familiar form of labour migration designed to improve their socioeconomic position. Unfortunately, they failed to take into account the differences between labour migration in peacetime and labour mobilisation in wartime. The latter led to the seasonal voluntary workers’ transformation into prisoners. Ukrainian Galicians thus became part of a much wider phenomenon of forced and slave labour, in which about 2.4 million people (including about 350,000 people from Western Ukrainian districts) were deported from Ukraine. Most of them were young, qualified workers who initially achieved much better production results than Germans. In the long run, however, the inhuman exploitation of the labour force led to advanced exhaustion, mass disease and trauma, and finally high mortality. Food was not sufficient and there was severe punishment for any breach of the German regulations. There was usually no appropriate accommodation for workers, the sanitary conditions were terrible and there was a permanent feeling of hunger. For these reasons most respondents refer to this period of their life as one when they were ‘in captivity’ or ‘in slavery’. At the same time we should emphasise that living conditions in captivity were different for Ukrainians from the Western parts and for those from the Eastern and Southern districts. In our view, it is necessary to distinguish three categories of Ostarbeiter – Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian – and to use the term ‘Ukrainian Ostarbeiter’ for workers deported from the Eastern and Southern districts of Ukraine. On the basis of this distinction we are able to distinguish between the respective social situations of Ukrainian Ostarbeiter and Galician workers and to describe them in detail. The Ukrainian population concentrated in the Reich Commissariat Ukraine and behind the front lines became the main reservoir of labour for industry in Nazi Germany. They suffered the worst working and living conditions. The Galician Ukrainians, on the other hand, were regarded by the Germans as ‘semi-sympathy foreigners’ (in the same class as people from the Baltics) and in most cases agreed to work in Germany voluntarily. They worked mainly in the agricultural sector or in small private enterprises. They enjoyed better working conditions than other Ukrainians, including partial payment for their work, one free day a week, access to medical care and training opportunities. Their living conditions were better than those of ordinary Ostarbeiter in that they lived in separate barracks, could attend church services, were allowed outside the camp and received ration cards for food and clothing. They were entitled to vacation time and permitted to correspond with

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their families (including sending and receiving parcels), and they were allowed to marry and have children. Galician Ukrainians were also able to make full use of the legal status of their public organisations, and from the beginning of the occupation had created a set of such organisations headed by the Ukrainian Central Committee. These organisations took care of both the workers in Germany and their families in Galicia. We should emphasise that Galician institutions very often provided aid to workers from the Eastern USSR, as well. But while these differences were often crucial to the everyday life of workers abroad, they did not radically challenge their status as slave labourers. The war balanced the fortunes of workers from different countries. Once in Germany, Galician workers and their compatriots from other Ukrainian districts found themselves in slavery and were exploited under very difficult conditions. United by difficult living and working conditions, Ukrainians tried to help and support each other and to do everything possible to survive and return home.

NOTE 1. See Alexander Baran, ‘The Ukrainian Catholic Church’, in Wsevolod Isajiw, Yury Boshyk and Roman Senkus (eds), The Refugee Experience: Ukrainian Displaced Persons after World War II (Edmonton 1992), 148f.

 19 

ORAL HISTORIES OF FORMER UKRAINIAN OSTARBEITER Preliminary Results of Analysis

Gelinada Grinchenko

B

y 1939, over 20 million (or 80 per cent of) Ukrainians lived within the borders of the Soviet Republic of Ukraine. Seven million lived in Polishheld Galicia and Volhynia, while others were under Hungarian control after the March 1939 annexation of the Subcarpathian Rus.1 According to the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, concluded in August 1939, Western Ukraine (along with Western Byelorussia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Bessarabia) was to be handed over to the Soviets. The consequence of this pact for Ukrainians was to assign about 4.5 million Western Ukrainians, most of whom had previously lived under Polish rule, to the Soviet Union in the form of the Soviet Republic of Ukraine.2 During the Second World War Ukraine was the largest Soviet republic to be fully occupied by the Germans and was held under German control longer than the occupied areas of Russia. There were four zones of occupation in Ukraine: the district of Galicia as a part of the Polish Government General (western territories of today’s Ukraine), the Reich Commissariat of Ukraine (central territories of today’s Ukraine), and the so-called military zone of occupation (eastern territories of today’s Ukraine). A small part of Southwest Ukraine was divided between the Romanian governorships of Transnistria and Bessarabia in 1941. In the course of the conflict 6.8 million Ukrainian civilians were killed and a Notes for this chapter begin on page 261.

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further 1.4 million military personnel either perished at the front or died as prisoners of war.3 According to estimates made in the Soviet Union in 1945–1948, 2.4 million people were sent to forced labour in Germany from the territory of contemporary Ukraine.4 They constituted the largest group and one of those with fewest rights among all foreign labourers who worked in the Reich. Before initiating hostilities and during the first months of the Blitzkrieg push of the Wehrmacht through Soviet territory and specifically through Ukraine, the German military authorities had not planned to use the labour force of the occupied territories in the Reich economy. The idea of mass mobilisation of manpower occurred only when the initial Blitzkrieg turned into a sustained war of position, and was eventually formulated in autumn 1941 by Göring’s well-known directive of 7 November, which outlined the legal status of civilian workers from occupied regions of the Soviet Union. A large-scale campaign to recruit volunteers in Central and Eastern Ukraine started in January 1942 and covered the leading industrial centres of this region – the cities of Kharkov, Stalino (Donetsk), Dnepropetrovsk and Kiev. The first train, carrying 1,117 volunteer skilled workers, set out from Kharkov for Cologne on 18 January 1942.5 On 22 January, a solemn ceremony was held at the departure of a transport with 1,500 volunteers from Kiev,6 and two days later, a train with 1,142 metalworkers left Kharkov for Brandenburg.7 The situation was different in Galicia, which after joining the Government General fell within the terms of reference of the labour legislation for occupied Poland, and from which, after 27 November 1941, 60,709 people left for work in Germany.8 After the Nazi authorities had approved the position of General Plenipotentiary for Labour Allocation and appointed Fritz Sauckel to it, the tasks of recruiting commissions widened considerably. From this moment on, not only highly skilled workers but also ordinary townspeople and – starting from spring 1942 – inhabitants of rural villages were also to be sent to forced labour. The mobilisation thus lost its voluntary nature at the outset. Until the last days of the occupation of Ukraine, the civilian population’s departure for work in Germany was involuntary in its character, form and organisation. The occupying forces proceeded (1) by posting orders (which were handed over to a future Ostarbeiter and required him or her to come at a specified time to a certain point to be later transported to Germany); (2) through round-ups or raids (which were carried out mainly in large cities and had various purposes, including fulfilment of labour mobilisation quotas); and (3) by selecting people for forced labour during evacuations from the combat zone. In the Reich territory, the Ukrainian forced labourers – Ostarbeiter – worked in all fields and spheres where the labour of foreign civilian work-

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ers was used: in plants and factories, railways and construction companies, in agriculture and domestic service. Liberated in 1945 by Soviet or Allied forces, they waited to be sent home for several months, meanwhile passing long-term checks at the Soviet control filtration points, filtration camps and other checkpoints. After this, men of conscription age often joined the Red Army, and women worked in various military detachments for periods of one month to half a year; they were deployed, among other things, to dismantle German industrial and agricultural equipment and other valuable materials and transport them to the USSR. The complicated stories and damaged lives of these people remained outside of both public attention and scholarly interest in the USSR for many postwar decades. This was because the memory of forced labour in Nazi Germany did not fit within the triumphalist narrative of Soviet history, with its rhetorical emphasis on the mass heroism and patriotism of Soviet citizens; labour in the enemy’s territory and for the enemy’s benefit could not be excused even by its forced nature. The only stories that were legitimate in this context were stories of resistance, whether organised – within the framework of an international anti-fascist movement – or spontaneous but deliberate, as in the case of sabotage carried out mainly at industrial workplaces. In turn, in academic research produced during the Soviet epoch, the forced labour of the USSR’s civilian population was treated as one of many Nazi crimes perpetrated in the occupied territories, and was commonly reduced solely to an episode of forced mobilisation. It is no wonder that in postwar Soviet historiography there existed not a single thematic monograph dedicated to comprehensive research into the history of forced labour, let alone to the analysis of the experiences and life stories of people who had worked in Germany under compulsion during the war years. With the breakdown of the Communist regimes and the dissolution of the USSR, sustained interest in this problem gradually developed in the national historiographies of the former Soviet republics. A substantial number of previously unknown (and often secret) documents became available to scholars, and many studies were produced. Not the least important feature of this development has been a dialogue between historians and ordinary people who lived through the historical events, which has begun only recently and would have been inconceivable in the preceding Communist epoch. Along with other oral history studies, the life-history interviews in the International Slave and Forced Labourers Documentation Project are not only shocking evidence in the investigation of the most complicated and contradictory event in twentiethcentury history – the Second World War, which is not losing its relevance – but also a unique monument to the ordinary person’s role and place in history.

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Our group conducted interviews in Central, Eastern and Southern Ukraine, excluding the Crimean peninsula. Half of the interviews were recorded in towns and cities, the other half in district centres and villages. Of the 40 interviews we carried out, 23 were with women and 17 with men. The average age of the interviewees was 83; the majority of them were born between 1924 and 1926 and thus belonged to the age cohort most massively mobilised for forced labour. The oldest woman we interviewed was 92 years old (born in 1914); the youngest, a man born in 1937, was deported to forced labour in Germany together with his family and worked cleaning the labour camp, streets and a railway station in Berlin. Three more informants, born in 1929, 1933 and 1935, were taken to Germany as children. Ethnic identity did not necessarily correspond to the language of the interview (one quarter of the interviews were recorded in Russian): 32 out of 40 interviewees considered themselves to be Ukrainians and 8 to be Russians. Among our informants’ parents there were two ethnic Germans and two ethnic Poles. As for religious identity, all the former Ostarbeiter interviewed by us grew up under the official atheism of the Soviet Union, which certainly influenced their religious identification. Almost all of them called themselves Orthodox Christians, but few of the interviewees strictly follow religious observances, go to church regularly or otherwise behave religiously. Several informants for whom the question of faith is vital became ‘active believers’ only in their old age. The exception includes two interviewees who were brought up in Baptist families and have considered themselves Baptists all their lives. The majority of the Ostarbeiter interviewed by us was born and grew up in the countryside, in traditional peasant families of the early 1920s. People with social origins in working-class families were much rarer, and hardly anybody came from a white-collar family. It is important to note that a great number of respondents lost close relatives in their childhood or early teens, i.e. before the war began – most often as a result of the famine of 1933 or repressions and executions in the 1930s. The war brought further blows; every one of our interviewees had family members who either did not come back from the front or died in an occupied town or village. Of the 40 people interviewed, 11 have higher education (one who holds a doctorate in geography changed his surname in his youth and has concealed the fact of his stay in Germany all his life). The others have full or partial secondary education, i.e. seven, eight or ten years of schooling. Three of those interviewed have primary education, i.e. four years of schooling. However, these figures are not representative of the level of education of former Ostarbeiter in general. Other sources show that only 3 per cent of former Ostarbeiter have had higher education, whereas in our selection the share is approximately 25 per cent.9

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In analysing interviews with former forced labourers, it is appropriate to address two main issues: the problem of studying the practice of forcing people to labour and the problem of studying the experience of being forced to labour. When studying the practice of forced labour as a wartime phenomenon, a researcher is principally interested in gathering otherwise inaccessible or insufficient information on the transportation of workers to Germany, on working and living conditions, on the reward and punishment system, on liberation and the way home etc. In this case, the nature of the information is largely supplementary and illustrative in relation to written sources. When studying the experience of being forced to labour, a different complex of issues is of interest. The object of research in this case is a narrative itself (more precisely, the transcript or recording), and the subject is the system of relations and regularities that structure the narrative. For example, how does an interviewee inscribe the experience of carrying out forced labour into the overall structure of his (her) autobiography, or where, at which moment and using what means does the narrator articulate and thereby transmit this experience? Which elements of the experience being transmitted and its rationale are positioned and articulated in terms of the official discourse, and which of them bespeak a personal interpretation? Which temporal and topical patterns do respondents select to integrate and align the life experience that is important for their biographies within the framework of a single narrative? And finally, which strategies of self-representation do they use in their autobiographical narratives? In view of the limited space available here, these questions will be answered briefly, in the form of theses.

Studies of the Practice of Forcing People to Labour Deportation to Germany All our informants claim they were taken to Germany by force. The overwhelming majority were deported in the spring and summer of 1942, a few people were taken in spring 1943. Two of our informants attempted to escape on the way to Germany but were caught and transported to forced labour. Transportation was carried out by rail; future Ostarbeiter went to the distribution camps in cattle cars, where there was nothing but the floor, ceiling and walls. They were taken by different means from the distribution camps to their places of deployment – by train, cart, bicycle and on foot.

Place of Work in Germany The number of former Ostarbeiter working in any given economic sector or form of labour turned out to be difficult to calculate, as about ten in-

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terviewees either changed their place and type of work (were taken from factories and plants to work as servants, or conversely were transferred to factories or plants from farmsteads), or combined several types of work (for example, during the week they worked at a factory and on weekends on a farm or in a household). Therefore, both in questionnaires and in this chapter we cite the number working in this or that sector in terms of the categories of postwar compensation payments. That is, if a former Ostarbeiter was paid compensation as a worker in the industrial sector, even if he or she worked on an agricultural farm for some time, we categorise this case as industrial work. Thus, among the 40 former Ostarbeiter interviewed, 20 worked in the industrial sector of the Nazi economy (including two in mines, one on the railway and one in road repairs managed by the Organisation Todt), 11 in agriculture, 4 in domestic service, 1 in the hotel business and 1 in the port of Hamburg. Three of the interviewees were children under ten during their stay in Germany; they had to work mostly cleaning the camp, streets and railway stations. Six people carried out slave labour in concentration camp work details.

Information on the Stay in Germany In their stories concerning their stay in Germany the witnesses first of all emphasised the aspects of their new surroundings that were extraordinary for them, regardless of whether this ‘new’ experience was positively or negatively perceived. Industrial sector workers began their stories with the living conditions (description of the camp, barracks etc.). Those who worked in agriculture began the story with the description of the farm and the working schedule; living conditions were described later. We will not dwell on their memories of the appearance of camps, barracks, farmsteads and houses now, but will merely emphasise the following. If a former Ostarbeiter was born and grew up in a village, he or she perceived and described his or her work on a German farm as habitual and familiar, comparing with interest the crops cultivated, methods of farm management and organisation of agricultural production at large. In other words, love for the land and the habit of working on the land (in prewar Ukrainian villages children started to help with work as early as age six or seven), formed by the time of deportation to Germany, considerably facilitated adaptation to forced labour in agriculture for this group of people and also mitigated the intensity of the identity crisis all former forced labourers suffered from. In this context, one of our last narratives recorded as a video interview is characteristic. In it a former Ostarbeiter talks about the reason for his escape from railway works. He escaped twice, with the result that he was imprisoned in Buchenwald concentration camp, from which he

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was liberated in the spring of 1945. The reason he gave for his escape attempts was not a desire to get home or ‘to friends’ but the wish to change his employment – to get to a ‘master’, to farm work, for, as he repeatedly said, he loved to work on the land and wanted to work – as long as it was on the land. Where Ostarbeiter had been punished in concentration and labour camps, they described their work previous to the places of imprisonment briefly and schematically in the first, open, part of the interview, highlighting only the motives for the actions that had led to their punishment. The living conditions and work before their internment in the concentration camp were just an introduction to the story of the hardest ordeal of their lives.

Repression and Punishments Among the kinds of punishment they suffered, our informants reported fines, discipline restrictions (for example, a prohibition on leaving the camp grounds), imprisonment or transfer to a labour or disciplinary camp. Many of them witnessed beatings imposed by camp administration or their masters. Among the former Ostarbeiter themselves beating was used much less often. There were also those who never mentioned beating or humiliation either of themselves or of others, but such cases are few. Incidents of beatings were recalled as taking place both during the stay in Germany and at the point of selection for deportation, as well as during transportation, examination and ‘disinfection’ in transit camps. Some women tell of beatings and humiliation, including multiple rapes by Soviet soldiers; in one interview a beating by American soldiers is mentioned. Among the reasons for imprisonment in concentration camps, attempts to escape from the workplace are most prominent, followed by refusal to work or conscious sabotage. In the only case we encountered of a woman being interned in a concentration camp, it was the result of her letters to a friend in which she wrote carelessly both about the camp administration and about Nazi Germany in general.

Coming Back to the Homeland Working in different regions of Germany, our informants were liberated by the Soviet troops as well as by the Western Allies. Memories of liberation by Soviet soldiers are reported in joyful and enthusiastic tones in the interviews of those who were taken as children to labour in Germany. Those who were older characterise their feelings and the events connected with the liberation by Soviet troops differently, describing both joy and the above mentioned shock and indignation at the soldiers’ bru-

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tality. Those who were liberated by American troops most often speak about the fact that they saw black soldiers for the first time in their lives; they also recollect with pleasure the generous American food rations. There are also stories about meetings with American soldiers who were ethnic Ukrainians. As to the postwar lives of our informants and the impact of their stay in Germany, we find both stories of lifelong concealment of this biographical fact and assurances from informants that they had not concealed anything from anybody, and that forced labour in Germany did not influence their later life in any way. The absence of repression or need for concealment is especially characteristic of interviewees from a rural background, who returned to their own village or settlement where they had been known since childhood and continued working in agriculture without being harassed by the authorities. By contrast, those who decided to settle in cities faced certain restrictions, be it non-admission to postgraduate studies or rejection for employment in large, especially military enterprises.

Studies of the Experience of Forced Labour It is obvious that each personal story recorded within the framework of the project is unique, as unique as every individual’s life. However, analysing the forced labour experience in Nazi Germany during the Second World War, we can group these widely different ‘life stories’ according to certain criteria, such as, for example, strategies of self-representation and ‘formulas’ for inscribing the forced labour experience into the overall autobiographical narrative, or the use of hackneyed phrases, clichés and metaphors of the official discourse vs. personal interpretations. What follows is a summary of some results of our analysis of the strategies of selfrepresentation within the framework of our informants’ autobiographical constructs and of the spaces in these constructs which are filled by the narrative of forced labour in Nazi Germany. An analysis of our informants’ autobiographical constructs reveals three main strategies of self-representation used by former Ukrainian Ostarbeiter. The first is a strategy of ‘compliance’ with the codes and standards of Soviet society and with the official version of the war generally accepted in that society. In the compliance strategy, the interviewee rarely returns to the subject of forced labour after having once described it in the context of the relevant topical block. This experience is not determinative for the subsequent life practices of the informants. Their life is ‘normal’, ‘like everybody’s’. In their autobiographical narratives, this group of people pays more attention to stories of their families, work,

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various life successes and hardships. In turn, they successfully ‘inscribe’ a narrative of their period of forced labour into the official Soviet account of the war as a whole and into the Soviet version of the history of forced labour in particular – that is, into the approved narrative of resistance outlined above. Here we refer to narratives of obligatory – though minimal and insignificant – sabotage that former Ostarbeiter tried to commit while working in industrial enterprises, in construction and other organisations. This ‘deliberate sabotage’ (including disobedience or demonstrative violation of discipline of different kinds) was not necessarily followed by punishment. In these cases, the main thing is a desire to show oneself at all costs as a fighter and protester rather than a passive and silent ‘slave’. In the event of work in agriculture or domestic service, where former Ostarbeiter were very closely associated with their ‘masters’ (unlike large enterprises where the ‘master’ was often depersonalised and/or was represented by the German state as a whole), the narrative of resistance took a different form. Here, we discovered two strategies: inversion or levelling of the power relations inherent in the ‘master–forced labourer’ binary opposition. Both of these strategies are implemented when former Ostarbeiter present themselves as equal or even superior to their masters in knowledge, skills or experience. Thus, for example, we recorded narratives of friendly relations between young Ukrainian female workers and their mistresses, of ‘transfer of experience’ in farm management and of the communication of vital practical knowledge and skills from Ostarbeiter to their masters, as well as episodes of protecting their masters from arbitrary actions by the liberators – namely Red Army soldiers. However, it is important to note that the Soviet narrative of resistance implied resistance to the enemy proper, the unambiguously and explicitly negative Nazi. The possibility of attributing positive characteristics to both ordinary German people and the ‘masters’ themselves (including cases when they needed to be ‘protected’) appears to be a feature of a contemporary, i.e. post-Communist, understanding of the problem, for which ambiguity and the absence of fixed ideological stereotypes are typical. The next strategy of self-representation is that of self-acquittal through accusation, where the narrator strives to acquit himself (or herself), in the eyes of society and the state, of an act of ‘betrayal’ that he (she) committed unwillingly and under compulsion by working on the territory of the enemy state. In this case, the theme of forced labour resounds throughout the biography as meaningful and determinative for the whole subsequent life experience, and the former Ostarbeiter positions himself (herself) not as a fighter but rather as a victim – of circumstances, of the aggressive policy of both the totalitarian states that triggered the war and of the later policy of the Soviet state towards Ostarbeiter. This strategy is most apparent in people with a passive life situation, whose personal or professional

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life was not a success, and who attribute all their hardships or frustrations specifically to the fact that they were detained in Nazi Germany as forced labourers. By contrast with the group described above, these informants’ accounts are characterised by extremely negative assessments of all Germans, the use of stock phrases and fixed discursive structures from the Soviet era (‘Nazi fiends’, ‘torturers’, ‘murderers’, ‘beasts’), and a brief and telegraphic style of retelling the experience of their sojourn in Germany and its lengthiness throughout the interview. This is most likely related to the fact that this experience was too painful for this group of people, and the trauma of the violence exercised against them by the Nazi state was aggravated by similarly traumatic restrictions, contempt and neglect on the part of the Soviet state that they have not been able to overcome in the course of their lives. There is also a diametrically opposed strategy that we might call ‘protest socialisation’. In this strategy, an individual positions him/herself as a socially active person and tries to minimise the impact of the forced labour experience on his (her) whole life, while at the same time perceiving this period as significant for his (her) fate. This strategy is typical for people who in one way or another protested against the system of constraints imposed by Soviet society on the professional and personal development of those who had worked on German territory during the war. This system included, among other things, secret instructions declaring marriage with former Ostarbeiter undesirable, restricted access to education and employment, and a prohibition on individuals who had been taken for forced labour at the age of over eighteen returning to live in large cities, all of which were in force during the first postwar years. ‘Protest socialisation’ implies persistent struggle to implement one’s own life plans (which often seemed ambitious to people around them) through a permanent search for ways to evade existing prohibitions. These included a change of surname, nondisclosure of the fact of forced labour in Germany at marriage and when seeking employment, the use of various tricks when passing checkpoints, etc. It should be noted that, like the ‘compliant group’, this group of informants placed the topical block of the narrative of forced labour within a narrative of resistance imposed on the ‘master–forced labourer’ relationship, but in doing so they aimed not so much to prove their loyalty to the official discourse on the war as to emphasise their active and protesting posture in general. This protest (most common in men’s narratives) was manifested not in overcoming power relations but in practices we call adventurous; these include tales of impossible escapes, of stratagems for making their work easier, of swindles and thefts that went completely unpunished, and so on. All these cases were described with the excitement of youthful adventure rather than as painful reminiscence.

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To conclude our account, it is essential to discuss the general structure of the autobiographical narratives of former Ostarbeiter, specifically in the open phase of the interviews, which proceeded without any detailed questions or intervention on our part. All the accounts we recorded are half-open narrative autobiographical interviews, designed according to an established pattern of sequential interchange in which the first phase is open, the second is explanatory, the third contains open questions and the fourth is critical. The first, open phase is commonly supposed to be the most important and representatively saturated. It is primarily on the basis of this phase that subsequent interpretations are made, associative series and links are analysed, and the existence of various patterns and models according to which an informant develops his (her) narrative is demonstrated. Our analysis of the strategies of self-representation is mainly based on this phase, but both in carrying out interviews and in analysing them we faced a number of problems, the main one being the informants’ varying ability to create a narrative without suggestive questions from us. Those who had already been interviewed in the context of other research projects constructed the first part of the narrative freely and without assistance, as did those who are commonly called ‘professional witnesses’ – representatives of public organisations of various types, with extensive experience of speaking about themselves and their experience of forced labour at meetings and social events. These narratives are chronologically and topically logical and well-structured and represent a stable, tried and tested construct. Here we observed a very interesting detail. The stories told by four representatives of the same public organisation, who had worked for completely different masters and at different enterprises, sounded absolutely identical – both in their contents and actors and in the specific details of what had taken place. From this we concluded that institutional communication has been enormously influential in establishing a common pattern in the narratives of ‘professional witnesses’. Other informants, predominantly rural dwellers, had had limited practice in presenting their own experience to the public. Consequently, a certain number of the interviews we recorded consist entirely of answers to our questions, often assuming the form of ‘problem narratives’, that is, free narratives uninterrupted by us but limited to the topics we had previously specified. But neither this nor the peculiarly structured quality of the forced labour narratives offered by representatives of public organisations reduces the cognitive value of the respective accounts. To return to the problems we faced in conducting the interviews, the following points may also be stressed.10 On the one hand, former Ostarbeiter often look forward to a conversation in the form of an interview, stressing that it removes ‘weight from their souls’ that has oppressed them

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for many years. Yet at the same time, and this is very notable, they continue to be afraid of this ‘weight’ and ‘truth’. The questions ‘May I speak about it?’ or ‘Who else will listen to my story?’, as well as the request that we turn off the tape recorder so they can speak ‘without extra ears’, are heard on our cassettes all too often. The ‘conflict of association’ should be underlined here, too: our respondents were much more ready to speak (for example to me) if, during our conversation, they could trust me and ‘forget’ that I might represent the official institutions that they are still afraid of, seeing me as a person who, by my age, could be their daughter or granddaughter. The accounts of former Ukrainian Ostarbeiter are still influenced by the marginality and isolation of the past years, in other words the ‘ban on memory’ that resulted from official Soviet ideology. But at the same time they are gradually becoming acceptable to society, finding their place in the structure of post-Soviet historical discourse. And in characterising the specific features of Ostarbeiter memoirs, we need to be aware that their specificity emerges directly out of this transitional condition.

NOTES 1. Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill 2005), 12. 2. Orest Subtelny, ‘The Soviet Occupation of Western Ukraine, 1939–41: An Overview’, in: Yury Boshyk (ed.), Ukraine during World War II (Edmonton 1986), 7. 3. Bohdan Krawchenko, ‘Soviet Ukraine under Nazi Occupation, 1941–1944’, in Boshyk, Ukraine during World War II, 15. 4. Украинская ССР в Великой Отечественной войне Советского Союза 1941– 1945 гг. / В 3-х т. / Ред. колл. Назаренко И. Д. и др. / Том 3. Советская Украина в завершающий период Отечественной войны (1944–1945 гг.). – Киев, 1975. – С. 153.. 5. Bundesarchiv-Militaerarchiv (BA/MA). – RW 31/16. – p. 18. 6. Центральний Державний архів вищих органів влади (ЦДАВО). – Ф. 3206. – оп. 2. – справа 78. – арк. 1-52. 7. Pavel M. Polyan, Zhertvy dvuh diktatur: Ostarbaytery i voennoplennye v Tretem reyhe i ih repartatsiya (Moscow 1996), 82. 8. N.a., Nimetsko-fashistsky okupatsiyny rezhyim na Ukraini (Kiev 1963), 57–58. 9. This information was provided by the Kharkiv City Society of Victims of Nazism; it has not been published. 10. See also Gelinada Grinchenko, ‘Ostarbeiter del Tercer Reich: recordar y olvidar como estrategias de supervivencia’, in Historia, Antropología y Fuentes Orales, vol. 35: “Utopía y Contrautopía” (2006): 123–137.

 20 

ORAL TESTIMONIES FROM RUSSIAN VICTIMS OF FORCED LABOUR Irina Scherbakova

Background

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or Russia (and certainly two other former Soviet republics, Belarus and Ukraine), the Second World War is the pivotal event in the history of the twentieth century and the most important in the official Soviet history and historiography. Inevitably, anything that did not fit into the ideological matrix based on ‘the great feat of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War’ was removed from the wartime mythology created in the Soviet era. This is why the truth was concealed about the beginning of the war (after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) and the first catastrophic defeats: such knowledge would also have revealed the terrible mistakes and crimes committed under Stalin’s rule. For the same reason, the number of Soviet prisoners of war and Soviet civilians deported to Germany was also kept under wraps, along with the truth about the Holocaust. It was only with the advent of glasnost, when the archives began to be gradually opened, that a realistic historical picture that encompassed the many complex facets of this war began to emerge. For the first time, the fate of those who could be described as the ‘victims of two dictatorships’ (albeit to differing degrees) was openly discussed. The huge number of prisoners of war (POWs) and forced labourers explains why so many witnesses are still available for interviews, despite Notes for this chapter begin on page 274.

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so many decades having passed, despite their experiences in Germany and despite the poor living conditions in the USSR and the resulting low life expectancy. In his monograph,1 which is virtually the only extensive Russian work on this subject, Pavel Polyan cites the following figures. On 1 January 1941, 195.4 million people lived in the USSR. Including evacuees and conscripts, he estimates that 60–65 million Soviet citizens lived on the territory occupied by the Germans.2 Polyan also agrees with Christian Streit’s earlier estimate of 5.7 million POWs, of whom 2.4 million were still alive at the end of the war. Comparing various figures relating to the number of civilians deported to Germany, he calculates a number in the order of 2.3 million.3 This does not include the Ostarbeiter living in the territories annexed under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Under Soviet law, however, these people were also treated as Soviet citizens who had been deported to Nazi Germany. Before mass deportations began on 5 August 1941, compulsory labour was introduced in the occupied territories for all 18- to 45-year-olds. Employment offices were created so that the occupying forces could record, monitor and distribute the workers. By autumn 1941, the first deportations were being made from the occupied territories to Nazi Germany. However, large-scale deportations from the Soviet Union only began after Himmler’s directive of 20 February 1942, which also defined the rules for the employment and treatment of Ostarbeiter.

The Search for Historical Witnesses In preparing the project, we had access to the extensive work carried out by the Memorial Society as part of its long-term project ‘Victims of Two Dictatorships’. Memorial has been collecting information on forced labourers in Germany since 1992, and its archive contains more than 400,000 letters from former Ostarbeiter. It was also in the early 1990s that Memorial embarked on its first pilot project to conduct interviews with victims of forced labour.4 We selected witnesses for this project according to the following criteria: – The witnesses had to have arrived in Germany at a reasonable age, i.e. no younger than ten or twelve at the time of deportation. This becomes more difficult each year, as there are fewer and fewer older historical witnesses. – The interviewees had to have been deported to Germany from various regions within the Soviet Union (Southern Russia, the Volga area and Central Russia). We wanted to choose places that had not already been extensively surveyed as part of other projects.

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– The historical witnesses had to have come from different social backgrounds and to have had different life experiences – before their deportation, in Germany and after their return. – There was to be an equal gender split as far as possible. – The interviewees could not be ‘professional’ tellers of their stories or have written any memoirs. They could not be known in the media as historical witnesses.5

Prewar Childhoods As a rule, those who record the oral histories of Ostarbeiter feel honourbound to accommodate the wishes of interviewees by beginning their stories precisely at the time of deportation to Germany and ending it with their liberation in 1945. Deportation to Germany represented such a harsh period in the lives of those interviewed that everything that preceded it appears to have been erased from memory. The majority of deportees still alive to tell their stories were born between 1925 and 1927. Their prewar experiences therefore relate to their childhood and teenage years. It would, however, be wrong to conclude from this that the prewar lives of these people are of no interest and should not be researched. On the contrary, it is precisely these reminiscences that give us the key to understanding how these individuals perceived occupation by Germany and life in Germany. The prewar memories of the Ostarbeiter (and the Red Army soldiers who became POWs) are of particular interest because these people are the younger representatives of the prewar generation and therefore the most ideologically indoctrinated in Soviet history. Apart from the young people from the regions of Western Ukraine that had been annexed before the war, this was the first generation to become a fully-fledged product of the Stalin era. All our respondents were educated in the highly ideologised Soviet school system. Of the 35 people interviewed, 21 had completed at least seven years of schooling by the time war began, which means they could have continued their studies at secondary school. Most of them – as follows from their stories – were staunch Soviet citizens when the war broke out. Many were members of the Soviet pioneer organisation, and some were already Komsomol members. Their belief in the Communist Party, Stalin and the invincibility of the Red Army had been instilled in them since early childhood. As far as our attitude … to the government and Stalin was concerned … we had been brought up as patriots at school and in the pioneer camps. When the war began we thought … we would soon be in Africa because the Germans had already occupied part of Africa and France … and we would take these countries over, too. But when they announced three

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days later that Lvov had capitulated and [the Germans] were marching into Smolensk … this is when we began to think: now, what’s going on? Surely we’re invincible, all-powerful … and suddenly we surrendered … Because before, before the war, whenever a film was on at the cinema … and one of our leaders appeared … Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov or Budyonny …. the whole room stood and applauded. And try staying in your seat: Everyone looks at you and says: ‘Why don’t you stand up?’ Yes, the mood was very patriotic at that time. (Zhabsky)

Having been raised and educated under the influence of Soviet propaganda, these people must have found it difficult to understand the events unfolding around them. It is important to remember that some of our respondents had been direct or indirect witnesses or even victims of prewar Stalinist repression.6 We should remember, however, that no matter how problematic their emotional and material experience was before the war, most respondents had survived the harsh prewar realities of hunger and squalor. Thirteen of 35 interviewees come from peasant families. Their dates of birth show that they lived at a time when peasant Russia was struck by a severe famine, which explains why their first conscious memories are connected with hunger. Hunger has an extremely strong impact on personality development and memory. We can find many examples of this in our interviews, where the accounts of early childhood are dominated by descriptions of hunger and misery.

Invasion Many respondents speak about the panic that broke out in the very first days of the war, along with anarchy and looting. Others describe unsuccessful attempts at evacuation before the German troops arrived. At the beginning of the war, evacuation was badly organised, and the reasons for this were chiefly ideological. The authorities called on the people to stand their ground, then hurriedly left the town and villages themselves; young people saw how they fled. As a result, the Germans took many POWs in the early months of the war. In addition, huge swathes of the civilian population found themselves in the hands of the enemy, who proceeded to burn and destroy everything that would have helped the people to survive.

Under German Occupation Our interviewees’ descriptions of life under German occupation are particularly important to us, because they reveal the circumstances under

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which they were deported to Germany, including how the deportation was prepared. Some respondents lived under occupation for many months and sometimes even years, which many felt made them grow up more quickly. They also gained important experience of life – experience that in itself was extremely brutal, particularly for those who had never lived through a war. During this time, it was the 14- to 17-year-olds, especially the boys, who were the most mobile members of the population. They were active on the black market; they could hide easily and get into places too awkward for most adults. In this context, many reports reveal a less welldefined moral and emotional conscience and insufficient experience in interpersonal relationships. Another important issue is the relationship of the interviewees with their German occupiers, because as Ostarbeiter they would come into contact with German civilians some months later. In most accounts, Germans are not seen as individuals but as representatives of a hostile and terrible war machine. These Germans only take on a more human aspect when the interviewees encounter them in close quarters, such as when they were accommodated in their homes: ‘And there, in the large room, there were always two or three Germans. They were soldiers. No older than lance corporals. And they were quite friendly to us, perhaps because I could speak German with them and we were the same age’ (Novgorodov). Many clearly separate the German war machine from German civilians. One of our interviewees (Shtepa) found the difference remarkable: ‘Where did these fiends come from? The people in Germany were good people, but what were their children doing?’

Recruitment and Deportation Deportation by the Germans was a phase of their lives that people were most likely to conceal during the Soviet era. We could still detect a reticence in the interviews we held during the early 1990s. This was not surprising, as the very fact of having been in Germany was seen as a blot on a person’s career right up until the early 1960s and even beyond. Soviet patriotism in the prewar years dictated that people should do everything they could to avoid falling into the hands of the enemy. Even going to one of the ‘recruitment points’ after receiving call-up papers was considered ‘voluntary’ to a certain extent and therefore unpatriotic. It was better to be rounded up. Indeed, many tried to claim they had been picked up during roundups. Of course, this did actually happen in some cases, but only after a certain time. And although not all interviewees expressed a sense of guilt, they nearly all showed signs of trying to justify their actions. Reasons given for their deportation to Germany included

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failed attempts to escape, the impossibility of getting away and betrayal by neighbours. Even today, almost no one admits to leaving of his or her own free will (or at least, our interviewees did not). Presumably, the acute famine of the winter of 1941–42 under German occupation or the overriding consensus in 1942 that the war was lost were inadequate reasons for going voluntarily to a collection point. But this is not surprising. Admitting to voluntary departure was not only morally problematic, it was treated as treason and penalised with at least eight years in a labour camp. In fact, very few people did leave voluntarily for Germany, and then only in the early winter of 1941, when the German recruitment campaign had just begun. Most of our interviewees were deported because their names were on Nazi lists and they were taken by local police. Alternatively, they were captured in a public place during a roundup. However, now that the interviewees are receiving compensation payments, it seems that much in their tone has changed in comparison with earlier interviews. There is now no reason for former Ostarbeiter to conceal the fact that they were deported. On the contrary, it is their stay in Germany that makes them eligible for compensation payments, which for most interviewees are very sizeable. This is why there are fewer cases of nondisclosure or distortion of facts; often, false information such as birth year and nationality was given at the time of deportation and in Germany itself. Sometimes people thought it would be better to be from Ukraine than Russia. Others also changed their names and surnames. A particularly obvious example is that of Jews claiming to be Russian or Ukrainian; this was their only opportunity to try and save their lives. That said, even now, hardly anyone speaks about the German recruitment campaign, which was widely reported in the German press in that period. We can, however, assume that this propaganda began to take effect in late 1941 and early 1942, particularly considering the hopeless supply situation, the hunger and the unemployment. Worst affected by this were the inhabitants of occupied towns and cities. Most interviewees state that people in towns received a call-up in writing, while in the villages a local police officer called at the house. Many went straight to the recruitment point on receiving the call-up, justifying their decision by saying they were afraid their family might be punished if they did not. Another common topic in the interviews is the mass roundup. The longer the war went on, the more brutal the methods became for deporting civilians in the occupied territories. In May, I got caught in a roundup at the bazaar. Someone I knew in the city police force came to my rescue, you could say … This chap said that … well … He took my passport and said: ‘Go on, off to the employment office. And don’t even think about hiding the fact that I know you. I’m

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warning you. They’ll see the passport and come to your home, and if you run away, if you don’t come but run away, then they could shoot everyone living at that address, whether they’re related to you or not.’ Well, I had to go straight to the employment office. (Novgorodov)

It is worth mentioning here a few points of interest that keep cropping up in the interviewees’ accounts. Germans are rarely mentioned in relation to deportation – the local police usually saw to everything. Most of our interviewees were deported to Germany in 1942 or 1943, only two in 1944, which is consistent with the general waves of deportation. Two interviewees were taken as POWs in 1941, and their accounts are essentially about a series of transfers from one POW camp to another until they found themselves in Germany. Most interviewees went to Germany unaccompanied by their families, though in a few cases children were deported with their families. If parents or other relatives had the chance to say good-bye, the parting was always extremely sad: ‘Yes, well. It was sad and we cried. Yes, especially my father. We went on a cart … He took me himself … He took me to the station. And when we got there? We said good-bye and cried’ (Khmara). Probably the single greatest factor in giving young people and children some stability was the fact that when mass deportation was introduced in 1943, people were deported in large groups from the same village or town. A lucky few were even able to stay together for the entire journey to Germany and return home together as well. All interviewees remember having very little in the way of luggage when they set off – some of them had only the clothes they were wearing.

The Journey Reports of the journey to Germany, including the description of the train, fellow deportees and stops, are very similar. This is because the conditions, as described in many of the interviews, were always the same: goods wagons or cattle cars, men and women transported together. Many interviewees mentioned the same humiliating experience of having to answer the calls of nature during brief stops with no segregation of men and women. Virtually all interviewees said that they had almost nothing to eat on the journey and very little to drink. They ate the food they had brought with them – if any. Some people died on the journey.

Distribution and Slave Market One of the most dramatic events in the interviews was the deportees’ arrival in Germany and their allocation to employers. This was no doubt

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caused by the emotional tension that had built up through a combination of fear and the knowledge that they had come to the very heart of the hated enemy’s territory. It was a shock to find themselves in an unfamiliar situation, hearing a language they did not understand and being separated from their families. The ‘labour exchange’, as it was known, was a very painful memory for most interviewees. They were taken there as soon as they were unloaded from the wagons and then selected for work by employers in farming and industry. Many, particularly the more educated, compared their experience to that of the slave trade as described in the books that were popular among Soviet schoolchildren in the 1930s. It was a goods station. … On the opposite platform stood about ten or fifteen people. And very well dressed, despite the war, better than Russians anyway. We hadn’t seen any foreign films back then. … As if they were from another planet. Such hats! Men wearing hats with feathers and one was wearing – somehow it caught my eye and shocked me – those short leather trousers, the ones from the Alps? Yes, I only saw them there. I don’t know why this German woman singled me out, she was very unpleasant. She had … But I was big … tall, basically. Anyway, they came over from their platform to ours, one by one, in order; someone broke away from this … There were a lot of us, and I’m only talking about one wagon. Yes, anyway, she – she wrote something down and took me with her. She asked me in German if I spoke German. I just remember that I … [laughs] There are things you remember by the sound of them. She said: ‘Dummkopf’.7 (Agranovskaya)

Another, looser description of a deportee’s selection at the ‘labour exchange’ nevertheless tells the same basic story: This Nazi came over – my future boss. He had a real mouth on him, just how you imagine a typical German to be. We were led out, seventeen of us lined up and this German came over and looked at us. He looked at our hands and looked at our teeth and that was it. And then he took five of us with him, five girls. (Beketova)

Feeling people’s muscles to see if they were strong enough for hard labour and inspecting their teeth to avoid dental costs produce particular associations. Most of our interviewees were delivered straight to labour camps after disinfection. These camps were usually located near factories and mines. Nowadays, it is often said that the deportees were shipped from one dictatorship to another – that they also experienced repression and injustice in their home country. The families of some were indeed victims of repression and were in effect used for forced labour as provided for by wartime legislation. Nevertheless, as soon as they reached Germany, they sensed that they had reached a new low in terms of humiliation and loss

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of freedom. It is clear from many interviews that the Germans simply did not understand that this was a new set of circumstances for them, or did not want to, and so treated these people as slaves. In their home country, many interviewees had felt that they were free, having been persuaded that they were the masters of their country, especially the young. But now they were clearly slaves of the enemy. Many interviewees were able to describe with great clarity the precise moment when they became a slave – a ‘thing’. They use the verb ‘to buy’ – ‘a farmer bought us’ and ‘everyone had been bought except me’. And many describe the circumstances of being ‘bought’ in a very similar way.

Working in Germany An obvious question that arises when examining the life of Ostarbeiter in Germany is: Which was worse, working in industry or agriculture? Of the thirty-five interviewees we spoke to, only five worked exclusively in agriculture. The rest either worked in both, or in a range of industries, or were employed as domestic servants. In most cases, the type of forced labour changed several times. Towards the end of the war, the forced labourers were constantly reassigned, seemingly on a random basis. As a rule, the living conditions and harshness of the labour varied according to when the people were deported. The first Ostarbeiter left Ukraine in January 1942, destined for work in industry and mining. And although the proportion of voluntary recruits was quite high in the first trains, their lot was probably the toughest. Housed in barracks behind barbed wire, their life differed little from that of POWs. Much also depended on the branch of industry, how cruel the commandant of the labour camp was and the ability of the individual to adapt and survive. Descriptions of labour camp organisation were similar in many interviews, with some worse than others, but it represented an acid test either way. In the camp, we were housed in barracks, you know, they were really basic structures, made of metal sheets. We were locked in at night. Completely – even the windows – everything was locked from the outside. And a guard patrolled outside. The camp was also enclosed by barbed wire. And round every bend, on every corner, there was a special device designed to stop the guard falling asleep. They were special clocks, they looked like alarm clocks. And the key … he put it in and turned it and the clock stamped something for him, with the time on. This was used to check whether he had fallen asleep. It was absolutely forbidden for them to fall asleep, or sit down or anything. (Shuldeshov)

Below is a description of a camp attached to an armament factory in Frankfurt:

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Fenced in, surrounded by barbed wire … Horrendous barracks. We made these … I drilled these holes. On a gun, there’s a barrel … I don’t know how to explain it, I have no idea. … And I drilled holes there with a type of drill, drills I had to replace myself. The barracks were terrible. They had three-tier bunk beds. Concrete floor, appalling conditions, no shower. Basically, if you couldn’t stand it, you were weeded out and then you disappeared. … This endless monotony. … Was that life, or just an existence? It feels like you’re in a dream … Sometimes I felt as if I was about to lose my mind. … In the barracks, in the morning when I woke up for the day shift, I always felt that if I kept my eyes closed, that it would all turn out to be a dream – the factory, everything. Perhaps a protective mechanism had kicked in, in my body, who knows? (Agranovskaya)

It is generally thought that working in agriculture, on a farm, was less severe and that it was easier to survive. This is true in the main, but some of our interviewees describe agricultural work as no less taxing. In his book Victims of Two Dictatorships, Pavel Polyan agrees with author and former Ostarbeiter Vitaly Semin that in Germany conditions were better in places where there were fewer people. This made it easier to build human relationships in inhuman conditions. Some of our witnesses refute this, however. Proximity and closeness to other people could be stifling in this tense atmosphere of ‘everyday fascism’, as it was much harder to bear any aggression and hatred when it came from people who were not anonymous. In an armaments factory, people often came face to face with the enormous war machine and the anonymous enemy – they were alone among many. But in a domestic setting, evil had a human face.

Relationship with Germans The attitudes of our interviewees towards Germans varied enormously, from fear and hatred (rarely occurring in undiluted form any more) to remembering the smallest kind gesture. Today, it is evident – and this may have something to do with the compensation payments – that our interviewees are making considerable effort to be objective, even when describing a concentration camp: The thing I remember most vividly about the concentration camp … I remember boiled potatoes … During excavation work, there were older Germans who transported all the bricks and cement and everything by horse, and while we were unloading it from the cart, somebody put something in my coat pocket … I didn’t know who. I felt around and it was warm. I reached inside – a potato! You see … this old German had … as I later realised … put a potato in my pocket. And that was a great help. (Bogoslavets)

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The same interviewee describes being pelted with stones, presumably by children: Well, sometimes they, when we were being led back to the camp after work, they all stood in the street, at their gates, and hurled stones at us, from behind … And the Germans laughed when one hit somebody, sometimes it would make them fall over. Yes. Then we had to pick them up and carry them. You are walking, looking around, and then you see, aha, now a kid has jumped out, in a minute, now we’d better … Who knows … You’re waiting to see if you’re going to get hit or not. Yes. That’s how it was. (Bogoslavets)

Of course, there are reports of much worse acts of cruelty, and not necessarily in the context of penal camps or concentration camps. Presumably, many of our interviewees felt a desire for revenge, but few speak about it today. At the time, this desire even made them welcome air raids, even if it meant that they would perish as well: ‘We got up early one morning to go to work … and I was pleased we had been bombed. Let’s have more! More bombs, and get the job done!’ (Zhabsky).

Liberation and Homecoming For many of our historical witnesses, liberation brought only more trauma. This was mainly because their home country, represented by various institutions (NKVD, ‘Death to Spies’ forces such as SMERSH and the repatriation authorities), did not exactly welcome them with open arms. According to the reports, only those freed by the Americans actually experienced the joy of liberation – for a moment, at least. For the first time in their lives, these people had a choice: they could go home or stay in the West. It was a truly extraordinary position for a Soviet citizen to be in, as many of our interviewees recall. Now in advancing years, some regret having passed up the opportunity to stay in the West and the possibility of a happy and comfortable retirement in the US or Australia. Back then, though, the percentage of those who chose to stay in the West was not particularly high. The people who did were mostly from Western Ukraine or the Baltics, or had suffered under Soviet repression before the war. The majority of ordinary Soviet citizens who had been deported to Germany while they were very young just longed to be back with their family and friends, speaking their own language. Incidentally, many cited this longing for home as a negative emotional factor in their life in Germany: ‘I tell you, we crawled home. We needed nothing, no silver, no gold, we saw none of that. We just needed our home, our school, our society, which had made us who we were’ (Khabarova).

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But disappointment was not long in coming for the former Ostarbeiter. As soon as they arrived at the collection points and filtration camps, they had to brace themselves for another tough time. Many, especially former POWs, were subjected to gruelling and humiliating interrogations. Well, I thought, I’ve gone from one concentration camp to another … I start to explain who I am. One sits there, writing, another leads the interrogation. Each time they call you, you get beaten up … Then they accuse everyone of betrayal … that we went over to the Germans, that we were spies, that we didn’t deserve to be trusted, and so on … Those were the conditions we had to endure. (Bogoslavets)

Sometimes these interrogations would go on for more than a week, at which point the former forced labourers would be arrested and sent to a gulag. Four of the thirty-five interviewees were arrested and sentenced as allies of the fascists. The situation was extremely hard for women and young girls, who more often than not were raped by their Soviet liberators. This was common in the camps and collection points where many former Ostarbeiter were held. Almost all the women we interviewed said that this had affected them in some way or other. Their own people, Soviet soldiers and officers, refused to see these women as victims, considering them the spoils of war, and made no distinction between them and German women. ‘Our Russian soldiers shouted: ‘You are prostitutes, you are the prostitutes of Germans. You slept with them and with the French as well’ (Khabarova). This may well have been another psychological trauma to have a negative impact on the subsequent lives of many of our interviewees. They were met with hatred and mistrust in their home country. Many marriages and families broke up as a result. After leaving the filtration camps, many of our interviewees were effectively sent to do forced labour again. Amazingly, they took this to be the natural course of events, more or less accepting this new regime of force. They had been used to living without their identity papers, in barracks, constantly being sent to new forced labour assignments. Conscripts did not have it any easier. After the war, a three-year service often turned into four or five years, even in the land forces, and unit commanders frequently refused to authorise demobilisation. On the plus side, a period of service in the Red Army could improve an otherwise ‘problematic’ past record for former Ostarbeiter and POWs. All the others tried to conceal their deportation to Germany as far as possible. This was easier for those who were not yet eighteen when they were deported. Anyone who tried to go to university or apply for a respectable job on his or her return from Germany was cruelly rejected. This occurred under different pretexts: ‘They snubbed me, saying

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people would rub my nose in it. And they did – saying I was inferior, a leper. That’s why I never attempted to apply for a managerial position’ (Novgorodov).

Conclusion Although the majority of former Ostarbeiter did not directly suffer repression after the filtration camps and only a small percentage ended up in a gulag, they still had a black mark on their records and were constantly afraid that someone would remember they had been in Germany and accuse them of ‘working for the enemy’. Only a few managed to study, join the party and hold down a career. Many kept their stay in Germany a secret, and most told no one of their experiences. Former Ostarbeiter were living in the ‘grey zone’, to use a phrase coined by Primo Levi. Their experiences in Germany did not fit into the model of official Soviet propaganda. For this reason, very few memoirs of forced labour were published before perestroika, even compared to the number of memoirs published by former POWs and concentration camp prisoners. It was only at the beginning of the 1990s, when the press reported that Germany was prepared to make compensation payments, that people began to speak openly and in detail – and of their own accord. Furthermore, in 1995 the Russian government under Boris Yeltsin finally decreed that former Soviet POWs and forced labour deportees should be put on the same legal footing as people who had fought in the war. As a result, former Ostarbeiter began to join forces, with various organisations and initiatives springing up at the grassroots level. But much time had been wasted: the majority of the active members of these organisations are those who had been very young prisoners and victims of fascism – the rest have all died. However, the most important shift in public awareness began when Germany started to make payments to the former forced labourers. This immediately raised their status both in society and among their families. It freed them from the feeling of social inferiority they had always known, and laid to rest the fears that had plagued many all their lives.

NOTES 1. Pavel M. Polyan, Žertvy dvuch diktatur: Žizn’, trud, uniženie i smert’ sovetskich voennoplennych i ostarbajterov na c=užbine i na rodine (Moscow 2002). See also Chris-

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5.

6. 7.

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tian Streit, Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941–1945 (Stuttgart 1978). Polyan, Žertvy dvuch diktatur, 54. These figures relate to the USSR population within its 1939 borders. The interviews conducted as part of the International Life History Documentation Project on Slave and Forced Labour were carried out by Alena Kozlova and Irina Ostrovskaya, both employees in the archives department of the Memorial international organisation and at the Centre for Oral History at the Memorial Research, Information and Educational Centre (RIEC). Irina Scherbakova headed up the project, which drew on Memorial’s vast database of addresses of former Ostarbeiter. This information was updated in 2002 and 2003 during an interview project involving former prisoners of the Mauthausen concentration camp. As part of the international Mauthausen project, the employees of Memorial conducted over 200 interviews, but we were unable to interview many of the historical witnesses who had been traced at that time. We also used information from the Russian foundation ‘Understanding and Reconciliation’, the partner organisation to the German foundation ‘Remembrance, Responsibility and Future’. The main target regions for the interviews were Perm (the Urals), Novocherkassk, Taganrog, Rostov (Southern Russia), Pensa (Central Russia) and Astrakhan (Lower Volga). This part of the project involved 35 interviews, 15 of which were recorded on video and 20 on audiotape. The interviews were held in: Moscow (7), Pensa (6), Astrakhan (6), Taganrog (4), Rostov-on-Don (4), Novocherkassk (3) and Perm (5). Twenty of the interviewees were women and fifteen were men. Their ethnic origins were: 23 Russians, 5 Ukrainians, 4 Jews, 1 Estonian, 1 Tatar and 1 Belarusian. Their social backgrounds were: 13 peasants, 6 members of the intelligentsia or Communist Party, and 16 manual workers. Four respondents had parents who had been victims of prewar repression. Nine interviewees were eighteen or older in 1941, 18 interviewees had turned eighteen by 1945. Twenty-one interviewees had completed at least seven years of schooling, 4 had completed four years or less, and 1 had attended university. Twenty-eight were Ostarbeiter, 5 were POWs and 2 were interned in ghettos and concentration camps on racial grounds. Seventeen had been deported from Russia, 12 from Ukraine, 4 from Byelorussia and 1 each from Estonia and Hungary. Five worked in concentration camps, 18 in industry, 5 exclusively in agriculture; 2 were domestic workers. Four interviewees were interned in gulags after liberation. The fathers of at least 4 of the 35 interviewees were arrested or dekulakised. German in original.

 21 

THE EXPERIENCE OF CITIZENS OF THE FORMER SOVIET UNION AS FORCED LABOURERS IN NAZI GERMANY Natalia Timofeyeva

T

he subject of forced labour carried out on the territory of the ‘Third Reich’ by citizens of the Soviet Union was a taboo for historians in the Soviet Union, and even after the USSR’s dissolution the topic did not receive due attention in Russia. Only in the last decade has there been a substantial increase in interest in this issue. The last ten years have also witnessed a number of fundamental research projects aiming to fill the information gap.1 In the context of the International Slave and Forced Labourers Documentation project, a group from the Voronezh State Pedagogical University conducted ten interviews. The Memorial Society2 was of great help to the students in their search for respondents. Geographically, the area where research was carried out was not limited to Voronezh and the Voronezh oblast (region) but also included the city of Kursk and the village of Kapustin Yar (in the Astrakhan oblast). The respondents were between 77 and 83 years old. Four of them were men and six were women. All but one of the participants were ethnic Russians (one of them was Polish) and half of them, despite having been baptised as Russian Orthodox in early childhood, do not display much interest in religion. The self-educated artist Anatoly Artyushenko says: ‘I was baptised in a church in Temryuk, I guess. And, as I was told, the priest – the Notes for this chapter begin on page 285.

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water was freezing cold – dropped me there. Into the bowl. My mother cried such a long time, and I cried at nights for seven or eight years … I am a materialist.’3 Most respondents’ so called ‘materialism’ is rooted in the long-term policy of secularisation of Soviet society, the beginning of which coincided with the dispossession of the kulaks during the 1930s. Its violence can be clearly seen in the interview with Yekaterina Kudinova, who comes from a large Orthodox family: Nobody told us not to join the kolkhoz. But my father said: ‘I won’t join.’ But they ravaged all the churches. My father believed in God, he had a Bible, so he would say: ‘These are people of the Antichrist; I won’t give them my soul.’ That’s why they harassed us … they took it all … we ate only grass and nothing else [weeps]. They took everything and then they came to take our dog, we had a beautiful dog. … And they said: ‘Untie the dog.’ They took it all, our cow, our horse, and everything we had. And they took all the potatoes. They started untying the dog, one took a pitchfork, one took a shovel, and poked the dog, and it got angry. It wouldn’t let anyone step forward, it was such a big dog. Then they said to my sister: ‘Go, untie the dog for us.’ My sister went ahead, she wanted to untie it, but the dog wouldn’t let her come closer. It could see there were people there with a pitchfork, with a shovel, they were hitting it, so it didn’t let my sister come closer either. … So she says ‘Guys, I’ll bring it to you tomorrow, there’s nothing for us to guard here, no one is going to steal the kids, I’ll bring it to you tomorrow, just let it calm down.’ She turned to go, and one man, he was my mother’s niece’s husband, hit her with a pitchfork on the back, and she fell down. He broke her spine and then she lay still for seven years like this.4

The Christian values that meant everything to the Orthodox Ivan Kudinov turned out to be incompatible with the kolkhoz activists’ attempts to meet the demands of the Communist Party. The Kudinovs’ tragedy was a rare case of a Voronezh farmer trying to fight for his freedom and for his beliefs, showing strength of character and a free will. Not all the believers remained steadfast in the face of the trials that Kudinov had to undergo; most of them surrendered to the party’s demands. Yekaterina Kudinova’s memories clearly show the need for research into the rural dechristianisation policy in the Soviet Union, to investigate its impact not only in terms of undermining the church’s influence, but also in terms of how it transformed the shared ethical principles that informed Russian society at large. Most of the respondents are city residents who were deported from various Soviet cities (Voronezh, Grodno, Krasnodar, Stavropol) or happened to be in a village when a deportation was taking place. Yury Khorzhempa’s first experience of war and German occupation was in the city of Grodno at the beginning of July 1941; Stavropol (Petr Ostrikov), Kras-

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nodar (Anatoly Artyushenko) and Shakhty in the Rostov region (Valentina Ukrainskaya) were occupied in the summer of 1942 along with the Voronezh region. All respondents recall the occupation as a very difficult time in their lives. Valentina Ukrainskaya lost her sister then. A German soldier quartered in their flat threw the crying baby out of the cradle in a fit of irritation: ‘My mum came and the girl was all covered in blood, lying there, dead. She was … two months old or so. And that was it – we buried the girl.’5 Violence and the vulnerability of the population became the main features of German occupation regime in the Soviet Union. Yury Khorzhempa talks about the occupiers’ anti-Semitic measures in Grodno with bitterness: ‘The central street – Ozheshko Street – and along the street there go the Jews. They weren’t allowed to walk on the pavement. The Jews had a star up front, on their chest, and one on their back. A lot of Jews were taken to the ghettos. You know, I was very sorry for them.’6 The food supply system that had operated under the Soviet regime stopped functioning and people were forced to look for food themselves, using all the means they could come up with. Their memories create a vivid picture of everyday life under German rule, and show how the ethnic and socio-political diversity of Soviet society led to differences in expectations when the German army arrived. My grandfather’s property had all been taken away and then he came to Donbass, and when the Germans came to the Kursk region, he told my grandmother straight away: ‘Let’s go to our motherland’. He thought that there the Germans would give them back all that they had taken away … They packed their stuff and went to the village … Nobody gave him anything.7

Each respondent has his or her own unique story of deportation. Most of them were taken to Germany by force. Yury Khorzhempa was stopped in the street by a German patrol, and a day later he was at the employment office in Königsberg that enlisted labourers for work in Germany. Valentina Ukrainskaya was caught when she was trying to get across the Don River to her family. Those who lived in Voronezh were thrown out of their homes by the occupiers; they were lined up and had to march the long distance to railway stations in the neighbouring Kursk region. They were given neither water nor food, and no consideration was given to children or old people. At the stations, they were put onto cattle trains and sent to work in the Reich. In the villages in the Voronezh and Kursk regions there were Soviet citizens working for the occupiers; they helped to gather up their own compatriots for deportation and accompanied the deportees on the march to the destination train station named by the Germans.

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There came a politzay [Soviet collaborator with the Germans] on a horse … and they forced us all to go. Half a kolkhoz. Not just young people … They took childless people, those who were over forty and over fifty, everybody. We went nonstop until Stariy Oskol. It was mud, raining all the time, pouring rain [cries]. In Stariy Oskol they put us into a kind of shed without a roof. A shed full of people. It was raining all day and then there was frost in the morning and we froze all together into our chunk of ice.8

In Krasnodar and Stavropol it was the German employment office that that played the main role in recruiting workers. Petr Ostrikov was the only one among our informants whose departure to Germany was in any sense voluntary. It was a result of his language skills (he got the call-up paper because of his friendly relationship with a German language teacher who worked at the employment office in Stavropol), his adolescent romanticism and passion for adventure. His enthusiasm did not last long, however: ‘In Rostov I began to understand … Here, in Rostov I wanted to jump out. But the railway station was detached and, of course, by then it was impossible to break through.’9 As regards the respondents’ professional background, four of them were clerks, three were farmers and three were factory workers. All of them had to leave school because of the deportation, and only two men managed to get a degree after the war. Yekaterina Kudinova is still illiterate as a result of what happened to her family. Most of the respondents worked in the armaments industry in Germany, in the Organisation Todt and/or in agriculture (Petr Ostrikov during the period between two imprisonments, Yury Khorzhempa and Alexandra Maltseva). All the respondents talked about the unbearable conditions under which Ostarbeiter carried out virtually unpaid labour in the German armaments industry. Maria Seleznyova recalls: ‘And then they would hand out the envelopes, they gave us some Pfennigs, and for the Pfennigs we could buy one bar of soap, sandy, nothing but sand.’10 Ivan Knyazev said that the fact that working conditions in the Organisation Todt were much better actually saved his life. In comparison to armaments work, the working conditions in agriculture, particularly on private farms (experienced by Petr Ostrikov and Yury Khorzhempa), were considerably better. There everything depended mainly on the employer himself, whose decisions, though primarily based on economic pragmatism, could also be influenced by religious, moral and ethical principles. Most respondents were accommodated in labour camps, where the living conditions were often similar to those in concentration camps. Maria Seleznyova recalls: We worked in two shifts. If we worked in the daytime, they woke us up at four o’clock in the morning, and we went to the factory in a column.

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We came to the factory; there was a big clock there, and everyone had a card. We found our cards, and stamped on them the time we came. At six o’clock sharp we were at the machines. We came to work with empty stomachs: woke up and went to work. Stood at the machines, and worked without any break until six o’clock in the evening. At six o’clock in the evening we finished, we came to the clock again, stamped on the card the time we left, and went to our camp. The road to the camp led through barbed wire. We came to the camp and lay down … For a whole day they gave us one loaf of bread for five people and a bowl of thin soup. Sometimes it was spinach, sometimes – turnip … We went to sleep, because we … were exhausted. For people who couldn’t go to work there was a first aid room. If they acknowledged that you were seriously ill, they gave you some relief, if not, especially the Russians, they lined us up … and marched us off. A German walked ahead, then came the men who weren’t going to work, and at the back was an Alsatian dog and it bit the legs of anybody who fell behind.11

All the respondents pointed to the scarcity of food supplies; they had to find more food by begging, stealing or extra work on private farms. Petr Ostrikov was, apart from other hardships, twice transferred to camp N5 at Auschwitz and also to the Auschwitz main camp and Auschwitz prison. He was able to ‘arrange’ some better living conditions in each of the German camps and prisons through various business activities: I’m good at arranging things. A Pole comes, for example, wearing some kind of boots. I come to him: ‘Will pan sell the boots?’ I start to speak Polish, I am interested in bootlegs. ‘Oh, no’. Then after a while he comes himself: ‘Will pan buy the bootlegs?’ So, I buy the bootlegs; we make slippers out of them … This man Boris turned out to be a perfect boot-maker; I was a deliveryman … So we sold slippers.12

Hunger was the main tool the Nazis used to destroy the personalities of the Ostarbeiter, and hunger is the key component of the memories of those who managed to come back home after their release about their time abroad. On the whole, hunger as a crucial factor determining the personality of an Ostarbeiter may well become a topic for a separate research project. Most respondents also suffered systematic abuse. They experienced the system of punishment and violence as an instrument for shaping the personality of the Ostarbeiter, calculated to break their will and demonstrate their complete dependence on the camp authorities. Total obedience was supposed to guarantee that that the work of the foreign labourers would be reliable and uninterrupted. One of the respondents (Yekaterina Kudinova) was subjected to a demonstrative visit to the ‘crematorium’, beatings and humiliation and was also forced to give blood. Survival in the camp depended on belonging to a micro-group consisting solely or mostly of people of the same ethnic background. It is

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important to mention here that the ethnic conflicts and prejudices that were common among people from Southern Russia, for example, were forgotten when cooperation and the sharing of skills and knowledge became crucial for survival. Anatoly Artyushenko recalls: For some reason there was a member of a tank crew from Armenia with us, his face was badly burnt. We agreed on something … And he was listening, the tank man … ‘Take me along, men, I have a compass’. I said: ‘Show us the compass.’ So I looked. We could use the compass to go east. We set a day, took some food, pieces of bread. We took watches from the Poles, and something else from others. Everything was possible: stealing and swapping things among us.13

Similarly, the groups of Ostarbeiter who escaped from camps and prisons were ethnically homogeneous or at least comprised only Soviet citizens. A strict hierarchy and cooperation were the keys to success for foreigners scavenging in German towns at night (Petr Ostrikov). On the whole, those who had had some previous experience of intercultural communication before deportation had a much better opportunity to survive (Petr Ostrikov, Yury Khorzhempa). Such experiences enabled them to approach foreigners, especially Germans, quite easily, using the interest, sympathy or weaknesses of their interlocutors to save themselves. The necessity of communicating with Germans in this situation of asymmetrical intercultural communication excluded every opportunity of making friends with them (or made it extremely difficult), but left the possibility of feeling some respect for their culture and gratitude for any kind of help, which was extremely dangerous in Nazi Germany. All the respondents longed to get back home, to their families. Half of them succeeded in returning home after they had been released and gone through the system of registration and examination by the Soviet authorities. Others had to serve in the army (Yury Khorzhempa), whereas the women worked for some time as domestics (Alexandra Zolotaryova, Alexandra Maltseva), and many were sent to rebuild the destroyed Soviet cities (Ivan Knyazev, Valentina. Ukrainskaya). Valentina Ukrainskaya recalls: They brought us to Bataysk … Called us to the KGB [Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosty, State Security Committee] … A lieutenant kept scribbling something down. So I tell him how it all went. And he started picking on me, saying ‘you have a German accent’. So I tell him ‘Where would I get it, I know three words in German’. So I don’t know why, but we go somewhere again, thinking we are going home … Hope you, that bloody lieutenant, son of a bitch, will burn in hell … They sent us to Novorossiysk to rebuild the city.14

Almost immediately after their release, sometimes even on German territory under Russian rule, the former Ostarbeiter had to face contempt

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from their own compatriots. The repatriate’s reaction to this attitude depended mainly on his/her self-confidence and their self-respect. It was easier to tolerate for those who were born into well-off Soviet families with a network of connections. A representative of the Soviet provincial elite, Petr Ostrikov, a man free of any restrictions and prejudices, considering himself an exception from any rule, ‘lost’ his passport with a stamp showing where he had been and got himself a new, ‘clean’ one with the help of a friend. The situation was much more difficult for manual workers and peasants, who had to do the hardest work, were dependent on the decisions of the authorities and, on top of that, did not know how to fight for their own interests. However, it was the experience of living in a camp that helped the former Ostarbeiter in their struggle for a place in postwar Soviet society. In the camp, fighting for survival under extreme conditions became their routine. The survival strategy that developed after the war did not allow for any contacts with former fellow prisoners; everyone had to fight for him or herself. The only support repatriates could get came from their friends and relatives; moreover, many of them became the sole breadwinners in their families (Yekaterina Kudinova). As time went by, past sufferings were gradually forgotten. To be sure, they often thought about the past, but it was never discussed. Such caution was also dictated by the difficulties they could come up against when applying for jobs or university places. Nevertheless, the interviews carried out both within and outside the context of the present project show that the former Ostarbeiter developed a group identity. Many of them found each other as soon as it was no longer dangerous and have a sustained and intense relationship despite their age and poor health (Alexandra Zolotaryova, Yekaterina Kudinova). The inability of the Ostarbeiter to speak about the past experiences which had shaped their personalities and careers led to difficulties in family life. The need to conceal their past made these people lonely in their families, and in most cases this led to a divorce (Alexandra Zolotaryova). As a rule, those who managed to create a new family learned from this experience and were happy in their second marriage (Yekaterina Khorzhempa). It is worth mentioning that some of the women who were forced to work in Germany during the war remained childless (Valentina Ukrainskaya, Yekaterina Kudinova). However, being an Ostarbeiter had little or no effect on the men’s health (Petr Ostrikov, Yury Khorzhempa, Ivan Knyazev). Not all respondents believe that the time they spent in Germany was a tragedy for them. Both Petr Ostrikov, who managed to escape from many German prisoner of war camps and prisons, and Yury Khorzhempa, who grew up in a multicultural environment (his father was Polish, his step-

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mother was Czech and his family lived in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and the Volga River region of Russia among ethnic Germans), believe that the experience of being an Ostarbeiter was a very important part of their lives, helping to widen their horizon and gain new skills. Women and individuals who were involved in the arts (Anatoly Artyushenko) were more likely to see their experience as negative. The more negative the respondents’ past experience was, the more negative was their attitude towards the compensation they received (Maria Seleznyova). The respondents’ income level undoubtedly plays an important role in this issue. For instance, those who have a good relationship with their well-off children can decide whether to accept financial help from the state or not (Maria Seleznyova, Lyudmila Grishayeva), whereas Yekaterina Kudinova, who lives alone, and Valentina Ukrainskaya, who is helping her adopted daughter (an elementary school teacher) to bring up a child, accepted the compensation gladly and without a second thought. Yury Khorzhempa complained that the representatives of ‘Remembrance, Responsibility and Future’ responsible for disbursing the compensation had not bothered to check his gender and placed him under the category ‘women’ (on account of his unfamiliar Polish last name), and that as a result of this ‘oversight’ he received less compensation money. In some cases the situation was worsened by Russian legislation, as in the case of Yekaterina Kudinova, who received no compensation (unlike two friends who had been interned in the same camp) because she had been legally an adult (nineteen years old) when she was taken to Germany; this meant that in the USSR she was considered a ‘traitor’ because she had worked for the ‘Third Reich’. The disrespectful attitude of the Soviets towards the repatriates persists to some extent in present-day Russia. Since all the interviews were connected with memories, emotional stress was unavoidable. All the respondents can still feel the fear that entered their lives on their return, the constant need to conceal their past in order not to lose their jobs (or the hope of one) or harm their relatives. Some fear the ghost of the KGB, remembering well the government pressure and their forced cooperation with this organisation (Maria Seleznyova). The respondents treat any problems connected with the government as KGB interference, which is not always the case (Anatoly Artyushenko). The survival strategies that their families adopted in the postwar Soviet Union are kept secret as well (e.g. the constant moving of a Polish-Czech family from town to town). Also of interest are their efforts to represent any violation of laws in Nazi Germany as actions of the resistance movement. This is how Petr Ostrikov, a bold and adventurous character, describes his theft of ration cards, which he generously shared among his comrades.

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Information about the war gleaned from external sources was very often presented as the respondents’ own experience. Only after several more questions had been asked did it become possible to distinguish between the respondent’s real experience and information heard on the radio or read in books. The group had a unique opportunity to compare two stories told by different respondents about the same camp, which appeared to be strikingly different. Moreover, one and the same person (the camp commandant) was described in two completely different ways. The respective narratives were clearly influenced by various factors including the women’s own experience, their personality, background and even their appearance. Looking back on their lives, all the respondents talk about the need to forgive. When they judge people whom they encountered, what they reflect on is not these people’s nationality or social class but their humanity. The Germans … they were not all fascists. And I am grateful to them for getting us out of there, us – four people, they saved us. Had it not been for them, I don’t know what would have happened … Either we would have been bombed by the Americans, or Herr Bischorat would have bloody killed us. Girls, it’s a long time ago, all that, we have to forgive, to build the world in a different way. And what I have gone through [weeps], may it never happen again to my grandchild. … You have to forgive people.15

All the respondents see their lives as a challenge sent from above that they have successfully met. Among them there are no ardent protesters against the Soviet regime or ardent supporters of it. Fundamentally their beliefs and actions are deeply rooted in Christian ethics. In the past decade Russia has made first steps towards changing the policy towards Ostarbeiter inherited from the Soviet Union. However, people at grassroots level are still unaware of the problems these people face. That is why the information gathered as a result of the Slave and Forced Labour Documentation Project needs to be made public. This can contribute to important changes in the current situation, since the observations and interpretations generated by the project allow us to see the experience of Soviet citizens in the light of the experiences of the many other people forced to work for Nazi Germany.

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NOTES The research project was carried out by the Voronezh State Pedagogical University. 1. See, for instance: Pavel M. Polyan, Zhertvy dvukh diktatur: zhizn, trud, unizheniye i smert’ sovetskikh voyennoplennikh i ‘Ostarbeiterov’ na chuzhbineye I na rodinye’ (Moscow 2002). 2. The Memorial Society is an international non-profit organisation engaged in charity work promoting historical awareness and providing legal support and re habilitation to those in need. 3. Interview with Anatoly Artyushenko. 4. Interview with Yekaterina Kudinova. 5. Interview with Valentina Ukrainskaya. 6. Interview with Yury Khorzhempa. 7. Interview with Maria Seleznyova. 8. See interview with Yekaterina Kudinova. 9. See interview with Petr Ostrikov. 10. Interview with Maria Seleznyova. 11. Ibid. 12. Interview with Petr Ostrikov. 13. Interview with Anatoly Artyushenko. 14. Interview with Valentina Ukrainskaya. 15. Ibid.

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PRESENTING LIFE IN CAPTIVITY Oral Testimonies of Former Forced and Slave Labourers from St Petersburg and the Russian Northwest

Anna Reznikova

In the context of the International Slave and Forced Labourers Documentation Project we conducted fifteen interviews with former forced and slave labourers, four of which were recorded on video. In St Petersburg, the project was supported by the Memorial Research and Information Centre. Memorial retains a card index containing information on individuals who suffered repression under the Soviet regime on the grounds of their political or religious conviction. A file on people subject to forced and slave labour during the Second World War was started as a separate index supplementary to the main card index in 1993. At present, the card index on St Petersburg and the Leningrad and Pskov regions comprises the names of more than 300 people, of whom only 70 are capable of giving interviews. New information is continually being added to the index, mostly through contacts with other NGOs in St Petersburg and the Russian Northwest. In connection with this particular project we received information from the Roma community and the Organisation of Child and Youth Prisoners. Almost all interviewees in this local project were interviewed in St Petersburg itself, with the exception of Vladimir Aleksandrovich Ivanov, whom we saw in Moscow. Obviously, none of them were sent to Germany directly from Leningrad. Most of them were captured either in Leningrad Notes for this chapter begin on page 295.

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oblast (five respondents) or Ukraine (five respondents). Of these, five were living in Leningrad when the war broke out but either were visiting relatives during the summer holidays or had been evacuated from besieged Leningrad at the time of their capture. The remaining five were captured in Smolensk oblast, Estonia, Rzhev, Belarus and Cherkassy. As both Leningrad oblast and Ukraine were mostly occupied soon after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, the majority of our interviewees were sent to Germany in 1941–42. On the whole we had no difficulty gaining permission for interviews; nevertheless the release form that had to be filled in aroused suspicion and bewilderment in almost all our interviewees. Extensive explanations were needed to overcome their suspicion, as these people had never before come across Western conventions such as copyright and right of publication, while at the same time they had a mystical fear of any official document.

The Interviewees Age When choosing participants for the given project we came up against the issue of age. A vital criterion for the selection of interviewees was their state of health and memory. Eleven of our fifteen interviewees were adults when the events took place. They are from the age group of those born between 1920 and 1926; thus, in 1941 they were between 15 and 21 years of age. Two interviewees were children at the time, aged ten and one respectively. The first is Olga Timofeevna Simnitskaya, born in 1932, who, as the daughter of a partisan, was sent together with her mother from Smolensk to Auschwitz in 1942 and became a victim of medical experiments there. The other one is Vladimir Aleksandrovich Ivanov, born in 1940, whose family was expelled from the town of Ostov in Pskov oblast in 1941 and sent to Auschwitz because of their Roma origin.

Sex Only four of our fifteen interviewees are male. A significantly higher number of women in the relevant age group have survived the war and are still able to give interviews. Therefore we gave preference to male eyewitnesses in the process of selecting interviewees. It is only possible to draw limited conclusions from this correlation, and they will mainly be based on personal impressions. I conducted five interviews myself, three of them with men (Tokarev, Lileev, Bogdanov) and two with women (Kossakovskaya, Dadziz). I had the impression that, irrespective of their

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upbringing and attitude to the Soviet regime, the men regard the time they spent as forced labourers in Germany as something logical, given that it happened during the war, if not as something that was natural under conditions of war. It did not make a difference whether they were soldiers (although Mr Lileev was forced into labour as a prisoner of war) or simply schoolboys whose education was interrupted by the war. They understand themselves very clearly as men who became victims of the war – this is their war. They fully identify with the war period. As far as the women are concerned, neither Mrs Dadziz, who was deported to Germany to work on a farm, nor Mrs Kossakovskaya, who was arrested during a raid following the murder of an SS man, has ever perceived her past in the context of the war. They more or less clearly distinguish between the period of war prior to their own deportation or arrest, that is, at home, and the period spent in Germany. However, these conclusions must not be generalised and did not apply to all the interviews, nor can they be backed up by statistics.

Education The general level of education among the former Ostarbeiter is low. Few of them managed to finish higher or even secondary specialist education. Thus only four of our fifteen interviewees have a degree, which they studied for after their liberation. The low standard of education is reflected in their storytelling, something I will show in detail below.

Interviewees’ Motivation for Telling their Story For several interviewees this was not the first interview on the topic of their past, which obviously influenced the way they told their story. Those who had been interviewed before tended to relate fairly fluently and coherently everything they had already said before, but any digression from the usual course of interview was perceived, possibly subconsciously, as something not quite correct. Some people’s desire to present a consistent narrative was obvious, and therefore they tried to avoid answers like ‘I can’t remember’ or ‘I don’t know’ when a question presented them with difficulties such as forgotten dates, names or details. One could say that some of them had developed a definite idea of what the interview should be like, because they already knew what it would be about. This was most obvious when it came to questions concerning parents, childhood or family life in general. Many interviewees expressed incomprehension and bewilderment and sometimes plainly refused to talk about their childhood and parents, like Mrs Stefanenko, who could not understand why

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this should be necessary if the interview was supposed to be about what happened during the Second World War. In order to contextualise the interviews conducted with ‘experienced’ interviewees, it would be useful to compare them with the texts of memoirs written earlier, and ideally, if possible, with earlier memoirs by the same eyewitnesses. It is not impossible that identifiable discrepancies in the interpretation of events arise not only from predictable changes in individual memory but also from shifts in the Russian culture of commemoration (e.g. public efforts to deal with the historical legacy) and contemporary Germany’s attitude to the victims of Nazism (i.e. the compensation payments). In the absence of an agreed methodology, the comparison of texts for such an analysis will be difficult, and it will therefore be essential to work out the parameters and criteria for comparison beforehand. This essay aims to begin that process, in anticipation of further research to come.

Presenting One’s Own Life It is also worthwhile to take a closer look at those who were recounting their lives for the first time. Among those I interviewed only Mrs Kossakovskaya was giving her first interview. She found it very difficult to talk about herself and to understand that we were interested not in the history of the war as such, in the nature and sequence of events, but in the history of her life, her views and circumstances, her personal worries and interpretation of what had happened to her. She found it difficult to talk about herself as a victim and it seemed to her that her fate had no historical significance. On the other hand, the fates of her father, girlfriends or chance acquaintances, even those with no connection to the war, in her eyes really deserve attention. It was quite hard to break through this barrier during the interview. She explained that she simply does not like to talk about herself. As she put it, her children and grandchildren know everything about her; that is, she has told her family everything, especially since she has never even tried to have her prisoner number from Auschwitz removed; it remains tattooed on her arm. But her husband, children and grandchildren are interested in her as a member of their family, whereas my appearance, that of a stranger, caused bewilderment and unease: ‘But why me? Why am I special?’ In her opinion only important people are interviewed. Moreover, as a rule she talks about her life to her family little by little and when the opportunity arises, but not all in one go. In many cases the impact of external influences, such as publications on the war from the 1960s to the 1980s, on personal recollections is

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palpable. Often an interviewee will begin his or her tale with the words: ‘On 22 June 1941 the war began’ or variations of this, regardless of the fact that this particular date does not mark a break in ‘normal’ life for every individual. In the majority of cases the reason is a certain poverty of language and a low level of education. As their education was interrupted by the war, they were unable to resume it after their return, not only because they had to earn a living but also as a consequence of Soviet policy towards them: because of their ‘curriculum vitae’, universities would inevitably turn them down. Thus even if 22 June was not a turning point for all of them, they start their report on this period of their life with the beginning of the war. Of course, there are also those for whom it was precisely the beginning of the war that brought the break. For example, Maria Ivanovna Vitkevich recalls that she and her sister had theatre tickets for 22 June: So, the war started on 22 June, that is, for that very day, the first day, my sister and I had tickets for the Pushkin Theatre [pause] and then the radio started at four o’clock in the morning [pause] My God, Levitan, shivers down my spine, attention, attention, attention, this morning at four o’clock, that is, the German fascists, the fascists crossed, that is, the border and attacked the Soviet Union.

As if she wanted to confirm the clear association between this date and the break in her life story – from then on ‘another life’ began – during the interview she kept returning to this event as an interruption of normal life: ‘Racing on skis I used to fulfil the norm, as they say, I was the first among the girls. [pause] So, that is how it was. [pause] On 22 June 1941 the Great Patriotic War began, but before the war you had to [pause].’

‘Man and the Totalitarian Regime’ Blanket judgments on the ‘fascist invaders’ are similarly widespread. For example, Mr Tokarev, who describes the good relations within the family of the farmer for whom he worked in Germany, nevertheless insists on calling the family fascists. He related his thoughts fluently, recalled positive moments and laughed, as long as he was not asked any direct questions regarding his life on the farm. However, he explained away all the difficulties of his life in Germany with ‘Why bother? They are Germans, after all.’ These preformulated phrases often contradicted the real events. I am inclined to think that here we can see a later addition, a consequence of active Soviet political propaganda. Possibly the revaluation happened even later, namely when he started to speak openly about his past. I read his written memoirs and found that what he wrote about the

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fates of Ostarbeiter is permeated by a tragic pathos. On the other hand, when he himself talks about his fate he constantly laughs and turns even the most everyday story into an anecdote. When reading Mr Tokarev’s tale as an example of additions prompted by Soviet propaganda we need to take into account the fact that he was arrested in the Soviet Union after his return from Germany, where he had been sent to a camp after working on the farm. In the Soviet Union he was arrested for forgery – he had tried to hide the fact that he had been deported to Germany during the war. And then, asked where life was harder, he replied without thinking: ‘No, of course, in Germany it was harder,’ without giving any reasons for his assessment. This brings us to the topic of the revaluation of a person’s attitude towards the Soviet regime. Five of the fifteen interviewees were arrested in the Soviet Union because of their stay in Germany or in the occupied territories. What attitude did people have who had returned to their motherland in the hope of finding their homes? Even those among them who were not directly persecuted after their return could not avoid being affected by Soviet policies towards prisoners, camp inmates and Ostarbeiter. This was especially clearly formulated by the ex–prisoner of war Nikolai Ivanovich Lileev: As you can see from my story, I lived in mostly decent conditions, in Germany as well as in Russia. Of course, from a moral point of view it was harder for me in the Soviet camp, because I was not aware of any guilt on my part. Moreover, I was not the only one, there were many like me. Well, in Germany I accepted it as a matter of course. The enemy had become a prisoner – grateful that they treated me the way they did and not worse.

Mr Lileev thus brings up the issue of whether the crimes of the Soviet and German sides could somehow be justifiable. Did they have the right to act as they did because they were the enemy? Or did belonging to the same people give them that right? Can there be a ‘right to terror’ in relation to ‘enemies’ or ‘one’s own people’? Everyone has some kind of answer to this question. Many share Mr Lileev’s point of view; others, conversely, think that the subsequent repressions were somehow inadvertent, a mistake. Mr Tokarev, for example, who had to hide his ‘personal details’, has a very relaxed perception of his spell in a Soviet camp, calling it ‘nonsense’. It is astonishing that only one of the five interviewees who were persecuted after their return, Maria Ivanovna Vitkevich, started to compare the camps without being prompted by the interviewer. I believe that this has to do with her specific perception of the break in her biography, about which I say more below. In almost every interview I was reminded that Stalin had prohibited the Red Cross from helping Soviet citizens. Anyone who mentions this

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fact openly presents it in a negative light and with open indignation, motivated not so much by the fact that it made the physical conditions of camp life worse but rather by its moral implications, i.e. the betrayal by their own side. These are Mr Bogdanov’s words, clearly indicating that the Soviet regime was to blame for the state of affairs – for the state of the Soviet Union at the end of the war, and even for the fact that Soviet citizens had ended up on German territory in the first place: ‘What can I say. I simply have to say it, because I know what great grief and suffering the Germans have brought to this country. But I know full well that we ourselves are to blame for the horrors that the war left behind. Well, Stalin’s famous order not to leave anything behind.’ What follows is a detailed account of how Soviet soldiers burned down a hospital in Rzhev. In Mr Bogdanov’s interview we also find a concrete formulation of why the Soviet regime is guilty of the fate of those who ended up on German territory: I can tell you straight away that I have never been embarrassed or ashamed of the fact that I was in Germany, no, inwardly I was uneasy, I understood my position as a man who had factually worked for Germany while it was waging war against my motherland. Understandable, that’s very simple. But I did not find my position shameful. Our own army abandoned me. The army disgracefully retreated under the leadership of our generalissimo Josef Vissarionovich Stalin; they all didn’t give a damn about us. [pause] So why should I be ashamed, who is to blame after all?! Was it me who wanted to go to Germany or what?! Did they ask me to enlist to go help the Germans?! They abandoned me there. Who abandoned me? My own people, everybody was abandoning their own people, of course not family and friends, ordinary people, we were abandoned by our government, we were abandoned by the very regime that had made all this possible. And those disgraceful retreats, and the terrible losses during the war.

Since most interviewees’ attitudes towards the regime were formed during their stay in Germany (thanks to their age, if for no other apparent reason) as well as directly after their return and after they had been confronted with the hostility directed at them, their fear of the regime materialised in the wish to keep away from it as far as possible. The still popular stereotype of the return as an expression of a great love for the Soviet regime (and what this meant here is precisely love for the Soviet regime, as opposed to love for the Soviet motherland) does not even appear in these interviews. The most common motivation for people returning was the desire to find one’s family, one’s home. Indeed, many knew and could not ignore what awaited them in the Soviet Union; they saw how some went to the West. But people simply wanted to return to ‘normal’ life. It is worth looking separately at two of our interviewees, Sergei Nikolaevich Bogdanov and Nikolai Ivanovich Lileev. They both grew up in

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families with an openly negative attitude towards the Soviet Union. Mr Bogdanov’s father was shot when he was twelve years old, whereupon he and his mother were exiled. When Mr Lileev remembers his childhood he tells about the parcels they packed for his uncle, who was imprisoned in the camp on the Solovetskii Islands, and also for his grandfather, who spent time in various prisons and camps, being persecuted as a priest. Their tales stand out from those of the other witnesses in that they always provide some kind of analysis of the situation. In the case of Mr Bogdanov the analysis is more global, including fairly harsh political judgements, historical concepts and an attempt to locate his own biography within the general political context. He did not shun contact with the regime, did not avoid it like the others. He consciously joined the Communist Party and explains his step with the desire ‘to have a look at the Soviet regime from the inside’. In a way he flirted with it. Mr Lileev is a different case. He has kept away from anything political. Having retreated to private life, he has retained a sober appraisal of what has happened. He is different from the others in that his retreat is smooth and organic, he does not suffer from inner conflicts and contradictions. The other interviewees do not follow that scheme; they suffer from an inner conflict caused by ‘incomprehension’ and ‘insult’, that is, a victim’s psychology: they unconsciously attribute guilt to themselves. Just as the German government was starting to pay compensation in the 1990s, a whole torrent of new information became available, criticising Soviet policy during the war years. This information contradicts the previously held perception of the place of one’s own fate in the historical context, which in turn sometimes leads to errors in the interpretation of events.

The Biographical ‘Break’ I have already mentioned the ‘break’ that war, occupation and periods spent in camps or doing forced labour constituted in our interviewees’ normal biographies. How is this break reflected in the general presentation of a life? As a rule, the break is there, but everyone locates it differently in time. For a minority the key moment was the beginning of the war itself, for others it was the occupation, for yet another group it was their own deportation or arrest. For a significant number of interviewees the break came with the German occupation prior to their deportation to Germany. Mr Bogdanov describes his feelings at the moment he found out that he was among the young people to be deported as labourers to Germany: ‘And I was absolutely incapable of raising an objection, because I absolutely didn’t care about where I’d starve to death: here I would die, there I would die.’

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By contrast, for Lidia Yanovna Dadziz the occupation did not disturb the course of her ‘normal’ life. It is important to analyse what exactly constituted the moment of the return to ‘normal’ life, whether it was the end of the war, the return to the Soviet Union or the (re-)socialisation, that is, being given a passport, finding work, founding a family, entering university. For Dina Estafyevna Stefanenko there has never been an endpoint to the break. She claims that up to the present day it has been impossible for her to return to ‘normal’ life, regardless of the fact that she has a family and a loving daughter. She could never find proper work and a job in her profession; she constantly changed jobs because she kept being made redundant due to her ‘curriculum vitae’. In cases where people were persecuted after their return, did the Soviet camp constitute a new break in their biography? As I have already mentioned, five out of fifteen interviewees were persecuted in the Soviet Union. Three of them, Mr Lileev, Mrs Krestyantseva, and Mrs Vitkevich, do not regard their stay in a Soviet camp as a second break. Mr Lileev was arrested as he entered the Soviet zone of occupation, where he was sentenced to ten years in a camp followed by three years of disfranchisement and being sent on to a camp in the Komi Republic. Mrs Krestyantseva worked as a nurse for the Soviet army in Germany after her liberation and in 1946 was sentenced as a ‘traitor to the motherland’ and sent to a camp in Kazakhstan. Mrs Vitkevich was harassed by a Soviet officer in the Soviet zone of occupation, who denounced her after she had rejected his advances. This led to her arrest as a ‘traitor to the motherland’ at a resettlement point in Berlin in 1946. By contrast, for Oksana Romanovna Kossakovskaya the arrest in the Soviet Union constituted a new break in her biography. Upon returning from Germany she had begun to study at the conservatory and in the German department in the philology faculty at the University of Lvov. In her own words: ‘I was enjoying myself so much at the time … I enjoyed my studies, you know, the freedom, the opportunity to socialise.’ She was arrested in her second year at university and sent to Magadan. Finally I want to consider the attitude of former slave labourers and forced labourers towards contemporary Germany. Some (for example Mr Tokarev and Mrs Dadziz) have been to Germany; Mr Lileev even went to see his former master. I did not detect any bitterness or bewilderment at the difference in life status or any of the now widespread slogans such as ‘we beat them, but they live better than us’ in the interviews. Mr Bogdanov remarked that it was the Soviet Union that lost this war, because ‘Germany literally raised itself from the rubble,’ while in the Soviet Union ‘half of the land was destroyed, burned, and has not recovered to the present day.’

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Unexpectedly for me, the topic of compensation was hardly ever raised. If at all, it came up in connection with the difficulty in obtaining the necessary documents and the fight with Russian bureaucracy. It was also raised in connection with the lack of respect shown by the authorities towards those who survived the concentration camps. In many cases the interview constitutes an act of social rehabilitation for the former slave and forced labourers. Giving an interview raises their status within their families, as well as the sense of their own importance, because ‘The historians are interested in me.’ Moreover, we know from previous research that the publication of the book Tyazhelye slova1 led to the organisation of several meetings of former forced labourers; they started to speak more openly and to acknowledge that they have a right to their own memories. As people begin to speak more freely about their wartime experience, it would be interesting to extend the circle of interviewees to include the children of camp inmates and Ostarbeiter in order to find out how their parents’ fate influenced their own lives, their attitude towards the regime and their understanding of the past.

THE INTERVIEWS D.E. Stefanenko, 31 August 2005 O.R. Kossakovskaya, 28–29 April 2006 M.I. Vitkevich, 23 June 2006 L.P. Tokarev, 11 and 15 September 2006 N.I. Lileev, 28 January 2006 S.N. Bogdanov, 12 November 2005 L.Y. Dadziz, 18 June 2005

NOTE 1. ‘It is hard to find words.’ The book ‘Es ist schwer, Worte zu finden’: Lebenswege ehemaliger Zwangsarbeiterinnen (n.a.) was published in German in 1999. It contains the recollections of fourteen former Ostarbeiter. In 2001 an expanded edition was published in Russian under the title Tyazhelye slova.

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WOMEN’S BIOGRAPHIES AND WOMEN’S MEMORY OF WAR Olga Nikitina, Elena Rozhdestvenskaya and Victoria Semenova

Soviet women participated in the Great Patriotic War on a large scale. Most of them, as part of the civilian population in the occupied territories near the front, were involved in the military conflict through forced labour mobilisation or the partisan movement. According to official statistics, the number of women who were conscripted and took part in military action amounted to 800,000. Women who joined partisan units in occupied territories made up 9.8 per cent of all partisans, of whom there were 28,500 altogether.1 Huge losses of the Soviet army in the initial period of war led to the mass mobilisation of Soviet women in 1942 to serve with the front-line forces,2 as well as in the rear. In spite of the unprecedented scale of women’s involvement in the war, the historiography of this involvement remains largely unwritten. This is true not only of the heroic experience of women who fought in the Red Army but also of the experience of everyday life, which has not been part of the official discourse of war. According to Olga Nikonova,3 the problem of women’s participation in the Great Patriotic War is gradually shifting from performative action – an attempt to make the ‘invisible soldiers’ visible – to the history of women’s experience of war and the study of feminine models of war memory, of state policies towards the commemoration of women’s

Notes for this chapter begin on page 308.

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wartime experience and of the construction and deconstruction of images of women in war and of war itself, as well as analysis of women’s psychology and behaviour in wartime.4 Oral history is an invaluable source to help fill these gaps in women’s wartime history, all the more so as the informants – participants and witnesses – become less and less numerous every year. In the context of the Slave and Forced Labourers project we were interested in the destinies and narratives of several categories of women (from among thirty interviews carried out with both men and women). First, we distinguished three main categories of women in war: civilians who were deported to forced labour from occupied territories; those who were conscripted, taken prisoner and then forced to work; and those who worked under occupation. This could be work in industry, construction, agriculture, camps, or some combination thereof. In addition, we focus on the labour of children who were deported together with their parents. Most of the interviews were conducted in the summer of 2005 in Pskov. Life-history interviews with the respondents who were deported to work in Germany and experienced the hardships of forced labour allow us to look at the long-term effects of early traumatic experience at the level of women’s sensory memory. For the various categories of women who had those experiences, we can consider what was preserved in memory at an individual, emotional level as being most meaningful, as well as what comes to the surface first or demands expression when memory is suddenly activated after long years of silence – and how this takes place5 Researchers highlight that war memory is gender-specific. Women’s war narratives are not only heroic stories about suffering but detailed everyday accounts of life and feelings; what they talk about and what they prefer to keep silent about does not accord with public war and postwar discourse. Moreover, the narratives show the dynamics of trauma experience, moving from latent forms of emotion and figures of silence to halftalking and later to narrating the full experience in detail. This dynamic could be explained by the socio-cultural context of Russia, where the public discourse excluded those deported to Germany; this resulted in silence and did not allow the overcoming of individual trauma. Most of the respondents revealed their traumatic experiences only in a significantly new cultural context that for the first time legitimised their past experience. Only in the past few years – since the beginning of the international campaign for compensation payments –has the public discourse in Russia addressed the issue of those deported to work in Germany. All this influences ways of talking about the past, figures of silence and other narrative models that shed light on the culture of commemoration that exists beyond the official war discourse.

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Prewar Childhood In the context of recounting their life histories, the way in which our respondents represent their childhood is notably abnormal. Ordinary childhood memories about peaceful family life are pushed to the margins and remain on the periphery of memory: the respondents mention them very briefly, immediately moving on to the traumatic memories of the beginning of the war and their experience of a childhood under occupation and then in German territory. Sometimes the story only consists of a list of material losses incurred by the war, which are connected with the family home: ‘We had a house … A good new house built before the war. … It was burnt during the war’ (Nina Danilova, b. 1932). This can partially be explained by the structure of the official forms that people in the Soviet Union were used to filling in, where only achievements in the public sphere, mostly career achievements, mattered. In the Western European context, the ‘disappearance’ of a childhood story can be explained by the sharp contrast between a comfortable prewar life and life under occupation, experiences of being taken prisoner and other hardships.6 But in Stalin’s Russia our respondents’ childhood and the postwar period were emotionally fused by the difficult conditions of hunger, repression and the struggle for bare survival that characterised both phases in their lives. This incapacity to remember childhood or an undisturbed phase of life is typical for our respondents: What about my childhood? Well, as a child I – frankly speaking, I don’t remember much. I remember school. There, where there is now a post office, there was a primary school. I first studied for four years here. Then I had to transfer there, by the railway station – there was school number nine, and there I studied until the beginning of the war. The war started in June, right when I had my exams. (Raijsa Kruekova, b. 1926)

For most of our respondents more detailed narratives started with the beginning of the war, usually with the words ‘and then the war began’. It is with these experiences that their lives were set on the trajectory that remains central in the biographical memory of the people of that generation.

Women’s Forced Labour in Wartime Those who experienced work in labour camps as children form a distinct group in our sample. These children between six and twelve years of age were interned in camps or were involved in domestic work in the families

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of camp supervisors or on farms, where they also worked as babysitters (six interviewees). In the historiography of the Second World War it is generally held that work on a private farm cannot be compared to the sufferings of those who worked in camps, since life on farms is deemed to have been more liberal. But what remained in the memory of our interviewees for decades was the combination of an everyday routine that though culturally alien was relatively normal, and moments of mortal danger – the image of ‘a mistress with a submachine gun’. Violations of everyday household order, even by children, could provoke brutality and cruel punishment from employers. For Ekaterina Muraschova (b. 1935, making her seven or eight years old at the time), her life on a farm is the most terrible childhood memory, even in comparison with the transit camp Stropen, where her mother worked laying railway tracks and clearing the forest while she and other children stayed in the camp. On the farm, the mother did both farming and housework, and the girl babysat for the owners. There were about twenty other workers of different nationalities on the farm, and they all lived under guard in barracks. All the family members walked around with submachine guns. She remembers the other workers’ stories about how the mistress of the house shot a Polish worker who had dared to drink a glass of milk. The owner, he was in the army. On the eastern front. And those three [the mistress, her mother and the owner’s brother] put guns all over them, and walked like this. We were there for a long time. It was tougher than in the camp … it was a horror … And that mistress … She had a lash and a Schmeisser submachine gun. And a pistol, she put it right here. And then, they forced me to babysit for their child. I had to push its pram … once I stumbled, and got five lashes … Her name was Frieda. And there also was her niece of my age who used to come. At that age, I spoke German very well, picked up their language so fast, so they couldn’t tell if I was Russian or German. That girl’s name was Berta, and once she stole chocolate from Frieda. They had big bars of chocolate, piles of bars on carved sideboards. So she grabbed a bar, but said it was me who took it. I’d have been afraid to do it, and my mum told me to never touch anything. But then … I can already hear: I’ll show her now! Where to hide? I am running outside, to the toilet room. I locked myself in there, and Frieda started shooting through the door. Yashka counted afterwards – she made twenty shots. That’s it.

Thinking further about why it is life on the farm that became the central episode of the story, we can note that the situation, apart from its direct threat to life, represented a personification of violence and oppression. In the camps, children worked and lived under conditions of anonymous violence, an ‘external force’, an oppressive machine, an army

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of supervisors who coerced and punished everybody. Shared suffering is easier to bear; as the Russians say, ‘Even death is great if it is in public.’ On the farm, evil and violence took on an individual character and had specific agents. They were directed at concrete people in their everyday relations within the triangle: the girl – her mother – the mistress. The story is constructed as a complement to the girl’s attempts to help her mother endure hardships in spite of constant oppression by the mistress. In some of our cases children in a camp were put in barracks separate from their parents. Such separation reinforces childhood memories of that period: childhood fears, life in crowded barracks on two-level plank beds, how the older children helped the younger ones, how they made straw dolls, how they drew squares on the ground to play a game, how all the children were taken out of the barracks to clean the camp grounds (interview with Galina Parchinskaya, b. 1936). One of our respondents said that there were small children under three years old, but she does not remember them crying; they just lay there silently. In a series of everyday events, one of the respondents, Galina Udaltsova, told a small episode that ‘firmly sticks’ in her memory. She wanted to use the toilet, but a supervisor made her wait for an hour, demanding that she ask in German. Physical punishment and fear were to blame for the respondents’ illnesses later in their life. By her own account Udaltsova, who worked as a caregiver for the 80-year-old mother of the camp supervisor and was beaten with a lead-tipped whip, was later subject to fainting fits and unable to go to school. She remained an unskilled worker all her life and needed constant medical treatment. In general in our stories, ‘childhood as a labour camp experience’ is not associated with any strong emotion, whether positive or negative. The narratives are rather descriptive and neutral, just as their childhood experience was empty – forcibly deprived of such natural experiences as the parents’ house and family care, community life and warm personal relations.

Women’s Forced Labour in Industry Women’s narratives of industrial forced labour carried out between the ages of 13 and 17 or 18 often focus on the physical demands of construction or factory work and on their attempts to construct their own meanings for the situation. These sometimes take the form of personal myths that draw on the sociocultural contexts of postwar or even later times. Raijsa Kruekova’s narrative is a good illustration of this pattern and demonstrates the position of a ‘witness from within‘.

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The Story of Raijsa Kruekova (b. 1926): ‘I just couldn’t remember my number’ Kruekova was born on the outskirts of Pskov and deported to Germany in March 1943 together with her parents and a younger brother. They spent two weeks in stables, and then in prison. Then they were taken further west to Lauterberg, 60 kilometres from Dresden, to an aluminium plant. They all worked there, except for the three-year-old brother, who stayed in the barracks. She remembers permanent hunger and weariness. The place was called Lauterberg, and there was an aluminium plant nearby. Lots of people died there. The aluminium was heated up, and was flowing along the gutter. Say, my father would stand on such a narrow platform, and as everybody’s hungry, if your head was spinning, you’d fall down into this aluminium. And would get boiled there … As for me, I sat at the little table, there was this kind of circular saw on it … we sawed aluminium plates and then stamped what we got. They said it was for planes, but I don’t know exactly, they just made us do it … My finger … I fell asleep at the table, and it was caught into the saw … They gave us clothes at the plant, those who dealt with the fusion got these rough grey canvas pants and a jacket. We also had chains with metal plates with our numbers on them. On the sleeve, there was the badge ‘Ost’ in blue. Eastern workers. I just couldn’t remember my number. My father’s number began with one thousand, and then I don’t remember. When we had to go to work we put these plates on our chest, when we came back, it was according to our numbers.

Kruekova told her story without much emotion, and we had the impression that she had chosen the form of narrative that would be least traumatic for her. Her past is emotionally closed, and she answered questions about her present-day life more willingly. This kind of story is a typical example of a collective narrative, which is told in the first person plural, ‘we’. All residents of their street were deported, forced to work, then liberated. This kind of narrative emphasises shared hardships and material losses. Another way of telling the story is by embedding and even disguising meaningful personal experiences in a structured narrative in which the ‘heroine’ plays an active role in challenging the circumstances or mastering the situation. Our hypothesis is that these narratives have a complex and multilayered origin and are a product of the postwar period of return to the Soviet Union, when everybody had to tell her/his story to the KGB. Later such narrative constructs were rewritten and reconstructed in the light of the new social and cultural context, but they still bear the traces of an earlier impulse to self-justification.

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The Story of Alexandra Tebeleva (b. 1925): ‘I’m a Komsomol member, I thought – so why am I sitting here doing nothing?’ Alexandra Tebeleva was sent to the labour camp at Hofgarten near Innsbruck in Austria from the Smolensk region, where she had been a liaison to partisans. In the camp, the prisoners built a road, and she and other girls had to wheel stones and sand in a barrow, while the men worked in the stone quarry. But one night, I got fed up with it all. I found a hole and ran away. I am a Komsomol member, I thought. – so why am I sitting here doing nothing? … They caught me, sent me from prison to a camp, to rot in an underground factory. They made shells there. I had to make duralumin plates, to make holes in them. The master showed me how: ‘Verstehen?’ I was like: ‘Verstehen’. Well, he left and I thought: ‘No, you won’t use these parts.’ And I’m shifting everything to the side. They were some parts for planes. He saw once what I did and gave me a slap. ‘Are you a fool?’ I say: ‘Ich bin dumm.’

In the memory of someone who was a girl at the time, alongside the image of the ‘victim’ who had to work in physically demanding jobs, the theme of human dignity gradually becomes central in the form of personal resistance to the imposed obstacles. Here it develops into ever more active resistance to the circumstances – an escape, then punishment and attempts to commit sabotage at work. Her story is coloured by the terms of Soviet ideology: ‘I’m a Komsomol member.’ The same type of narrative can be seen in Ekaterina Shipova’s case, where a charitable gesture by a German woman is interpreted as a sign of divine providence: But once … You know, I got to believe in God after that. Once, after a long working day I felt really bad, thought I wouldn’t survive. When it finished, everybody went to toilet rooms, and I stayed with my back to the wall. I didn’t have the strength to move, thought I was dying. Please, help me, God! At that moment a German woman working by one table passed by, the one who worked at the table with me. She rarely talked with me, probably it wasn’t permitted. But there she says, ‘I left you a sandwich, did you take it?’ I said, ‘No. Where?’ She says, ‘Here’, and I see the sandwich, a German one, small. I hadn’t seen it! And this sandwich helped me. That’s fate.

Shipova (b. 1924) was a prisoner of war and worked in the POW camp at Sichevka as well as on farms and at a rubber factory in Trier.7 After liberation from the camp she moved around, evading offers to combine work with the role of an informer. She attracted KGB attention several times during her life. She does not have a family. She could not overcome the deep trauma of a relationship with a Soviet officer back in Germany who

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left her because he was afraid his potential wife’s ‘bad cv’ – her former POW status – would damage his military career. Some of the historical literature8 proposes that the specifics of women’s narratives and women’s memories of war are different from men’s in that they represent more emotional, detailed trauma narratives rich in fantasy and imagination. Based on our experience of interviewing both women and men we take another view. In men’s narratives the individual comes through more clearly as an actor. Men’s memories are more comprehensive and compartmentalised. Their narratives move through logical sequences. In general, men maintain control over their emotional memorisation, although their stories are no less emotional or detailed (interviews with Alexander Ivanov, b. 1934; Georgy Kozhevnikov, b. 1939; Nikolay Zaytsev, b. 1922). Women’s memories are constructed according to a different logic; they move away from strict chronology. They are driven from one episode to another by emotions, in a sequence that reflects the pattern of their emotional experiences and the way in which their memories are triggered and shaped by feelings and relationships. Women also develop their memory process as a ‘group’ construction: me in relation to others, me mediating with others. This deviation from the ‘factual’ story in women’s narratives is caused primarily by a dominant period-specific public discourse: first by the ideologically charged filtration process they were subject to during the postwar period, and later by rehabilitation and public ‘discovery’ of the Ostarbeiter. Tebeleva’s ‘Komsomol’ story and the religion-focused story of Shipova are examples of this.

Women in the Occupied Territories Biographical narratives of women’s forced labour in the occupied territories are rare because there was silence about it in Russia for decades. The fact of having worked for the fascist occupiers was considered a crime and prosecuted under Soviet law. Thus, such narratives as we have cannot be generalised, and should be presented as individual documents. Vera Kovaleva, born in 1925, worked at the same leather factory in Pskov before and after the war. If we tried to find the most meaningful phrase to characterise her narrative, it might be: ‘Every time I pass by, I can’t help remembering it.’ This is her story of what happened when Pskov was occupied: So we worked. They brought bloodstained fur coats from the front; we made soft shoes and gloves from them. Germans put them on. Fur coats from wounded soldiers … They brought more things, say, they shot Jews

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in the Ogul Hills and brought their things, which they’d taken from them before the shooting. They’d bring a whole truck loaded with this stuff, pullovers and such, and we had to carry it to the stock. And there were the two Amelkin sisters. One of them hid a pullover somewhere. One of the sisters was shot for that and the other taken to prison. During lunch break we gathered in the canteen and she was brought from prison into the canteen. They gave her twenty-five lashes. She had white underwear; they bent her like this, and there was blood. Nobody could eat any more.

Along with forced labour, the mass executions of Jews form a theme in her narrative: ‘That girl’s parents, Jews, were shot together with the others. And she hid the girl. Hid her behind a feather bed. She’d just open the door, so that the girl would breathe. That woman was a music teacher; she taught my son when he was in music school.’ Ludmila Terekhova, born in 1921, was a teacher in the occupied territory. Under the occupation she remained in her home village near Pskov as a teacher, but was also asked to work as an interpreter because she spoke German. She had to accompany a person who recruited workers to be sent to Germany. She visited those workers’ homes. As for herself, she managed to convince the Germans not to deport her because of her health problems. In fact, and this was the beginning of the conversation, she suffered from long and heavy menstrual periods, during which she had to keep her bed. Thus she succeeded in staying in the village until 1944. When the Soviet army was about to come, she and other teachers were put on a truck that was in the middle of the motorised column. ‘We were hostages, maybe to hold off the partisans,’ she remembers. In Terekhova’s version, which sounds rather like a myth, the commandant rescued the people whose houses he had stayed in. After they had left, the rest of the villagers were taken in a column outside the village. They were ordered to run away, and when they did they were shot in the back. Thus Terekhova, though she knows she is not guilty, feels guilty and suffers from her inability to justify herself: ‘I can’t explain to everyone in the village that I did not leave by my own will. That commandant, he took everybody – because he knew there would be a catastrophe after they left. So he was saving those people, maybe trying to soothe his conscience or something.’ While telling her story, Terekhova struggled to justify herself. The story contains very intimate moments that are difficult to present publicly. It also reveals the problem of a person who had to make individual decisions and did not simply share a collective fate. Thus, Terekhova does not have the support of a collective narrative. She has to construct her own, sometimes mythic, version of the events. After the war Terekhova did not manage to work as a teacher again, as there was an instruction to fire all the teachers who had been in occupied

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territory or prisoners. In 1945 she married a war veteran who worked as a driver. They had four children, but two of them died early. Later on, she had a gynaecological operation.

The Return Home and Postwar Adaptation In their stories, these women have in common the fact that they suffered radical changes in their prewar life expectations. They lost valued professions, the men they loved or their health. The common features of their biographical situations were marginalisation and stigma incurred by the fact of being former prisoners, as has been described well by Pavel Polyan.9 The mass repatriation of former prisoners ended in September–October 1945. According to a survey held in Pskov, more than 75 per cent of respondents faced lack of understanding or even open hostility and reproach.10 Some of our respondents, like Terekhova and Shipova, were on NKVD notice for a long time, whereas others, like Udaltsova, could not find a job. Some preferred not to return to their birthplace, as was the case with the Murashovas, mother and daughter. After the liberation, at the very first filtration camp, they were deprived of all papers, though they were promised them back after their arrival in the Pskov region. They heard through the grapevine that everybody would be sent immediately to NKVD camps, so they decided not to go back. During the next six years they wandered without papers through the abandoned villages of Byelorussia, and only when the daughter became old enough to be issued a passport did they submit a written application to their hometown.

Women’s Resources in the Labour Camps: Sexuality and Communication We have already noted that women’s memories include narratives of everyday life in all its physical and emotional detail. That includes the specific experience of sexuality. ‘Physicality’ with all its functions and needs is highly codified in Russian narratives, compared to Western war memories. There are several reasons for these sexual taboos: the suppression of sex as a topic and the popularisation of romantic love in the cultural discourse of Soviet society; the legitimisation of asexual roles for women as ‘protectors of the motherland’, ‘comrades in the common struggle’, caregivers and nurses;11 the moral veto on love and intimate pleasures during the war (‘Sacrifice everything for victory’); and last but not least the ban on all contacts with the enemy. By contrast, men’s collective discourse makes it possible to admit to intimate contacts with

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enemy women as a privilege or power (or compensation for its loss): it is well known that Stalin said that the ‘tired soldier has a right to have some small pleasure’. Talking about sexuality becomes possible in our interviews only with reference to ‘the other’, culturally different women: Ukrainians or Poles. Kruekova’s account illustrates the way in which issues of sexuality are projected onto women of other ethnic groups or age groups and away from Russian women: Germans would harass Polish women. You never know whether they just didn’t like the Poles, or if it was just a matter of habit, but the Germans had Polish women come to them, they had even some rooms somewhere or so. But us, Russians, they wouldn’t touch us. As for Ukrainians, they were mostly eighteen or twenty years old, very young. As for Russians, there were some like my mum, of forty-plus, there were other women of that age, and me, I was just a little girl. So they [Germans], they’d mostly bother Polish women. Ukrainians, too, the youngest.

Sexual violence was also associated with Soviet soldiers in our interviews. There was mention of such incidents several times in different interviews (Ludmila Terekhova, Ekaterina Alexandrova, Alexandra Tebeleva), but in all cases they were described as unsuccessful attempts and were spoken of only when the microphone was switched off. Terekhova said: Well. I don’t want to tell about certain things. In a nutshell, our way back was hard. I don’t want to remember it … Our soldiers gave us a lift, they saw we were walking at night in a forest and they had a car. But then he started to behave badly towards us. So we got out of the car and said, ‘No, we won’t go with you,’ and walked on in the forest all by ourselves … [Later, during the filtration] they tried – oh they really tried – and only the administrators, at that. No soldier would propose that, not a single one.

They came across Russian armies several times and found other soldiers sympathetic. But when she came back to Pskov she was often interrogated by the NKVD, and there she had to surrender to the officers’ sexual advances. Another shared resource that features in the women’s narratives is associated with their ability to communicate, ‘to be one of the rest’. Their strategy of adapting and their ability to build connections to others helped them to survive in labour camps and constituted a definite advantage. Many of their stories feature some powerful figure from the German administration that protected them, provided some additional freedom and helped them to escape punishment. There were also many examples in women’s narratives of an aptitude for language learning as a communicative resource (‘I was clever enough

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to learn languages quickly’). Early mastery of the language put women in the position of communicators between the German administration and other prisoners. That gave them access to some personal privileges, marked them as different and eased their fate. If we pass from individual stories to the analysis of a wider sample (thirty interviews with deportees), we can identify distinct strategies for coping and for reconstructing biographical continuity in our respondents’ lives. In a strategy of normalisation, women marry (and thereby lose the surname associated with the fact of having worked in Germany), have children and get a job. Men normalise their biographies by adding a successful period of military service12 and a postwar career. A strategy of compensation involves engagement in a social or cultural activity that allows, although sometimes indirectly, a dialogue about the past experience; examples of this are playing an expert role in archive work, involvement with an organisation, for example one of former child camp prisoners, or publishing historical or literary writings.13 There are also examples of hyper-compensation, including role reversal and self-identification with a camp guard as ways of processing the wartime experience.14 The ‘classical’ way for Russians of the Stalin era to escape from possible repression was anonymisation, including moving from one workplace to another, manipulating identity documents (losing or changing them), strategically choosing marriage partners, and concealing facts. Finally, we can identify narrative and linguistic strategies for coping with trauma: fragmentation (gaps in the story where childhood or private life is concerned), emotional detachment in relation to the most difficult periods of life and the suppression of certain details. In conclusion we could say that considering war narratives as a kind of woman-to-woman talk reminds us of the contradictory nature of gender discourse and throws up many issues that take us beyond the dominant, characteristically masculine vision of war. Attention to the linguistic constructs and images used by women to describe their own wartime experiences can help us not only to reconstruct their life stories, but also to understand more general aspects of women’s identity construction.

CITED INTERVIEWS Ekaterina Alexandrova, b. 1926, Pskov, interviewer E. Rozhdestvenskaya. Nina Danilova, b. 1932, Pskov, interviewer E. Rozhdestvenskaya. Alexander Ivanov, b. 1934, Pskov, interviewer V. Semenova.

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Maria Ivanova, b. 1922, Pskov, interviewer E. Rozhdestvenskaya. Raijsa Kruekova, b. 1926, Pskov, interviewer E. Rozhdestvenskaya. Vera Kovaleva, b. 1925, Pskov, interviewer V. Semenova. Georgy Kozhevnikov, b. 1939, Pskov, interviewer E. Rozhdestvenskaya. Ekaterina Murashova, b. 1935, Pskov, interviewer V. Semenova. Galina Parchinskaya, b. 1936, Pskov, interviewer V. Semenova. Ekaterina Shipova, b. 1924, Moscow, interviewer E. Rozhdestvenskaya. Alexandra Tebeleva, b. 1925, Pskov, interviewer V. Semenova. Ludmila Terekhova, b. 1921, Pskov, interviewer E. Rozhdestvenskaya. Galina Udaltsova, b. 1934, Pskov, interviewer V. Semenova. Nikolay Zaytsev, b. 1922, Moscow, interviewer E. Rozhdestvenskaya.

NOTES 1. Juliane Fürst, ‘Heroes, Lovers, Victims: Partisan Girls during the Great Fatherland War. An analysis of documents from the spetsotdel of the former Komsomol Archive’, Minerva: Quarterly Report on Women and the Military, 18(3–4) (2000): 38–75. 2. The Central Committee of All-USSR Young Communists’ Union (TsK VLKSM) mobilised about 500,000 young women, 70 per cent of whom were in front-line forces; see Vera Murmantseva, Sovetskie Zhenschini v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine (Moscow 1974), 123. 3. Olga Nikonova, ‘Zhenschini, voina i “figuri umolchania”’ [Women, War, and ‘Figures of Silence’], Neprikosnovenniy Zapas [The Untouchable Reserve] 2–3 (2005): 40–41. 4. Carmen Scheide, ‘Kollektivnie i individualnie modeli pamyati o Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine 1941–1945’ [Collective and Individual Models of Memory of the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945], Ab Imperio 3(2000): 1–26; Fürst, ‘Heroes, Lovers, Victims’. 5. William Steele, ‘Trauma Impact on Learning and Behavior: Trauma and Loss’, Research and Intervention 2(2) (2002) 34–47. 6. According to Gabriele Rosenthal, one of the reasons why people fail to present a full life story is that they idealise the period before the trauma and people they knew in that period, which results in a distortion of feelings, actions and thoughts connected to it. This can produce the effect of avoiding talking about that ‘happy time’, as the storyteller is afraid that those idealised images will be affected. Rosenthal, Erlebte und erzählte Lebensgeschichte (Kassel 1992). 7. The number of Soviet prisoners of war is huge; it is estimated to be as high as 5.7 million people, from which only 2.4 million survived; the other 3.3 million (57 per cent) died. See Pavel M. Polyan, Zhertvi Dvukh Diktatur: Zhizn’, trud, unizhenie i smert’ sovetskikh voennoplennikh i ostarbaiterov na chuzhbine I na rodine [Victims of Two Dictatorships: Life, Labour, Humiliation, and Death of Soviet POWs and Ostarbeiter Abroad and at Home] (Moscow 2002). Unfortunately, there are no statistical data on the number of women among POWs. Beate Fie-

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8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

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seler, ‘Der Krieg der Frauen: Die ungeschriebene Geschichte’, in Deutsch-Russisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst (ed.), Mascha + Nina + Katjuscha: Frauen in der Roten Armee 1941–1945 (Berlin 2002), 11–20; Nikonova, ‘Zhenschini, voina i “figuri umolchania”’. Anna Reading, The Social Inheritance of the Holocaust: Gender, Culture and Memory (Houndmills/New York 2002). Polyan, Zhertvi Dvukh Diktatur. G. Kozhevnikov (ed.), Ne predat zabveniu [Not to Forget] (Pskov 2004). See Irina Zherebkina, ‘Passion: Women’s Body and Women’s Sexuality in Russia’, Gender Studies 3 (1998): 155–210 and Oleg Ryabov, Motherland-Russia: Experience of Gender Analysis of National Identity in Native and Western History (Moscow 2001). Kruekova’s father was called up to the front immediately after the liberation, while he was on his way home and thus added army experience to his biography. Nikolay Zaytsev was similarly deployed for military service, but in a penal battalion, where he committed a heroic act in a battle and reached Berlin, thus acquiring a front-line biography. Many of our respondents write poems and songs, and one of them, Alexander Ivanov, has published a book. Maria Ivanova (one of the wider group of interviewees), who had worked as a welder at a military plant in Germany, did not return to her village or to Pskov after the liberation but went on to work at a gold mine in Siberia guarding the prisoners who worked in the mine.

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THE DEPORTATION OF THE ITALIANS 1943–45 Doris Felsen and Viviana Frenkel

Historical Introduction

W

hen the Second World War broke out in September 1939, Italy, in spite of having sealed a treaty of military alliance with Nazi Germany, did not side with its powerful ally immediately. Mussolini was conscious of the army’s lack of training and preferred to sit on the fence for several months. However, the Germans’ first easy victories, the illusion that the war would be short and the ambition of standing by the winners moved the Duce to take the fatal decision to enter the war. The Italian army attacked France, which had already been defeated by the Germans. This ‘stab in the back’ was never forgotten, and even in the camps Italian deportees were reproached for it by their French fellow-prisoners after 1943. In October 1940, anticipating a quick victory, Mussolini sent troops to Greece and to the Aegean. But the Greeks resisted bravely, and only German intervention saved the situation for the Axis. The Italian army suffered more defeats until, after many ups and downs, it was beaten along with the German Afrikakorps at El-Alamein at the end of October 1942. At the same time the Russian campaign, on which the Italian troops embarked alongside their German allies in summer 1941, ended ruinously for them with the dreadful retreat in the winter of 1942–43. In the meantime, the heavy bombing of Italian towns caused extensive destruction and many deaths. In this tragic context, on 10 July 1943 Notes for this chapter begin on page 323.

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the Allied landing in Sicily struck a decisive blow against the credibility of the Fascist state and the power of Mussolini, against whom the Great Council of Fascism passed a vote of no confidence on 25 July. He was arrested on order of King Vittorio Emanuele III and replaced with Marshal Pietro Badoglio. After a period of confusion and uncertainty, the armistice was announced on 8 September 1943 and signed by the new Italian government and the Allies. This announcement, made sooner than had been intended in the agreements, represents the crucial and dramatic turning point in Italy’s contemporary history. After the announcement Badoglio’s government and the royal family fled to Brindisi, an area already controlled by the Allies, which constituted a new political entity that was named ‘Kingdom of the South’ and formally declared war on Germany in October. In the meantime, soon after the armistice, German troops had marched down to Italy through the Brenner Pass, following a plan (the Achse plan) that had been prepared long before; they occupied Rome and the rest of Central and Northern Italy. Italy thus found itself tragically split in two. And on 12 September, it was a German commando that freed Benito Mussolini from the Gran Sasso in Abruzzo, where he had been imprisoned. Welcomed by Hitler, Mussolini agreed to re-form a state under German ‘protection’ called the Repubblica Sociale Italiana (RSI, Italian Social Republic). Its ministries were set on the shores of Lake Garda, which led to the common appellation Republic of Salò. The RSI continued the racial laws of the Fascist state and actively collaborated with the German occupiers in the arrest and deportation of Jews and political opponents. After the armistice of 8 September the Italian army, left entirely to its own devices without any orders and in utter confusion (as even our interviewees confirmed), disbanded. Some soldiers ran away; in other cases the troops stood up to the overwhelming German forces who demanded that they lay down their arms and suffered terrible reprisals (such as happened on the Greek island of Cephalonia). Elsewhere, individual soldiers or entire units joined the Resistance. The main body of the army, however, was forced to surrender, and about 700,000 men were taken prisoner and sent to internment camps in Germany and Poland. At the same time the Allies were advancing north up the peninsula. In April 1945 the resistance of the German army, which had halted on the Gothic Line, was shattered. The Committee of National Liberation (the high command of the Resistance) ordered an insurrection for 25 April, which has been celebrated since then as the date of liberation. The Allies reached Milan and other northern cities. Mussolini was captured by the partisans while trying to flee towards Switzerland and was shot at Dongo, on the shores of the Lake Como, on 28 April 1945. Under the

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German occupation Jews, political activists and Italian military internees (among others) were deported to Germany and forced to work or even killed.

The Deportation of the Jews The Jewish community in Italy is the oldest continuous settlement of the European diaspora. The Jews of Rome boast a continuous history from the age of Julius Caesar to modern times. The Risorgimento (the Italian national liberation movement that united the country between 1815 and 1870) also contributed to the emancipation of Italy’s Jewish communities. The newborn nation state granted them freedom and equality. At the beginning, the Fascist regime maintained this position. Mussolini’s policy changed when he entered an official alliance with Hitler and in 1938 the ‘Racial Laws’ against Italian Jews were issued. This legislation expelled foreign Jews from Italian soil and deprived Italian Jews of their civil rights, stripped them of party membership, expelled them from the armed forces, removed them from their positions in government service and educational institutions, barred students from the universities and the state schools, banned marriages between Christians and Jews and forbade Jews to own or manage large corporations, among other repressive measures. At the beginning of the war, the Jewish population in Italy included more than 33,000 individuals. Actual physical persecution of the Jews and their deportation to the death camps would not begin until 1943. Mass killings, roundups and deportations of Jews began immediately after the German invasion, and the Nazis were soon joined in these actions by the militia of the Fascist Republic of Salò. In a deadly raid on the Roman ghetto on 16 October 1943, 1,022 people were captured and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Only seventeen of them survived. In the spirit of Mussolini’s anti-Semitic policies, the RSI played an active role in the persecution of Jews, organising a transit camp in Fossoli, near Carpi, where many Jews were taken before being deported to Auschwitz. Many trains left directly from Milan and other northern cities in the territories of the RSI, which meant that the Italian authorities were involved at every level in the deportations. Altogether, there were forty trains, some of which left from the territories annexed to the Reich (Adriatisches Küstenland1). Transit camps were later established in Bolzano and in Trieste (Risiera di San Sabba, which was both a concentration and a death camp). The deportations also involved the Jews living in Rhodes and other Aegean islands that formed the Italian Dodecanese (about 1,900 people). Many Jews who were rescued by individuals or by Catholic organisations (especially in Rome, with the silent help of the

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Vatican, and in the North of Italy) found refuge in Switzerland. By the end of the war, 6,750 Jews had been deported from Italy and 1,820 from the Dodecanese. Of these, 7,557 perished in the camps and another 350 were killed in massacres. The fate of more than 1,000 additional individuals is unknown. We interviewed three Jewish survivors (Liliana Segre, Piero Terracina, Gilberto Salmoni), who were deported respectively to AuschwitzBirkenau and to Buchenwald. Like many others, they did not speak about their experiences for many years, largely because a public silence surrounded these memories. But today things have changed: on 20 July 2000, by unanimous vote of its parliament, Italy joined the international community in establishing 27 January, the date of the liberation of Auschwitz, as a Memorial Day for the persecution and slaughter of the Jewish people and of the Italian military and political deportees in the Nazi camps. It also serves to memorialise all those who saved other people’s lives at the risk of their own.

The Deportation of Political Prisoners As early as 12 September 1943, a few days after the capitulation of the Italian government, Hitler gave orders for the advance of the Allies to be held back at all costs to allow time for razing and destruction. This brutal and reckless action came up against resistance from the Italian population, especially in Central Italy, where the Wehrmacht had a larger presence than in the northern part of the country. At the beginning, resistance was a reaction to various abuses from German soldiers, such as arrests, deportations and forced labour. However, it was also fed by opposition to the continuation of the war, which seemed completely senseless to most people. There were local strikes against deportations to forced labour, the stripping of factories and the removal of machinery, goods and raw materials to Germany. When these measures intensified at the beginning of 1944, on 1 March more than a million workers went on strike, mainly in the industrial area of Northern Italy (Turin and Milan). The strike ended a week later, on 8 March. Many of the strikers were arrested and deported on special transports as political prisoners. All those individuals whom the German occupying forces regarded as guilty of acts of disobedience, opposition and dissent were given the title of ‘political prisoner’ and sent to concentration or extermination camps. In addition to well-known anti-fascists, supporters of the underground parties, partisans and their real or suspected supporters, the deportees included many absentees, fascist deserters, common criminals, priests, anyone under suspicion of helping Jews, people detained during raids or

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even passengers who had been travelling without a ticket on trains or trams. During the twenty months of German occupation, eighty transports of political prisoners left Italy bound for the territories of the Reich. The total number of political deportees from Italy is about 40,000. Only 10 per cent of them survived. Since 1945 the political prisoners have set up organisations of former deportees, and some of them have been testifying to their experience since the beginning in various media and contexts. Many of them are politically committed and have taken an active role in preserving the memory of their unarmed resistance, siding in spirit with the partisans and other members of the Resistance who actually fought against the German army and the forces of the Repubblica Sociale. One of our interviewees, Angelo Signorelli, is an example of this category. He was very young when he was deported to the concentration camp Mauthausen (Austria). However, they did not all follow this route. Many of the political prisoners went back into the shade after liberation and started talking and bearing witness only about ten years ago, often going into schools to have direct contact with the new generation. Carla Liliana Martini, who like Angelo Signorelli was very young herself when she was deported to Mauthausen, has taken this approach.

Italian Military Internees (IMI) On 8 September 1943, after the armistice was announced by Field Marshal Badoglio, the German troops began to round up the Italian soldiers who had been left without any orders by their commanders in Italy, France, Greece, Yugoslavia etc. They were then quickly deported to transit, labour and concentration camps in Germany. According to the most recent research, the number of these soldiers is somewhere between 650,000 and 716,000. An estimated 30,000 to 50,000 of them never returned. They were called Italienische Militärinternierte (Italian Military Internees) under a specific order issued by Hitler on 20 September 1943. This decision was taken not only in revenge for the Italian ‘treason’, but also to prevent any monitoring or support from the Red Cross and deny them the guarantees of the 1929 Geneva Convention. Before arriving at the concentration or labour camps and also during their captivity, the Italian soldiers were invited both to declare their allegiance to the ‘Third Reich’ and the Repubblica Sociale Italiana and enlist in the Wehrmacht or the SS, or to reject this offer and face a very uncertain and painful fate. About 90 per cent chose to be deported rather than accept the German offer. The IMI (all private soldiers and also some officers) were then forced by the Wehrmacht to work for the German

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war industries, in mines, removing rubble, along railway lines. Moreover, many of them were sent to sub-camps of concentration camps such as Dora, the notorious centre for the underground manufacture of V1 and V2 bombs. In July 1944, on the basis of an agreement between the Third Reich and the Repubblica Sociale Italiana, the IMI lost their military status against their will and were regarded as civilian workers. But their general condition did not change, as the people we interviewed confirmed. At the beginning the officers were not obliged, but urged to work; however, a few groups were sent to forced labour. After January 1945 the German command ordered the call-up of all officers. Many were forced to gather in Wietzendorf to await deployment as forced labour. The lack of raw materials because of the approaching front and then the end of the war spared them this fate. The recent opening of the former Soviet archives has shed light on the fate of more than 12,000 Italian soldiers who suffered a second deportation to Russia. The Soviets had regarded them as collaborators in the service of the Wehrmacht, captured on the eastern front and sent to forced labour in the Soviet gulag. More than a thousand died during this detention. About 11,000 were then sent back to their home country in September 1946. For many years, because of historical, psychological and political motives that would take too long to analyse here, Italy has lacked the capacity to reflect on and accept the reality of the deportation of a whole army and of hundreds of thousands of survivors. Only in recent years has this memory re-emerged to become the object of historical research and official acknowledgment. And yet the condition of hundreds of thousands of soldiers who could at any moment have brought an end to the torments of their confinement by showing allegiance – often only formally – to the RSI was unusual, if not unique in the history of the deportations. This is thus a critical moment both from a moral-ideological viewpoint (‘The great majority has always said no … even because we thought that shouldering the gun again against the Italians … hadn’t got the heart to kill a brother of mine, I hadn’t got the heart to!’, says our witness Frigerio), and from a historical-military one. In fact, as Claudio Sommaruga, another interviewee who is also a leading historian of the subject, says: ‘What would have happened if all seven hundred thousand of us had gone over to the RSI?’ The vicissitudes of the soldiers we interviewed are emblematic in their complexity, because the set of rules controlling their internment was very intricate and not infrequently contradictory. The four interviews carried out for the project give an impression of the variety of experiences of the Italian internees. Since this category of deportees has not received the

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appropriate recognition up to now, we think it necessary to dwell upon these stories.

Military Deportation as a Moral Choice: Claudio Sommaruga, Donato Esposito, Alessandro Frigerio, Giovanni Bonotto Corporal Alessandro Frigerio, stationed at the Greek front on the island of Andros, learned of the armistice on Wednesday, 8 September 1943, announced to the Greek population and to the Italian soldiers by the ringing of bells. After a few days’ fighting, his garrison surrendered to the German forces that arrived on the island in the meantime. But Alessandro did not give in: ‘I won’t give myself up as a prisoner!’ Helped by some local families, he eluded the Germans for some months, living wild in the mountains of Andros. Finally, he was arrested on 11 December and imprisoned in Athens, where he was urged to go over to the RSI and refused. His odyssey through the prison camp system began here. Radiotelegrapher Giovanni Bonotto, too, was caught by the signing of the armistice on the Balkan front, near Spalato in Dalmatia. Even here, after an attempt at resistance, the Italians were compelled to surrender and were taken to Germany, first by forced marches and then by train. Young Second Lieutenant Donato Esposito, stationed at Casteldecimo in the Roman countryside, was in Rome on that 8 September: ‘Along the way, during our journey, on the train to the fortress, we heard some cries outside the train: “The armistice! The armistice! The war is over!” Obviously this filled us with joy; my soldiers were elated. As for me, at first I felt pleased of course, but then pleasure was immediately replaced by a big worry: “What about the Germans?”’ The young officer phoned for orders but received the answer: ‘Here everybody has fled! Do what you want!’ The German forces were overwhelming; the garrison was dismantled. Esposito was locked into the barracks at Ostia. Here, with other comrades, he refused to join the RSI for the first time and from here he was sent by a civilian train to Meppen in northern Germany. Claudio Sommaruga, a newly appointed officer, found himself at the officers’ mess in the barracks in Alessandria: ‘At a quarter to eight, on the radio, Badoglio’s voice, the armistice … panic!’ Without orders and disconcerted, the Italians were taken prisoner after a pathetic attempt at defence. When Claudio was asked to enlist in the SS, he refused for the first time; this would be the first of seventy-five refusals. He was put on a train and taken to Germany via Tarvisio. The four Italian soldiers went through very different experiences, but they had in common acute suffering, terrible starvation, disease and ill-

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treatment. None of them, however, gave in to the inducements of repatriation and better conditions offered to the ones who ‘opted’ for the Repubblica Sociale Italiana. Sommaruga sums up well the feeling that moved many young people who grew up in the climate of Fascist consensus: ‘This period marks the turning point: how all of a sudden, on 8 September, we turned from being enthusiastic or pro forma, so to say, fascists to anti-fascists.’ Bonotto arrived at Görlitz after a two-day train journey. His memory focuses on the registration and the first watery soup. A few days later, after a simple eyesight check, he was selected to work in the coal mines in Dortmund, where he remained from October 1943 to November 1944. His account of the work in the coal mine is rich in technical detail. The conditions were hard, but he was lucky to meet a German civilian who would instruct and protect him and who showed him, as far as possible, some sympathy: ‘He was human enough, so to say, and we talked about this and that.’ Later he was transferred from the mine into a camp in Ackerdorf, where he worked as a woodcutter in the freezing German winter: ‘An awful cold and I remember that my shoes became a block of ice.’ He was transferred once more to a place not far from the Vistula and was compelled to work with the civilian workers of the Organisation Todt, building defences against the Soviet troops. Frigerio’s story is altogether different. After a journey from Athens in frightening conditions, he arrived at the isolation hospital of Zeithain on 15 February 1944. It was a hospital in a manner of speaking, because nobody cured us, it’s only that they didn’t send us to work, because it was a hospital. But I didn’t get better at all, of course. And there started hunger, hunger and hardships, ill-treatment. Then, when I was discharged, I started being hungry, terribly hungry, one must try and feel so hungry in order to understand. They discharge me on 31 March and send me to Mühlberg.

In that camp he had bitter experience of the harsh treatment reserved for the Italians: We get … to where the Dutch were and I run inside. The Dutch did not eat what the prisoners were given. We were given turnips with turnip soup and turnips – or cabbage, and then the usual two potatoes, the usual knob of margarine and two teaspoons of sugar, once a day! And I ran in there, this shed of Dutch people who got things from the International Red Cross, they received a parcel of food every fifteen days. But what food – chocolate, barley, rice. They were well treated! It was detention, but they were well treated.

He worked digging potatoes at Oschatz, then at Döbeln in a sugar beet processing plant, and later in a munitions plant. Since he was not an

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expert mechanic, he was accused of sabotage and sent to the Reichenberg penal camp: They led us out, in the morning, as the light rose, well, and we went back into the lager in the evening. We walked three or four kilometres to dig the widest and deepest trenches possible. They made us work because we were being punished. We were supposed to work hard, the aim was to stop the Russian advance, the tanks of the Russian army.

Bonotto and Frigerio were both on the eastern front. General Zhukov’s army arrived at Reichenberg on 25 January 1945. Alessandro Frigerio was set free but left on his own, found himself on the line of the RussianGerman front and watched in horror the terrible battle and the subsequent ravages of the Red Army: ‘They were destroying everything, they were destroying. And we were there. That night was a night of chaos, a witches’ Sabbath, to see the tanks move forward. … Telling it gives me the creeps!’ Later he was sent by the Russians to various assembly camps for prisoners of war (Rawicz, Breslau and Öls). In spite of rumours about a possible transfer to Siberia, he was sent back home at the end of September 1945. Since he was a keen amateur historian, during the imprisonment he tried to understand what was happening, storing dates, names and places. Now he is retired and has applied himself for many years to the collection of the memories of his own experience as an internee, also taking an active part in the veterans’ associations. Giovanni Bonotto was not so lucky. Soviet troops entered the camp where he was working on 6 February. His account of the Russians’ arrival contains nothing epic or joyful: ‘Well, it is when they arrived that we realised … that the Germans were no longer there, and then we came out into the open.’ As a matter of fact, he was not set free, because he was made prisoner again by his ‘liberators’ and sent by troop train through Poland to the camps of Voronezh and Usman, on Soviet territory, where he was forced to work. He was released only a year later, on 20 September 1946. During his two imprisonments, Giovanni was an unconscious victim of circumstances who watched with bewilderment and resignation the tragic events in which he found himself involved: ‘We wondered, we wondered, but we couldn’t say why.’ Only recently, talking about it with his friend Sommaruga, he has understood that the Russians deported him a second time because they considered him a collaborationist. At the time of the interview, he had not tried to revisit his past or find the places of his imprisonment. He emigrated but later returned to Italy, and now he is active in the veterans’ association. After getting to the transit camp of Meppen near the Dutch border, Second Lieutenant Esposito was transported in a cattle car to Biala Podlaska in eastern Poland, where he arrived on 28 October. Here, after strong

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pressure from the representatives of the RSI, almost all of the 2,600 officers went over. Esposito was among the very few (147) who refused. In March 1944 he was transferred to the camp of Sandbostel (Bremervörde, St. 300 XB9) in Germany, ‘which was infamous – besides the food and the conditions, also because of the treatment of a commander, who – to say he was a beast was putting it mildly: in fact, he came to a bad end at the end of the war: He ended up in the hands of the Russians, of the Russian prisoners!’ He was lucky not to be forced to work and he himself observes the contradictions of his situation: ‘At least, as far as I know, there was no straight, specific order to go to work […] the ones who wanted could go. Since officers were exempted from work according to the Geneva convention – which the Germans never abided by, of course!’ Cultural activities, lessons, performances and concerts were organised in the lager, and to ward off hunger, which was everybody’s constant thought, We got to the masochistic ludicrous point of getting together – so many officers – and each of us described the recipes of his own town, of his own region and I, how foolish of me, drew up a list. … I have two copybooks full of recipes, well – hunger makes you think of these mouth-watering rich dishes, so I thought we’d be soothing the pangs of hunger; but instead I felt them harder, because it was a rabid hunger!

Towards the end of 1944, his group was transferred to Wietzendorf (Oflag 83), about 50 kilometres north of Hanover, near Lüneburg, where he waited to be deployed for work, according to the order issued at the end of January 1945. Liberation by the Allies on 16 April saved him from the forced labour imposed on all officers and from certain starvation: ‘The doctors who were among us said that, when we were liberated, we had more or less a couple of months’ life left … , people died, people ended up with tuberculosis.’ Hunger recurs constantly in his story and shapes his memory: ‘Look, hunger is something which sticks to your skin!’ But neither hunger, nor cold, nor hardships, disease or the brutality of the Germans induced him to go back on his decision: ‘I had examined what had happened, what fascism had done … the war which was playing havoc in Europe. … I had really – so to say – an almost physical refusal. … Even when hunger had reduced me to skin and bones – No!’ This choice of his represents the focal point of his internment experience. It represents the act of rebellion that had been missing in the defence of Rome and also represents the turning point in his life. Esposito has thus taken on the role of guardian of this memory over the years; he now works actively in the ANEI (the veterans’ association) and is the president of the Milan section of it. The story of the deportation of young officer Claudio Sommaruga, who was taken prisoner after 8 September, is unbelievably complex and

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can be precisely reconstructed only because he noted down all the key events and places. His first destination was Sandbostel, in the extreme north of Germany. After 20 September 1943 the soldiers who had been taken prisoner were identified as IMI and urged again to enlist in the Italian SS. On 23 September, Sommaruga and his group were taken in cattle cars to Czestochowa St, 367, in Poland, where he remained until 4 November. There followed another transfer to Chelm (Cholm), on the border with Ukraine. Here and in the other camps the interned officers started organising a series of cultural activities, performances and concerts, in spite of hunger and hardships: ‘The whole cream of the Italian universities was there … we built ourselves a culture and it helped us to make a new personality for ourselves. Because, since the Germans had taken away our names, our ranks from us … I stop being a number and become a man again. All this gave us the strength to survive.’ Another precious source of strength for Claudio and his mates was an intense faith that allowed them to interpret the sufferings of imprisonment as a participation in Christ’s suffering and made them more bearable: ‘Jesus Christ was interpreted by us as a military internee … , it was we who, by our sacrifice in the lager, shared in the Golgotha, in the Calvary.’ Their imprisonment takes on a positive, almost maieutical value on a political level too, alongside the cultural and religious ones: ‘Terribly cold [in Chelm], around the stoves, we talk around the stoves. Our discovery of democracy was born there. We carried on our self-criticism around this small stove … and precisely there we became democratic and united … , we go on discussing for hours round these unlit stoves.’ This reinterpretation of the lager as a school of democratic politics for a new generation of Italians represents, in retrospect, a fundamental experience of the internment, as witnessed also by written memoirs. Meanwhile the demands for collaboration continued, but Claudio still said no, though he was fully aware of causing pain to his family through his refusal and consequent persecution. His last stop in Poland was Deblin-Irena, on the Vistula, Stalag 307 (and then Oflag 77), from 21 January to 19 March 1944. Because of the advance of the Russian front, the Italians were posted again to Germany and sent to work in the industrial region on the Dutch border (lager of Oberlangen, sub-camp of Papenburg), until 14 June 1944. In the light of the failure of voluntary recruitment, the Germans now imposed compulsory labour on the group of young officers to which Sommaruga belonged and he was transferred to Duisdorf/Hardthöhe, Stalag VI G, until 2 August 1944. Claudio continued to refuse to work here too, because it was contrary to international conventions. After being interrogated by the Gestapo, on 2 August he was sentenced – with 400 fellow officers – to forced labour in Straflager AK 96

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in Cologne, a re-education camp subordinate to Buchenwald. Prisoners of different nationalities worked here, including a group of anti-Nazi German girls, ‘students who had refused to work; they were in rehabilitation, in rehabilitation to work, some of them were pregnant too, some were there with their children, there were about thirty of them.’ Claudio was forced to work in a factory making rayon for parachutes, which was Anglo-German owned and therefore spared by allied bombers (the Glanzstoff & Courtaulds A.G. factory): We were put to work making all sorts of things. We were in this factory, the work schedules were awful, I won’t certainly go into details, but they are anyway all published and denounced. In twenty-five days I lost 14 kilos. I was ill, I ran a temperature of 40, 39–40 degrees, dysentery, I didn’t eat any longer, I was utterly – let’s say – ‘undone’. Always there, I worked in the camp, digging drains, ditches, jobs in the camp. Even there from time to time I tried to change line, because first, as a chemistry student, chemical engineering, then you carry carboys of acid, then I saw my mates from the first shift, because we worked three eight-hour shifts, the first shift with red eyes, swollen hands, without any protection to handle acids. … I say, ‘No, you have made a mistake, I am not an engineer, I am a geologist – at a certain point – no, I am an electrician!’ And then at a certain moment the Germans, who are precise and meticulous, ‘You said geologist, let’s see what you can do as a geologist. Take that pick and that shovel, then, and dig a ditch!’ After that they made a compromise between a geologist and an electrician: I dug holes and rammed in an electricity pole! I put it up lopsided, as sabotage.

Since Claudio was seriously ill, he was hospitalised in the St Elisabeth Hospital, a teaching clinic where, to his disbelief, he experienced humanity and kindness from Sister Sulpicia, Sister Evilasia and the whole staff. After he had recovered, the Cologne lager was evacuated because of the approaching front, and Claudio was taken on a long trek on foot, by car and by train and under escort, sometimes coming into contact with German civilians. One showed unexpected solidarity: And, at a certain moment, I am on a tram … and on the tram I see an officer, a tank major who watches me. On the alert. … This German major jumps to his feet, passes by me, throws a packet of cigarettes and a bar of chocolate into my pocket and says to me: ‘I Afrikakorps. I speak Italian, take heart!’ And he gets off immediately. I am stunned: Germans have a soul too!

At last, on 13 October 1944, Claudio rejoined his Cologne group, which had been transferred by now to Wietzendorf, Oflag 83, the sorting camp for non-commissioned officers detailed for labour: ‘and here I feel hungry, everything, the vicissitudes of my mates in this camp and here one must go and work, one is forced to work, one says no, I always manage to say

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no, to shirk, to hide, to have some volunteer stand in for me.’ The last days were dramatic: I feel very ill, the doctors say to my mates, ‘No, Sommaruga has two, three weeks’ life left, he won’t make it.’ And then, what do my friends do? … they assign a share to one another, as starving as they are too, but they fix a share of their rations to give to me without telling me they were doing so. I knew about it two months later, because true charity is silent. They didn’t tell me.

Liberation day arrived on 16 April. ‘The Germans had fled. At four in the afternoon Canadian Major Cooley arrives with four Canadian soldiers on a German car. He gets there and says: “You are free!”’

Remembrance and Compensation The deportation of Jews, political activists and Italian military internees did not play an important role in the postwar collective memory in Italy. Italian resistance and the mass murder of the Jews by the Germans dominated the public discussion. The fate of the Italian military internees seemed to be nearly forgotten. This has only changed in recent decades. It is the case, as the latest historiography has pointed out, that within the common tragedy the experience of each group has specific features. Moreover, the survivors themselves are organised in separate associations that, though working together and pursuing the same aim of preservation of memory, retain their distinct characters. Like other non-Jewish Western Europeans, the IMIs were unable to claim compensation from the German Foundation ‘Remembrance, Responsibility and Future’. Their organisation brought a suit against the foundation, but without any success. This refusal angered not only the former internees but also the Italian public.

LIST OF INTERVIEWS2 Giovanni Bonotto (b. 1921), military internee, 24.11.2005 Donato Esposito (b. 1921), military internee, 21.11.2005 Alessandro Frigerio (b. 1920), military internee, 23.11.2005 Carla Liliana Martini (b. 1926), political deportee, 9.6.2005 Gilberto Salmoni (b. 1928), Jewish deportee, 10.6.2005

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Liliana Segre (b. 1930), Jewish deportee, 8.6.2005 Angelo Signorelli (b. 1926), political deportee, 3.4.2006 Claudio Sommaruga (b. 1920), military internee, 7.6.2005 Piero Terracina (b. 1928), Jewish deportee, 29.9.2005

NOTES 1. On 1 October 1943 the ‘Operationszone Adriatisches Küstenland’ was set up by the Germans. It comprised the North Italian regions that were occupied by the Wehrmacht after the armistice of 8 September – Udine, Gorizia, Trieste, Pola, Fiume – and the parts of Yugoslavia that up till then had been occupied by the Italian army (Ljubljana, Susak and Bakar). 2. Shooting and video reproduction by ISTITUTO LUCE, Rome/Italy.

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FORMER FORCED LABOURERS AS IMMIGRANTS IN GREAT BRITAIN AFTER 1945 Christoph Thonfeld

Historical Context

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reat Britain was the main destination of emigration for displaced persons in Europe, but very little research has been done on this.1 Among displaced persons (DPs), former forced labourers were the largest group. Most of those who reached Great Britain did so in one of four ways. First, the country allowed the immigration of (mostly) Jewish survivors of National Socialist persecution, continuing the policy of strictly regulated and limited asylum that had been granted to Jewish refugees from the pogroms in Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century and from increasingly radical persecution in Germany during the 1930s. But this was now strictly dependent on having relatives living in Great Britain. Second, already sizeable immigrant communities from Poland and Ukraine with a developed social infrastructure were now lobbying intensively for the acceptance of their compatriots who had become homeless after 1945 or were not willing to return to their home countries.2 In the case of the Poles, this resulted in the creation of the Polish Resettlement Corps.3 This organisation made it possible for Polish soldiers who had fought in Allied units during the Second World War to be demobilised to Great Britain. Meanwhile, the Polish Resettlement Corps also organised the admission of civilians who had become refugees as a result of the war Notes for this chapter begin on page 335.

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and who had been living in British camps, mostly in India, the Middle East and various African countries.4 In the case of Ukrainians, concern about the consequences of forced repatriation to the Soviet Union meant that some 8,000 former prisoners of war, among them many former members of the Waffen-SS division ‘Halychyna’ (Galicia), were sent to Great Britain and granted civilian status in the context of the European Volunteer Workers Resettlement Programme.5 Similarly, the Czech Trust Fund, which had been established by the British Government during the war, helped Czech DPs to integrate.6 Third, from 1946 on the British government initiated the two resettlement programmes ‘Balt Cygnet’ and ‘Westward Ho’, in order to provide the British economy with urgently needed manpower. ‘Balt Cygnet’ arranged for around 6,000 female DPs from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to be employed in exhausting work in hospitals, sanatoriums and private households. ‘Westward Ho’ recruited mostly men, but also some women, without restriction on nationality or place of origin, to make up for manpower shortages mainly in mining, agriculture and the textile industry; the programme brought some 80,000 DPs to Britain. These programmes did not succeed in recruiting sufficient numbers of workers and in some cases uncertainty about their residence status and difficulties with integration led to problems. As a result, further programmes were developed to recruit women from Germany (‘North Sea’) and Austria (‘Blue Danube’) explicitly for temporary work in private households and hospitals, and to recruit Italian men for the mines and Italian women for the textile industry. In fact, Great Britain was engaged in intense competition with other Western European states, especially Belgium and France, to recruit DPs as manpower. In view of this, it was mainly healthy, strong and skilled DPs who were recruited. This provoked criticism, mainly from the Soviet Union but also from the UN-founded International Refugee Organization (IRO), that the Western Europeans were exploiting the desperate situation of war victims for their own economic self-interest. Thus, in Germany and Austria there increasingly were left only the ‘hard core’ DPs, the ill, the old and the unskilled. Accordingly, (and fourth) in 1950 the British government, under gentle pressure from the UN, declared its readiness to allow immigration on humanitarian grounds for a small number of those DPs still in German camps.7 Having arrived in the receiving country, the former forced labourers, who now – due to the unpromising label ‘displaced persons’ – were generally called European Voluntary Workers (EVW), at first encountered widespread suspicion among a range of social and political groups that saw the DPs as endangering the interests of the British population or of controlled immigration from the overseas possessions of the United Kingdom – specifically from India and the Caribbean.8 Resistance came

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from the mining and textile trade unions, whose members feared negative consequences for British workers, but also from the general public and in particular from spokesmen for industry who warned against the possible immigration of war criminals and collaborators.9 But the lack of interest accorded the DPs since the mid 1950s can be measured by the fact that they have only recently resurfaced in the consciousness of the British public.10 The second official history of immigrant DPs starts in the mid 1980s, with a parliamentary investigation on Nazi war criminals who had disappeared in Great Britain.11 In this context the country was dragged into the limelight mainly through new investigations by the UN and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre.12

Developing the Sample History In accordance with the decision of the international jury that decided on the choice of groups of interviewees, no former British prisoners of war were interviewed for the project, although some 105,000 of them had had to do forced labour for the German Reich. Although this is certainly an area on which research is needed,13 it was thought that the place of Britain in the project was most appropriately as a representative country of post-1945 survivor immigration. Accordingly, only immigrant former forced labourers, most of whom were of Polish origin, were supposed to be interviewed. By arrangement of the International Organisation for Migration and the Bergen-Belsen Memorial, six interviews with former forced labourers were conducted in Britain. All had immigrated there from DP camps after 1945, among them three from Poland and one each from Ukraine, the Czech Republic and Germany. Some potential interviewees refused, claiming lack of interest in the project – though this may have been a code for fear of confronting the past. One further refusal resulted from the potential interviewee wanting a fee, which was rejected on principle. Altogether, the preparations proved to be lengthy, which certainly reflects the fact that as a result of their experiences these ‘new settlers’14 had neither sought publicity nor, indeed, attracted public attention.

Ways of Immigration Jaromir B. came from Czechoslovakia. In April 1945, he was able freely to leave his place of forced labour at a plant for aircraft parts where he had been since 1942. He went to his sister in Pilsen, only to find that she had been killed in an air raid just before he arrived. After this traumatic experience, he decided straightaway to go back to ‘his’ forced labour factory,

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which was located on Czech territory, and he was hired at once. After the Communist seizure of power in 1948 he decided to go to the West and made his way to a DP camp in Bavaria. An injury to his leg, which took a long time to heal and made him unfit for work for nearly eight years, delayed his emigration, so that only in 1952 was he granted immigration status as one of the last DPs to be accepted under the British goodwill agreement of the government of 1950. Wasyl B. came from Ukraine. After his three years of forced labour as an electrician at a factory, he worked on a farm before being sent to a DP camp. There he decided not to go back to Soviet Ukraine. Instead, in 1947 he accepted a job in the Belgian coal mines, which, he decided after a year, was not suitable for him. Back in Germany, he lived from trading on the black market until the currency reform in 1948 made him think seriously about emigrating. That same year he made the rather arbitrary choice to go to Great Britain with the EVW programme, starting with a job in agriculture again. Jerzy C., from Poland, succeeded in escaping from the Flossenbürg concentration camp, where he had been sent after the mass arrests that followed the Warsaw uprising of 1944, in February 1945. He made his way to the US army and was demobilised to the Polish army in exile after the end of the war. This way, via Polish reception camps in Austria (1945) and Italy (1946), he finally came to Great Britain with the Polish Resettlement Corps (1947). Having done forced labour in agriculture in Eastern Friesland for almost five years, Sofia H. from Poland lived in the Polish DP settlement at Haaren together with her husband, who was an officer of the Polish army in exile. In 1947 they were able to choose between France and Great Britain as a future home, and it was Sofia who opted for Britain, on sentimental grounds. Anita L.-W., from Germany, had to do forced labour in a paper factory near Breslau from 1941 onwards, because she was Jewish. There she was arrested and given a prison sentence in early 1942 for forging passes for French prisoners of war. In late 1943 she was taken from the prison to Auschwitz. There she played the cello in the camp orchestra until it was dissolved. She had to live through the last months of the war at BergenBelsen. In 1946, at the end of a lengthy process, she was able to leave the DP camp there and join her sister and other relatives in Britain, where she started a very successful career as a cellist. Jozef R., from Poland, had been an agricultural forced labourer after his deportation in the spring of 1942. As a result of being denounced by his employer, he spent several months at a corrective labour camp, and upon his release he was deployed as an escort by a meat haulage company. Liberated in May 1945, he spent periods in Polish reception camps

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in Austria and Italy (1945) with the Polish army in exile, for which he worked as a clerk. He arrived in Great Britain in 1946.

The Presentation of Forced Labour and its Psychological Consequences in Life-history Accounts Being violently separated from one’s family is a repeated motif when former forced labourers are talking about their involuntary stay in the Third Reich. Even those whose family relationships had been less than happy describe their forced departure from their family of origin as a sad loss.15 For slave labourers, their living and working conditions remain a constant preoccupation in their accounts, as does the need to always be alert in order to avoid the arbitrary brutality of guards and foremen. On the other hand, in their case this same circumstance seems to have made them particularly aware of every available space for autonomous action and every opportunity to bend the camp rules easier or circumvent them: Yes, I think, you know, it was very much a business of keeping your Wuerde somehow, as a person. You do something that these assholes don’t want you to do, this is anyhow, it’s my mentality, you know, some sort of ridiculous triumph, they don’t want us to speak with the French, because we identified with the people who were against the Germans, of course. That was a matter of somehow belonging to the other side and not being somehow in the middle as, as some material that has to be taken out of the world.16

Once in the camp, the forced labourers often adopted a perspective that might be described as ‘seeing like a survivor’. They tried to understand the commands that were shouted at them in a largely unfamiliar language as the unbreakable rules of the game, and to stay as invisible as possible during the working day in order not to attract attention or make a negative impression. As a form of ‘mental self-defence’ they tried to focus their view exclusively on their immediate surroundings, and in the end they found that the fixed series of actions demanded of them day after day gradually became part of an internalised routine: [T]hey were trying to break your spirit. So you became like a robot. You see, because you, you got to a stage, you were hungry, you were chased all the time. Then you stop thinking for yourself. You, you just thinking, that, you know, you just have to do whatever you’re told, because otherwise you could see the people bleeding, people being hit, anything like that. So you start watching, how I’m going to survive this and – then one of the older prisoners in there, they said this, just don’t ask any questions, don’t make yourself, you know, so the people notice you. Try, try to just keep going – that helped.17

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While civilian forced labourers were mostly able to adapt to their work relatively quickly, slave labourers were permanently confronted with existential challenges: changing places of work, changes in circumstances that arose from being constantly moved around for no obvious reason, brutal punishments that could result in being moved to a new camp and further harassment. Even in retrospect, much of this remains incomprehensible, or even when it has been worked through, aspects remain unclear: ‘Ah, and life was that, you know. You complain, you swear, even when you swear on a God, why, why keep you there? What you done so wrong? Ah, well, that’s very hard, very hard to understand, ah, your own life, ah, and … [long break].’18 The relations between the different nationalities were the subject of contradictory accounts. While most of the generalised accounts of these are positive, some negative accounts of particular events in the camps are explicitly linked to tensions among and between national groups. A considerable range of attitudes were represented among camp inmates, from the outspokenly internationalist to the aggressively nationalistic. For example, Jaromir B. expressed disappointment at the forced labourers’ lack of solidarity: ‘There was not really, between the other boys, the other country, was not really friendship. You will be expecting. And everybody, the other person, something, know something good and that things, you can buy or something like that. They keep it for, everybody for himself, never give, tell to other person, go and buy something for yourself.’19 On the other hand, there was further internal differentiation within the national groups themselves. This was largely the result of the conditions and opportunities provided by the camp hierarchy. In this context there are repeated stories of spies and collaborators – which, however, are often based on rumour and hearsay.20 From the point of view of the context and purposes of the documentation project, two things are striking. On the one hand, the interviewees were definitely willing to contribute to the recording and preservation of their stories as a legacy, to inform and even to warn future generations. They tended to see themselves as transmitting information that they themselves had largely put behind them or come to terms with. On the other hand, however, they gave the distinct impression that despite all their efforts to put the events behind them and despite age-related distance from the events, the period of forced and slave labour has marked them much more deeply than they are ready to admit. Moments of bitterness and deeper internal injury were expressed in coded form. One topos that bespeaks the lasting impact of daily humiliation is the recurrent use of German key words. Their appearance in the course of an interview acts like a flash camera, suddenly bringing events the speaker thought long buried into the present:

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I retired in 1992 and since then I’m not bored. I haven’t got a time for anything [laughs]. The only thing is age catching up with you and I still wake up five in the morning and I hear the: ‘Aufstehen! Alles raus!’ That was the dreaded, the dreaded thing, you know. In a main camp that was really dreaded, because there were, everybody was coming up, beaten, kicked and everything.21

Interpretation of the Narratives The Context of Forced Labour The interview with Jerzy C. provides an example of an account of forced and slave labour heavily charged with symbolic power. He was arrested in the course of the widespread repression that followed the Warsaw uprising in the summer of 1944. As a very young man, and because while only an apprentice he had to support his whole family, he had not been actively involved with the resistance: ‘How frustrated we were watching them being bombarded and so on, is – knowing my sister was already in the city. My mother and me was here and you could see the place coming down, you know, all that and see all the burning of fires. We couldn’t do anything about it.’22 He describes the forced labour that was then imposed on him – at least in retrospect – almost as an opportunity to share in the identity of the heroic collective of victims by sharing the punishment imposed on surviving freedom fighters. A more defensive way of dealing with traumatic experiences is the ‘time shift’, in which the interviewee insists on the absolute chronological discontinuity of past and present events, something Jaromir B. has obviously chosen for himself. Here the period of forced labour becomes the absolute ‘other’ of the present, unable any more to pose a threat, but also largely inaccessible, since the ways of seeing and speaking of ‘then’ are not compatible with those of ‘now’: And, it’s completely different, you know. I got friends, and when you come there, they tell you all time the same story, every time the same things, what’s happened during the war, he was in India and that things. I don’t want to know. I want to know what’s come next week, not what was last year. And that’s always the same things, I always think forward.23

Particularly – though not exclusively – from the point of view of some Jewish survivors, there has developed a deep-seated cognitive incompatibility between persecution, forced and slave labour, the Holocaust, life then and life today. Particularly among secularised, assimilated Jews who may even have harboured the vision of an enlightened German nation, this reflects a persistent disorientation in the face of the effective and irrevocable erasure of an integration that they had long taken for granted

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as the basis for their daily life and professional development: ‘So one was very, “Das … ist nicht möglich, was hier passiert” But bit by bit one realised, “Alles ist möglich.” You know, when the Nazis took over, everything collapsed really what was normality.’24 Unlike many slave labourers, many former forced labourers in industry and agriculture have chosen to see forced labour as part of a continuum within which changing conditions are interpreted, without reference to particular ethical or political considerations, as challenges that had to be met. As a way of dealing with daily life, or at any rate accounting for it retrospectively, this may be characteristic of members of ethnic and other minorities, for many of whom coping with various forms of discrimination and persecution was and still is a transgenerational reality and thus more easily integrated into an experiential continuum. When successive experiences of persecution are set in relation to each other, compared and shaped into a coherent narrative that can be integrated into a life history, particular episodes do not necessarily stand out for their own sake but acquire meaning in the context of the whole story – or, as Wasyl B. puts it: ‘As I say, life is life, you always try to make the best. I nothing done what I did regret.’25 In this field there is still a need for research that is explicitly comparative, international and interdisciplinary. Insofar as interviewees make a judgment on their own role as forced labourers, it is ambivalent. Although here there can be no question of guilt, given the perilous consequences – direct or indirect – of any action under the conditions of war and internment, there remains a powerful need for self-reassurance: ‘And this factory where – what I – naturally did contribute to the German war. [Laughs] You want it or not, but I did contribute.’26

View of Germany and the Germans, the Home Country and Other Nations Alongside some evidence of negative experiences with Germans, which often takes the form of comparisons, the accounts of former forced labourers frequently include neutral or positive impressions of the country and its people. These may colour the interviewee’s current view of Germany or at least serve to counterbalance memories of specific negative experiences, which are regarded as one-offs or explained in terms of human nature or the circumstances of the time: [T]his how my conclusion come, to Germany and German people. I never did condemn, never. I say, I find one, once I did get a kicked, you know, of that bully man what I did tell you … And this … you cannot judge by one person or two persons, you have to judge, like I say, in that factory, in that department in factory where I work this not many was but this not a single man what I dislike.27

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Cases in which the experience of slave labour or internment in a concentration or penal camp is linked to the loss of friends and family represent an exception to this pattern. These sometimes form the basis for a continuing negative image of Germany – though this does not exclude attempts at reconciliation. Various efforts on the German side in this respect are quite tellingly summed up in the term ‘Wiederbessermachung’, used by Anita L.-W.28 Sometimes we can also observe a distinctly ambivalent mixture of respect towards and criticism of contemporary Germany and its people, which illustrates the struggle to find a position that can do justice to both the past and the present: I don’t equate the now Germany, that I know and the Germans that I know with them … That would be, that would be just perpetuating, really, the whole thing. That is just what I don’t want to do. Whether I will succeed is another matter but, this is what is my theme now, is to build bridges and, you know, that we could come to some sort of understanding as people, never mind whether we are Germans or whatever. So, it’s a bit of a fight, it seems to me, but worth, I think, worth fighting.29

During the Cold War most former forced labourers’ view of Eastern Europe was coloured by a long-standing rejection of the Soviet Union – arising from the experience of Soviet policies particularly towards Ukraine in the 1930s and towards Poland after the beginning of the Second World War – and in most cases an associated anti-communism.30 This was reinforced by impressions gained during visits there before 1989. In the case of the Czech interviewee the suppression of the Prague Spring served as a further confirmation of the correctness of his decision to emigrate.31 Until 1991 Wasyl B. did not dare to accept British citizenship (for which he had been eligible since the beginning of the 1950s) because he had faked his place of birth on his identity papers in order to avoid forced repatriation in 1945 and feared this might have negative consequences for his status or even lead to his being deported to the Soviet Union.32 For some, their relationship with their home country may have become attenuated, but within families it still plays an important role, be it in the context of passing on one’s native language or of looking for one’s roots, even if the distance of several decades proves to be a serious obstacle to a new or rediscovered nationality. Accordingly this relationship can be intensely experienced as a story of loss: [W]hen we meet old friends, you know, we from the war time, anything like that, because we having reunions, different reunions anything like that, we – the ones, who living in the West, we, we got same language. But when you got there, obviously is different after fifty years living in, living under different regime. When we talk about our, say school in Murnau, I

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remember, so and so remember how we went skiing or whatever and that’s our childhood. You know, I was seventeen and, but after a while different type of life, I mean, I’ve got a television with Polish programmes and looking at that look at locations, don’t want to be bothered about politics.33

Many have effectively solved the problem of ‘internal arrival’ in the host country for themselves, or accepted that there is no perfect solution. But this is sometimes an even greater challenge for the second generation: ‘I didn’t want them to speak German and have an accent in English. I wanted them to be English. This is of course also a pipe dream, you know.’34 In the grandchildren’s generation, belonging to British society is more obviously taken for granted, while the grandparents’ home country is more or less interesting but is basically viewed through the eyes of a foreigner. There is room for more research on this aspect of the story, where the history of forced labour and the ways in which its victims come to terms with it overlaps with questions raised by migration studies. The interviewees’ overall assessment of the period of forced labour is characterised to a greater or lesser degree by an impulse to reconciliation, the result of age and/or reflection. This is sometimes blocked by acute experiences of loss that remain in the background and cannot be erased from memory even when the narrative account of them is free of affect: I praise the people in Germany. They had the same trouble, some of them. I see lot. I see how the Russian prisoners were in there. No, everything for little? I, I was young, I not thinking so much. My dad died, I not sure ’43 or ’44. Then he went, the crematorium, forty-eight years old, young man. Was hard that was the second war.35

Specific Patterns of Narrating and Remembering Forced Labour With almost all former forced and slave labourers who emigrated after their liberation, forced labour seems to have been seen subsequently as a way station in the emigration process. Opportunity and family or other relations are the main grounds for choosing emigration to Britain. However, in most cases the choice was more against going back to the home country or staying in Germany than for settling in Britain.36 In this context, continuing one’s education or training, which was probably seen as being easier to do in the West, appears regularly as an important ambition.37 Even if this objective itself was not immediately realised, it could definitely become a point of reference for one’s future life, if only in the form of communicating the value of schooling to the

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next generation: ‘I didn’t want the children to live in this slums, so I, you know, didn’t want two children to go without education. They had their education. They have different jobs and, you know, with the – quite a good, comfortable life.’38 On the other hand, some showed pride in having made a career without this further education: ‘So without having studied in the normal fashion life, my son or grandchildren go to school, so it’s all possible without Abitur, which is a very important thing in Germany.’39 Sometimes it was very difficult for the interviewees to activate their memories of forced labour. In the societies that were marked by the war, it was hard to gain an audience for one’s suffering in the immediate postwar period. Great Britain was a victorious power but at the same time faced deep economic crisis and social change under the new Labour government. Later, after the ‘magic moment’ (Anita L.-W.) of immediately wanting to tell had passed, the imperative was often to organise the future and not to be held back by contemplating the past – an attitude that was emphatically supported by the host society. It was also important as far as possible not to burden one’s own family with the past, a past that then burst out again with advancing age: Well, as I come out, come out from the first couple years when the war’s gone you had the nightmares, you had, you know, some more condition, I had a problem in the kidney, I had the, all kind, but I think, because I was spent so many years at sea with the fresh air and everything like that and then being busy organising everything, not giving up, you know, that helps. I’ve forgotten completely all about it, didn’t want to know anything about it, but when you start thinking, it is different.40

In the end, the interview could provide a welcome opportunity to either come to terms with the topic again – this time for good – or to open it up for the first time in the communicative sphere of the family.41 Basically, almost all interviewees tend to draw human, social, or political lessons from what happened to them, perhaps because they thought this was what the project expected of them, or because they were moved to it by the obvious difference in age between themselves and the interviewer – a gap of a generation and a half. The interviewees have also developed an exceptionally laconic way of recounting the events of their forced labour, whether or not they are used to telling their story in public: ‘There was the good time, there was the bad time. I have to [say], I [was] the lucky one, twice: one winter time, summer time we have very, very heavy work in the field. We have to. But winter time there was not so much work.’42 While this indicates that they have achieved a degree of distance from those events, their accounts of their present situation show that returning to a kind of normality (however defined) presented an existential challenge, and for some of them continues to do so. This is true at least for the slave labourers:

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And even my nieces in Israel, they’re completely unreligious etc., on the Jewish holidays the family gets together. Well, we don‘t even do that because I don’t even know when the Jewish holidays are. So that I would consider normality which, I’m afraid, I have not achieved, because I would have had to drag it out of the air because … I didn’t get it with the Muttermilch, you know.43

Conclusion Overall, the results of recent research constitute a positive picture of the integration of former forced labourers.44 The very limited sample presented here would tend to confirm this. While many former forced labourers emphasise the condition of being torn between their home and host countries,45 our interviewees showed a determination to become part of British society. This also confirms Holleuffer’s thesis that immigrants are ‘an active agent in a reciprocal process of acculturation between themselves and their receiving countries’.46 However, by all appearances forced and slave labour has no place in cultural memory of the Second World War in Britain. The canon of remembrance of British war veterans has other points of reference, even among former prisoners of war. The memories of immigrant former forced labourers were or are integrated into a narrative that is primarily structured by their membership of a particular (national) immigrant group, which usually has crystallised around a common experience of exile. The loss of the prewar reality of family and home country and the demands of postwar reality between integration and keeping their identity are more important in shaping their narratives than their wartime experiences. This is reinforced by the dominant perspective of the immigrants, which was or is overwhelmingly forward- and future-oriented and always sought to avoid pausing any longer than necessary at the negative stations of their past. And in the end we won by sheer luck and coincidence. (Anita L.-W.)

NOTES 1. The few studies there are have been published almost exclusively in the form of essays, the earliest one being Elizabeth Stadulis, ‘The Resettlement of Displaced Persons in the United Kingdom’, Population Studies 3 (1952): 207–237. Still the

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2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

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most comprehensive is Diana Kay and Robert Miles, Refugees or Migrant Workers? European Volunteer Workers in Britain 1946–1951 (London and New York 1992). See Kay and Miles, Refugees, 136. Ibid., 53. See Michelle Winslow, ‘Polish Migration to Britain: War, Exile and Mental Health’, Oral History 27(1) (1999): 57–64, 58. See Kay and Miles, Refugees, 43. See the transcript of the International Forced Labourers Documentation Project (IFLDP), interview with Jaromir B. (England, 12.3.2006), 51f. See Kay and Miles, Refugees, 49–53, 165f. See Kay and Miles, Refugees, 8ff. See Kay and Miles, Refugees, 59; Great Britain. All-Party Parliamentary War Crimes Group (ed), Report on the entry of Nazi war criminals and collaborators into the UK, 1945-1950, London 1988, 52, 60. On trade union resistance as a common response to labour migration see Christiane Harzig, Einwanderung und Politik: Historische Erinnerung und politische Kultur als Gestaltungsressourcen in den Niederlanden, Schweden und Kanada (Göttingen 2004), 308. See Kay and Miles, Refugees, 160. See David Cesarani, Justice Delayed: How Britain Became a Refuge for Nazi War Criminals (London 1992). See Charles Ashman and Robert J. Wagman, The Nazi Hunters (New York 1988), 257ff. Currently, the British historian Joanne McNally is the only scholar researching this topic. This is my own term, and is meant to provide a provisional characterisation of the emigrant DPs by analogy with the process of postwar ‘resettlement’. See the transcript of the IFLDP interview with Jaromir B., 2f. Transcript of the IFLDP interview with Anita L.-W. (England, 17.3.2006), 28. Transcript of the IFLDP interview with Jerzy C. (England, 15.3.2006), 5. Transcript of the IFLDP interview with Jozef R. (England, 16.3.2006), 6. Transcript of the IFLDP interview with Jaromir B., 9. See the transcript of the IFLDP interview with Wasyl B. (England, 13.3.2006), 30f. Transcript of the IFLDP interview with Jerzy C., 18. Transcript of the IFLDP interview with Jerzy C., 4. Transcript of the IFLDP interview with Jaromir B., 19. Transcript of the IFLDP interview with Anita L.-W., 21f. Transcript of the IFLDP interview with Wasyl B., 9. Transcript of the IFLDP interview with Wasyl B., 23. Transcript of the IFLDP interview with Wasyl B., 24f. Transcript of the IFLDP interview with Anita L.-W., 27. The term is clearly coined on Wiedergutmachung – compensation or restitution – and can be translated as ‘making things better again’. Transcript of the IFLDP interview with Anita L.-W., 57. See the transcript of the IFLDP interview with Jerzy C., 16. See the transcript of the IFLDP interview with Jaromir B., 59f. See the transcript of the IFLDP interview with Wasyl B., 4. Transcript of the IFLDP interview with Jerzy C., 23. Transcript of the IFLDP interview with Anita L.-W., 66. Transcript of the IFLDP interview with Sofia H. (England, 14.3.2006), 8.

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See the transcript of the IFLDP interview with Jaromir B., 46f. See the transcript of the IFLDP interview with Wasyl B., 9. Transcript of the IFLDP interview with Jerzy C., 40. Transcript of the IFLDP interview with Anita L.-W., 20. Transcript of the IFLDP interview with Jerzy C., 20. See the transcript of the IFLDP interview with Jaromir B., 8 and 72. Transcript of the IFLDP interview with Sofia H., 6f. Transcript of the IFLDP interview with Anita L.-W., 68f. See Henriette von Holleuffer, Zwischen Fremde und Fremde: Displaced Persons in Australien, den USA und Kanada 1946–1952 (Osnabrück 2001), 372. 45. See Mark Wyman, DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons 1945–1951 (London and Toronto 1989), 10f. 46. See Holleuffer, Zwischen Fremde und Fremde, 150f. and 156.

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SLAVE LABOUR AND SHOAH A View from Israel

Margalit Bejarano and Amija Boasson

What future awaits us? Forced labour and life or forced labour and death? —Salek Perehodnik (1943)

T

he twenty-five former Jewish slave labourers interviewed in Israel were born in twelve different countries: Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, Transylvania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece, Germany, Austria, Holland, Tunisia and Libya.1 Their common denominator is not the territory of memory but the territory of retrospect; they all look back at their lives and interpret their experiences during the Shoah from an Israeli and Jewish perspective. They feel different from other national groups who suffered the hardships of forced labour but were not doomed to perish. Knowing that for the Jews, slave labour was life on borrowed time, they define themselves as survivors, not as slave labourers.

Historical Background According to the ideology of National Socialism, Jews had no place in human society.2 Systematic discrimination and brutal persecutions started in Nazi Germany, but until the outbreak of the Second World War they were directed at forcing Jews to emigrate from the Reich.3 After Poland Notes for this chapter begin on page 349.

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was invaded (September 1939), its territory was divided between Germany and the Soviet Union. The eastern part was annexed to the USSR and the western part to the Reich, with the central part – the Government General – put under a German civil administration.4 Between 1939 and May 1941 the Jews of Poland were persecuted and humiliated, losing their basic human rights. They were concentrated in ghettos and sent to forced labour under extremely difficult conditions. Jews from other occupied countries (including Holland, Yugoslavia and Greece) as well as from Austria and Czechoslovakia were deported to occupied Poland and recruited to forced labour under conditions that may be termed ‘indirect extermination’.5 With the invasion of the Soviet Union (June 1941), units of the Einsatzgruppen started the mass murder of the Jews in territories that included Lithuania, where the local population eagerly collaborated in the killing.6 At the same time there began the ‘Final Solution’ – the plan for the systematic annihilation of all European Jewry using gas chambers in Auschwitz as well as in other extermination camps. Most of the Jews of Poland had been murdered by the autumn of 1943. The last to be deported from the ghettos were those considered fit to serve as slave labourers. In the case of the Łódz ghetto, whose Jewish population was economically useful, the liquidation of the ghetto was delayed until May 1944. The Jews from other occupied countries, including Holland, Yugoslavia and Greece, were sent to the gas chambers upon their arrival at Auschwitz.7 Transylvania was under Rumanian rule from 1920 to 1940, when the northern part was annexed to Hungary, a German satellite. Like the Hungarian Jews, the Jewry of this territory were denied human rights and subjected to forced labour. With the German occupation (as of March 1944), the Jews of Hungary and Transylvania were deported to Poland, where most of them perished in Auschwitz.8 A different situation existed in the North African countries that fell under German domination, where the German occupation did not last long enough for the ‘Final Solution’ to be imposed on the Jewish population. In Tunisia, the occupation by German and Italian troops (beginning in November 1942) was accompanied by anti-Jewish measures that included arrests and deportations of leaders as well as the removal of men to labour camps, where they were treated brutally.9 In Libya, the Italian authorities imposed the same racial laws that were in force in Italy and sent all Jewish men aged eighteen to forty-five to forced labour camps.10 The liberation of Libya by the British army (January 1943) brought an end to the anti-Jewish policy but was accompanied by the massacre of Jews by the Muslim population. In Europe, the defeat of the German army at Stalingrad did not slow the rate of extermination, but the scarcity of manpower increased the

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demand for Jewish labourers, who continued to be worked to death. As they retreated from the front, the Germans tried to conceal their crimes by destroying the extermination and labour camps, killing most of the prisoners. In late 1944 there began ‘death marches’ of prisoners evacuated from the camps, who were forced to walk long distances to Germany in the most unbearable conditions, most of them dying on the threshold of liberation. Most Holocaust survivors had lost their entire family, and many could not remain in their hometowns, where they were met with hostility by the local population. Some 250,000 of them joined the Bricha (Escape) movement, directed towards Palestine, after finding temporary refuge in DP camps in Germany, Austria and Italy. Immigration to Palestine was restricted by the British Mandate authorities, and illegal immigrants caught at sea were sent to detention camps in Atlit (near Haifa) or in Cyprus. Only with the establishment of the state of Israel (May 1948) did the Jewish people find a country that opened its doors to all Jews.

The Interviewees’ Experience of Forced Labour Most of our interviewees, regardless of their place of origin, came from a middle- or lower middle-class urban background. Many of them came from religious families with varying degrees of orthodoxy, and a considerable number had been exposed to Zionism. All of them had some degree of general and Jewish education, and their command of languages was extensive, particularly when they came from regions with multinational populations. They came from close-knit families, but memories of a happy childhood were often tainted by anti-Semitic episodes and economic difficulties. The four interviews with Sephardi background (two from Salonika, Greece, and two from North Africa) shared similar characteristics. At least half of the interviewees were taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they were separated from their families and in most cases lost their closest relatives. Others were taken directly to labour camps or were engaged in forced labour in other contexts. The labour and concentration camps where interviewees were interned include some well-known ones in Germany (Ravensbrück, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald, Groß Rosen, Dora-Mittelbau), Poland (Czestochowa, Plaszów, SkarzyskoKamienna, Stutthof, Siedelce), Czechoslovakia (Theresienstadt), Holland (Westerbork) and Austria (Mauthausen), as well as in North Africa (Sidi-Azaz, Sedjenane and Mateur). It is beyond the scope of this article to trace personal stories, though each individual interview contains a wealth of factual information that often reflects the changing circumstances in the respective region following the Nazi invasion. We will limit

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ourselves to the impact of forced labour on human behaviour, as portrayed by the interviewees. Most of the interviewees did hard physical work that included the building of roads, carrying stones in quarries, laying railway tracks and building airports. The technical and managerial work was generally done by free workers or other nationals, and the Jewish forced labourers carried bricks and other material, such as heavy bags of cement, cleared the ground of heavy stones or uprooted and removed trees.11 Others had to dig trenches and bunkers, or clear the ground after air raids. In the forests they removed the burnt trees, and in the cities they cleared the ruins of the bombed buildings.12 An exceptional case was that of a Dutch nurse who was employed in her profession in the hospitals in Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen.13 A few women were involved in work in munitions factories or producing parts of airplanes. Others were employed by private enterprises, such as the Schindler factories in Plaszów or IG Farben in Buna (Auschwitz III) and Wolfer & Goebel near Siedelce. Tasks that required precision gave the prisoners some interest in their work and were considered a means of survival.14 One woman worked in her hometown of Skarzysko and acquired considerable skill in recycling bullets. Luckily for her, she was not placed in the Werk C, where prisoners were exposed to poisonous sulphur, turning yellow and dying quickly.15 In North Africa the roads were not adequate for heavy vehicles, and Jews were employed in building new ones. In Tunisia, forced labourers were used as porters, carrying food and ammunition to the front from the points where the paved roads ended.16 The most fortunate prisoners were those who had some access to food, working in the fields or in kitchens. One survivor was stationed in the kitchen in Libya because the Italian officer liked his cooking, another in Germany, because he peeled potatoes with the thinnest peels.17 Interviewees recall with precision not only the small rations of food that they received in each camp, but also the fights over every crumb of bread, fights in which ‘we were stripped of our humanity; we became animals’. ‘Dying of hunger’ had a real meaning, and a dying person was searched for the last piece of bread that he held in his fist, ‘because it was a luxury to bury him with the bread’.18 Practically every interviewee was haunted by hunger, and many were ready to risk their life for a piece of raw potato. The difficulty of conveying to the listener today the meaning of real hunger is reflected in one interview: ‘The hunger – drove me mad. It’s extremely difficult to explain what hunger is … for an adolescent child. It was painful, terribly painful. … I stood up to being flogged; I couldn’t stand up to that pain.’19 Interviewees described in detail their daily life in each camp, including housing, clothing and hygienic conditions. The protection of the body

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against cold, lice, skin infections and disease was a constant struggle that did not discriminate between the sexes. Women, however, paid a heavy price for the loss of their femininity. The shaving of their hair and their nakedness before men was intensely humiliating. One interviewee recalls that on her way to Auschwitz she was sitting next to her boyfriend, paying little attention to the suffering around her. Still unaware of the meaning of what was happening, she was forced to undress and was shaved: ‘It was awful, awful, simply awful! I would rather die than appear naked before men.’ A few hours later she happened to meet her boyfriend behind the barbed wire. When he saw her without hair he told her: ‘Go away quickly. I don’t want to see you!’20 The shaving of their hair transformed them from women to monsters, unrecognisable even to their closest relatives, and during their incarceration all of them stopped menstruating. Only upon liberation did these women realise how they looked: ‘I saw a mirror in the hall. I looked at it and started crying. I cried because I didn’t recognize myself … I saw two big eyes and I don’t have a face!’21 Their monstrous appearance as walking skeletons with bald heads and infected skin gave them some protection against the rape by Russian soldiers that was one of the major threats immediately after liberation. Though living in totally inhuman conditions, forced labourers were able to enjoy limited cultural activities, such as concerts or the celebration of Sabbath and holidays. The most popular activity, however, was talking about food, preparing and eating wonderful meals in their imagination. An important cultural activity was singing songs, sometimes inventing new words to popular melodies. One prisoner remembers that in their free time they sometimes sang songs or recited poetry: ‘We even laughed sometimes. Everything we did was around food – how we cooked, we exchanged recipes. We never spoke of despair.’

Forced Labour in the Context of Shoah The exceptional interviewees in our project are the two men from Tunisia and Libya, who were taken to do forced labour while their families remained at home.22 They were humiliated and physically maltreated, but they did not face deportation to extermination camps. Another unusual case is that of a boy from Austria whose parents received a certificate releasing the father from Dachau and allowing them to emigrate to Palestine, though without their children. He was sent to relatives in Slovakia and Hungary, where he was forced to work for the Hungarians ‘as an adult’, although he was only ten years old. In 1941 he was sent to Palestine on a children’s transport arranged by Aliyat Hanoar.23

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The other twenty-two stories were totally different: Thirteen of the interviewees were taken to Auschwitz, and others went through similar experiences of being torn brutally from their parents and siblings, whom they often never saw again. The stories are well known, and the interviews may not add new historical facts, but they are essential to give the episode of forced labour its real dimensions, also in the eyes of the interviewees themselves. After a dreadful rail journey under the most inhuman conditions – in the case of the interviewees from Salonika it lasted eight days – came what in later years interviewees perceived as the most tragic moments of their life. The stories are composed of different layers of awareness; they speak of what they knew or did not know at the moment of arrival, of the discovery of the inevitable death of their loved ones. These memories are charged with all the information they have subsequently accumulated, as well as with bitter remorse for what they did not do at that moment of helplessness: ‘I can’t forgive myself that I did not look at them in the last moment; at least to see them … before we were separated.’24 Most interviewees emphasise the element of denial, even in the presence of the chimney and the smell of burning flesh: Who could imagine it! … only to stand there, to see, to breathe the air, the air full of burning flesh and the sight of the flames. … and to know that they are burning (they already burnt our parents two days ago) but they are burning persons that are maybe our cousins, friends, anyway they are Jews. He who has never been there will never understand.25

Denial is also present in the testimony of an interviewee who was employed in ripping apart the shoes that came from Auschwitz, so that the leather could be used again: ‘I didn’t want to believe it, although I already knew … but one doesn’t want to believe such things … to understand where the shoes came from.’26 Only a few claim that they or their parents understood the meaning of the first selection: ‘Papa told us to say that we are older and to volunteer to work … only work will save you, and take care of mama.’27 The interviewees’ narratives also emphasise how moments of grotesque surprise and irony were characteristic of the Shoah experience. An unusual story is that of Jacques Stroumsa from Salonika, who, after learning that his parents, brother and pregnant wife had been murdered was forced to play the violin, becoming the first violinist in the Auschwitz orchestra. Referring to his absurd situation he says: ‘On the one hand they kill and on the other they give me a cigarette because they heard a Mozart concerto; this was unbelievable.’28 Similarly, the Auschwitz experience created an association between a gas chamber and a regular

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shower, but also placed ‘normal’ suffering in a different perspective. One interviewee recalls that he was terrified when he was taken to a shower in Buchenwald, not knowing that it was a concentration and not an extermination camp. He was undressed and shaved, and started to recite ‘Shma Israel’;29 then he was disinfected with an extremely unpleasant liquid: ‘It was horrible, it burnt, it was an unbearable pain – but you are alive!’30 What did it mean to remain alive? Those who ended the war as Muselmänner (the prisoners’ term for walking skeletons) were too sick to rejoice; they were taken to hospitals to begin a long road to recovery that in some cases lasted for years.31 Weakness, however, was not only physical. Interviewees remember the depression they felt when they realised that they had lost all their families and had nowhere to return to: But what now? Where? What were we liberated for? Why? Where do we want to return? Do we want to live among the people who caused us all this pain? … we didn’t study, we have no money, we have no clothes and winter is coming. Who is living? Where are mother, sister and father? All this suddenly exploded inside me.32

Several interviewees found their way to Palestine, in several cases illegally, after a relatively short period. Others were caught behind the Iron Curtain and migrated during the 1950s. One interviewee migrated to the United States and settled in Israel only about ten years ago. One of the questions that arose after liberation was the attitude towards religion. During the Holocaust period circumstances did not allow people to fulfil their religious duties to the letter, although interviewees also recount attempts to celebrate, even symbolically, the holy days. Most interviewees became less observant as a consequence of their Holocaust experience, or even abandoned religion altogether. People who asked the question ‘How could God permit this to happen?’ lost their faith.33 Two of the interviewees came from very Orthodox families; one was the daughter of a famous rabbi. Both arrived at an Orthodox Jewish boarding school for girls established by rabbis in Sweden, one as a student and the other as a teacher, which created a protective context that served as a substitute for lost families and offered spiritual answers to their existential problems. ‘The atmosphere united them so much, and they were consoled, and they [the rabbis] explained the situation to them from the standpoint of faith so that they recovered spiritually.’34 Others, like the ‘Buchenwald children’, were taken to France, where they were placed in warm children’s homes run by Jewish organisations.35 Another protective context sought by the interviewees was marriage. Some married very young, as early as they could, trying to escape solitude and hoping to start a new life by creating a new family. They wanted to

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raise normal children and tried to protect them from the knowledge of what they themselves had gone through.36

Interviews as the Interpretation of Memories The interviews reflect the interviewees’ motivation to participate in the oral history project and the tension between speaking up and remaining silent. A few of those we approached refused to be interviewed, but all were very cooperative and even urged their friends to give testimony. Some of them were speaking for the first time, while others had already been interviewed in other contexts or even published their memoirs.37 Most of the interviewees, if not all of them, speak of years of silence occasioned by the lack of understanding in society at large, the necessity of building a new life and their feeling that it was pointless to talk. They refer to their desire to forget, to start a new life and to protect their children from painful knowledge. Some of the interviewees for the project argued that even though they have tried to suppress their memories and outwardly they seem to live normally, the Shoah has always been an inescapable presence in their daily lives. Their experiences during the war continue to haunt them in their nightmares, or in sleepless nights. They complain about poor health, loss of teeth, wounds that were caused by maltreatment, such as a bullet in the leg, chronic illness or a deaf ear.38 In many cases interviewees broke their silence at the request of their grandchildren. They admit that they were emotionally damaged by their experiences during the Shoah, that they were not able to show tenderness and love to their children as they do now with their grandchildren. They were busy trying to survive and later to make a living, and were unable to expose their feelings and memories.39 Communication with their grandchildren helped them to open their hearts and in most cases was a trigger that released their testimony. Speaking out is also described as a way to close a cycle or to find peace of mind. One interviewee said that he had hoped that by speaking he would find some tranquillity for his soul, but in the end he felt that it was futile.40 Interviewees explain the reasons for their recent decision to tell their story, and the painful process of exposing themselves to speaking in public. Some of them participated as witnesses in the ‘March of the Living’, which brings Jewish schoolchildren to Poland, or lectured in various contexts about their experience during the Holocaust. Despite their emotional difficulties, they feel an urge to participate in what they perceive as an important mission, to pass on their personal experiences as Jewish victims of National Socialism to the younger generation. One of them

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explained to his listeners, both in Israel and in Germany: ‘You have the privilege of seeing a Shoah survivor. Soon we will not be here and you will not have anything or anybody to ask. This is why it is important for me.’41 One of the problems faced by the interviewees is their conflicting feelings with respect to others’ capacity to comprehend. On the one hand they feel the incapacity of any shared language to convey what they went through: ‘It is impossible to transmit this – there is no expression for this situation. There are no lexicologists who can write an expression suitable for this exasperation.’42 On the other hand, however, they refer to the common knowledge shared with the interviewer: ‘What happened in Auschwitz you know. I don’t have to tell you.’43 Interviewees use oral history to interpret to themselves, as well as to others, the meaning of what they went through. During the interview they build up their personal story by interweaving the remembered events with the information that they have been accumulating throughout their lives. Memory is re-examined in view of that additional knowledge, with interviewees being able to distinguish between the different layers of time. One interviewee uses his reminiscences and personal investigation to criticise the conventions shared by other survivors. He has been dedicating himself since his retirement to clarifying some historical misconceptions and injustices. One case that he has occupied himself with is that of a Kapo in Auschwitz who gained the confidence of the Germans and used it to help his fellow Jews, yet was regarded by his fellow Jews as a collaborator and in the end became a victim of his reputation.44 The interviews also serve as a medium for explaining the reasons for survival against all odds. The presence of a relative or a good friend appears as one of the most important sources of support: ‘Being together gave us the strength to continue, so that one protected the other all the time.’ In a few cases interviewees were adopted by older persons: ‘I was her lager-daughter and she was my lager-mother.’45 A common explanation is the combination of chance with an unexpected intervention of a powerful person. An SS guard who pushed the speaker to the left in a ‘selection’ or a medical doctor who forced an interviewee to go to work were later considered life savers. A boy from Salonika who was sent to work in the kitchen with ‘gorillas’ who were known to be criminals was saved by a boxer from his hometown who took him under his protection.46 One interviewee explained that he owes his survival to the small lights that appeared in crucial moments in the period of darkness: ‘How many stars I saw in my way, how many angels … they were the persons who helped me, who put me on my feet again.’47 Interviewees often realise that they were doomed to die, and were saved only by ‘blind chance’:

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Nobody can tell me that he was saved because he was more intelligent, or because someone hid him or because he was a great fixer. It was all a question of luck. You were lucky if you succeeded in escaping one aktzie, but then they could … drag you to work, or a guard who, just for caprice, took out a revolver and killed you. Obviously, it was just luck.48

Whether it was mere luck or a series of miracles, the interviewees describe in detail the fragile chain of events that saved them from extermination: ‘The thread running through my story is chance. [Without] one lucky chance in any one place I could not have reached the end.’49 A central interpretive issue is the construction of personal identity and its links with national identity. The strong desire to build a new life is integrally linked with the discovery of the possibility of migrating to Palestine. Many of our interviewees arrived illegally in Palestine during the mandate period and were interned in the refugee camp of Atlit or were sent to Cyprus. One of them drew a direct line between his experience in Auschwitz, his internment in Cyprus and his captivity by the Jordanian Legion during the War of Independence: I would like to point out the trauma that remained with me from Auschwitz that increased with the capture of our boat when we were brought to Cyprus. And that night in which they informed me: ‘You are going to captivity’. This left a trauma until this very day. I dream often about concentration camps, and I cannot see anything connected with war … or with violence. It always reminds me of my past.50

Through the transmission of national ideology interviewees find meaning in their sacrifice. They stress the importance of having a Jewish homeland, becoming advocates of Israeli patriotism: ‘This is the only state we have. The Jews aren’t liked anywhere. So we have to guard this small country to build it and to protect it. This is the message that I want to give to those who will hear my story.’ The state of Israel is perceived not just as a home for its inhabitants, but also as ‘the insurance company of the Jewish people’, a guarantee that the Holocaust will never happen again: ‘Thank God that we live in a different reality. We have a state of our own and we have to protect it. … This is what I told IDF soldiers two years ago … : Don’t ever leave this country … this is the place that guarantees that what happened then will never happen again.’51 By telling their story in this particular historical moment, survivors thus take on the role of prophets: I think that [to forget] is an injustice not towards us, but towards the coming generations, because … the enemy is always here. The enemy yesterday was Hitler, today he may be … an Iranian … who says that the Jews have no place in Israel. … My story is interesting only if you understand that you are in danger, by you I mean the Jewish people …

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You, your children, your grandchildren and whoever is born will always be in danger.52

Another question related to the contemporary Israeli discourse is that of the incorporation of the Jews from Muslim countries into the national history of the Holocaust. The two interviewees from North Africa define their identity with respect to their experience as forced labourers. The interviewee from Libya argues that he is a witness but not a survivor, although he also claims that potentially every Jew is a survivor: ‘I was in the Shoah. Every Jew living today is a Shoah survivor, because who knows … everybody could have been exterminated.’53 The interviewee from Tunisia, who grew up in a wealthy family that adopted French culture, remembers that when he was taken to the labour camp his group was marched to the train station passing through the street in which he was born, and his neighbours, who were all Europeans, applauded the Germans: ‘At that moment, I remember, I said: “That’s it. I don’t belong here.” … It was broken once and for all. … These terms, of course, are taken from the future.’54

Conclusion The twenty-five oral histories in our project are based on the reminiscences of Jewish Holocaust survivors living in Israel. Their main contribution to research lies not in new historical evidence, but in the way they allow us to interpret their experience as forced or slave labourers under National Socialism in the context of their fate during the Shoah from a life-history perspective. They also enable an analysis of the changing role of the survivors in Israeli society as they find a voice sixty years after the end of the war. Interviewees appraise the impact of forced labour on their lives during the Shoah by comparing experiences: their own at different stages of the war, such as while they lived in the ghetto, in an extermination camp or in a labour camp, or theirs with what other victims went through, a comparison that places their own sufferings in a different perspective. For those who were sent to Auschwitz the most painful memories are related to the separation from their closest relatives and the discovery of their fate. The traumatic memories of the utmost brutality, their own helplessness and shame, the smell of burning flesh, the screaming of victims and the last glance of their loved ones overshadow all their later experiences. In these oral histories forced labour, despite the hard physical work, starvation, disease and human cruelty, is remembered above all as a ray of hope to remain alive. With respect to their role in the Israeli society, these

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interpreted memories show how the interviewees have moved over the decades from a position of silence to the status of last living witnesses.

NOTES 1. For the quotation in the subtitle see: Salek Perehodnik, The Sad Task of Documentation: A Diary in Hiding (Jerusalem 1993). Names of countries throughout the text are given according to the frontiers in 1939. 2. The short historical survey that follows is based on Robert Rozett, Shmuel Spector, Efraim Zadoff et al (eds), Shoá: Enciclopedia del Holocausto (Jerusalem 2004). 3. See interview with Walter Gutmann (born 1928). All the interviews were conducted by Amija Boasson in 2005 and 2006. Copies of interviews were deposited in the Oral History Archive of the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 4. See interviews with Binem Wrzonski (b. 1928), Chava Slutzki (b. 1930), Noach Lasman (b. 1924), Meir Eldar (b. 1930), Zecharija Shagrin (b. 1925). These interviewees came from western and central Poland. 5. See interviews with Judith Mogendorff (b. Holland 1916), Yehoshua Neubauer (b. Austria 1930), Lilly Har Kochav (b. Czechoslovakia 1925), Yaffa Hanigal (b. Czechoslovakia 1920) and Giselle Cycowicz (b. 1927 in Karpato-Russ, a zone contested between the Czechs and Hungarians). 6. See interviews with Rivka Wollbe (b. Lithuania 1922) and Uri Chanoch (b. Lithuania 1928). 7. See interviews with Chava Michaeli (b. Yugoslavia 1928), Moshe Weiss (b. Yugoslavia 1925), Jacques Stroumsa (b. Greece 1913), Jackie Yaacov Chandaly (b. Greece 1927). 8. Interviews with Miriam Gross (b. Hungary 1922), Shmuel Bogler (b. Hungary 1929), Martin Kieselstein (b. Transylvania 1925), Malka Jacobson (b. Transylvania 1929) and the brothers from Transylvania, Joseph Pinsker (b. 1924) and Arie Pinsker (b. 1930). 9. Interview with Gad Shachar (b. Tunisia 1923). 10. Interview with Shalom Arbiv (b. Libya 1923). 11. Interviews with Noach Lasman, Lilly Har Kochav, Rivka Wollbe, Miriam Gross, Shmuel Bogler, Zecharija Shagrin. 12. Interviews with Chava Michaeli, Shmuel Bogler, Uri Chanoch. 13. Interview with Judith Mogendorff. 14. Interview with Giselle Cycowicz. See also Zecharija Shagrin, Chava Slutzki, Walter Gutmann, Meir Eldar, Binem Wrzonski. 15. Interview with Chava Slutzki; see also Giselle Cycowicz, Zecharija Shagrin, Binem Wrzonski 16. Interviews with Gad Shachar, Shalom Arbiv. 17. Interviews with Moshe Weiss, Martin Kieselstein. 18. Interview with Zecharija Shagrin. 19. Interview with Uri Chanoch. See also: Shmuel Bogler, Chava Michaeli, Chava Slutzki, Miriam Gross.

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20. 21. 22. 23.

Interview with Chava Michaeli. See also Giselle Cycowicz, Malka Jacobson. Interview with Lilly Har Kochav. See also Chava Michaeli. Interviews with Gad Shachar (Tunisia) and Shalom Arbiv (Tripoli). Interview with Yehoshua Neubauer. Aliyat Hanoar was a project of the Zionist Organisation to rescue Jewish children and youth by sending them to Palestine for training in agriculture and manual trades. Interview with Joseph Pinsker. Interview with Joseph Pinsker. See also Arie Pinsker, Chava Michaeli, Miriam Gross, Shmuel Bogler. Interview with Walter Gutmann. Interviews with Giselle Cycowitcz, Miriam Gross. Interview with Jacques Stroumsa. ‘Hear O Israel’, the last prayer recited before dying. Interview with Binem Wrzonski. Interviews with Joseph Pinsker, Binem Wrzonski, Meir Eldar, Lilly Har Kochav, Walter Gutman, Noach Lasman. Interview with Giselle Cycowicz. See also Binem Wrzonski, Shmuel Bogler, Chava Michaeli, Noach Lasman. Interview with Joseph Pinsker. See also Martin Kieselstein, Arie Pinsker. Interviews with Rivka Wollbe, Malka Jacobson. Binem Wrzonski. See for example Miriam Gross, Yaffa Hanigal. Rivka Wollbe, Veemunatecha Baleilot (Jerusalem 1997); Yaacov Chandaly, Mehamigdal Halavan Leshaarei Auschwitz, 2d ed. (Tel Aviv 1997); Jacques Stroumsa, Geiger in Auschwitz (Konstanz 1996); Judith Rosenblit-Mogendorff, Zichronot midor ledor (Raanana 2002); Noach Lasman, Hakvish (Tel Aviv 1996). See for example interviews with Lilly Har Kochav, Joseph Pinsker, Shalom Arbiv, Walter Gutman, Noach Lasman, Malka Jacobson. Interviews with Miriam Gross, Uri Chanoch. Interview with Shmuel Bogler. Interview with Uri Chanoch. See also Binem Wrzonski, Jacques Stroumsa, Lilly Har Kochav. Interview with Lilly Har Kochav. See also Naomi Rosh White, ‘Marking Absences: Holocaust Testimony and History’, in Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (eds), The Oral History Reader (London and New York 1998), 172–182. Interview with Yaffa Hanigal. Meir Eldar, Yaacov Kozolcyk: Hagibor mikriniki beblok 11 (Jerusalem 2001). Interview with Meir Eldar. Interviews with Shmuel Bogler, Miriam Gross, Chava Michaeli, Joseph Pinsker, Binem Wrzonski, Arie Pinsker. Interview with Jackie Chandalay. See also Arie Pinsker, Martin Kieselstein. Interview with Binem Wrzonski. Interview with Uri Chanoch. See also Martin Kieselstein, Jackie Chandaly. Interview with Moshe Weiss. Interview with Shmuel Bogler. Interviews with Joseph Pinsker, Uri Chanoch, Binem Wrzonski. Interview with Jacques Stroumsa. Interview with Shalom Arbiv. Interview with Gad Shachar.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

 27 

INTERNATIONAL SLAVE AND FORCED LABOUR DOCUMENTATION PROJECT United States, Atlanta, Georgia

Sara Ghitis and Ruth Weinberger

[Auschwitz] was an existential nightmare. … [W]e lost our identity, our souls and spirits. It transformed us from human beings to dehumanised, nameless victims. —Interviewee C

T

his chapter is based on ten interviews with Holocaust survivors resident in the United States, conducted between May 2005 and August 2006. The interviews, of which three were recorded on video and seven on audiotape, attempted to explore the lives of slave and forced labourers, their survival and their postwar lives. The following is a synopsis not only of the survivors’ experiences during the Holocaust, followed by their immigration and integration into the United States, but also of the interview process itself and key analytical elements.

Selection of Interviews By contrast with our previous oral history experiences, identifying interview subjects for this project and carrying out the interviews proved unNotes for this chapter begin on page 362.

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usually arduous. On the basis of previous experience with projects such as the Shoah Foundation (Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation), the Mauthausen Survivors Documentation Project (MSDP) and The Breman Museum Legacy Project, our assumption was that it would not be too difficult to find witnesses willing to give testimony. Prospective interviewees were contacted in various parts of the United States with the help of organisations involved in aiding Holocaust survivors, and a special effort was made to find survivors who had yet to tell their story. Unfortunately, in most cases these attempts were unsuccessful. The rate was about one successful interview per ten failed interview attempts. Most prospective interviewees who declined to be interviewed noted that previous interview experiences had proven to be too upsetting, too painful, and that they were not ready and willing to relive this experience. While there is limited research available on the well-being of survivors following interviews, it is a known fact that some survivors react with distress and often with discomfort in the aftermath of an interview.1 This is related to the fact that the oral historian responsible for this project had a much harder time finding female survivors who were willing to be interviewed than male interview partners. Almost all female prospective interviewees referred to the tremendous pain involved in reliving the war years, saying that they were simply ‘too weak and tired’ to go through such a process again. Other survivors waived participation by stating that they were physically unable to withstand the interview. And in one special case a survivor changed his mind after telling his story for one hour. He was concerned that his story could turn into a book that would compete with his own published memoir. Lastly, two Second World War Jewish prisoners of war who were forced to perform labour were equally not ready to be interviewed. In summary, despite the project’s intention to interview survivors who had never talked about their experiences, only one interviewee among this pool of ten life stories was telling his story for the first time. Those survivors who made the decision to participate in this oral history project often justified their decision by stating that their stories had to be passed on, that it was their responsibility; they were eager to contribute to the documentation of the Holocaust.2 Interviewee G, for example, noted: [M]aybe that was the purpose that I didn’t perish with my family, I didn’t perish with the millions of people, that I had a mission, I had a duty, I had an obligation to speak about it because of those six millions that cannot be here to talk about it. So even if the subject is a painful subject for me, just like pulling a scab from an unhealed wound, I have to talk about it because after my generation is gone, it won’t be any first-generation survivors and will go down in history, and little by little it will be forgotten, forgotten just like nothing happened.

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Similar was the argument of interviewee I, who noted that God wanted me to survive, to tell the story or to be a witness. Who knows? He works in His different ways and infinite wisdom, different ways how to keep history going. … And this is my motto right now: There are so many things to do in life; there are so few people [who] are willing to do it. And there’s still more left to do. There is still more left to do.

Another justification for participating was the fact that the Holocaust might bear some important lessons for future conflicts and ethnic crisis. Interviewee C, for example, reasoned that ‘[h]istory taught us that when any ethnic group is degraded, it degrades all human values. It degrades the teaching of religious doctrines. It degrades the core values of pluralism and democracy. Most of all, it degrades the moral character of a nation.’

The Interviewees All interviewees, five male and five female survivors, reside in the United States: three in San Francisco, California, and seven in Atlanta, Georgia. All are Jewish and originate from the then Poland, Lithuania or Hungary. All of them are between 75 and 89 years old. Interviewees A, B, D, F, and I were all born in Poland and experienced at least the majority of the war years in Poland. They were among the 3.5 million Jews living in the country before the Second World War. Before the Holocaust, Poland was an important centre of the Jewish world, and the interviewees were in the midst of it. Poland also became the place of the most feared Nazi ghettos, concentration and extermination camps, which all interviewees were forced to experience firsthand. The Second World War started when Hitler’s troops invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. Polish defence quickly crumbled in the face of Hitler’s troops. On 17 September, Russia, which had signed a non-aggression pact with Germany, sent troops into Poland from the East. Germany’s part became the Government General, headed by Hans Frank, and included important cities such as Cracow, Warsaw and Lublin. Soon Poland developed into the ‘dumping ground’ for everybody the Nazis considered racially inferior and wished to exterminate. Those who were not murdered upon arrival in death camps were used for slave labour. Poland soon became a centre of Nazi organisation of slave labour and total exploitation. After Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, Germany also conquered eastern Poland, and Lvov was subsequently attached as a fifth district to the Government General.3 Interviewee A, born in 1924 in Strachowice (formerly Schöngarten) in south-western Poland, was in 1942 first transported to Mayufka, and

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then to the Hermann Göring Werke (Salzgitter, Braunschweig) for slave labour. In 1944 she was transported to Auschwitz, where she remained until early 1945. After Auschwitz, Interviewee A was sent to Ravensbrück, followed by Leipzig and Malchow (a concentration camp in Mecklenburg). In 1945, the Soviet army liberated her. Interviewee B, born in 1923 in Chrzanow in southern Poland, was first transported in 1940 to Upper Silesia, where he performed slave labour, and then to Tarnowitz (Friedrichsgrube) to work for Krupp. The next removals took him to Marstadt, and then to Fünfteichen (Neubrandenburg, Lower Silesia), a satellite camp of Groß Rosen. In 1944, interviewee B was transferred to the main camp of Groß Rosen and in 1945 was evacuated to Germany, where again he was assigned to perform slave labour. In 1945, he was liberated in Bergen-Belsen. Interviewee D was born in 1920 in Kielce in south-eastern Poland. Soon after the German attack on Poland he was forced to perform slave labour (probably for HASAG – Hugo Schneider Metallwaren Fabrik AG), and in 1941 the Nazis deported him to Skarzysko-Kamienna, Poland (again a HASAG labour camp). From there, in 1943, he was first transported to Czestochowa (also HASAG), and then onwards, in 1945, to Buchenwald and Dora-Mittelbau, a sub-camp of Nordhausen. From Dora-Mittelbau interviewee D was transported to Bergen-Belsen, where he was liberated. Interviewee F was born in 1929 in Zaleszczyki (Tarnopol oblast) in southern Poland, which is now part of Ukraine. In October 1941, she was sent to the ghetto in Horodenka (Ukraine), and in September 1942 to the ghetto of Tluste (or Tovste, also in Ukraine). By spring 1943 she was working in the agriculture labour camp in Lisowce (Lvov oblast). In March 1944 Soviet troops liberated her. Interviewee I was born in 1924 in the province of Warta in Poland. In 1940, his family sent him to Piotrokow to avoid persecution. He lived in the town’s open ghetto until 1942, when he went into hiding. Nonetheless, he was still drawn into forced labour at a nearby glass factory. In May 1944 he was able to escape his forced labour and find refuge with Polish farmers. In January 1945, interviewee I was liberated. Interviewees C, G, H and J were all born in Hungary and were thus drawn into Hitler’s extermination policy ‘only’ at a later stage, as Hungary entered the war nearly two years after Poland, in June 1941, as an ally of Nazi Germany. At that time, more than 40,000 Jews were sent to slave labour battalions in Ukraine and Serbia. These labour battalions were among the first of many anti-Jewish measures adopted by the successive Hungarian governments beginning in early 1938. The measure also clearly reflected Hungary’s increased alliance with Nazi Germany.4 Nevertheless, Hungary’s Jews were still relatively safe. The situation changed

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drastically with Germany’s occupation of Hungary on 19 March 1944. And despite Hungary’s relatively late entry into the European Jewish destruction, Greater Hungary’s Jewish community still suffered more than 450,000 casualties.5 In other words, on the eve of the Allied victory, and after surviving the first four and a half years of the war, the Jews of Hungary were destroyed.6 Interviewee C was born in 1930 in the village of Bilke in eastern Hungary, now Ukraine. In 1944, after German troops had invaded Hungary, he was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he was forced to work. In March 1945, after Birkenau had been evacuated, a death march took him to Buchenwald, where he was liberated. Interviewee G was born in 1929 in Oradea Mare, Hungary, now Romania. In 1940, Oradea Mare became Nagyvarad. A month after Germany’s occupation of Hungary in 1944, interviewee G was drafted into one of the Hungarian army’s slave labour battalions. After some time he was able to make his way to Budapest, where he received help from Raoul Wallenberg and was thus able to survive. Interviewee H was born in 1927 in Kolosvar (Cluj), Hungary, now Romania. After the Germans had occupied Hungary, she was transported to Auschwitz as a slave labourer. In October 1944, another transport brought her to Mährisch Weisswasser (today Karlov Moravsky) in the Sudetenland; this was a labour camp for women attached to Telefunken. In May 1945, she was liberated. Interviewee J was born in 1931 in Huszt (today Khust), Hungary, now part of Ukraine. In March 1944, together with her family, she was deported to Auschwitz and assigned to perform slave labour. By the time Auschwitz was evacuated, interviewee J had been sent to Hainichen, a satellite camp of Flossenbürg operating for the ‘Nebelwerfer Programm’ of the Framo Werke (Frankenberger Motorenwerke). In the spring of 1945, having survived a death march headed for Theresienstadt, she was liberated. Interviewee E came from Lithuania. On the eve of the Second World War and the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union in August 1939, the decision was made to divide Poland between the two big powers; in the process, Lithuania was placed in the Soviet sphere. Lithuania’s Jewish population numbered about 250,000 at that time. Following the Soviet-German war in June 1941, the first Wehrmacht units, soon to be followed by the Einsatzgruppen, arrived in Lithuania. However, Hitler’s troops were not the only ones to commit crimes against Lithuania’s Jews. The Lithuanian ‘partisans’ played an equal role in the Jewish annihilation. At the end, only about 8,000 Lithuanian Jews are thought to have survived the Holocaust.7 Interviewee E, born in 1918 in Insterburg, East Prussia (now Tschernjachowsk) was raised in the shtetl of Shavel, Lithuania (today Siauliai, in

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German Schaulen), to which her parents returned shortly after her birth. She considered Shavel to be her hometown. Soon after the German invasion of Lithuania, she was transported to the Kovno (Kaunas) ghetto. In October 1944, she was transported as a slave labourer to Ereda, Estonia (a sub-camp of the Vaivara concentration camp). A few months later another transport took her to the Goldfilz (Khotlas) labour camp, again a sub-camp of Vaivara in Estonia. In 1944, after a bombing raid on the camp, she was transported to Stutthof, and soon thereafter to Bydgoszcz/ Bromberg-Ost, a women’s sub-camp of Stutthof. In January 1945, she escaped the camp with several other young women. While the interviewees sampled in this article originated in different countries, their persecution history had one major common factor: they were all subjected to Hitler’s system of exploitation of human beings, which resulted in the forced employment of about 14 million people, including some 2.5 million Jews performing slave labour in concentration camps.8 This massive draft of labour was unprecedented in its scope and purpose,9 and all over Nazi-occupied Europe it also became a tool to persecute Jews and other victims of the regime.10

America: The New Home With the exception of Interviewee I, who first migrated to Canada and only later to the United States (in 1965), all of our interviewees emigrated to America in the years immediately following the Holocaust. Interviewees H and J came to the United States in 1947, interviewee C in 1948, interviewee F in 1949, and the rest in 1950. Integration was not easy in the new homeland. The United States had not proven receptive to Jewish refugees in the years leading up to the Second World War. Between 1933 and 1941, at the time the Nazis sought to make Germany ‘judenrein,’ many attempted to obtain immigration visas to go to the United States. However, as early as 1924, the US Congress established immigration quotas that limited the number of refugees permitted into the country – a policy that did not change despite Hitler’s terror regime and subsequent mass murder. Reacting to increased international pressure, then President Franklin D. Roosevelt organised a conference with delegates from thirty-two countries to discuss the pressing refugee problem. But even the 1938 ‘Evian Conference’ – named after the French resort where the conference took place – did not result in any changes in US immigration policy.11 This nonchalant attitude again came to bear on the occasion of the United States’ refusal to grant entry permits for 930 Jewish refugees on board the MS St. Louis. In 1939 they were all sent back to Europe.12 Even as the State Department on 24 No-

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vember 1942 confirmed a report of the Nazi plans to slaughter the Jews of Europe,13 America’s own anti-Semitism was rising; it reached its peak in 1944.14 Even the end of the war and the increasing knowledge of the annihilation of European Jews did not change the US’s overall attitude toward the plight of the survivors. Americans, including members of Jewish communities, showed deep resistance in dealing with the question of Jewish survivors and opposed any large-scale immigration of refugees. The advance of communism only aggravated this situation. Between 1946 and 1947, the concern was voiced that many of the Jews who wanted to immigrate to the United States might be communists.15 To sum up, the situation faced by Jewish survivors in the fifteen years following the end of the Second World War was quite different from what was to follow, or what it is today. Interviewee F, for example, remembered how, after her immigration to the United States in 1949, she could not find anyone to talk to about her experiences: When I first came I thought the people would want to know, the people would want to hear what happened there, and I found out very quickly that they did not. Nobody wanted to talk about it. My cousin,16 whom I loved dearly, was a wonderful woman, and the best thing she could tell me is, ‘Forget the past, and start a new life. Forget the past.’ As though you could. I used to dream, for the longest time, nightmares of, over and over again, the same thing repeating itself. But people did not talk about it, and I had this feeling that I have to be as normal as everybody else and not talk about it either, just to be an American, just to adjust.

Similar memories are held by Interviewee C, who recalled how his immediate postwar years were difficult, socially and financially. … finding a home, securing financial resources, dealing with cultural shock, loneliness, lack of marketable skills and language barriers. Most of all, unloading onerous emotional baggage and putting the past to rest was yet another daunting hurdle I had to confront and overcome. Straddling between two worlds endlessly sapped me of much of my emotional energy and became a zero sum game.

Later on, he recalled how ‘[w]hen I came to these shores in my late teens in 1949, I could not shake loose of the deeply embedded prejudices. I was dogged by fear of rejections, nagging insecurities and a low self-esteem. It was a struggle to escape from the shackles of a ghetto mind-set.’ The reports of our interviewees accord with the results of other studies, which have shown that it took approximately twenty years for most survivors not just to fully integrate themselves into American society but even more so to find a hospitable and sympathetic society that was will-

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ing to listen to their experiences and comfort them in their traumas.17 Only in the 1960s did it become possible for Jews to look at the Holocaust in a new light, with a certain sense of security stemming from their new home.18 This paradigm shift was caused by numerous factors, among them the highly publicised Eichmann trial in 1961, Arthur Morse’s book While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (1967), and the 1978 broadcast of the television saga Holocaust. Finally, by April 1979, when Remembrance Day was introduced and the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was resolved upon, then President Jimmy Carter acknowledged how ‘the United States became a homeland for many of those who were able to survive.’19 Coming back to the interviewees analysed in this paper, all of whom are today citizens of the United States of America, it is clear that all survivors surveyed for this project successfully integrated into American society – despite having faced difficulties in the early years following their immigration. All interviewees not only made the US their new home but are today financially comfortable and could be placed either in the middle or upper middle class. At the same time that the US accepted and integrated its Jewish Holocaust survivors, the economy started to improve, allowing for refugees to also settle economically.20

Social Setting With the exception of interviewee E, who was married at the outbreak of war and is now widowed, all of our interviewees are still married to people they met in the aftermath of the war, when they were mostly in their early twenties. Six are married to fellow survivors. All the interviewees have children, and eight are grandparents. All survivors interviewed for this study have reached an advanced age and are increasingly faced with the knowledge that they are approaching the end of their lives. Particularly among Holocaust survivors, this can often trigger emotional traumas, as old age is often experienced as a recapitulation of Holocaust experiences. Traumatic experiences such as having to leave home, family and parents, and soon thereafter being confronted with death, often trigger feelings of abandonment, isolation or loneliness, especially in old age.21 Interviewee J, for example, noted: ‘Emotionally, I think I was crippled for life. … So, yes. The answer is I was crippled as a human being. … I felt, even with my children. I was so afraid of losing that I don’t know if I was hugging enough. Do you realise what I’m saying?’ In the same vein, Interviewee C referred to his increasing inability to cope with the experiences: ‘[A]s I get older it becomes more and more of an issue because, as you sum up your life, you ask yourself, What

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would life have been if this did not happen to me?… I feel I never made it to the finish line in … because my life has not been whole in that respect … an emptiness in life that has never been filled. At the same time, he noted: ‘I’m going back to Auschwitz, for closure, in July. I’m taking my daughter with me.’

Observations and Themes for Further Exploration ‘So I said, Oh, my God, I’m free. I felt I’m liberated. I felt liberated. And I regained more courage than ever before that I can remember, more courage than ever before. You are surviving. You are surviving. This is it.’ (Interviewee I)

The majority of the interviewees were teenagers and adolescents at the time of their imprisonment. The youngest, interviewee F, was 11. The oldest were interviewees D and G, who were both twenty-one at the onset of the war. Their youth not only played a major role in their ability to survive, but it also made them resilient and able to prove themselves, or to be exemplary workers. While some scholars have speculated that youth may have been a key factor in resilience to trauma during and after the Second World War, thus far not enough research has been conducted to confirm this theory.22 In the existing literature, youth is often identified as an advantage, because young people showed greater flexibility and openness during but also after the war.23 When children and youngsters are exposed to the same traumatic events as adults, their psychological response is different, ‘as it is mediated through a developing organism, continuing to mature cognitively, physically and socially and who is usually living within a family system.’24 However, youth is not the only element with potential to lead to an increased sense of resilience. Other factors, such as length of exposure to trauma, types of trauma or extent of loss, play equally important roles. Thus, having experienced torture for a shorter period of time or with less severity could also help to facilitate postwar adaptation.25 Interviewee J, who was a month shy of her thirteenth birthday at the time the German army invaded Hungary in 1944, recalled her slave labour in Hainichen, a satellite camp of Flossenbürg, as follows: My job was to sharpen these cogs that go around, but it had to be so accurate that once I sharpened it … there was a certain skill, to measure to the tenth of a millimetre, the same size, that each one is exactly the same … I had the patience for that. I started to get involved in it. Sometimes my conscience bothered me, afterwards, really, that I was so involved in this. And I became so good at this that they took me to a school … to learn how to read blueprint. And they made me, after two weeks, a foreman.

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Interviewee I, who was fifteen years old while performing slave labour, noted: ‘I consider myself one of those odd workers. You were given, let’s say, like, three hours to unload a car full of coal. We did it in two, so we had an extra hour of doing light work.’ And later in the interview, the same survivor stated: ‘In the war life was shattered, but I never gave up. This is my make-up. I never gave up. I never gave up and never had despaired. I said, somehow, somehow, some way we might survive … I was not sure, but said we might survive.’ Similarly, interviewee H recalled her arrival in Auschwitz, and her willingness to adapt and show courage: So she [her sister] started crying, and she said, ‘Oh, no, they cut your beautiful hair.’ And so I said, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it. I’m not worried about hair. If that’s the worst thing that happens to us, it won’t be so bad because hair grows back.’ So she said, ‘Oh, no, but you had such beautiful hair.’ And I said, ‘Just think; now we won’t have to wash and comb it and bother.’

While some of the younger survivors were able to develop a stronger sense of resilience, youth could also increase the trauma of being separated from family members, especially parents.26 Interviewee I, for example recalled: I lost my entire family: my mother and my siblings, my sisters and brother. And I remained alone, alone in the world. It was very difficult to get used to the idea. I started asking questions, ‘Why not me? Couldn’t I have been together with my family?’ At times I said I should have been with them together. Why should they be dead and I’m alive?

Interviewee C also remembered the trauma of having to separate from his family: The last thing I remember that my mom shouted at me when she was separated with my three younger brothers, the last farewell, is, ‘I love you, son,’ and those are the last words that my mom uttered, and I’ve never seen my mom since. That was the end. … I asked one of the prisoners, ‘Do you have any idea where they might have taken my mom and my three brothers?’ And he paused for a second, and he said, ‘Come on out, I’ll show you where they are.’ It was an underground bunker. I remember walking out the bunker, and he pointed the crematorium to me, belching out smoke, and he said, ‘That’s where they are.’ That was an awakening experience, a rude awakening. That’s when I realised that I lost everything.

As a last point, we can point to youth as a key element in how ‘kindness’ by others was experienced and interpreted. It seems that ‘kindness’ affected young survivors in a different way than it might have done with older survivors. Almost without exception, most interviewees referred to episodes where individuals showed unexpected kindness toward their

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plight. However, as is often the case with traumatic memories, they are sometimes paired with ‘faulty’ memories, which instinctively help reduce present anxiety and place historical experiences in a different light. Survivors, and especially child survivors, sometimes remember themselves as having been safer than they actually were at the time of the traumatic event.27 Interviewee G, for example, seeks to acknowledge the kindness he experienced by finding ways to honour righteous gentiles – in particular Colonel Imre Revicky, who he believes participated in his rescue. In another example, interviewee F, fourteen years old at the time and working as a slave labourer in Lisowce, Poland, remembered: We began to collect our fallen comrades. Among them was my brother Julek, seventeen. The days that followed were in a haze. I refused to go to work and walked aimlessly in the compound, and one day, I saw before me the black boots and I thought it was the end. It was the commander of our camp. He asked me how old I was and where I was going. I told him I was eighteen. He told me to go to his villa and tell the cook to give me food and clothes. I was totally amazed.

Conclusion This project provided a remarkable opportunity to explore the lives of ten Jewish survivors, who were all drawn into the wartime slave labour regime at a very young age. These interviews are testaments to how survival was possible, how resilience and courage were shown during and after the war, and how all of them were able to adapt and fully integrate themselves into postwar American society. At the same time, the interviews shed light on the United States’ inability to deal with the experiences of its Jewish refugees, not only in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust but for the fifteen years following the end of the Second World War. This fact is important to note, not only because it has shaped the survivors’ lives but also because the United States has since developed into one of the more receptive countries for Holocaust survivors. Today, the United States is home to a myriad of organisations aimed at studying, helping and monitoring Holocaust survivors. America’s Jewish community, including its Holocaust survivors, has gained confidence over the last couple of decades. It is therefore not surprising that most interviewees surveyed in this oral history project are not only fully integrated but are for the most part respected members of their communities and fill their position as Holocaust survivors with pride and dignity.

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NOTES With gratitude and appreciation to the survivors who so generously shared their stories with us. Guidance and support from Elisabeth Pozzi-Thanner and the staff at The Breman Jewish Heritage Museum. 1. Please note that throughout this essay, the survivors will be referred to by signifying letters, not by their real names. This was done to preserve the survivors’ privacy, in particular as some play a rather prominent role in their respective social setting, and even short versions of their name would reveal their identities, which was not wished for. Laura E. Finkelstein and Becca R. Levy, ‘Disclosure of Holocaust Experiences: Reasons, Attributions, and Health Implications’, Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 25(1) (2006): 117–140, 119; Flora Hogman and Eva Fogelman, ‘A Follow-up Study: Child Survivors of the Nazi Holocaust Reflect on Being Interviewed’, in Judith S. Kestenberg and Eva Fogelman (eds), Children during the Nazi Reign: Psychological Perspectives on the Interview Process (Westport 1994), 73–80. 2. Finkelstein and Levy, ‘Disclosure of Holocaust Experiences’, 119. 3. Michael Steinlauf, ‘Poland’, in David Wyman (ed.), The World Reacts to the Holocaust (Baltimore 1996), 81–155, 95f; see also Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, student edition (New York and London 1985), 64–96. 4. Randolph Braham, ‘The Hungarian Labor Service System (1939–1945): An Overview’, in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Centre for Advanced Holocaust Studies (ed.), Forced and Slave Labor in Nazi-Dominated Europe (Washington, D.C. 2004), 49. 5. Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews: 1933–1945 (New York 1975), 403. 6. Randolph Braham, ‘Hungary’, in David Wyman (ed.), The World Reacts to the Holocaust (Baltimore 1996), 200–224, 205. 7. Dov Levin, ‘Lithuania’, in Wyman, The World Reacts to the Holocaust, 329–336 8. Ulrich Herbert, ‘Zwangsarbeiter im ‘Dritten Reich’ und das Problem der Entschädigung: Ein Überblick’, in Dieter Stiefel (ed.), Die Politische Ökonomie des Holocaust: Zur wirtschaftlichen Logik von Verfolgung und ‘Wiedergutmachung’ (Munich 2001), 203–238, 214, 218. 9. Stuart Eizenstat, Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labor, and the Unfinished Business of World War II (New York 2003), 206. 10. Wolf Gruner, ‘Jewish Forced Labor as a Basic Element of Nazi Persecution: Germany, Austria, and the Occupied Polish Territories (1938–1943)’, in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Forced and Slave Labor, 35–47, 35. 11. Holocaust Encyclopedia, ‘Emigration and the Evian Conference’ (http://www .ushmm.org/wlc/ en/index.php?ModuleId=10005300; accessed on 11 January 2007). 12. Timeline of America’s Reaction to the Holocaust (www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/ holocaust/timeline /index.html; accessed on 11 January 2007). 13. Timeline of America’s Reaction to the Holocaust (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/ amex/holocaust/timeline/ index_2.html, accessed on 11 January 2007). 14. Thirty-three per cent of all Americans stated in 1944 that they were held antiJewish sentiments. See David Wyman, ‘The United States’, Wyman, The World Reacts to the Holocaust, 693–748, 701. 15. Arthur Hertzberg, ‘The First Encounter: Survivors and Americans in the Late 1940s’, Monna and Otto Weinmann Lecture Series, 30 May 1996, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Centre for Advanced Holocaust Studies, 2–5.

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16. Interviewee F’s cousin was raised in the United States. 17. Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory: The American Experience (Bloomsbury 1999), 1f; see also Rolf Steininger, Der Umgang mit dem Holocaust. Europa – USA – Israel (Vienna 1994), 437. 18. Hertzberg, ‘The First Encounter’, 8. 19. James Young, ‘Memory and the Politics of Identity’, in Helene Flanzbaum (ed.), The Americanization of the Holocaust (Baltimore and London 1999), 68–82, 71. 20. Allen Glicksman, Kimberly Van Haitsma, Michelle M. Mamberg, Michelle Gagnon and Daniel Brom, ‘Caring for Holocaust Survivors: Rethinking the Paradigms’, Journal of Jewish Communal Service 79 (2–3) (winter/spring 2003): 148–153. 21. Yael Danieli, ‘As Survivors Age’, National Centre for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Clinical Quarterly 4 (1) (winter 1994), 1–7. 22. Glicksman et al., ‘Caring for Holocaust Survivors’, 148. Overall, not enough research has been conducted to date on resilience to trauma in Holocaust survivors. See Liat Ayalon, ‘Challenges Associated with the Study of Resilience to Trauma in Holocaust Survivors’, Journal of Loss and Trauma 10 (2005): 347–358, 348. 23. Shamai Davidson, Holding on to Humanity: The Message of Holocaust Survivors. The Shamai Davidson Report (New York 1992), here quoted after Ayalon, ‘Challenges’, 352. 24. Jon A. Shaw, ‘Children, Adolescents and Trauma’, Psychiatric Quarterly 71(3) (2000): 227–243, 228. 25. Ayalon, ‘Challenges’, 353, 351. 26. Sara Botwinick, ‘Overcoming Victimhood: A Case Study on the Extended Traumatic Effects of a Holocaust Childhood’, The Journal of Jewish Communal Service 81(4) (spring/summer 2006): 249–260, 249. 27. See: Valerie Yow, Recording Oral History: A Guide for the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2d ed. (Walnut Creek 2005).

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FORCED AND SLAVE LABOUR IN THE CONTEXT OF THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST EXPERIENCE Dori Laub and Johanna Bodenstab

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he interviews discussed in this chapter form part of a New Haven– based project that aims at a comprehensive study of the Jewish forced labour experience under the German Reich. The interviews were all carried out in New Haven, Connecticut, with most survivors residing either in that state or in New York. The vast majority of those contacted were very ready and willing to carry out what they felt to be a binding duty to history and their loved ones. Eight had already been previously interviewed by Dori Laub twenty-five years ago within the framework of what has since become the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University, and all the others had been interviewed either by the Yale Video Archive or by the Shoah Foundation. The interviews can be divided into four groups (some with subgroups) based on the subjects’ place of origin. The four major geographical categories observed are: (1) Jews from Poland, including (a) those who came under German occupation in 1939 and (b) those who came under German occupation in 1941; (2) Jews from Hungary (this group includes individuals from territories in Czechoslovakia and Romania that were occupied by Hungary after 1939); (3) Jews from Germany (one individual fled to Belgium, his testimony therefore reflects the fate of the Belgian and French Jews); (4) Jews from Czechoslovakia, including (a) those who came under German occupation in 1938 and (b) those whose towns came under Hungarian rule.

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Depending on these regional differences, different scenarios of persecution were typical. The Polish Jews who came under German occupation at the very beginning of the war typically served the longest period as forced and slave labourers. Their stories indicate a process during which the infrastructure of labour camps was put in place. Eventually all survivors of this subgroup ended up as concentration camp inmates. The Polish Jews whose home territories were occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939 and came under German occupation in 1941 were recruited for work by the German authorities and witnessed the slaughter of their communities by the Einsatzgruppen. The Jews from Czechoslovakia were typically deported in 1941. They were sent to Theresienstadt (Terezin) and then to Auschwitz, where they were selected to do slave labour, frequently in German cities. Their fellow citizens in the eastern part of the country, however, shared the fate of the Hungarian Jews, i.e. systematic deportations to Auschwitz in 1944, from where they were shipped into the Reich to work in ammunition factories or to clear rubble in German cities devastated by air raids. Of course these are only historical storylines, whereas each interview reflects an individual experience. Each testimony is more than a mere variation on a basic master narrative, and some of the stories go far beyond the categories. One interviewee from Poland (Helene R.) obtained false papers and passed herself off as a gentile. She was recruited for forced labour in Germany as a Polish gentile and worked as a nurse for other forced labourers. Another interviewee from Czechoslovakia (Peter D.) came from a mixed marriage. His mother was Jewish, his father a gentile. His first labour assignment as an ‘Aryan’ took him to Berlin, where he worked for Siemens and was paid a salary. A few years later, however, he was judged to be a Mischling and sent to two forced labour camps. The twenty interviewed survivors, a group composed of eleven women and nine men, share similar demographic characteristics, ranging in age from 75 to 85 with the youngest ones born in 1930 and the oldest in 1920. Most are between 80 and 82 years old. This slight variation in age plays out in different ways as far as the most fundamental moment of this period is concerned, namely the separation from their parents. While the older interviewees were better prepared to fend for themselves, the younger ones consider this a significantly more traumatic moment due to their almost complete dependence on their parents. Nevertheless, the general proximity in age accounts for the shared experience of interrupted schooling and professional education. All our interviewees described to us how their parents paid close attention to the education of their children. In most cases, the exclusion of Jews from public schools during the Nazi period was compensated as long as possible by private schooling. In some cases tutoring continued on a clandestine

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basis even in the ghetto. Depending on the extent to which their families were observant as Jews, we found several approaches to education before the war: completely secular, or a combination of public schooling and Jewish studies in the Cheder for male interviewees, and/or Hebrew schools where some of the subjects were taught in modern Hebrew. Some survivors came from traditional Jewish households in Eastern Europe where secular schooling was clearly secondary even for boys. But even in extremely poor families (Meir S., Leo G.) where training for work started at an early age, a religious education was pursued whenever means were available to finance study. After the war, those interviewees who had managed to get some occupational training before and during the war eventually fell back on this knowledge. Sidney G. established himself as a tailor, Leon W. as a baker; Leo G., who had helped in a cabinetmaker’s studio and had done carpenter’s work as a slave labourer, became a builder. Others managed to establish themselves professionally with the help of family members already living in the US (Joseph K., Kurt R., Zelig P.). Helene R., a trained nurse, married and had children while waiting for her immigration papers in a DP camp in Germany. She never went back to work. Another group of interviewees emigrated to Palestine/Israel, fought in the War of Independence (Zoltan G., Meir S.) and became active Zionists (Zahava S., Anita S.). Roma B., who had obtained her secondary school diploma in Germany immediately after the war to study medicine, left for Israel during her first semester and joined the army. Henry G. got his professional training as an aircraft electrician through the Israeli Defence Force. Especially the younger ones faced the problem of unfinished schooling. Both Eva B. and Anita S. describe their considerable struggle to go back to school to obtain qualifications for higher education. Those who eventually finished their secondary schooling fared quite well. Ralph F. became a dentist, Shifra Z. a teacher, Judith A. a designer, Anna G. a real estate broker. In part, their achievement seems connected with the survival of their core family or close relatives, who provided a stable emotional and economic context for studies and personal growth. Those who had to fend for themselves because they remained the only survivors of their entire families were under acute existential pressure once they moved beyond hospitals and DP camps. Without doubt, it must have been a bizarre juxtaposition to return to normal life and to act as a teenager after the horrendous experience of Auschwitz or a death march. However, the unfinished educations of many of our interviewees do not necessarily reflect feelings of displacement and paralysis resulting from their persecution (Leon W., Eva B., Anita S.). In some cases they bespeak a certain unwillingness to return to normality and a cunning

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desire to take on life and to reinvent oneself (Zelig P., Henry G., Zoltan G.). While none of those whose parents had achieved academic and professional degrees before the war reached a comparable level of education (Kurt R., Esther B., Roma B., Anita S.) for themselves, none of these interviewees expressed a sense of failure. The only person to explicitly mention his regret at never having finished school was Leon W. Ultimately, the question of social status cannot be separated from religious orientation. In the case of the interviewees, residence in a big city such as Prague, Warsaw or Hamburg is frequently associated with a prosperous and/or secular family background. This secularism was particularly pronounced among the Czech interviewees (Eva B., Anita S., Peter D.), who came from the bourgeois segments of society, participated actively in the cultural life of their cities and were passionate patriots. Those interviewees whose families resided in smaller towns typically came from tightly knit Jewish communities and were often less prosperous. One survivor (Leo G.) who grew up in conditions of extreme poverty came from a devoutly religious background, at which he only hinted during his testimony. His six siblings, his parents and his large extended family all perished. Yet his extraordinary ability to observe and reflect led us to believe that the observance of tradition and knowledge must have made his early life experiences rich on an emotional level. The ethnic range of the interviewees allows for exploration of various levels of persecution. In general, the groups best represented here are Jews from greater Poland and greater Hungary. The Polish experience was initially characterised by humiliation, menial labour for the Germans and loss of contact with families. The most significant distinction among them is between those whose slave labour experience began in 1939, following the German invasion of Poland on 1 September, and those for whom it began after the German invasion of eastern Poland and the Soviet Union in June 1941. The stories of Jews from eastern Poland accordingly start later, but they are marked by instant massive brutalities at the hands of Wehrmacht, SS and Einsatzgruppen (humiliating work, beatings, random executions and the systematic eradication of their entire community). The pain of these memories seemed much more palpable, if only because the personal dimension of loss was not overwhelmed by the traumatic sequence of camp experience upon camp experience. A case in point is the testimony of one survivor (Shifra Z.) whose family managed to hide and eventually fled into the Soviet Union with the help of partisans. During their escape she lost her older brother. This single loss overshadows her whole story and makes tangible a level of pain that is merely implied tacitly in the testimony of others who remain sole survivors of their families and whose pain is numbed by the magnitude of their losses (Sidney G., Henry G.).

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It is striking that the Polish interviewees who joined the partisans (Ralph F.) or were able to escape with their help (Shifra Z.) both came away with their core families intact. Both managed to finish their schooling and achieved the highest academic degrees. In contrast, deportations to Auschwitz from the Hungarian territories did not begin until after German forces entered the country in the spring of 1944. Until that point the fascist Hungarian government had issued certain restrictions on its Jewish population, such as curfews, stars of David to be worn on clothing and the recruitment of able-bodied men into labour battalions that were sent to assist the troops fighting on the Soviet front. Many had heard the earlier rumours of what had been happening to Jews in other countries, but most simply refused to believe such horrible tales. Some even believed that the Hungarian state would not allow such atrocities to be perpetrated on them and might protect them (Zahava S.). Before long, however, Hungarian Jews found themselves in the all too familiar cycle of round-ups in factories and tents, transitional camps leading to deportations and eventually transportation to Auschwitz. This often happened within three weeks of the round-up. The start of their ordeal was their arrival on the Auschwitz-Birkenau ramp and the last moments with their loved ones. Few were able to say goodbye to family and friends. A whole train with thousands of people would be processed in forty-five minutes. Those few not sent to the gas chambers upon arrival were either assigned to work details (Anna G., Zoltan G.) or in due course sent out to Germany to work in ammunition factories and construction work. Generally speaking, as the war dragged on in the European theatre, the experience of many of our Polish interviewees (e.g. Zelig P., Sidney G., Leon W.) became increasingly deadly and cruel as they neared the heart of the German Reich. A prisoner’s lot could have been a ghetto or a forced labour camp while still in Poland, but as he or she was moved into Germany, chances were that the ultimate destination would be a concentration camp. On the other hand, for those deported to Auschwitz the fact that they were taken from there into the Reich on work assignments was experienced as an improvement of their general conditions and of their chance of survival (Anita S.). However, this sense of improvement applies only within the continuum of the Jewish experience of persecution and cannot be sustained in a comparison with other groups of labourers. The forced labour experience was, of course, not explicitly Jewish. In many labour settings different groups of labourers worked side by side. In some of the camps, as well, the accommodations were shared with other groups, such as Polish gentiles deported to Auschwitz following the Polish

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uprising in Warsaw of 1944, political prisoners in Buchenwald and other forced labourers from Western and Eastern Europe. Soviet POWs and gypsies brought in from countries such as Romania, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary (and from Germany and Austria as well) were also mentioned as inmates kept separately from Jewish inmates under their ‘own’ specific conditions. In most cases, our interviewees described vast differences between themselves and these other groups with regard to living conditions, treatment and nutrition. The conditions of Jewish inmates were, generally speaking, described as the worst. A number of testimonies also reveal the overwhelming hunger that Jewish prisoners suffered, describing how they devised ways of stealing food (Leon W., Zelig P.) or tried to eat whatever seemed edible (Zoltan G.). ‘Cooking’, i.e. conversations about favourite dishes, and bartering with gentile workers were likewise strategies to cope with the devastating shortage of food. Even before their deportation, the Jews were exposed to radical changes in their social environment ranging from ordinances issued against them to constant violence and random shootings and killings. An oppressive climate of fear and harassment dominated their day-to-day experience long before they were processed in any camp system. The experience of life in disarray while still living at home included, alongside menial labour done for the Germans (such as shovelling snow, cleaning their living quarters, carrying firewood) in an atmosphere of continuous harassment, the exposure to the terror and worry about family members who either returned home heavily beaten and wounded, or never did return because they had been murdered by the Nazis; their bodies had to be picked up from the streets or at night from the Gestapo torture cellars. Nevertheless, within their Holocaust experience the labour experience represented one of the more humane facets for some of our interviewees. Although some describe mistreatment as part of the working conditions, such as not being allowed to go to the bathroom and the terrifyingly vigilant eye of the SS always hovering above them, work was actually life-saving, if only because it provided an opportunity for real human interaction and the development of relationships. There were trades to be learned from foremen willing to take an apprentice under their wing and aid them in their day-to-day struggle for survival (Leon W., Leo G., Joe K.). Sometimes this guardian could prove to be a particularly benevolent German or even a member of the SS. Although variations to such stories do exist, we heard repeated reports of Germans who gave food to Jewish inmates and of SS guards who hid food packages for them (Anita S., Kurt R., Henry G., Zoltan G.). Compared to the actual camp experience with its high levels of terror and brutality, the workplace was

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a relatively humane setting for the Jewish prisoners, giving them a daily sense of purpose and meaning and reminding them that they were still useful human beings. As the war progressed, however, work conditions deteriorated, particularly for Polish Jews incarcerated while the camp system was still evolving. Many remember the beginning, when they were still allowed to wear their own clothing in the labour camps (Joe K., Leon W., Sidney G.). The moment these became affiliated to actual concentration camps and uniforms were forced upon the inmates, there arose the sense that a threshold in the experience was being crossed. Although the description of the work per se seems almost to vanish in the face of the horrors endured, it was usually conducive to memories of heinous treatment upon return to the camp. The semblance of civility found in the workplace became instantly opaque upon return to the camp proper (Leo G.). A vigilant SS guard was at hand during working hours with pen and paper in hand to take notes about any and all infractions committed, which were severely punished upon return to the concentration camp. Some of these punishments were performed in public (beatings until the prisoner passed out; public hangings) to be used as a scare tactic for the entire camp population (Henry G.). Perhaps the only thing more terrible than the inhumane atrocities perpetrated before their eyes and the brutalities and death marches of the final weeks and months was the loss of loved ones; some of the survivors interviewed were the sole survivors of their whole families. The emotional and psychological impact of the Nazi brutality seemed to be relatively uniform throughout Europe. Inmates’ lives were singlehandedly guided by their constant hunger and their terror at the thought of being ‘noticed.’ Nothing was done to sustain the Jewish labour force; the system was one of complete exploitation eventually culminating in death. Towards the end of the war, the heaps of corpses, typhus epidemics, death marches, executions, massacres and freezing open cattle-car rides left the inmates too broken in spirit to pay much heed to rumours of Allied advances and nearby cannon fire from American and Russian artillery. The increasingly frequent Allied bombings had no effect on either their daily routine or their general psychological state. In fact, one gets the sense that the inmates hardly paid any attention to what was going on in the war because it had absolutely no impact on the reality of their lives. The deportations in open cattle cars in subzero temperatures and senseless death marches proved to be typical of the experience of Jews towards the end of the war. For some, this final period began with the liquidation of Auschwitz in late January of 1945, whereas for others it commenced in February or March of the same year as the front line was nearing other camps. The marches were the ultimate experience of Nazi

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brutality. As the Germans walked them aimlessly, thousands of inmates simply fell away and died; stragglers were immediately shot. In the weeks before the end of the war, the decision to exterminate those who could not keep up became all the more acute. One interviewee estimates that approximately 90 per cent of those forced to march died in the process. One interviewee recalls escaping by hiding in haystacks that were sprayed with bullets by Germans once they had discovered that prisoners were hiding in them (Leo G.). Another prisoner (Henry G.), singled out during a selection for execution, helped to carry the corpses and then hid in a heap of dead bodies so as later to slip back to the side of the living unnoticed. It is striking that this survivor, who came so close to his own death, is the only interviewee who never started a family. From a psychological viewpoint this raises the question whether he was ever able to reverse the death sentence the Nazi executioners had placed him under. Most of those who survived the evacuations of the camps in Poland and the death marches ended up in ammunition factories or in concentration camps such as Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald and Mauthausen, from which they were further sent out to work. Liberation was barely noticed. The way survivors knew that they were ‘free’ was by seeing themselves surrounded by soldiers with uniforms different from the Germans’. Conditions were so overwhelmingly dire that even after liberation the pervasive atmosphere of death and destruction created by the Nazis persisted; the dying among the emaciated inmates continued, and in many cases it took the survivors time to regain their ability to digest normal food. The Germans had behaved as if the war would never end and could never be lost, as if their absolute control of the lives and deaths of their prisoners could never cease. In the mind of the survivors this fiction frequently loomed long after liberation. Of the survivors interviewed in New Haven, approximately half found absolutely no one alive after the war. Some had siblings who survived, and in other cases a parent who had remained with them during the war also made it out. In the weeks and months immediately following the war, those survivors who still hoped to be reunited with members of their families directed their remaining energy to the task of making it through the anarchy and chaos still engulfing Europe and back to their childhood towns. The results were ultimately disappointing. Instead of finding any semblance of the security associated with home, the interviewees were confronted with the full scale of the destruction. There was usually nobody to come home to. Many ended up in Germany, working for the Allies (Zelig P.) or waiting in DP camps (e.g. Leon W., Anna G., Helene R.) until their emigration papers came through. Some managed to establish contact with relatives in the United States who sponsored their visas (Joseph K., Esther B.,

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Judith A.). Sidney G. was adopted by the family of an American GI who had befriended him after his liberation from Dachau. Others finished their secondary education before moving on (Shifra Z., Roma B.). Eva B. and Anita S., however, related their struggles to go back to school and obtain professional training after their return to Czechoslovakia. Both women eventually left Europe and reached the United States after years in New Zealand (Eva B.) and Israel (Anita S.). Another distinct group tried to get to Palestine immediately after the war. Some received training in Zionist organisations (Meir S., Zahava S., Zoltan G., Anita S.) before they became illegal immigrants. The British held Henry G. and Zahava S. for several months in an internment camp in Cyprus. Zoltan G. fought as a soldier in Israel’s War of Independence, and Henry G. joined the Israeli Defence Forces after the state had been founded, as did Roma B., who went to Israel in 1948. All twenty interviewees had eventually become convinced that there remained nothing for them to return to or to reconnect with, leaving them only with the option of beginning a new life. These new beginnings led to fulfilled lives for all of the interviewees. In spite of the painful interruption in both their life and education, they achieved material success. Some continued their former family trades in the United States, opening up shops as a tailor (Sidney G.) or as a baker (Leon W.) in the tradition of generations before them. Interestingly, despite the diversity of background of the children of the nineteen subjects who are parents, every single one had higher education, some even achieving master’s degrees and doctorates. The children fared as well as their parents and became accomplished individuals both academically and professionally, although in some cases, unlike their parents, they remained very reluctant to raise families of their own. These survivors ultimately rebuilt their life, now held together by the English language. Polish and Yiddish ceased to be the day-to-day language for these individuals. Nevertheless, as their testimony progressed it became laced with idioms or comments from other languages: Hebrew, Yiddish, German, Polish, Hungarian. It seems that not only does memory awaken these languages in the minds of our interviewees, but also that they continue to exist in a multilingual continuity that connects them to their past and is a source of pleasure (Zahava S., Esther B.). It was obvious that many of the survivors have never completely forgotten their respective mother tongues, and that even if they never taught these languages to their children they continue to speak them with people of their own generation and with other survivors (e.g. Joseph K., Shifra Z., Judith A.) During the interviews, reference to Yiddish and Hebrew (both as the language of religious practice and of the state of Israel) very often served as a code, either creating a bond of shared knowledge with the interviewer and crew present or marking a difference with them.

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As a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, the interviewees began with a myriad collection of detailed and colourful memories from their childhood, conjuring vivid imagery of everything from a little boy with a lantern coming home from Cheder on a dark winter night (Sidney G.) to a young girl going with her grandfather to buy cows from farmers (Judith A.). All had fond memories of family gatherings at Sabbath meals and on holidays. The memories of persecution, on the other hand, were dealt with in different ways. The interviewee with the most detailed images of this time has kept them to himself throughout his life, writing hundreds upon hundreds of pages that were never published of the memories that separated him from the world around him (Leo G.). Another interviewee had also carried these memories within herself until, upon the urging of her children, she put them on paper and found the courage to publish them (Roma B.). The book is co-authored by herself and her son who is a historian. In a laudable effort, many survivors have taken it upon themselves to educate the young and teach the lessons from the past at schools and other social gatherings. These stories contained the most elaborate memories, reinforced by both factual knowledge and emotional experience, with a clear distillation of the message they had to convey. Even interviewees who had not spoken in public were extraordinarily aware of themselves and of their feelings while bearing witness. Although they could accurately relive their memories, they remained self-contained and kept their boundaries intact. At the same time, we were amazed at how much courage, resourcefulness and zest each one of these individuals showed. One woman went through the selection twice as a fourteen-year-old, figuring that the German officer would never recognise a naked Jewish woman twice (Anita S.). The first time she was rejected, but on the second attempt she succeeded. Acts such as hiding from the roll calls between mattresses, managing to get into another work commando (Roma B.) and stealing food in order to fight off starvation (Zelig P.) are initiatives that are difficult to explain in people who had been so debilitated. Many ascribed their survival to a relationship they had while in the camp, be it two sisters or a mother and daughter surviving together, or just an older person taking care of a younger person. These human relationships were crucial because the presence of someone else whom one could depend on and for whom one was in turn responsible provided a feeling of safety and security in the midst of a total void of humanity. The varied narrative styles of the interviewees all represented different ways of keeping their stories together and dealing with memories. We proceeded on the basis that each account was to be respected and allowed to go on without interruption. While some seemed more loquacious and at ease discussing their memories, others showed greater signs of strug-

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gling with their stories. Some appeared distant from the interview, actually watching their narrative play out like a movie in front of their eyes. Some were overwhelmed by the pain, as was the case with the woman who, helped by partisans to flee with her family, suffered the loss of her beloved older brother (Shifra Z.). Others with more prolonged ghetto and camp experiences did not seem as overpowered by the brutality and manifested their pain subtly. Those who displayed both presence of mind and strong emotion successfully introduced factual knowledge into their testimonies in order to enhance their stories. These delved into greater details regarding their experience and had a more tangible message for subsequent generations. Those who had been selected for extermination proved to still be groping with this proximity to death, unable to move beyond this overwhelmingly terrifying ordeal. The fact that the momentous and destructuralising power of trauma can be kept at bay by the mere act of telling one’s story to oneself in the presence of passionately committed listeners, lends impetus to the survivor’s attempt to rebuild a world that has rhyme and reason and rekindles hope. One survivor who is working on a book told us: ‘I wish I could let go of the Holocaust, but the Holocaust doesn’t let go of me.’ There is both a need and a responsibility to give these memories form, provide an anchor, delimit them and find the ability to recount them. This aptitude for ‘telling’ is by no means a result of formal education, which is considered secondary by every single interviewee. It is an integral part both of survival and of mastery of the trauma. It is truly impressive that these individuals in their late seventies and early eighties could sit for three hours and transform lives marked by anguish and terror into cohesive narratives. Trauma and anger contribute a certain momentum to creativity, which allows for a whole to be formed by piecing together shattered fragments. It is this whole that proves to be the interviewees’ legacy to the moral awareness of subsequent generations.

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A MEMORIAL FOR THE PERSECUTED, MATERIALS FOR EDUCATION AND SCIENCE The Compilation of Biographies of Former Slave and Forced Labourers

Almut Leh and Henriette Schlesinger

Organisation of the Project

At different levels, planning and conducting the project ‘Documentation of the Biographies of Former Slave and Forced Labourers’ was a challenge for everybody contributing to it. The foundation Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft (Memory, Responsibility, and Future), with its fund ‘Memory and Future’ as the initiator and funder, the thirty-two very different institutions from twenty-seven countries that conducted the research on the ground and the Institut für Geschichte und Biographie (Institute of History and Biography) as the planning and coordinating authority cooperated with the objective of creating a unique compilation of biographical interviews of remembrance that may be used both for future research and scholarship and for cultural and political education of various kinds. Interviews with different groups of victims of the National Socialist forced labour system were to be conducted and compiled to produce a single archive. We intended that through this project the variety and the differences within the phenomenon of National Socialist forced laNotes for this chapter begin on page 391.

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bour and its impact on people’s life histories should become clear – even though we knew that the collection would never be fully representative. High scholarly and technical standards of conducting and documenting the interviews, which were binding for every project partner, were meant to enable later analysis and use as well as to take long-term archiving into account. Because of the costs, it was planned that only a part would be conducted as video interviews, but that these should be recorded to a high TV standard to make later use possible. The majority were to be conducted as audio interviews. One important aspect was the considerable time pressure under which the project had to be carried out. More than sixty years after the end of the war, most of the c. 13.5 million former slave and forced labourers were long dead. Only 1,660,000 people had been able to make claims for compensation with the Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft foundation.1 Finally, two more decisions were fundamental for organising the project: If possible, the interviews were to be at the interviewees’ homes, and in any case they should take place in the interviewee’s home country and not in the context of visiting programmes in Germany. And ordinarily the interviews should be conducted in the interviewees’ native languages, that is, without interpreters. All this suggested sharing out the project among many hands and looking for partners directly in those countries were interviews were to be conducted. Thus, the first step was to advertise for participants in the project and to organise the selection of partners. The selection process was carried out by a jury of scholars set up by the foundation with involvement of its partner organisations2 and advised by the Institut für Geschichte und Biographie as project coordinator. One feature guiding the choice of partners was the distribution of interviews by country. At least 440 audio and 110 video interviews were to be conducted, 80 of them in Poland, 40 in the Czech Republic, 80 in the Ukraine, 40 in Belarus and 60 in Russia, as well as at least another 80 with Jewish and 60 with non-Jewish survivors. Altogether, one third of the interviews were to be with former slave labourers; Sinti and Roma – being a group of victims that had been largely ignored up to then – were to be given appropriate attention.3 Other fundamental criteria for selection were experience with carrying out oral history projects and demonstrated knowledge of the history of the Holocaust and the Second World War, but also the financial calculation and the applicants’ proposals for using the interviews in their own countries. As a result of the discussions, it was possible in the spring of 2005 to conclude cooperation agreements with thirty-two institutions that were to conduct interviews in twenty-seven countries.4 In their great majority, it was possible to select project partners who were able to plan and carry

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out interviews in the relevant locations. Where the partner institutions were based Germany, it was usually the case that the individuals carrying out the interviews were themselves based in the relevant country. It was also possible in most cases to conduct the originally planned number of interviews in each country,5 and in countries where a large number of interviews were planned the involvement of as many as four institutions made it possible to meet the target within the brief period of only twelve months. Most of the interviews were conducted in Ukraine (82), followed by Poland (78), Russia (70), Belarus (42) and the Czech Republic (40). We deliberately gave particular attention Ukraine, Russia and Belarus (former Soviet Republics) and Poland, because these were the countries from which most of the forced labourers and prisoners of war were recruited for work in the course of the war,6 whereas the Czech Republic is clearly over-represented.7 In fact, the distribution of interviews among countries was not guided exclusively by the representation of national groups among the original population of forced labourers. On the one hand, it was not possible to conduct interviews in every country from which forced labourers had been recruited. Thus, some countries are completely missing (e.g. Belgium and Denmark), so that other countries not only ‘speak for themselves’ but also serve as examples of others and are thus overrepresented (e.g. the Netherlands with 10 and Norway with 11 interviews). Frenchmen (20 interviews) and Italians (9 interviews), on the other hand, are less well represented than would have been appropriate to the actual wartime situation,8 since a strict rule of proportionality would have meant either multiplying the number of French and Italian interviews further or reducing the number of interviews from other countries to the point where a meaningful analysis would have been impossible. By contrast, the high proportion of former slave labourers in our sample reflects our desire to take account of the fact that the living conditions of slave labourers were decidedly worse than those of civilian forced labourers – up to and including ‘extinction through labour’. We therefore set out to conduct as many interviews as possible with those very few who are still alive today. Among the interviewees are 134 Jewish survivors and 46 persecuted Sinti and Roma. Interviews with surviving Jews were conducted in the principal countries of emigration – 30 in the USA, 25 in Israel, 8 in South Africa, and 6 in Great Britain – as well as in the countries of origin. It even proved possible to hold more interviews and to record a higher proportion of them on video than we had planned. In the context of the project a total of 582 interviews were conducted with 590 people,9 192 of them as video interviews. Almost 1,900 hours of conversation were recorded, with an average interview length of 3 hours and 20 min-

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utes, the video interviews usually being slightly shorter than the audio interviews.10

Guidelines for Conducting Interviews That such a substantial archive could be collected in just over a year is due not least to the drive and commitment of the researchers who worked in the thirty-two cooperating institutions. The institutions represented ranged from university and non-university research institutions through museums and nongovernmental organisations to documentary film production companies. Apart from historians, sociologists and psychologists, journalists and exhibition and film makers took part, all of them contributing their experience in conducting interviews but, thanks to professional orientation, national influence and individual interests, using and favouring very different methods. A thoroughgoing clarification of the procedures and methods was thus necessary in the interest of building up a broadly uniform archive of comparable interviews. At the beginning of joint project work two seminars were conducted that decisively contributed to creating a ‘common project consciousness’ and to developing cooperation among the project groups.11 Apart from orientating all participants towards a common outcome, an essential objective of the seminars was communicating uniform standards for the conduct of the interviews – from the choice of interviewees through preparing and conducting the interview to the working up of the raw material.12 In selecting the interviewees, the researchers were expected to aim at the widest possible variety in each subgroup, to reflect far as possible the actual composition of the population of forced and slave labourers in terms of sex, national and social origin, religion, type of persecution, grounds and mode of deportation, kind of labour (agricultural, industrial etc.), living conditions, liberation, homecoming and subsequent history. Precisely because the only people who could be interviewed sixty years after the end of the war were those who had been young at the time, as many older subjects as possible were to be included. Also, it was made clear that not only people who were entitled to compensation under the terms of the Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft foundation’s dispensation should be interviewed, but that in particular those kinds of forced labour that were not covered by the guidelines for compensation should be represented. The interview procedure that was communicated to all participants as the basis for the project work was that of the semi-open narrative life history interview. Through an introductory question about their biography, which was as open as possible, the interview partners were first given

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the opportunity to talk about their history and experiences as they liked, according to their own criteria of relevance and in as much detail as they chose. Only after this phase did the interviewer ask questions. The interviewer had a list of questions but did not simply go through the list; rather, the questions were deployed in a way appropriate to the conversational situation, with a view to prompting further narratives from the interview partner rather than simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers.13 The life history dimension meant that the interview was open to exploration of the interviewee’s entire biography. Precisely because the conversation usually focused on the experience of forced labour, the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of the persecution also had to be discussed and interrogated. In this context, key topics were family background and the social and political milieu, education and occupational history, the immediate impact of forced labour and its long-term and/or late-manifesting consequences in respect of health, career and social position, and questions of psychological coping and compensation. With the help of this knowledge it is possible to comprehend and interpret the experience of forced labour in its biographical context. At the same time, attention to periods outside of the experience of forced labour shows us the subjects as multifaceted individuals in different social contexts, and not just as victims. Many participants in the project were rather sceptical about conducting three- to four-hour interviews, but most of them found that if interviewees were given enough time to speak freely and their whole life history was covered, this length was easily achieved. Some interviews are shorter, usually in connection with the interviewee’s poor health, which required that the interview be curtailed. The extended length of the majority of the interviews (about two thirds of them lasted more than three hours) indicates that in the overwhelming majority of conversations, both the narrative impetus and the life history dimension were fully realised. Binding standards were also set in respect of the technology used. For both audio and video recordings, analogue was preferred to digital format because in a wide-ranging international project like this one, a variety of digital formats and data carriers could lead to problems with the compilation and later usability of the material. For audio interviews, which were usually recorded by the interviewer him/herself, the technical operation was to be as simple as possible to avoid recording mistakes; this too suggested the use of analogue recording technology. And not least, at present the transcription of conventional audiocassettes is easier, since there are machines adapted for the appropriate kinds of playback. On the other hand, great value was placed on high-quality microphones and on positioning them towards the interview partner to achieve optimal sound quality.

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For video recordings BETA SP cameras were used, so that a high standard of quality was achieved, making possible the unrestricted use of the tapes for films, televised documentaries and exhibitions.14 At the same time, this recording technology called for and guaranteed the input of a professional film team and thus also good lighting and high sound quality. The interviewees were supposed to be shown in their own homes and against an authentic background, so that not only is the interview partner him/herself seen but there is also an idea of his/her personal surroundings. During the actual interview the camera was supposed to be directed at the interviewee using minor variations in zoom range; before and after the interview, however, the interviewer and, if possible, the room where the conversation was taking place were supposed to be shown. For both video and audio interviews, photos of the interviewee were taken after the interview. In addition, family photos or documents were photographed in situ if they were available.

Documentation and Processing of the Interviews Particularly when an extended set of interviews is to be used by third parties, careful documentation and processing is at least as important as the technical and methodological standard of the interview itself. This is still truer of a project in which some 600 interviews are recorded in twenty-five different languages. At the same time, processing interviews – from transcribing and translating to indexing and editing them for archive purposes – is very expensive in time and money. In the interest of an efficient use of the available resources we implemented a scheme whereby careful documentation and preliminary processing by the interviewers themselves made immediate use possible, while at the same time a solid basis was created for subsequent reworking, so that the material can be still more effectively exploited in the future with the investment of further staff time and money. Among the indispensable steps that each interviewer took immediately after the interview was to write a record of the interview and a short biography of the interviewee. The two- or three-page record of the interview includes the following aspects: the prehistory of the interview (that is, how the conversation became possible and what contact was made before the interview), the people present (who, apart from the interviewer and the interview partner, took part in the interview and for what reasons), the nature of the space in which the interview took place (description of the home and neighbourhood or wider environment), the most important aspects and particularities of the biography or the interviewee’s narrative, the atmosphere during the conversation, how the relationship

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between interviewer and interviewee developed and the interviewer’s reflections on positive or negative feelings towards the interview partner. This record not only conveys concise information about the interview but above all provides the later user with indications of the interviewee’s situation beyond the audio or video recording – from the interviewer’s point of view – as well as of the relationship between the conversation partners, both of which are factors that can be held to have influenced the content and course of the conversation and thus are important for its interpretation. The short biography is an important aid to a first approach to the interview. In about one page, it provides a chronological sketch of the most important stations of the interviewee’s life. It includes family background, education and vocational training, stages of persecution and forced labour, as well as the development of family and career in the postwar period and up to the time of the interview. In addition to these free texts, a data sheet was developed in which data from the interview and in particular the interviewee’s biography are recorded and described according to 132 criteria with predefined answers or fixed answer formats. These are statements on the interview (kind, length, date, persons, materials and stage of processing), general statements on the interview partner him/ herself (name, sex, year of birth, nationality, victim category etc.), his/her biographical data (such as marital status, religion and political orientation, education and career), statements on forced or slave labour and subsequent fate as a persecutee (such as time of deportation, forms of labour, type of accommodation), and the period after liberation (such as date of liberation, repression suffered in the land of return, health consequences, compensation), as well as general biographical statements on mother, father, partner and children. Although it is often difficult in individual cases to condense qualitative data for a standardised data sheet, it remains a useful instrument, on the one hand for choosing individuals or groups according to certain objectifiable criteria, and on the other hand as a basis for quantitative analytical and interpretative strategies. However, it must be remembered that these supposedly objective data are also based on subjective assessments made by a number of different observers, and must thus be used with due care.15 Most of the records of interviews, short biographies and data sheets are in German, though in a few cases they were written in English. The transcription of the interviews is the essential precondition for any subsequent use. Thus, it is a great advantage that it has already been possible to transcribe all the interviews and that thus are available in writing in the language in which they were conducted. They can already be used in the countries where they were recorded or by anyone with the relevant language skills. Rapid transcription was also indicated because it

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would enable the interviewers to review the transcripts at an early stage, so that errors of understanding and transcription could be corrected. Comparative analysis and international use call not only for transcription but also for translation of the interviews – as far as possible into both German and English. Within the framework of the documentation project it has so far been possible to provide German translations for 150 of the video interviews,16 so that most of the ones that are of particular interest to the German-speaking public for use in the context of exhibitions or documentary films have already been translated. Thus, for 150 video interviews there exists a translation of the transcript into German, and for every one of the 582 interviews the following documentation is available: a recording of the conversation on audiocassette or videotape; a record of the interview and a short biography (two, in the case of interviews with couples) in German, sometimes in English, as text files; about 4,600 digital photographs, most of them of the interviewee on the day of the conversation but in most cases also a selection of photographed pictures and important documents from the interviewee’s life (all of which have been included in a tabular database comprising images and explanatory text); a transcript of the entire audio record in the language of the interview; and finally a formal signed declaration in the language of the interview by which the interview partner permits the contributing institutions – the one whose staff conducted the interview, the Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft foundation and the Institute of History and Biography – to use his/her interview for research, educational and exhibition purposes.

Possibilities of Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis The principal means of gaining access to the whole body of interview data is a searchable database incorporating the contents of all the data sheets. This database includes 590 data sets with 132 fields each (corresponding to the fields in the data sheet). The database makes it possible to find interviews according to certain search criteria, or to generate a description of the entire archive according to quantifiable features, so that different groups can be compared to each other or the samples can be assessed in terms of how far they correspond with the historical ‘reality’ as it can be reconstructed from other sources. The following examples are meant to illustrate these possibilities and at the same time to provide an introduction to some key features of the sample. The whole group of interviewees consists of 341 men and 249 women. This makes a balance of 57.8 per cent men and 42.2 per cent women. This near equality hides the real variations among different national groups,

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differences that existed at the time and are also found in our sample. In September 1944 in every national group, the share of women among foreign civilian workers, that is, excluding working prisoners of war, was clearly lower than that of men.17 Only among forced labourers from the Soviet Union and from Slovakia were women, at 49.3 per cent and 44.5 per cent respectively, almost as well represented as men. The third largest share of women, 36.5 per cent, is found among forced labourers from the Baltic states, followed by Polish women with 34.4 per cent. Among forced labourers from the occupied countries of Western Europe, the share of women was again distinctly lower: among French forced labourers women account for only 6.6 per cent, among Italians 7.8 per cent and among the Dutch 8.2 per cent. If our sample is broken down by nationality, there too a considerable range becomes obvious, whose structure roughly reflects the 1944 situation as described above. Interviewees from the former Soviet Republics – Russia, Ukraine, Belarus – display the largest representation of women, at 67 per cent, 51 per cent and 45 per cent respectively; among those from the Baltic states of Lithuania and Latvia, the proportion of women is also clearly below average (42.5 per cent); a 42 per cent proportion of women among interviewees of Polish origin18 also corresponds to the wartime situation, as does the distinctly low share of women from most of the Western European countries.19 The birth dates of the former forced and slave labourers interviewed (Table 29.1) range from 1907 to 1940. At the time of the interview, the oldest interview partner was 98 years old and had been arrested as a Jew in the former Yugoslavia and deployed for forced labour. At 65, the youngest interviewee was a Roma who was interviewed in St Petersburg. The median year of birth of all those interviewed is 1924, and there are very few at the outer extremes of the range. Almost 90 per cent of those interviewed were born between 1918 and 1932, almost half (45.7 per cent) between 1923 and 1927. Table 29.1

Absolute Percentage

Years of Birth (n=590) Before 1908 1 0.2%

1908– 12 5 0.8%

1913– 17 29 4.9%

1918– 22 152 25.8%

1923– 27 270 45.8%

1928– 32 102 17.3%

1933– 37 27 4.6 %

After 1937 4 0.7%

Given this concentration of subjects in relatively few years, there is little variation between subgroups in respect of age. The French interviewees were on average two years older than the group as a whole (median year of birth: 1922), the Russians and Belarusians two years younger (median year of birth: 1926). In spite of all our efforts to find older interviewees, the majority of our subjects represented the experiences of

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people who had been young, sometimes very young, during the war. Even the so-called Ostarbeiter, among the youngest groups at the time, were on average older than the ones in our sample. In 1944 male Ostarbeiter were 24 years old on average, and females were 21;20 in our sample the average age of male and female Ostarbeiter was 18.21 A high proportion of those interviewed in the context of the project experienced and suffered from forced or slave labour as children or young people. At the end of the war, 95 of the 590 interviewees were sixteen years old or younger. Among the economic sectors where those interviewed were employed, industry clearly predominates. Almost every second interviewee (45 per cent) names industry at least once, though there could be several phases of employment, sometimes in different sectors.22 Agriculture and construction are equally represented, each being named by 28 per cent of those interviewed. By comparison with the relevant figures available for 1944, employment in construction is unusually high in our sample; by contrast, in the distribution of foreign civilian workers across economic sectors at the time, industry was first and agriculture and forestry were second.23 For our sample, as for the historical population of forced labourers as a whole, an analysis by nationality results in a differentiated picture, which can only be sketched here for some selected groups (see Tables 29.2 and 29.3). Whereas Frenchmen and Czechs in their great majority had to work in industry, only about half of Soviet labourers were deployed there. The corresponding groups in our sample display a quite similar distribution. By contrast, while more than two thirds of Poles overall were occupied in agriculture and only one in five worked in industry, the two sectors are almost equally represented in our Polish sample.24 Table 29.2 Interviewees’ Employment in Economic Sectors by Nationality Agriculture and forestry Industry

Polish n=110

Soviet25 n=196

French n=22

Czech n=42

Sample n=590

36% 42%

41% 49%

9% 86%

13% 64%

28% 45%

Table 29.3 Employment in Economic Sectors by Nationality in August, 1944 Polish

Soviet

French26

Czech

All foreign civilian workers

Agriculture and forestry 68% 35% 9% 5% 36% Industry 18% 45% 72% 58% 43% Source: Mark Spoerer, Zwangsarbeit unter dem Hakenkreuz: Ausländische Zivilarbeiter, Kriegsgefangene und Häftlinge im Deutschen Reich und im besetzten Europa 1939–1945 (Stuttgart and Munich 2001), 225.

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These few examples (of sex, year and field of employment) show that referring to the structure of the whole population of forced and slave labourers is an important corrective for interpreting the project documentation. Given that the interviews were conducted more than sixty years after the end of the war, it was not possible to avoid certain anomalies or even distortions; what is more important is to identify these variations from the norm as precisely as possible and to take them into consideration for interpreting the life stories of our subjects. Apart from this, the analysis of the raw biographical data may generate further questions about the life histories and may be used for constructing new subgroups, so that for example we can ask how nationality, age and sex but also where they worked, under what conditions they were detained (‘accommodation’) and the like influenced the experience of forced labour and later life. Analysing these seemingly hard biographical facts is nevertheless full of difficulties, as has already been indicated above. For instance, in order to check whether one third of all those interviewed belonged to the group of so-called slave labourers, we included the category ‘slave labourer’ in the data sheet as a field requiring the answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’. The astonishing result: 400 out of 590 interviewed were slave labourers, or two thirds rather than one third. The following assumption suggested itself and was confirmed by questioning the interviewers. When they filled in the sheets, the interviewers used a different definition of slave labourers from ours (concentration camp prisoners employed for forced labour). They opted for the term because in their view it expressed the gravity of the persecution suffered by their interview partners. That some reinterpretation of the term has taken place is also suggested by comparison with other fields of the data sheet. Thus, in giving the reason for persecution, only 134 of all interviewees were attributed to the group ‘persecuted on racial grounds/Jews’, while another 112 were entered as persecuted ‘on political grounds’ – both categories that overlap with the category of ‘slave labour’ according to our (admittedly formal) criteria, since the relevant interviewees were interned in concentration camps. The category of accommodation (i.e. conditions and place of internment) can also be deployed to answer the key question of who was a slave labourer. According to this, 195 of those interviewed were imprisoned in concentration camps,27 which makes up exactly – astonishingly – one third of all those interviewed. Probably, however, on this point too the boundaries were blurred since it is not always easy to distinguish between a concentration camp and a ‘camp with concentration camp–like conditions’. Finally, it is worth noting two more aspects of the quantifiable postwar experiences of former slave and forced labourers: When asked whether they suffered repression upon returning home, 112 of those interviewed

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answered ‘yes’ and 343 ‘no’; the rest made no statement.28 Thirty-five of the ‘yes’ answers come from interviewees from Ukraine alone, another 22 are from Russian interviewees and 23 are from people returning to Poland. A very large majority of those interviewed, 442, received compensation; however, 83 remained without compensation, Sinti and Roma being the biggest single group with 13 uncompensated people. Sixty-five made no statement on the question of compensation. It is noteworthy that it was primarily subjects interviewed in Israel and the US who did not talk about compensation; in these cases it remains unclear whether this question was asked at all by the interviewers.

Further Analysis and Accessibility of the Archive Although the focus of the project has been on conducting the interviews and on documenting them, the archive is already accessible to the extent that concrete enquiries can be answered. Apart from the database, the electronic record of all transcripts, translations, interview records and biographies is a research tool that should not be underestimated. As previous experience shows, most enquiries relate to particular camps or locations where forced labour took place, and a full-text search of our documentation can easily locate the relevant place-names. Nevertheless, improving access further is an immediate aim that was anticipated and planned for from the very beginning of the project. In this context we will need to use and to extend the database. One of the main tasks will be to sort the interviews according to geographical locations and businesses, camps and concentration camps, adding these to the categories of country and person that already exist, so that it will be possible to answer directly and in full the most frequent kind of enquiry. For this, the main challenge is to check spellings and standardise them in relation to the names of actual geographical locations and camps.29 Furthermore, compiling a keyword index of the transcripts and translations on the basis of a thesaurus developed especially for the purpose will be an important step towards making the contents of the documentation accessible and usable. The translation of all the video interviews, and following that of all the audio interviews, complete with their accompanying documentation (interview record, short biography and relevant parts of the photographic database), is key to enabling use of the archive as a whole and in particular to facilitating comparative study. At the end of this process, all the material should be available in both German and English. Finally, the mainly analogue audio and video recordings of interviews need to be digitised. On the one hand, the digital form makes handling – transfer of material, the parallel use of different kinds of documents such

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as video or audio recordings, transcripts and translations, photographs etc. – considerably easier. On the other hand, digitising the material is a matter of urgency from the point of view of long-term archiving. Although digital formats often change and the material will need to be repeatedly converted or reformatted, the digital format promises to preserve the current high quality of the recordings. The further processing of the material will provide the essential conditions for these important sources on the history of slave and forced labour to be used in as many ways as possible for a long time to come, so that this ‘Documentation of the Biographies of Former Forced and Slave Labourers’, which is probably unique, will be able to justify its claim to be a memorial of a special kind for future generations.

Appendix 29.1

The Project Partners

Institution

Head of the Project

Interviews in

Centre for Gender Studies, International Humanitarian Foundation (Belarus, Minsk)

Elena Gapova

Belarus

RWTH Aachen, Lehr- und Forschungsgebiet Christoph Rass, Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte (Germany, Alexander Dalhouski Aachen)

Belarus

Gemeinschaftsunternehmen Internationale Petra Rentrop, Bildungs- und Begegnungsstätte Minsk GmbH Imke Hansen, (Belarus, Minsk; Germany, Dortmund) Kristina C+ehovskaja

Belarus

Institut für sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung, Birgit Mair Bildung und Beratung (ISFBB) Nürnberg e.V. (Germany, Nuremberg)

Bosnia

Ethnographic Institute and Museum at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (Bulgaria, Sofia)

Ana Luleva

Bulgaria

Institut für Geschichte und Biographie (Germany, Lüdenscheid)

Alexander v. Plato, Christoph Thonfeld

Germany, Great Britain

Association des Amis du musée départemental Anne-Marie Granetde la Résistance et de la Déportation de l’Isère Abisset (France, Grenoble)

France

Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary History (Israel, Jerusalem)

Margalit Bejarano, Amija Boasson

Israel

Instituto Luce (Italy, Rome)

Doris Felsen, Viviana Frenkel

Italy

Culture and More (Germany, Munich)

Christian Schölzel

Croatia

International Organisation for Migration (IOM) (Republic of Moldova, Chisinau)

Natalia Moisevici

Latvia, Macedonia, Moldova

Lithuanian Names Project (Israel, Jerusalem) Rose Lerer Cohen

Lithuania, South Africa

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Institution

Head of the Project

Interviews in

Universiteit van Amsterdam, Faculteit fer Geesteswetenschappen (Netherlands, Amsterdam)

Selma Leydesdorff, Ellis Jonker

Netherlands

Krigsinvalideforbundet (Norway, Oslo)

Bente Jerkö, Olav Hobbesland, Jan Asmund Jakobsen

Norway

Fundacja Os;rodka KARTA (Poland, Warsaw) Piotr Filipkowski, Katarzyna Mitzner

Poland

Motór-Film Sp.z o.o. (Poland, Warsaw)

Artur Podgorski

Poland

Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt e.V. (Germany, Berlin)

Gisela Wenzel, Ewa Czerwiakowski

Poland

Centrul de studii istorice, economice si sociale Adriana Gheorghe Ltd. (CSIES) (Romania, Bucharest)

Romania

Regionalbüro Forschungs- und Informationszentrum ‘Memorial’ (Russia, St Petersburg)

Irina Flige, Ana Reznikova

Russia

Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences (Russia, Moscow)

Elena Rozhdestvenskaya, Russia Victoria Semenova

MEMORIAL – Internationale Gesellschaft für Irina Scherbakowa, historische Aufklärung, Menschenrechte und Alena Koslowa soziale Fürsorge (Russia, Moscow)

Russia

Pädagogische Staatsuniversität Woronesch (Russia, Voronezh)

Natalia Timofeewa

Russia

Fachbereich Geschichts- und Politikwissenschaft der Paris-LodronUniversität Salzburg (Austria, Salzburg)

Barbara Wiesinger

Serbia

Muzej Novoješe Zgodovine Slovenije (Slovenia, Ljubljana)

Monika Kokalj Koc=evar

Slovenia

Asociatión Historia y Fuente Oral (Spain, Barcelona)

Mercedes Vilanova

Spain

Živá pame=t’ (Czech Republic, Prague)

Tomas Jelinek, Šárka Jarská Viola Jakschová

Czech Republic, Slovakia

Kovalskich-Ostinstitut für die ukrainische Landeskunde, Lehrstuhl für Ukrainische Landeskunde (Ukraine, Kharkiv)

Gelinada Grinchenko

Ukraine

Educational Initiatives Center (Ukraine, Lviv)

Olena Shynarovska

Ukraine

Teleki Laszló Institut, Zentrum für mitteleuropäische Studien (Hungary, Budapest)

Éva Kovács

Hungary, Slovakia

Yale Center for International and Area Studies (US, Connecticut, New Haven)

Dori Laub

United States

The William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum (US, Atlanta, Georgia)

Jane D. Leavey, Sara Ghitis

United States

Fritz Bauer Institut (Germany, Frankfurt am Main)

Daggi Knellessen

Auschwitz trial witnesses

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Appendix 29.2 In alphabetical order Belarus Bosnia Bulgaria Croatia Czech Republic France Germany Great Britain Hungary Israel Italy Latvia Lithuania Macedonia Moldova Netherlands Norway Poland Romania Russia Serbia Slovakia Slovenia South Africa Spain Ukraine United States Auschwitz trial witnesses total

Interviews by Country

42 8 9 12 40 20 8 6 15 25 9 5 8 6 6 10 11 78 17 70 11 11 24 8 11 82 30 8 590

By number of interviews per country Ukraine 82 Poland 78 Russia 70 Belarus 42 Czech Republic 40 United States 30 Israel 25 Slovenia 24 France 20 Hungary 15 Romania 17 Croatia 12 Norway 11 Serbia 11 Slovakia 11 Spain 11 Netherlands 10 Bulgaria 9 Italy 9 Bosnia 8 Lithuania 8 South Africa 8 Auschwitz trial witnesses 8 Germany 8 Great Britain 6 Macedonia 6 Moldova 6 Latvia 5 total 590

NOTES 1. Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft foundation and Erinnerung und Zukunft fund, press release ‘Pressemitteilung über die 20. Kuratoriumssitzung am 13./14. Dezember 2006’ of 14 December 2006, 1. 2. The Polnisch-Deutsche Aussöhnung (Polish-German Reconciliation) foundation, the Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian ‘Understanding and Reconciliation’ foundations, the Deutsch-Tschechische Zukunftsfonds, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany and the International Organisation for Migration.

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3. These guidelines were formulated by Ralf Possekel, the representative of the foundation Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft, at the beginning of the jury meeting on choosing the project partners (s. b.). 4. See list of project partners in Appendix 29.1. 5. For details, see the overview of interviews by country in Appendix 29.2. 6. Between 1939 and 1945, 4,725,000 Soviet citizens were employed for forced labour, 1,950,000 of them being prisoners of war. In relation to the total number of foreign civil workers and prisoners of war deployed for labour (13,020,000) this makes a share of 36%. In our sample, the 194 interviews carried out with natives of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus (excluding those who emigrated after the war) make up 33% of the total. The percentage of Poles among foreign workers and prisoners of war deployed for labour was 14.6% (1,600,000 civil workers and 300,000 prisoners of war), while in our sample Poles (again excluding emigrants) make up 13.3%. These figures and our own calculations follow Mark Spoerer, Zwangsarbeit unter dem Hakenkreuz: Ausländische Zivilarbeiter, Kriegsgefangene und Häftlinge im Deutschen Reich und im besetzten Europa 1939–1945 (Stuttgart and Munich 2001), 221f. 7. Czechs (without emigrants) make up 6.8% of the sample, compared to 2.7% of actual forced labourers (based on Spoerer, Zwangsarbeit, 221f.). 8. With 1,050,000 civil workers and 1,285,000 POWs, Frenchmen employed for work were the third biggest group, accounting for almost 18% of forced labourers. With 960,000 civil workers and 495,000 POWs, Italians were the fourth biggest group and made a share of 11.2%. With our sample they are represented only 3.4% or 1.5%. (Calculations again based on figures by Spoerer, Zwangsarbeit, 221f.) 9. Eight interviews were with two people at once (some of them married couples, some of them friends). 10. The average length of audio interviews was 3 hours and 30 minutes, video interviews 3 hours and 15 minutes. 11. One of the seminars took place immediately at the beginning of the project; the second – reflecting on our first experiences with selecting interviewees and the interview methods – was held some weeks later. 12. This was based on the interview guidelines developed for the project by Alexander von Plato. 13. An appropriate list of questions was given to the project partners. 14. For two projects digital BETA SP cameras were used. 15. In some cases the information on the data sheet is based on statements by the interviewees themselves, while other items on the same data sheet represent the interviewer’s assessment; it is not clear from the data sheets themselves what the source of any given item of data is. 16. Originally we intended to have all the video interviews translated, which would have amounted to 25% of the full set of interviews. In fact slightly more than one quarter of the total set was translated – 150 interviews – but this did not include all of the video interviews. Far more interviews (191) were videotaped than originally intended (the additional ones quite often being recorded with the help of semiprofessional three-chip cameras), but funds were allocated for translation of only about 150 of them. 17. For this and the following figures referring to the proportion of women on 30 September 1944, see Spoerer, Zwangsarbeit, 222.

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18. For the following overview those who emigrated after 1945 and were interviewed in their current home countries (the US, Israel, South Africa, Great Britain and Germany) were also taken into account. Number of men and women from Eastern-European countries within the sample: Russia Ukraine Belarus Latvia Lithuania Poland Total Men 23 41 23 3 5 64 341 Women 47 43 19 2 7 46 249 Total 70 84 42 5 12 110 590

19. Number of men and women from Western-European countries within the sample: Men Women Total

France 21 1 22

Italy 7 2 9

Norway 8 3 11

Spain 10 1 11

Netherlands 7 7 14

20. This corresponds to the birth years 1920 and 1923. As a comparison, further median birth years according to Spoerer (Zwangsarbeit, 223): male Italian civil workers 1908, Italian military internees 1919, male French civilian workers 1918, French prisoners of war 1910, male concentration camp prisoners 1918, female concentration camp prisoners 1920. 21. The median birth year of interviewees from Russia and Belarus was 1926, that of interviewees from Ukraine 1925. 22. For 590 interviewees there are 761 entries in the field ‘field of employment’. 23. Forty-three per cent of foreign civil workers were employed in industry, 36% in agriculture and forestry, 12% in the services field, 6% in building and 3% in mining. See Spoerer, Zwangsarbeit, 225. 24. This, however, may be supposed to be due to the stricter way of implementing the project guidelines, which dictate that the composition of the group of interviewees should take into account all fields of employment. 25. The former Soviet citizens of our sample consist of 84 Ukrainians, 70 Russians and 42 Belarusians. 26. With French prisoners of war the situation was the other way round: 60% were employed in agriculture and forestry, 26% in industry. See Spoerer, Zwangsarbeit, 225. 27. ‘Camp’ is given 356 times under ‘accommodation’ and ‘private’ is given 133 times; multiple entries are possible in individual cases. 28. This assumes that the interviewers, when they filled in the data sheet, were referring to that what was actually asked during the interview. 29. Often German names were simply written as they were heard. Another source of mistakes is nonstandardised transliteration from other alphabets.

 30 

‘A MOMENT OF ELATION … AND PAINFUL’ The Homecoming of Slave and Forced Labourers after the Second World War

Christoph Thonfeld

T

he homecoming of former forced labourers was an extremely complicated process that in some cases lasted many years, was contingent on a1 number of different factors and, for some, was never actually achieved. Memories of family and home constituted for many forced labourers a crucial emotional reference point and a form of mental sustenance. In many ways, packages and letters received from home supplied practical support. Repatriation was the internal vanishing point of a situation otherwise largely determined by external factors. The journey home has lost some of its significance as a life-history event amongst former forced labourers. However, it has not lost its fundamental impact in setting their future life courses. This chapter investigates this transition, which, since most forced labourers were entering adulthood during their periods of forced labour, almost resembled a rite of passage.

Between Total War and Collapse By the Normandy landings and the Soviet summer offensive of 1944 at the latest, it became apparent that Germany would lose the war. For many Notes for this chapter begin on page 404.

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forced labourers, this signalled the hope of survival and the possibility of escape. The confusion of Allied bombings, evacuations and the relocation of industry presented forced labourers with a few practical opportunities for escape.2 Those who escaped tried to hide in forests, sticking together wherever possible with their compatriots or with fellow victims from other countries. Others attempted to return home on foot, covering long distances in the process.3 Of course, most were recaptured or managed to make it only as far as the next farm, where they were forced back into labour, albeit under possibly better conditions and with better food than before.4 A few even managed to make it all the way home, although this did not necessarily mean an end to their difficulties. If their country was still occupied, they were forced to go into hiding. They could only hope that relatives, acquaintances or underground groups would conceal their hideouts and supply them with provisions. There are reports that in this way former forced labourers became partisans – without actually intending to and without having any particular political ambitions.5 This could make a decisive difference to their subsequent destinies; indeed, in the victorious and liberated countries of both Eastern and Western Europe, having a history as a resistance fighter was held in higher esteem than being a ‘mere’ forced labourer.6 If forced labourers’ homes were no longer habitable because they had been destroyed or were occupied by other people, their homecoming turned into another odyssey. Important factors in deciding whether to stay or go included whether family members had survived the war, where they were, in what sort of situation they found themselves and what social and political status they had held prior to and during the Second World War.7 In addition, repatriation in no way guaranteed that forced labourers would be welcome in their home countries. Even those refugees who had endless marching behind them and had crossed several front lines along the way were likely to be greeted as ‘undignified traitors’. This was especially the case in the Soviet-dominated territories.8 The situation was less severe for the Czechs, although they too could face discrimination. As reported by a former Czech female forced labourer, this discrimination, as in most other countries, frequently had a gender-specific dimension: ‘For the girls who had been in the Reich … it was as if they had a symbol branded on their foreheads. They were considered to be inferior. Even when they behaved impeccably … That humiliated me the most.’9 During the war, it was in particular young Czechs born between 1918 and 1924 who were conscripted for forced labour or mobilised. Officially, some of them attended ten-month training programmes, following which they returned to the ‘Reich Protectorate’ where they were forced to work.10 Others were immediately drafted for unlimited periods of forced

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labour.11 However, there were opportunities to return home long before the end of the war, even if, once there, they were mobilised again as forced labourers (although sometimes allowed to sleep at home).12 Polish forced labours actively sought to be recruited for labour in their own country as it represented a semilegal way to evade a threatened deportation to Germany.13

Liberation and the Liberators The increasing erosion of both the wartime economy and the general administration of the ‘Third Reich’ presented forced labourers with an increasing number of uncontrolled spaces, with all the positive and negative consequences that these implied. Many fell victim to increased arbitrary violence, massacres and death marches or continued hunger, disease and exhaustion. However, more and more of the forced labourers were able to be liberated by the approaching Allied troops. Which of the three main Allied powers liberated them could make a crucial difference. Generally speaking, the British attempted to quickly repatriate all displaced persons – a large proportion of whom were former forced labourers – from their occupied zone so as to be able to withdraw their personnel as quickly as possible and minimise the costs of occupation. The Americans were the first to feel responsible for a reconciliation of interests between the victors, the Germans and the displaced persons (DPs). This required a longer – and a financial – commitment. By contrast, the Soviet Union was directly affected by the problem in two ways: the former forced labourers, for the most part, came from their own territories, and they were urgently required as workers to reconstruct the war-ravaged country. This led to a collision of interests among political leaders since the repatriates were considered to be ‘enemies of the state’. At the same time, the Western allies on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other were at pains to secure the return of their own prisoners of war and use those of their counterparts as bargaining tools during negotiations. France adopted a special position, since there were many DPs in the country. These were to leave France immediately; however, the French were in no great hurry to repatriate displaced persons from their zone of occupation in Germany as this would have involved considerable logistical and organisational efforts.14 What is striking in the accounts of former forced labourers is above all the strong contrast between the positive memories of in particular American soldiers, and the often negative depictions of Soviet soldiers.

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Between Displaced Person (DP) Camps and Repatriation Even the well-meaning liberators were uninterested in uncontrolled mass migration. For the French, Belgians and Dutch liberated in the West it was possible to freely make their way back home. Thanks to the International Red Cross, special efforts were undertaken to repatriate Scandinavian slave and forced labourers, sometimes even during the final stages of the war.15 However, the majority of forced labourers were initially rehoused in collective accommodation. The inactivity, uncertainty and overcrowding in the camps quickly descended into a depressing and seemingly endless wait to be sent home, or to accept whatever alternative arose. Now DPs, the former forced labourers again tried to accustom themselves to something resembling normal life. The majority of our interviewees arrived home in trains, lorries or other vehicles, some of which were only marginally better equipped than those in which they had been sent to Germany or the occupied territories all those years before. Now, however, they had different expectations and emotions. During their journeys, it was always advantageous to be with friends or acquaintances as the circumstances were still precarious. Food, for example, sometimes became scarce upon leaving the areas covered by the United Nations’ aid organisation UNRRA. Travelling with acquaintances meant that somebody was there with advice if, for example, a train stopped and either volunteers were needed to work with the occupied powers or there was a possibility of rebuilding a livelihood in a settlement area. After all, the forced labourers might already have known at this point that their homes had been destroyed and/or abandoned. According to interviews with those who returned home, the Western military or administrative personnel allegedly frequently offered the prospect of possible expatriation, mostly to the United States, which they declined in order to prove their loyalty to the home country.16 This plays an important role especially in the accounts by Poles and (Western) Ukrainians, as returning to the Soviet-occupied zone triggered the greatest rejections and for the returning forced labourers resulted in a particular pressure for legitimacy.

Homecoming and the Reactions of Home Countries and Host Societies Return to the Soviet Union Those returning to the Soviet Union often faced an ‘initial disappointment’ as soon as they reached the border.17 The Soviet repression against

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former forced labourers seems to have been particularly harsh in Western Ukraine, as the filtration of the repatriates was entangled with the war against the independence movement and the search for members of the Russian Liberation Army (the so-called Vlassov army).18 On the other hand, the female forced labourers who returned to the remote countryside had good chances of avoiding more detailed intelligence-service controls. These, however, were almost inescapable for city dwellers, especially those with higher education and career ambitions. Alongside the temporary detentions by the occupation troops, conscriptions to the Red Army, resettlements, expatriations, internments and renewed periods of forced labour that potentially caused further disfranchisement, humiliation or even dangers to life,19 it was in particular the interrogations by the intelligence services that became a symbol of continued persecution. During these, the intelligence services attempted to coerce former forced labourers into collaboration, using their precarious economic, social and political situation against them. But even without these experiences, there were repatriates who, despite being able to return more or less unchallenged to their home villages, suffered from lifelong fears that triggered strong individual uncertainties and social distrust.20 Especially during the immediate postwar period, many former forced labourers reported nightmares, flashbacks and other traumatic effects of their wartime experiences.21 In accounts of their homecoming, female interviewees from Eastern Europe in particular also reported how, immediately after the end of the war, the frequently encountered contempt in which native populations held repatriates manifested itself in more brutal gender relations. An example of this is the evidence for relations between the ultimately victorious and overwhelmingly male Red Army soldiers and the female forced labourers who had been compelled to support the losers.22 Interviewees often only hinted at the threats, attacks and even rapes perpetrated towards the end of the war in filtration camps or on the way home by soldiers initially perceived as liberators, because it was too difficult to talk about them directly.23 The ‘blemish’ of forced labour continued to have an effect on gender relations later in life. The widely enforced silence sometimes isolated the victims from their husbands and could lead or contribute to marital breakdowns.24 Or their biography became a ‘burden’ for the occupational, political or societal ambitions of their partners, which again put relationships under pressure.25 However, there were relatively few relationships between former forced labourers. Rather, they sought people who for various reasons themselves occupied marginal positions in society.26

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Return to Eastern Europe Poland developed only very subtle sanction strategies against former forced labourers. Upon their return, they as a rule did not suffer any further discrimination linked to their having worked for Germany. True, in individual cases they suffered persecution and fear, lost their jobs or were barred from further school or vocational education.27 But in most Eastern European countries apart from the Soviet Union, having undertaken forced labour for Germany was rather a flexible incriminating device that could be tacitly deployed, for example, when somebody attracted attention during the political unrest of 1956. Admittedly, there are also reports of active participation by former forced labourers in the communist parties of Eastern Europe, which at least points to a certain penetrability in the new political order. In the countries of former Yugoslavia, where the victors were still attempting to secure their positions of power in the wake of the Second World War, the repatriates were sometimes viewed with great distrust.28 In Slovenia, for example, police controls were set up; however, these were not comparable to the Soviet filtration system in either logistical or systemic terms. Nonetheless, the immediate postwar period witnessed numerous revenge killings and uncontrolled punitive actions, involving many lines of confrontation. Especially virulent was the fundamental ethnic dimension, which set Serbs, Slovenians, Croats and Bosnians against each other (again). However, this could be undercut or intensified by concurrent religious, political and social tensions, depending on whether these developed analogously to or across ethnical conflicts, or were perceived as doing so.29 The former forced labourers had to do nothing more than accept the marginalised social positions marked out for them if they wanted to be able to live their lives to some degree unchallenged.

Return to Western Europe Similar observations hold for the return to Western Europe. For example, the best that Italian prisoners of war could hope for was to be left in peace. Following their capture by the German army in the autumn of 1943, they were particularly badly treated as ‘traitors to the Axis’ when deployed in forced labour. Following their homecoming, they were largely ignored during the postwar period as they did not fit into the self-perception, increasingly propagated by state and society, of a resisting Italy. The French deported to Germany under the Service du Travail Obligatoire faced a similar situation. Despite their rapid occupational and social reintegration, society increasingly refused to recognise these forced

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labourers as victims of the National Socialist or Petain regimes. To some extent, this refusal lives on today. The specific problems linked to their situation – notably, having been conscripted by their own country’s collaborationist government to work for the wartime enemy – is reflected in accounts that document the strong pressure on former forced labourers to justify themselves to the many prisoners of war and those deported by the Germans. … they picked me up, yes, that was, despite everything else, a sign … They were friends of my age who were resistance fighters. They were older than me, a little, but after all, they were resistance fighters. No, but my integration was conducted quite well, but there were some who criticised us because we went to Germany to work.; but that was so easy to say, and more difficult … In 1943, if it had been possible for me not to go, I wouldn’t have gone.30

The situation for Spanish slave labourers who wanted to return home was even more complicated. Since they had generally either fled the Franco army for political reasons, been interned or even sent to concentration camps, they were also further persecuted under Franco after 1945. As a result, they could enter Spain only illegally or had to remain in exile, sometimes until the late 1970s.31 Even if they returned to their home villages after the end of the war, they faced the threat of possible denunciation from resentful or Franco-supporting neighbours.

Forced Labourers Who Remained in Germany Those former forced labourers who remained in Germany paint a somewhat different picture of their situation. Initially, they were able to take advantage of the unclear occupation situation, the protection of the Allied forces and existing contacts with sympathetic Germans. However, they became increasingly marginalised and subjected to the quest for administrative order, on the one hand because of the passing of time since the end of the war and on the other hand because the Germans progressively assumed more and more administrative responsibilities. Following the reinstallation of German authority, they were declared ‘homeless foreigners’ in 1951. Those who managed to integrate into mainstream society were accepted only begrudgingly. Even when they attempted not to overly stress or even actively concealed their origins or cultural identity, the relatives of their partners and their neighbours in many cases continued to refer to these for many years.32 Generally speaking, former forced labourers did not consciously sever links with their home countries; rather, they saw their displacement chiefly as a temporary break determined by circumstances. However, as

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the years and decades passed, thoughts on returning home increasingly played a subordinate role in their life perspectives, to be replaced – in retrospect at least – by short-term but often highly symbolic visits home loaded with complex emotions. Only belatedly, and in the worst cases not at all, did they manage to step out from the shadows of the past, which, from the perspective of many Germans, they still epitomised. As the former forced labourers have grown old and begun to increasingly contemplate their past wartime experiences, questions regarding home again play a more important role, linked to some extent to approaching death and the question of where they would like to be buried.33

Emigrants The former forced labourers who emigrated, and in particular the Jews among them, appear not to regret their decision. After years of humiliation and disfranchisement and the ensuing years of uncertainty and waiting, an atmosphere of optimism now broke out amongst emigrant displaced persons. Prevented from confronting themselves overly with their own past, not least by an environment that was often preoccupied with different memories and problems, they devoted themselves energetically to building a new existence.34 They actively attempted to put the past behind them. As a result, their relationships with their home countries were also pushed into the background, which was counterbalanced by their largely successful attempts at integrating into their respective exile communities and/or host societies. The memory of their home country gave way to a comparatively sober sense of solidarity, just as they present forced labour as a whole in a generally detached manner.

Return and Emigration of Jews Jewish slave workers frequently experienced liberation as a sort of renaissance. As this Czech survivor puts it: I’d made it. Everything ran wonderfully, I would make it home, and my father would take care of me, and my life would be as it had been before. And the surge of energy and the surge of hope overwhelmed everything. I was in the first truck that left Bergen-Belsen.35

At the same time, their future prospects were particularly poor. Returning home was not an option for those whose houses had been destroyed or whose families had been murdered. In addition, anti-Semitism was still rife across the whole of Europe. If Jews did return home, it was almost exclusively for reasons of familiarity or feelings of togetherness. Despite increasingly anti-Semitic tendencies in the former Soviet territories since

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the late 1940s, our interviews reveal that some Jewish survivors had some impressive postwar careers, notably also in the former Axis countries of Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary.36 Since Jews in these countries were barred from positions of influence in the civil service and politics, they turned to industry, commerce and science. Strict bans were soon imposed on emigration to Israel.37 The conditions of existence for Jewish communities were anything but favourable, such that personal successes are the exception rather than the rule. The emigration of Jews from displaced persons camps in Germany and Austria to the West or to Palestine or Israel was also restricted and difficult. Some countries were particularly reluctant to accept Jews from Eastern European countries.38 Given these circumstances, many Jewish displaced persons did not necessarily remain in the first country to which they emigrated. Rather, they moved again in the immediate postwar period, in the 1950s or even later, to second or third countries of emigration.39 In addition, Jewish emigrants in many cases considered emigration to Israel as a distant objective and saw their stays in other countries merely as intermediate stopovers. Yet the opposite also occurred: some Jewish emigrants did not feel able to cope with the living conditions of the pioneer and settler society taking shape in Israel, whose relationships with its neighbouring countries were highly fraught.40 For the most part, the survivors followed their relatives who had emigrated either before or during the war, or they joined in exile the survivors of their own or other Jewish communities, or joined other communities of survivors.

Return of Roma The return home was also an uncertain perspective for Roma, since their countries of origin were not necessarily happy to see them (again). Their houses and families had also been destroyed, albeit not systematically, by the occupiers. In addition, the Roma had not been extensively or universally conscripted for forced labour. In Macedonia, for example, they faced repression from the Bulgarian occupying forces, who indiscriminately forced them to work, mostly on construction projects, but then allowed them to return home a few months later. Some Roma used this opportunity to join partisan groups.41 For the Roma, persecution during the Second World War did not appear to be such an unusual experience: it did not necessarily trigger biographical or social disruption, and did not demand a new start in life after the war. For the most part, the Roma returned to join the survivors of a Roma community, or they established new communities and attempted to live their lives as before. Despite the deep political changes in both Eastern and Western Europe, this could still mean continued discrimina-

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tion. In some cases, such as in the Soviet Union, they were deported again since their lifestyle and their cultural and religious background were not necessarily viewed as being compatible with Soviet communism.42 Especially in the case of Bosnian Roma who fled to, amongst other countries, Germany before the civil war between the countries of former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, memories of forced labour and the Second World War were overshadowed by new experiences of war and persecution, or were updated in a changed context.43 In these cases, memories are repeatedly refracted as Germany, formerly a country of persecution, now offers safety in times of contemporary violence, even if the country shows conflicting attitudes towards refugees.

Remembering and Dealing with Forced Labour Experiences between Homecoming and Emigration The former National Socialist forced labourers, longing to return home or build new homes, were after the war largely received across all countries in either a rejecting or a neutral manner. Whilst very heterogeneous paths from repatriation to emigration can be traced, some general tendencies are nonetheless observable. After the war, repatriates attempted to organise themselves as former forced labourers, insomuch as this was permitted by political framework conditions. As a result, memorial communities were established, leaving visible marks in respective individual representations. There emerged amongst them a strong biographical connection to the prewar or wartime periods. They remember forced labour predominantly as a loss of life chances. Recent investigations, however, point to an increasing number of survivors who, beneath the enforced deportation and exploitation, refer to gains in personal orientation and the meaningful life-history experiences that remain from surviving this existential threat.44 Behaviour patterns acquired during periods of forced labourer proved useful, especially in societies where victims were again confronted with repression. In individual cases, there is even evidence of work-related benefits that arose from forced labour in Germany.45 The majority of former forced labourers wanted to return home, despite the serious warnings of negative consequences. The decision by some to stay in Germany or emigrate was mainly informed by fears of repression in their home countries, by economic or political considerations, or simply because they had found a foreign partner.46 Although the former forced labourers who stayed in Germany remained strongly attached to their home countries, they nonetheless attempted to integrate as quickly as possible and without attracting attention to themselves. Such

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endeavours were also generally observable amongst repatriates, although in many cases they were denied equally successful outcomes. The former forced labourers who remained in Germany, in common with those who emigrated, tended to stick together with their compatriots. In retrospect, they tended to consider forced labour as a fateful intrusion, which they sought to deal with as pragmatically as possible. Their decision to remain in a country where they had been subordinated and exploited for so many years was generally a result of growing personal relationships or job offers following the war. By contrast, emigrants wanted to separate themselves clearly from the country in which they had endured forced labour and begin a new life. They attempted actively to assimilate themselves into their host societies, even more so than those former forced labourers who remained in Germany. These attempts at assimilation were aided by engaging with and in some cases appropriating the political and cultural opportunities that their host societies offered for dealing with their past. The severing of links with their countries of origin led former forced labourers to conserve many prewar and war-time impressions of their home countries or Germany. These impressions continue to have a strong influence over their contemporary accounts. In general, however, these impressions are more pronounced among emigrants than among those who remained in Germany. For the emigrants, forced labour became something of a springboard into a new life. Unlike the Jewish survivors, the Roma ultimately rarely organised themselves as victims, undertook few public attempts to obtain compensation and only to a small extent formed noticeable memorial communities. By actively pursuing such matters, the Jewish survivors have forged a strong new identity, or at least maintained their identity.

NOTES 1. Translated excerpt from International Forced Labourers Documentation Project (IFLDP) interview with Andre D. (France, 23 June 2006), 25. 2. See IFLDP interview with Galina A. (Memorial, Russian, 19 June 2005). 3. See IFLDP interview with Oleksa S. (Educational Initiatives Centre, Ukraine, 24 July 2005). 4. See IFLDP interview with Valentina S. (Kharkiv University, Ukraine, 22 May 2005). 5. See IFLDP interview with Jakov A. (Croatia, 4 July 2005) and IFLDP interview with Dragica V. (Croatia, 8 July 2005). 6. See IFLDP interview with Reshat S. (Macedonia, 9 December 2005).

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7. See IFLDP interview with Lucja S. (KARTA, Poland, 2 July 2005) and IFLDP interview with Anna M. (Memorial, Russia, 25 December 2005). 8. See IFLDP interview with Jevgenij R. (Kharkiv University, Ukraine, 22 April 2005). 9. Translation of the transcript of the IFLDP interview with Mrs M.U. (Czech Republic, 13 December 2005), 48. I would like to thank Šárka Jarská for translating the passage. 10. See IFLDP interview with Libuse H. (Czech Republic, 9 January 2006). 11. See IFLDP interview with Ladislav M. (Czech Republic, 10 January 2006). 12. See IFLDP interview with Boleslav W. (Czech Republic, 20 December 2005). 13. See IFLDP interview with Lucjan P. (KARTA, Poland, 17 June 2005). 14. For general information on the French policy towards displaced persons, see Andreas Rinke, Le grand retour: Die französische Displaced Persons-Politik (microfiche edition), (Hanover 1999). 15. See IFLDP interview with Ruth H. (Norway, 6 May 2005). 16. See IFLDP interview with Ivan K. (Voronezh State Teacher Training University, Russia, 15–17 July 2005) and IFLDP interview with Iwan G. (RWTH Aachen, Belarus, 31 August 2005). By contrast, some requests from Jewish slave labourers were accepted. 17. See the translation of the IFLDP interview with Angela D. (Slovenia, 18 March 2006), 3. 18. See IFLDP interview with Petro G. (University of Lviv, Ukraine, 5 July 2006). 19. On temporary detentions, see Ulrike Goeken, ‘Von der Kooperation zur Konfrontation: Die sowjetischen Repatriierungsoffiziere in den westlichen Besatzungszonen’, in Klaus Dieter Müller , Konstantin Nikischkin and Günther Wagenlehner, Die Tragödie der Gefangenschaft in Deutschland und der Sowjetunion (Cologne and Weimar 1998), 315–334, here 330 onwards. On conscription, see Vladimir Naumov and Leonid Reschin, ‘Repressionen gegen sowjetische Kriegsgefangene und zivile Repatrianten in der USSR 1941–1956’, in Müller et al., Die Tragödie, 335–364, here 343. On repatriations, resettlements and internments see Naumov and Reschin, ‘Repressionen’, 338. 20. See IFLDP interview with Raisa B. (History Workshop Minsk, Belarus, 17 August 2005). 21. See, for example, the translation of the IFLDP interview with Pavel U. (Czech Republic, Subproject Slovakia, 21 June 2006), 48. 22. See IFLDP interview with Regina L. (KARTA, Poland, 2 July 2005); IFLDP interview with Ljudmila T. (Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia, 11 October 2005) and IFLDP interview with Bloeme E. (Netherlands, 30 June 2005). 23. See IFLDP interview with Nadja S. (Germany, 2 November 2005) and IFLDP interviews with Ermine J.-B. (Latvia, 31 August 2005). 24. See IFLDP interview with Alexandra S. (Voronezh State Teacher Training University, Russia, 7–9 July 2005) 25. See IFLDP interview with Jekaterina S. (Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia, 2 August 2006). 26. See IFLDP interview with Nina D. (Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia, 14 July 2005). 27. See IFLDP interview with Jozef S. (KARTA, Poland, 6 July 2005). 28. See IFLDP interview with Janez B. (Slovenia, 8 August 2005). 29. See IFLDP interview with Joze B. (Slovenia, 15 September 2005); IFLDP interview with Andrija M. (Serbia and Montenegro, 29 July 2005) and IFLDP interview with Milan D. (Serbia and Montenegro, 28 July 2005).

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30. Translation of the transcription of the IFLDP interview with Andre D. (France, 23 June 2006), 25f. 31. See IFLDP interview with Neus C. (Spain, 28 April/30 November 2005). 32. See IFLDP interview with Nadja S. (Germany, 2 November 2005) and IFLDP interviews with Josef B. (Germany, 13 December 2005). 33. See IFLDP interview with Nadja S. (Germany, 2 November 2005) and IFLDP interview with Josef B. (Germany, 13 December 2005). 34. See IFLDP interview with Charles G. (Breman Museum, United States, 16 August 2005) and IFLDP Interview with Harry R. (Breman Museum, United States, 17 August 2005). 35. Translation of the transcription of the IFLDP interview with Anita S. (Yale University, United States, 16 October 2005), 48. 36. See IFLDP interview with Liviu B. (Romania, 15 June 2005); IFLDP interview with David C. (Bulgaria, 8 June 2005); IFLDP Interviews with Ede Z. (Hungary, 11 May 2005) and IFLDP interviews with Janos W. (Hungary, 28 April /5 May 2005). 37. See IFLDP interview with Nandor H. (Hungary, subproject Slovakia, 10–11 July and 22 August 2005). 38. See paper presented by Suzanne Rutland (Sydney) ‘Sanctuary for whom? Jewish Victims and Nazi Perpetrators in Postwar Australian Migrant Camps’ at the conference ‘Beyond Camps and Forced Labour’ in London, 11–13 January 2006. 39. See IFLDP interview with Violette F. (South Africa, 5 March 2006). 40. See IFLDP interview with Zoltan G. (Yale University, United States, 16 December 2005). 41. See IFLDP interview with Redzep E. (Macedonia, 23–26 December 2005). 42. See IFLDP interview with Konstantins C. (Latvia, 29 August 2005). 43. See IFLDP interview with Omer A. (Bosnia, 16 May 2005); IFLDP interviews with Osman H. (Bosnia, 23 July 2005). 44. See IFLDP interview with Jurij C. (Voronezh State Teacher Training University, Russia, 4 April 2006). 45. See IFLDP interview with Michail B. (History Workshop, Minsk, Belarus, 16 August and 5 October 2005). 46. See IFLDP interview with Nadja S. (Germany, 2 November 2005) and IFLDP interviews with Josef B. (Germany, 13 December 2005).

 31 

WITNESSES AT THE FIRST AUSCHWITZ TRIAL IN FRANKFURT Dagi Knellessen

In contrast to other subprojects, the common feature among the subjects of this chapter is not the country where the former forced labourers are living today. In this case the point of reference is the German Federal Republic of the 1960s, a period when the dominant elements in West German society evaded the question of guilt for the crimes of the National Socialist past, and notably the Holocaust, by avoiding talking about them at all. In the course of the past forty years the approach to these monstrous crimes, and to the victims and survivors of murder and persecution, has fundamentally changed. The full extent of these crimes against humanity has been accepted without reservation or equivocation. Today, remembering the victims is considered an integral part of a German, European and indeed a transnational culture of remembrance. The large-scale trials of the perpetrators and their impact on the public were decisive for this development. In 1961 the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem provoked worldwide horror at the dimensions of the Holocaust. In 1963 there followed the Auschwitz Trial, which brought the regime of terror and murder into the open court in the home country of the perpetrators. This came at the end of a period when trials of Nazi criminals had been the exception rather than the rule and the failure to punish offenders had already resulted in criticism abroad. The Auschwitz Trial had been initiated and pushed through against considerable resistance by the Jewish returnee and Hesse public prosecutor, Fritz Bauer. His purpose was Notes for this chapter begin on page 424.

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explicitly educational – to ensure that the fact and the dimension of Nazi crimes should be firmly rooted in public consciousness and to initiate a critical discussion on questions of individual responsibility for this part of history. The effect of his efforts has been long-lasting. Decisive for both the public impact of the trial and its outcome were the statements by 211 survivors of Auschwitz who appeared as witnesses. The era of dealing with Nazi war crimes judicially will soon end and itself become history. Extensive research has already been published. The course of the Auschwitz Trial, the events of the trial itself and, thanks to the excellent source base, the history of its reception have all been thoroughly researched, documented and published. But we still know comparatively little about the witnesses.1 In the course of this project it was possible to conduct interviews with survivors of Auschwitz who had appeared as witnesses in Frankfurt am Main.

The Interview Partners The project arises out of research done for an exhibition on the Auschwitz Trial organised by the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt am Main.2 The eight interviews were conducted in Israel, Poland and France. The four Polish interview partners were Ignacy Golik, Józef Mikusz, Anna Palarczyk and Józef Seweryn, who is the only Jewish witness among the Poles. All of them stayed in the People’s Republic of Poland after 1945. Kornelia Judith Berner from Transylvania (then in Hungary) and the Czech Jews Yehuda Bacon and Imre Gönczi, live in Israel. Paul Schaffer, from a Jewish family in Vienna, settled in France after the war and lives there still. The oldest interview partner is Jószef Mikucz, born in 1914, the youngest Yehuda Bacon, born in 1929. All interviewees achieved secondary or higher education. Yehuda Bacon, an internationally renowned artist, studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts in Jerusalem. Kornelia Judith Berner attended a music conservatory and performed as a singer in public until she was quite old. Ignacy Golik was a successful journalist. Imre Gönczy had his own dental practice in Israel. Józef Mikusz continued his career as a public official after the war. Anna Palarczyk worked as an archivist at the State Archive in Cracow. Paul Schaffer built up a large company near Paris. Józef Seweryn qualified as a skilled worker after the war. Yehuda Bacon placed restrictive conditions on the interview because he wanted to focus on his experiences as a witness at the Auschwitz Trial and his attitude towards being a witness. His interview does not include a biographical part, although fragments of his biography found their way

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into the interview. Józef Mikusc vehemently criticised the approach of the overall project, which focuses on forced and slave labour. He argued that in basing compensation payments on forced labour, the Germans were once again marginalising conscious political opposition to National Socialist occupation. He explained that he would make statements as a member of the Polish resistance and as a political prisoner at Auschwitz, and that beyond this he would speak exclusively about the Auschwitz Trial. He did not want to talk about his private life before his arrest and after his liberation – a restriction that he himself modified in the course of the interview.

The Structure of the Life-history Narratives With all interviews, the beginning of persecution, arrest and the time of imprisonment at Auschwitz are in the focus. All other periods of life fall far behind this. This is particularly true for childhood and youth, but also for the period before being arrested and deported. Only Kornelia Berner and Józef Seweryn give an extended account of the prewar period. Kornelia Berner provides a vivid picture of her childhood and youth, as well as the life of the non-Orthodox Jewish Hirschhorn family at Szentmáte3 (Transylvania). In the course of her narration she comes back to her youth again and again. The interview with Józef Seweryn reveals a life marked by family trauma even before the war – he was illegitimate and Jewish – and by National Socialist persecution and arrest as a political activist. Józef Seweryn recounts his childhood and youth in detail, describing how he grew up with his grandparents, who cared for him lovingly, in the Cracow neighbourhood of Podgórze, which the German occupiers later turned into a ghetto. Not far away lived his mother, newly married to the non-Jewish Pole Seweryn, who did not recognise his stepson. Even as he stood at his mother’s deathbed in 1936 he was pushed away by the new husband, though this same man would provide him with a non-Jewish identity in the year 1941. The pain of this rejection has left its traces in Seweryn’s narrative, which is coloured throughout by a consciousness of hurt. All the other interview partners limit their accounts of the prewar period to a short summary structured around biographical data, whereas their narratives of the period after 1945 are distinctly more detailed. The analysis of the interviews that follows refers to the central part of the narrative, the period of imprisonment in Auschwitz, while focusing on slave labour as well as on the common postwar experience as witnesses at the first Frankfurt Auschwitz trial.

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Internment in Auschwitz: Roles and Status The characteristic features of the interviewees’ accounts of their time in Auschwitz cannot be understood independently of their category as prisoners, that is, whether they were persecuted on political or racial grounds. Equally important are the date of their arrival in the camp and the part of the camp to which they were sent. When the part of Auschwitz later known as the Stammlager or Auschwitz I was put into service, it operated as an instrument of German occupation policy. During the so-called Polish period, the inmates were almost exclusively members of the Polish intelligentsia, politicians and potential members of a Polish national resistance.4 At this point Auschwitz was already well known for its brutal regime aimed at the systematic degradation and physical exploitation of the prisoners, up to and including their death. During this early period the political objective of the SS was restricted to running the camp on the basis of self-sufficiency, in a way that would be cost-neutral. Accordingly, the prisoners were used to build and extend the camp, and also for work in the camp’s administration and economic operations.5 At the same time, work was always also an instrument of degradation and physical annihilation. Józef Mikusz and Ignacy Golik were among the early, political prisoners during the Polish period; they were taken to Auschwitz in December 1940 and January 1941, respectively. Once they had survived the first months, the chances of survival rose for the two Poles. Early prisoners like them, recognisable by their low prisoner numbers, had the chance to rise to better positions within the hierarchy of prisoner ‘self-government’; this also put them in a relatively strong position vis-à-vis the SS.6 As a functionary prisoner, Józef Mikusz worked in the Labour Deployment Section after February 1942; at the same time he was a member of the camp’s resistance group and so held a responsible position. Ignacy Golik held the position of Kapo at the SS station. Systematic killings and selections of arriving transports of Jews from the occupied countries started in July 1942.7 Now Auschwitz was more than a concentration camp, or even an extermination camp; it was also an inexhaustible reservoir of labour. The economic goal of the greatest possible exploitation of prisoners was by no means in contradiction to the racist aim of mass extermination; it was simply another weapon: ‘extermination by labour’.8 Paradoxically for the prisoners, their only hope of survival was to be used for slave labour. In this context, their position within the hierarchy of prisoners was decisive. According to the racist dogma of the National Socialists, Jews, Roma and Sinti were at the bottom; until 1943–44 they were barred from higher prisoner functions.9 Rising to be a functionary prisoner considerably improved one’s living

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conditions, but the functionary prisoners continued to be subject to the daily, deadly threat of the unpredictable terror of the SS, if to a lesser extent than ordinary prisoners. Imre Gönczi, Anna Palarczyk and Józef Seweryn all arrived in Auschwitz in 1942.10 After working in different labour details, mostly outside the camp, they all rose to be functionary prisoners. Being a Jew, Imre Gönczy held the low-status position of an assistant nurse at the prisoners’ infirmary in the Stammlager. From the summer of 1943 on he was a bacteriological laboratory technician at the sub-camp of Rajsko. From December 1942 on, Anna Palarczyk was able to work as the clerk of her block in the women’s camp of Birkenau. In the following year she was made the forewoman of a block in the model camp.11 Józef Seweryn, who was registered as a political prisoner, became an odd jobs man in the storeroom at the SS residences. Starting in June 1943 Auschwitz-Birkenau was the centre for the extermination of European Jews. The three Jewish interview partners Paul Schaffer, Yehuda Bacon and Kornelia Berner were deported to Auschwitz in 1943 and 1944 respectively; none of them held any prisoner function. After his arrival at Birkenau in September 1943, Paul Schaffer carried out slave labour for the Siemens-Schuckert-Werke AG. A short time later he was transferred to the sub-camp of Bobrek, together with the Siemens work unit.12 Yehuda Bacon, then fourteen years old, was sent to the family camp set up in Birkenau for deportees from Theresienstadt on December 1943. When the family camp was liquidated by the SS in two stages in 1944, Yehuda Bacon was one of eighty-nine boys who had already been transferred to a different part of the camp and thus escaped being murdered. From then on, these youths did hard labour with the Rollwagenkommando – a transport detail in which children were forced to pull a heavy cart around the camp. Kornelia Berner was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau from North Transylvania in May 1944, along with her family. Trains from Hungary began arriving there on 15 May, marking the beginning of the mass murder of Hungarian Jews. Kornelia Berner, her sisters and other family members were among the Hungarian Jews selected to be housed in a special part of the camp and, at first, not forced to work.13 Her parents died in the gas chambers.

Leitmotifs of Auschwitz Narratives In their narratives each of the interview partners emphasises particular aspects of his or her life as a prisoner. Some have clearly been influenced by experiences and discussions since 1945. Slave labour occupies different-sized spaces in the different narratives.14 In three of the interviews

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work is the key topos around which the narrative is structured.15 The following account presents the features of slave labour and their narrative representation that the interviews have in common.

The Topos Labour Most of the interview partners were briefly assigned to work outside the camp in details (Außenkommandos) involved in construction work on the outer periphery of the camp as well as in maintenance. All interviewees emphasise the catastrophic conditions in the Außenkommandos, which were critically different from details within the camp. The brutal working conditions are not described in detail in any of the narrations; they are only sketched out in few sentences. All of them characterise work with the Außenkommando summarily as a guarantee of death in the long run. Only Imre Gönczi recounts in detail his first deployment in Auschwitz, when shortly after his arrival he was assigned to an Außenkommando together with his father. 16 For him, work with the Außenkommando is connected with painful loss and trauma that constitutes the focus of his narrative: the murder of his father. Food was tight, but still it looked like food. From time to time they beat us, but for us that was already normal. … To this workplace, we were accompanied by SS men and dogs and SS men, they surrounded us, we are not to run away. Until one day, 7 July ‘42 – I will never forget this date in my life … I was driven outside, my father was sent to an SS man. The SS man took his cap, threw it away, and my father had to bring it back. At the moment when he started walking to get the cap the SS shot him. That was an SS man, a guard. … That was [not] his job, doing this. That was a kind of sport for him, and he knew if he shoots somebody, he will maybe get a day off. And when I had seen that, I went and jumped at the SS man. He beat me down with his rifle. I says to him: ‘Shoot me! Shoot me, I don’t want to live!’ And says he: ‘That’s a waste of a bullet. You’ll croak anyway, you dirty Jew!’ And as a punishment I had to pick up my father, together with another prisoner. And I will never forget this moment. His blood, still warm, clotted on my hands. Well, that was the most terrible thing I experienced, compared to all the other things I experienced in those days. You know, I carried my father together with the other prisoners, and we went back to the camp.17

All interviews describe the working conditions in the Innenkommandos or work as functionary prisoners, and in much more detail. The fact that slave labour is dominant as a guiding topos can be explained by the fact that in the extermination camp, work and being able to work were the basic preconditions of existence itself. Survival strategies, which could best be developed outside the walls of the camp, were intimately connected to working conditions. In some interviews, slave labour is de-

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scribed as the only field of activity that offered even minimal scope for independent action. Here there was the possibility to ‘organise’, something that was important for survival.18 Here it was possible to improvise together with fellow prisoners and even with members of the SS (swap, blackmail). These sometimes very detailed accounts emphasise how skill and talent were used to secure one’s own survival and support or even rescue fellow prisoners. Thus Ignacy Golik: And they noticed that I organised a lot, I mean food. And also, it often happened that the SS men, the non-commissioned officers in charge of the good details – butcher section, bakery, and so on, they came to the disinfection station with good clothes on, they needed their pass: deloused! My boss was supposed to put a stamp on it: deloused! And the signature: medical officer. And when, for example, someone had to take his clothes off, I took the suit, put it into the pot and twenty minutes later his uniform looked like, well you know what it looked like. And if I knew he was a bastard, according to the instructions I could also add formalin. Not just water but formalin. And that gave it a terrible smell, formalin. But these people who wanted to go on holidays, they didn’t want to look like they’d just come out of the water. So they bribed us.

In this context, we need to bear in mind that in the end the Polish interview partners were employed as functionary prisoners, that is, they counted among the privileged prisoners. But Imre Gönczi’s account also contains these ‘positive’ memories and experiences in the context of labour. With Yehuda Bacon’s interview, slave labour is directly and decisively linked to his task after 1945: testifying to what he experienced. As young as he was, Bacon counted among the few prisoners who had an overview of life in the camp, and this was because of his hard labour with the Rollwagenkommando: But I thought it was my duty to tell as good as I can; in those days I did not know what documenting is – but to put it down on paper in my own way. That is, during the first two years after the war I made many sketches about this, and also I wrote for myself in my diaries. And in the course of time much of this became documents because I noted certain details which probably only a child was able to perceive. Like the so-called visit to the gas chambers. That I looked at everything closely and told about it later. Even the showers and so on, that there were no holes for water there, only as-if-holes which were bored in. And by looking more closely I was able to see every detail. And then, that I asked the special commandos to explain everything to me. Because, first of all nobody dared to talk to these people, and nobody asked them about details, of course. And then there is a fourteen-year-old child and wants to know exactly how everything happens. And that was a unique possibility, to see it and to describe it. And also, to get explanations from somebody who is working there, yes. How the lift works, and what the box for the gold teeth looks like and – I saw this box and so on – or where this autopsy table

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of Mengele is, and all these different tools and so on. And that was a child’s curiosity, maybe that of an unconscious artist. And this longing for recording details, everything, as if I wanted to swallow it up. Although even then it seemed unlikely that I would ever come out. I remember absolutely clearly that the special commandos were saying: ‘Ah, anyway nobody will come out of here, out of there. What do you want it for?’ And then I said: ‘Who knows, but if I get out, I want to tell about you.’ And also this unique possibility to [see] this entire, huge complex of Birkenau and Auschwitz, due to my work, that is with these wagons, instead of horses there were twenty children there, we went from one camp to the other and were able to have a look at it. And still I had the power and the will to hear and to see. And these memories were very strong and alive. Still today, some images are very strongly influenced by those days.19

In the interview with Józef Mikusz some other aspects of working as a high functionary prisoner become apparent: the individual power over fellow prisoners that came with these positions, as well as the key significance of these positions of power for organised resistance. In the early period of the camp, positions in the prisoner hierarchy were exclusively occupied by Kapos who had been imprisoned for ordinary criminal offences; as was intended by the SS, they established a regime of sadistic violence. Increasingly, however, members of the resistance movement in the camp, such as Józef Mikusz, were able to take over vital functions. He worked in Birkenau from February 1942 on. Even today, the moralethical questions posed by his position of responsibility and influence add an element of self-criticism to his approach to his time of imprisonment at Auschwitz: Well, there were unpleasant things because there were spies among the Poles in the camp. And it was about eliminating both the Polish spies and those Poles who were beating up other prisoners. We achieved this by different methods. I had a black armband. I was one of the four functionary prisoners in the camp, the so-called prominent figures, as they were called. They were the senior prisoner [Lagerältester], the reporting clerk, labour service, and I was labour deployment. I ran a list of all the occupations there were in the camp. And when there came the order, here so many metalworkers, lathe operators and so on, then from my file I knew which block they were accommodated in. And I put together a detail. They were even given to private firms. But the SS men didn’t do this themselves anymore. And so the people were sent to other camps, so-called handings over. And on these transports the spies and the bullies were also sent, to get rid of them. And then the Poles, once they got a functionary post, forgot about everything and started beating people up. That was the dark face of the resistance movement. … We didn’t have the right, the right to pronounce death sentences. But given the situation in the camp this happened. … But please explain one thing to me: we were standing for roll-call, 20,000 people. [break] Lined up. Before our very eyes the SS men beat and murder somebody. And we are just stand-

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ing there. All of us had been either soldiers or partisans! And still, none of us had the courage to interfere.20

Paul Schaffer explains what it was like to be deployed in armaments production as, so to speak, a classical slave labourer. The electronics firm Siemens-Schuckert Werke AG was the last to set up a plant close to Auschwitz – at the sub-camp of Bobreck – in the hope of profiting from the exploitation of slave labour. In his narration, slave labour symbolises most of all the exploitation of the prisoners, which this firm was able to enforce with the help of SS terror. The Siemens engineers were the embodiment of power; it was they who decided about any improvements in living conditions or whether the prisoners would live or die. After his arrival at Birkenau in September 1943 Paul Schaffer had been chosen as a skilled worker by a Siemens engineer, although he had absolutely no expertise in metalwork: And after in this gigantic Birkenau labour camp there were thousands and tens of thousands of workers, Siemens didn’t want to lose their specialists. And so he said, there in that camp you will be well looked after, and he ordered the senior prisoner to give us a second portion of soup, to feed us a bit more, so we could do the hard labour that awaited us. … Another surprise was, when we were standing in front of the SS without our caps on, he gave the order: ‘Why are you standing there without caps on, it’s terribly cold, put your caps on.’ Of course, this was a surprise, and a pleasant surprise. I tell you this story because what will follow later is very important, in so far as we were thinking we were dealing with a normal human being, with a man who had a heart and who wanted to help us somehow. … Only, the first piece of metal I had to turn, I made a ten millimetre mistake. For a lathe operator, ten millimetres, that’s incredible. And then he simply told me, quite calmly: ‘Well, if you make another mistake, you will be sent back to Auschwitz.’ And I guarantee you, I never made any more mistakes. Because I knew that back to Auschwitz means death. And then I really made efforts to work as well as possible, and I really learned to be a lathe operator.21

The Topos Solidarity Another topos dominating above all the accounts of the two women is the relationships among female prisoners, and especially their mutual solidarity. Anna Palarczyk was one of the first female prisoners sent to the women’s camp of Birkenau.22 The catastrophic hygienic and sanitary living conditions, made worse by water shortages and raging infections, are in the focus of their interviews. Their abiding conclusion is: I want to talk about the help from our comrades. Without this help you, you couldn’t survive. I’m talking about the most terrible time. [clears her

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throat] In the Auschwitz period, in the Auschwitz history, in the Birkenau history it is that, [clears her throat] that is the most terrible time. That is misery, that is death, selections and terrible.[sic] This lasts until, until the spring of ‘43.23

In her recollections Anna Palarczyk also discusses the relationship between female prisoners of different nationalities and particularly between Jewish and non-Jewish women. The struggle to assert difference that arose out of the women’s enforced community, about which she also speaks, is overshadowed in her account by the solidarity on which survival depended. I got typhus, and I had to go to the station. At the station, that was our hospital. That was a few barracks, no doctor, nurses without training; anybody could be a nurse. The boss of the hospital was a Jewish woman from Slovakia, Enna Weiss. … And I must say, I owe my life to her, to that Jewish woman from Slovakia. … She was the head doctor at Birkenau. Well, we went to the station, our group of sick people, it was hot, twelve o’clock, we had to undress, to strip naked, and we were standing in the sun for hours, until the doctor comes from Auschwitz I, from the main camp. Well, and we were standing naked in front of him. He was standing about three metres away from us, and was looking at us, and Enna went and said: flu, flu, flu, flu. Well, with typhus fever some have, there’s a, spot, it makes spots. Well, they couldn’t hide that, could they? But, if she had said that I was suffering from typhus I would have got an injection and would not have the pleasure to talk to you [laughs]. Well, Enna saved my life. This happened to me twice during my stay at the camp, that Jewish women saved my life.

Kornelia Berner contrasts the mass murder of Hungarian Jews at Birkenau in the spring of 1944 to the microcosm of family ties. Predominant in her account is psychic surrender in the face of the conditions in the camp, the loss vitality and of the will to live. We were waiting for hours, after many hours the tall man came, just to do the count. The count! For roll call. Anybody who couldn’t work left his life at roll call. And I fell backwards. And then my sister and with my sister-in-law Olga grabbed me, to make me stand up. Then I stood up. I stayed alive. And some days later I didn’t stand up. It was they who held me up. When the German came I held on to them.24

Apart from concrete help, emotional support among the five women (her two sisters, her sister-in-law, the latter’s sister, and herself) was important for survival. Permanently in danger of becoming brutalised themselves in the violent struggle for survival, they tried to maintain dignity and morality: ‘We shall remain human beings. Human beings! It was like this, we kept an eye on it. When somebody stole, why did he steal? And everybody stole from everybody. That was a great shame. You must not do that in a place like this! We had to remain human beings!’

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Living on after Survival All interview partners went back to their home countries after their liberation, with the exception of Paul Schaffer. In January 1945 he was able to escape the death march from Auschwitz to the West and had himself repatriated in France, which had been his family’s last station during their flight. There he hoped to find his father. Like Paul Schaffer, almost all returning survivors faced an urgent question: who else had survived? With the exception of Anna Palarczyk, most of the family members of each of our Jewish interview partners were murdered in the death camps. Paul Schaffer, too, learned that his father was dead. The postwar accounts speak of the pressing wish to return to normality, start a career and found a family. However, the personal wish to build a new life free of the traumatic past could be realised only to varying degrees. Kornelia Berner, who provides the most detail about her postwar history, tells about being married after the war to the physician Dr Mauritius Berner, whom she had already known before the war in her hometown. During the Auschwitz trial, Mauritius Berner gave a particularly distressing statement about witnessing the selection of his first wife, his oldest daughter, and two twin girls on the ramp of Birkenau. A short time later he learned they had been murdered. In the new marriage Kornelia Berner fought against her husband’s pain and guilt, which were undermining his will to live. The interview provides only the vaguest reflection of what this fight for happiness as a young woman may have cost her. Only when the family emigrated from Romania to Israel did the past retreat into the background. And I said: Life gave everything to me. I used to say: You can’t live always, always with the Holocaust. You can’t live. I say: You shouldn’t look at the Holocaust. Whenever I forgot [about it], those were the happiest times of my life. Even if I had to fight a big fight against my husband until we came to Israel. In Israel my fight was over. He changed. He didn’t cry that much, and about suicide he completely forgot.

Anna Palarczyk, too, expresses her determination to block Auschwitz out of the new normality. For many years she even kept her past secret from her new family. Paul Schaffer, by contrast, has often spoken about his flight and his time in the camps since his return, hoping at first to be able to ‘talk himself over it’. As an artist, Yehuda Bacon found his way of dealing with what he had experienced by producing detailed documentation. He describes his early meetings with the educationalist Premysl Pitter in Prague and the great Jewish humanists such as Martin Buber, Hugo Bergmann and others in Israel as key moments. They helped him to draw meaningful conclusions from his humiliating and inhuman expe-

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riences. To the question about the meaning of life, Yehuda Bacon is able to give the answer: ‘Yes, if life shakes you so deeply that you get a better understanding of your fellow human.’ For Józef Mikucz, who was the only one to be a victim of repression after 1945, the political situation in postwar Poland is clearly in the fore. Having been a member of the Polish national resistance movement, he was forced by the political pressure around the consolidation between the Socialist Party (PPS) and the Polish Communists (PPR) to live in exile in Wroclaw for years. In his hometown, local Stalinists had threatened him with deportation to Siberia. It was only in 1956, during the political ‘thaw’ under Gomulka, that he returned to Zabrze. Similarly, Imre Gönczi emphasises the political situation in Czechoslovakia as a contributor to his approach to the past, for he was the only one of our interview partners whose period of imprisonment and persecution was a matter of public interest. As an expert representative of the official national association of concentration camp prisoners, he was called upon to communicate his experiences in the camps to a broad public. This led to the accusation that Jews were using their victimhood to try to gain high positions and influence – evidence of the atmosphere of antiSemitism faced by those Jewish interview partners who returned to the Eastern bloc. Other interviews mention in passing what Yehuda Bacon names clearly: I was invited now and then, but all this happened only after the Eichmann trial. That was the first time that we were asked at all. Before that, I don’t know if I ever talked about it, nobody here in Israel wanted to or was able to listen to what we had to say, and we became silent very fast. And I didn’t know if we were saying too much or if it was too brutal, and we didn’t have any criteria. Once, I described it just after the war, how different we were from other people. And we kept saying: us and them. There was a wall there.

For a long time, even after the first postwar years, the ‘Auschwitz people’ remained among themselves with their camp history. Twenty years after the end of the war, change would set in with the Nazi trials that raised international attention. The survivors were asked to talk about their experiences in the camp, and they were listened to.

Witnesses at the Auschwitz Trial The police investigations that resulted in the Auschwitz Trial25 started in 1958. For more than five years there was a worldwide search for survivors who could testify to the crimes. Involved right from the beginning was the Auschwitz survivor Hermann Langbein, from Vienna, who was then

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the head of the International Auschwitz Committee.26 He contributed decisively to the turnout of 211 survivors from eighteen countries who finally appeared as witnesses before the criminal court in Frankfurt.27 Of the eight interview partners introduced here, three were located for the public prosecutor’s office by Hermann Langbein.28 Anna Parlaczyk emphasises in her interview that at first she was not ready to give evidence in the country of the perpetrators: ‘I did not have any contact to Germans. Not at all. No German language, not a German word. I had had enough! But well, from Hermann we knew that this was a serious thing. So I said: I will go!’ In addition to their personal reservations, the foreign witnesses were troubled by uncertainty about the situation in Germany, which is vividly described in the interviews. As witnesses for the prosecution, how would they be received in the country of the perpetrators? In case of emergency, who would protect them? With the exception of Ignacy Golik, all the Polish interview partners say that anti-Western propaganda at home made it difficult to judge realistically. Józef Mikusz remembers clearly how he bought a knife in Frankfurt and how, armed in this way, he entered the courtroom. Imre Gönczi, on the other hand, was under surveillance by the Czech secret service in Frankfurt. The interviews illustrate the icy atmosphere of the Cold War. Nevertheless, the Auschwitz Trial in particular represents an early example of cooperation between the Federal Republic and countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Almost half of the 211 survivor witnesses (101) came from the states of the Eastern bloc, sixty-one of them from the People’s Republic of Poland, which the Federal Republic had no diplomatic relations with in those days.29

‘That was a very difficult moment of my life, that trial.’ The trial opened at the Frankfurt criminal court on 20 December 1963.30 At issue were the individual contributions of twenty-one former SS members and one functionary prisoner to the murders at Auschwitz. Shocked headlines reported that the twenty-two defendants, who were accused of brutal murders and of having been accessories to murder, were ordinary citizens from all walks of life. After the first few days it became clear that the defendants did not have much to contribute to the establishment of the truth, since they either remained silent, denied their guilt or were demonstrably lying. With the beginning of the presentation of evidence, Auschwitz survivors came from around the world to make their statements. During the first months they were completely on their own. In the beginning they even shared a hotel with those defendants who were not in custody. In the spring of 1964, thanks to the initiative of Emmi Bonhoeffer, committed citizens began to take responsibility for looking after

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the foreign witnesses.31 In all of our interviews, this initiative is described as having been a source of immense support and relief. In the interviewees’ accounts, the experience of giving evidence in court occupies the greatest space. In an exposed position in the middle of the gigantic courtroom, at a small table, the witnesses were subject to questioning by numerous parties to the case, on their own or assisted by an interpreter; the presiding judge was joined by three more judges and six lay jurors. The prosecution was in the hands of four public prosecutors. Two lawyers were there to represent the families of the victims. Each of the twenty-two defendants was assisted by two or three defence lawyers, some of whom were members of right-wing circles; they mounted vigorous, if illegitimate, attacks on the witnesses. At the rear of the courtroom sat visiting members of the public, along with journalists from all over the world reporting back to an international audience.32 In their majority the witnesses experienced giving evidence as an extreme situation that was both psychically and physically stressful. Following a sudden attack of faintness, Józef Seweryn had to go to hospital. During his interview Yehuda Bacon, who had already appeared as a witness at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, remembers being confronted with the images from the past: I thought it would be much easier. What do I mean by easier? Physically easier. But after finishing my report I noticed that I was completely exhausted to such an extent that I had to lean on somebody. That is, two people helped me out of the courtroom from the place where I had given evidence. I did not imagine that it would make me so exhausted. Thus, of course great physical and emotional pressure, this confrontation for the first time, as somehow all the images I had experienced with those, with a painter or an artist it’s different, there are not only words but literally you have the things before your eyes, yes. You have it before your eyes, exactly as it happened. It is like watching a film again. That was very, very strong, and particularly in this situation.

Meeting their former tormentors again is described reluctantly by the interviewees. From the audio records it becomes obvious that the former SS men appeared self-confident, even certain of victory. It was not unusual for them to almost cross-examine the witnesses, often accusing the survivors of lying; whenever necessary, they suffered from a convenient loss of memory. The interviewees mention this kind of behaviour only in passing. They emphasise more the fact that the changed appearance of the men in the dock, whom they had known as uniformed members of the master race, was extremely irritating. Twenty years older, they looked well-off and well-dressed. Thus Józef Mikucz: But really I was wondering about something else. The defendants, the SS men – in the camp some of them looked like rags. Badly dressed. And

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now during the trial: smart! Shaved, well-groomed. And they were defendants? And each of them had two or three defence lawyers. Whereas we witnesses at this trial were supported only by the public prosecutors. And the rest, all of it was attacks. It was hard [short break] to bear that pressure.

The concerted attacks by the defence lawyers, vigorously countered by the presiding judge, are hardly spoken of; indeed, they are accepted as a matter of course. Similarly, the other parties to the case play only a minor role. All our interview partners met the enormous challenges posed by their appearance as witnesses; even in retrospect they are satisfied with their evidence. Anna Palarczyk concludes: ‘Well, then, I pretty much succeeded in saying what I meant to say.’ Imre Gönczi describes a strategy the witnesses used to ensure that they were able to make the statements during the trial that were of personal importance to themselves, one that reappears in several accounts: And I was supposed to give evidence against that Klehr.33 And in the course of giving my evidence I had it like that, that I was going to talk about everything. Not only about this question concerning Klehr. About Klehr I told quickly, and then I started: Institute of Hygiene, human flesh, and all that. And that gave a lively atmosphere to everything because the judge did not know about the things I was describing. I was very nervous, but I had prepared my mind.

For several of the interview partners the trial was a forum to communicate to the public as far as possible the lived reality of prisoners at Auschwitz.34 Their purpose in appearing as witnesses – to give evidence of the crimes committed – arose from a feeling of responsibility towards those who had been murdered. Józef Mikucz says: For me it was about the comrades who had died. I had to tell the truth. And because of this I went to the trial, although it wasn’t a pleasant business. One had to tell the truth. … That wasn’t personal revenge, so help me God! It was about telling the truth. That was the last will of those who had died, hundreds of fellow prisoners, comrades.

Paul Schaffer does not connect his inner drive to give evidence in public with his own appearance in court. He makes the verdict the focus of his statement, which allows him to indict his former tormentor, the Kapo of the Siemens detail, Emil Bednarek.35 Ignacy Golik gives as one motivation the fact that giving evidence in Frankfurt provided an opportunity to make a journey to the West. For Imre Gönczi, who had been speaking publicly about his time in the camp since his liberation, the Auschwitz Trial was another attempt to come to grips with the traumatic experiences. In his interview he was the only one to speak of the desperate wish for revenge that he was never able to fulfil. By giving

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evidence he hoped at least to contribute to condemning the defendants and reaching an international public. ‘I was looking for ways to pay my debts. I knew that I wanted to shoot somebody. I knew that I would help to arrest somebody. I didn’t know how to do this. So I told myself: Shout it out to the world!’ It is clear why the witnesses chose to expose themselves in and to the judicial process. But how far were their personal expectations of the trial fulfilled? Did their lives change as a result of the trial and their participation in it? All interview partners judge that the trial was fair and well-conducted in the spirit of determining the truth. There is some criticism of the fact that some of the defendants were released from custody prematurely, that the active contribution of IG Farben to the systematic murder at Auschwitz, which was mentioned several times during the trial, was not pursued further and that only a small proportion of the nearly 7,200 SS members stationed at Auschwitz were legally convicted.36 Imre Gönczi says that the acceptance of his evidence at the court, that is, the judicial authorities’ confirmation of what he had experienced, was important. However, the trial did not result in any change to his personal life. Shortly after his appearance in court his application for an exit visa was approved in Czechoslovakia and he migrated to Israel. There he hardly spoke about his past at the camp. For Ignacy Golik the trial was the reason why he continued to tell his Auschwitz story in public. Anna Palarczyk says that her life was greatly changed by the trial. From her meetings with the German women who looked after the witnesses there developed lasting friendships that fundamentally changed her attitude towards Germans: Well, and the most important thing was, I experienced and I met those people who were completely different. And that was the beginning of friendship. As the ladies and their families came to Poland, and a few times, with much difficulty, we went to Germany. My son, he got his PhD in Germany. And his best friend was German. If anybody had told something like this to me at Auschwitz, that one day my son would have a friend, a German as his best friend: never, never, never, never [laughs], never, never in my life [laughs] … No, that is impossible. You know, still it was possible.

Józef Mikucs’s expectations of the trial had been fulfilled by the very fact of giving evidence. He had kept his vow to tell the court the truth on behalf of his comrades who had been murdered at Auschwitz for their resistance against the German occupiers. His role as a resistance fighter was acknowledged only at the beginning of the 1980s, when a state of emergency had been announced in Poland. At that time the Maximilian Kolbe Werk contacted him to support survivors in Poland.37 He continues to work for this organisation, supporting survivors in Upper Silesia.

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For Paul Schaffer the Auschwitz Trial was of little significance. His memory is more strongly coloured by a meeting with the Siemens engineer Kurt Bundzus, which took place as a consequence of his giving evidence in Frankfurt. Bundzus had been the one who assigned Paul Schaffer to the Siemens detail in Auschwitz in spite of his obvious lack of expertise. Now Bundzus was able to answer the question that Schaffer had been asking himself since his liberation: Well, why did you choose me as a specialist then?’ Then there came the answer, impressing me deeply, and which I am not able to forget still today: ‘I did not choose you for what you were but for what I could make out of you, and you became a good lathe operator, metalworker.’ Thus he proved that he didn’t have any human feelings, that he was just an intelligent man, and that, as an officer, he felt it to be his task to help the Wehrmacht. Of all of this time, this memory is one of my worst.

For Paul Schaffer, the business of being a witness changed in the 1980s, when Holocaust deniers and revisionist historians had an increasing public presence; since then he has appeared regularly in public to bear witness. Yehuda Bacon’s hope was and still is that documenting the mass murder in court, particularly in the country of the perpetrators, will act as a warning of what human beings are capable of. His aim to pass on a message about responsibility was fulfilled during the trials, and now he is transmitting this message to the younger generation: I think that was the last chance to put something on record. And people were trying, particularly Langbein and all those who helped with recording something in this context, as documents. And this unique thing, Germans taking Germans to court, so that people couldn’t say: Oh, those Jews, or that it was outsiders wanting to do something about it. And what is even more important for me: what to do with this material now, for the future, for education? The way I see it, that is, this burden we all have to bear, all the people who, like us, experienced the Second World War or who came close to suffering, what good is it to us? I think it’s supposed to bring us towards deeper understanding, towards something more human. … ‘It is our task to sow the seeds, the harvest will have to be done by somebody else.’ But what we are able to do we must do, we shall do. This is my credo.

The experiences of the interview partners in their respective postwar societies, as survivors and witnesses of the mass crimes of National Socialism, extend from silence in Israel through being politically coopted and experiencing anti-Semitic hostility in Czechoslovakia to being threatened with repression in Poland. Nevertheless, twenty years after their liberation all of them took a stand publicly, without support but conscious of their responsibility towards those who had been murdered, of the historic dimension of this crime and of their responsibility towards

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themselves. For Anna Palarczyk the trial in the Federal Republic was of personal long-term significance. For all other interview partners it was a brief bright moment of acceptance that was communicated primarily by way of media interest. Through their evidence, they set in motion the long-term process by which the Holocaust and the other crimes of National Socialism became inscribed in the historical memory of the Federal Republic and that of the international community.

NOTES 1. On behalf of the Fritz Bauer Institute and the Institute of History and Biography of Hagen University, Alice von Plato carried out an interview project with former witnesses at the Auschwitz Trial in 2000–2001. See Alice von Plato, ‘Vom Zeugen zum Zeitzeugen: Die Zeugen der Anklage im ersten AuschwitzProzess (1963–1965)’, in Irmtrud Wojak (ed.), ‘Gerichtstag halten über uns selbst’: Geschichte und Wirkung des ersten Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozesses. Jahrbuch 2001 zur Geschichte und Wirkung des Holocausts (Frankfurt am Main 2002), 193–217. 2. The exhibition Auschwitz-Prozess 4 Ks 2/63, Frankfurt am Main was presented in Frankfurt am Main in May 2004, and in Berlin in November 2004. 3. Hungarian: Szentmáté; Romanian: Matei; German: Mathesdorf. 4. See Sybille Steinbacher, Auschwitz: Geschichte und Nachgeschichte (Munich 2004), 21ff. 5. See Waclaw Dlugoborski and Franticzek Piper (eds), Auschwitz 1940–1945: Studien zur Geschichte des Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslagers Auschwitz (Oswiecim 1999), I-V, vol. II, 83f. 6. Prisoner ‘self-government’ embedded the dominant practices of hierarchical division and internal terror among the prisoners themselves. Granted a limited degree of power, the functionary prisoners (Funktionshäftlinge) were responsible for the smooth operation of their respective areas of responsibility. In compensation, they received protection and privileges from the camp SS. See Steinbacher, Auschwitz, 28. 7. Ibid., 49f. and 84. 8. This term appears in a letter of 18 September 1942 from Reich Minister of Justice Otto Georg Thierack to Heinrich Himmler. See Steinbacher, Auschwitz, 50. 9. Ibid., 28. 10. Imre Gönczi was transferred from Majdanek to Auschwitz together with his father. Anna Palarczyk was sent there in August 1942, Józef Seweryn in December 1942. 11. According to Anna Palarczyk’s evidence at the Auschwitz Trial, the model camp accommodated the prominent prisoners – the highest-ranking functionary prisoners of the women’s camp. See n.a., Das Verfahren: 100. Verhandlungstag (15.10.1964). Der 1. Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozess, DVD-Rom (Berlin 2004), 21483 (see AP 189.064, p. 0).

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12. The Siemens-Schuckert-Werke was the last business to ‘rent’ prisoners from Auschwitz. See Dlugoborski and Piper, Auschwitz 1940–1945, Vol. I 138. 13. See ibid., vol. I, 115ff. 14. In the absence of a clear definition, the term ‘slave labour’ is used here for all forms of work: employment as a functionary prisoner, labour in war production and membership of labour details (both those operating inside the camp and those sent out from the camp for specific tasks). 15. Józef Mikucz, Ignacy Golik and Imre Gönczi. 16. Imre Gönczi and his father were employed with the Buna unit. 17. Interview with Imre Gönzci, Haifa, 24 September 2005. 18. ‘Organizing’ was a key term in the prisoners’ language of survival. Essentially, it meant finding food or any possible object that might be swapped for food. 19. Interview with Yehuda Bacon, Jerusalem, 27 September 2005. 20. Interview with Józef Mikusz, Zabrze, 7 July 2005. 21. Interview with Paul Schaffer, Paris, 13 September 2006. 22. All women prisoners held in the Stammlager were transferred to Birkenau, camp section Bla, in August 1942. See Dlugoborski and Piper, Auschwitz 1940–1945, 105. 23. Interview with Anna Palarczyk, Cracow, 8 July 2005. 24. Interview with Kornelia Berner, Jerusalem, 22, 25, 26 and 30 September 2005. 25. The history of the Auschwitz trial has been documented by the following publications: n.a., Auschwitz-Prozeß 4 Ks 2/63, Frankfurt am Main (Cologne 2004) and Der Auschwitz-Prozeß, DVD-Rom (Berlin 2004). As an aide-memoir for the judges, almost all sessions were recorded on tape. A total of 430 hours of the audio recording have been preserved and were published in a transcribed version with the DVD. 26. An international organisation of survivors founded in 1952. 27. Hermann Langbein also appeared at court as a witness and was the most important chronicler of what happened during the trial. Hermann Langbein, Der Auschwitz-Prozeß: Eine Dokumentation (Frankfurt am Main 1995). 28. Yehuda Bacon, Ignacy Golik, and Anna Palarczyk. 29. In December 1964, the site inspection of Auschwitz, in Communist Poland, by a delegation from the Frankfurt criminal court raised great public attention. 30. Quote in heading from the interview with Anna Palarczyk. 31. Emmi Bonhoeffer, née Dellbrück (1905–91), was the widow of the jurist Klaus Bonhoeffer, who was murdered in April 1945 because he was involved in the resistance activities of 20 July 1944. 32. There were about 20,000 visitors to the trial, which lasted for eighteen months. 33. Defendant Joseph Klehr, SS infirmary orderly (among other roles) at Auschwitz from 1941 to January 1945. 34. This was the case with Anna Palarczyk, Józef Mikusz, Yehuda Bacon and Imre Gönczi. 35. Defendant Emil Bednarek, political prisoner in Auschwitz from June 1940 to January 1945, 1945 as prisoner in charge of the punishment detail. 36. For the figures, see Dlugoborski and Piper, Auschwitz 1940–1945, 91. 37. The Maximilian Kolbe Werk, a German aid association for former concentration camp prisoners, was founded out of the German section of Pax Christi as a reaction to the Auschwitz Trial.

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TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER Revisiting Testimonies of Holocaust Survivors

Dori Laub and Johanna Bodenstab

Introduction

T

his essay is based on our participation in the interviewing sessions with Holocaust survivors in the framework of the documentation project for forced and slave labour during the Nazi period. One important objective of our sub-project was to locate survivors who had been already interviewed by Dori Laub in the late 1970s and 1980s1 for what was to become the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University2 and to conduct a comparative study between those early testimonies and the more recent recordings. Unfortunately, with time it has become increasingly difficult to locate previous interviewees. Many of them have passed away, or have left the area to be taken care of by their children, or are in such poor health that they are unable to give another interview. In the end, among the twenty survivors who were interviewed in the fall of 2005 and early spring of 2006, there were eight who had given earlier testimony to Dori Laub.3 When we look for shifts and differences between the two groups of interviews taken more than twenty-five years apart, there emerge three major levels of comparison in which major changes become manifest. The first of these is Holocaust awareness. In the more recent interviews a number of references clearly indicate that a major shift in public awareness of the Holocaust has occurred in the United States over the past thirty years. This shift not only provides a societal context for the narNotes for this chapter begin on page 439.

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ratives of the survivors, which previously had not existed in the public sphere, but also has influenced their ability to give testimony by affirming their identity as survivors and witnesses to history. The second point of difference is biographical. The two sets of testimonies capture our interviewees at two different stages of their lives. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the interviewees were well established in their professions or businesses and had children in college or ready to leave home for their studies. Today they are pensioners with grown children and, in most cases, grandchildren. It seems that the ability to relate to their past has shifted with age. Surprisingly, in most cases the memories have not become blurred with time or age-related memory loss. Only Sidney G. was confused about the sequence of camps he had been incarcerated in, as became obvious to all of us toward the end of his interview, when we were looking at documents he had brought with him. Rather, it seems that the past is much more alive in our interviewees now than it was when we first interviewed them. This shift is particularly interesting from a psychoanalytic point of view, since it may suggest that in the course of their lifetime our interviewees have reached higher levels of integration of their very often traumatic experience. Of course this lifelong process of ‘working through’ is deeply entwined with the change of the social ‘climate’ surrounding the survivors, but it speaks as well to the intensity of their memories and to the emotional strength of most of our interviewees, who live with a horrifying past. Ralph F.’s is the only interview that had to be cut short because its emotional impact on the survivor threatened to become too much. The third point of comparison is the dynamic of the interview itself. Since both groups of interviews were conducted by the same person, it is possible to observe changes in, or even an evolution of, technique. Of course, the outcome of an interview always depends to a large extent on the ability of the interviewer to engage the interviewee, both with questions and as his or her listener. But along with such variables, in the more recent interviews there is an underlying understanding of ‘testimony’ as a narrative form on the part of the interviewer. This understanding did not exist at the time of the first video interviews with Holocaust survivors but has developed over many years of interviewing, theorising and supervising. In the following essay we will try to elaborate further on these elements of change, which in practice we understand as interconnecting and overlapping. The narrative shifts that have occurred over the past twenty-five years must not be attributed to any one of these factors alone but should rather be considered as a consequence of complex changes happening not only in the society surrounding our interviewees but also in their lives and even during the interview session as it evolves.

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Narrative Shifts in the Context of an Evolving Public Discourse on the Holocaust Whereas our interviewees spoke in relative isolation twenty-five years ago, nowadays their testimonies occur in the context of a much wider public discourse. It is impossible to determine to what extent the increased public awareness of the Holocaust has helped our interviewees to shape their identity as Holocaust survivors and to what extent the testimonies of survivors have helped to raise this public awareness of the Holocaust in the first place. What can be said with certainty, however, is that each has left its mark on the other. Institutions such as the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., or the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City, academic study centres such as the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University or the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, let alone large-scale interviewing initiatives such as the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University or Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, did not exist at the time of the first video interviews. The interest generated by such institutions is focused not only on the Holocaust as a historical event, a paradigm of genocide, or a Jewish catastrophe but also on the survivors themselves as eyewitnesses to this history. Although historians continue to debate the relevance of survivor testimonies to their research and to the historiography of the Holocaust,4 many schools in the United States, both public and Jewish, rely on the personal account of survivors when ‘teaching the Holocaust’. Indeed, several of our interviewees mention that they are invited to speak in schools on a regular basis (Helene R., Sidney G., Shifra Z.; also Joseph K.). They experience these encounters with young people as personally gratifying and express hope that future generations might glean insight from these teachings to prevent further genocides from happening. They seem convinced that they are making an important contribution to the future by relating their past. Their experience is thus not simply validated by the interest brought to it by others but is endowed with collective meaning. Our interviewees may well be ‘in demand’ as survivors but it seems that they are also taking more interest in themselves as survivors. Shifra Z. is on a committee that organises annual memorial events for the Jews murdered during the Holocaust and helps to maintain the local Holocaust monument in New Haven. Leon W. has written a memoir, which is carefully researched to place his personal experience within the history of the Ło;dz; ghetto. Eva B. has become active as member of the local chapter of an organisation of child survivors. They worry that the Holocaust could be forgotten with their passing. They feel a need to put

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their story on record. They want to be part of the future, go down in history, but they also share a need to belong that they feel is best fulfilled in each other’s company. There seems to be a special connection among survivors forged by their common experience of the Holocaust. In this respect survivor organisations that arrange for social events and communal celebrations of holidays serve as support system and substitute family. This has become more important over the years, since there is an acute awareness among survivors that they belong to a ‘dying breed’ and their numbers are dwindling. To some extent our interviewees’ interest in themselves as survivors is certainly mediated by the questions of their children and grandchildren. In the context of the Holocaust there is a focus on the ‘Second Generation’ that did not exist twenty-five years ago: The trauma of the parents has in many cases been transmitted to their children and is re-enacted. This problem has generated not only fine neurobiological research (Rachel Yehuda) and psychoanalytic literature5 but also artwork by members of the Second Generation themselves.6 Some of our interviewees have tried to protect their children from their Holocaust experience. As Leo G. stated, he was deeply afraid of the emotional impact his past experience might have on his children and grandchildren and felt extremely hesitant to burden them. To this day he struggles with their repeated questions since he is not sure whether he will be able to convey his story and whether they will be able to understand him. Zoltan G., on the other hand, came with one of his daughters and seemed not to have the slightest hesitation about giving a very detailed description of his difficult experience in Auschwitz in her presence. It is clear that our interviewees have become more self-confident as survivors. This is not to say that they are more at ease and comfortable with their past than they were at the time of their first interviews. But they no longer need to question the reality of their experience during the Holocaust. Testimony has become a well-respected societal discourse, which continues in the personal voice of an individual embarking on a journey of self-discovery. In the more recent interviews, however, that personal voice was occasionally taken over by the historical discourse. The memory of personal experience was muffled by an overarching historical narrative. This was especially true for the interview with Leon W., who in the course of writing his memoir had obviously done a substantial amount of research on the history of the Ło;dz; ghetto. Sometimes his narrative was a composite of the knowledge he had acquired through his research and the knowledge that was his by experience; at other times the overarching historical narrative seemed to function as a shield that kept his personal memory at bay. In such moments the interviewer felt that Leon W. had to be brought back to his personal narrative. It was as if a

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protective envelope had to be opened again and again, so that Leon W. could relate to his past in a more intimate fashion less shaped by the historical discourse.

Changes within the Interviewees’ Lifetime and their Effect on the Narrative So far we have addressed the issue of testimony and its resonance with the societal and historic circumstances in which it occurs. However, since we understand testimony not only as a product of its times but also as a unique narrative of personal experience, we must likewise look at biographical factors contributing to narrative shifts and changes to the narrative gestalt as a whole. A comparison of the two testimonies of Leon W. yields the most complex example of such shifts. Leon W.’s first testimony, which counts as the second video interview ever taken with a Holocaust survivor, lasted for about an hour and merely touches on most aspects of his experience without describing very much in detail. It skirts his experience of four years in the Ło;dz; ghetto. The only memory fully stated is the starvation he suffered throughout these years and what it led him to do: ‘In them days the only feeling was hunger.’ At night he would get up and secretly slice a piece of bread from his sister’s ration. In retrospect he could hardly believe that he could ever have done such a thing and felt extremely guilty. No one in his family survived, including the sister he stole from. His more recent interview lasted for two and a half hours. He had been very hesitant to give it because of his state of frailty and his fear that his memory would not hold up. When the interviewer Dori Laub specifically tried to bring him back to the stolen bread rations, Leon W. said that it had really been his mother from whom he had stolen because as an adolescent he had been able to convince himself that his parents were so indestructible that his theft could do no harm to them: ‘It would not hurt them.’ It also became clear that stealing from his mother’s ration had really been the least of his bread thievery in the ghetto: at night, he would extract bread through the open windows of a storage place where the freshly baked bread for the inhabitants of the ghetto was put to cool off. When somebody noticed that bread was vanishing, bars were put in front of the windows. Leon had to refine his technique: he attached a knife to a stick to cut up the loaves of bread and then extract them by the slice between the bars. He made it clear that he had stolen not only for his own benefit but to feed his entire family. When he eventually wound up working in one of the ghetto bakeries he made himself a pouch that he secretly filled with flour to smuggle out of the bakery at the end of his

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shift and bring home to his mother. This went on until he got caught. After a short imprisonment he was demoted to work as the Fäkalist, who had to clean the outhouses in the ghetto and bring the excrement to a dump. The changes recorded in the two video interviews of Leon W. are indeed remarkable. A shift from the sister to the mother has occurred; the experience of his hunger is much more vivid; the strategies he devised to get more food are much more elaborate and less self-centred. All of this is accompanied by a distinct change in the survivor’s attitude toward his own acts. In the early interview his account remains tight-lipped and is, as it were, restrained by shame. In the more recent interview, however, Leon W. relates to himself as the bread thief with glee and takes pride in his cunning. It is quite possible to interpret this considerable change as an indication of the changing public attitude towards the Holocaust that we have commented on already. Whereas in his first testimony Leon W.’s description of himself as someone who was driven over the edge by his hunger and stole from his own family remains a personal tragedy, in his more recent testimony he is much more at ease with his own thievery, which as part of the history of the Ło;dz; ghetto has been transformed into an act of resistance. The bread thief has become a historical figure and as such has liberated the survivor from his personal sense of shame. A new narrative freedom has opened up for Leon W., and he can reveal his thievery in the ghetto to a much fuller extent. However, his increased awareness of a historical discourse is also based on the research he did while writing his memoir. Since he has retired, Leon W. has had more time to think about his past. Another aspect of his advanced age is his ability to look back at himself as the young man he no longer is. None of this was the case at the end of the 1970s, when Leon W. gave his first testimony. His interviews, taken more than twentyfive years apart, provide us with glimpses of the same person at different stages of his life. Generally speaking, this is true for all our interviewees: they have moved closer towards old age since they gave their first testimonies. This also means that their position within their respective families has shifted. Their children are grown-ups, there is a new generation of grandchildren, and some (Helene R., Eva B.) have lost their partners after lifelong marriages. It is our impression that these changing biographical circumstances have affected the way in which our interviewees relate to their past. This difference becomes manifest in the narrative gestalt of their interviews. The underlying relationship to one’s own past seems to have shifted, and the emotional participation in one’s own testimony has changed. To some extent this is certainly due to a different time economy in the phase of retirement, which has a slower pace and offers more room for thought

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and contemplation. In addition, looking at one’s children and grandchildren provides countless reminders of oneself at a younger age, yet opens a possibility to relate to one’s own parents, knowing full well that one has reached an age they never lived to experience (Leon W.). It is also known that in the minds of the elderly, the distinction between past and present becomes much less relevant. This tendency is not necessarily a sign of disorientation or mental derangement. Rather, age creates a permeability of the present by the past that is rarely found in younger people. While their past seems to occupy a larger part of their day-to-day living, their familial situation continues to offer opportunities to work through the past on a psycho-emotional level. In the early interviews the survivors seemed to feel bombarded by not yet contextualised, powerful fragments of their own past, which they did not become fully aware of in the course of their narrative. The boundaries between their past and their lives at the time of the recording of their testimonies seemed to be at risk of being damaged or lost altogether. Affects were much more unexpected, broken up and disorganising; they remained detached from the narrative and contributed next to nothing to its flow or elaboration. The memories themselves were captivating in their immediacy, full of colour, and all-eclipsing: a Belgian prisoner trading in his food for a tobacco ration, only to smoke it all at once and then go to the latrine to hang himself (Zoltan G.); a friend slashing his wrists shortly before liberation and the survivor witness bandaging his wounds, not allowing him to die (Leon W.); the pleasure of seeing one of the German guards shot by inmates after liberation (Leon W.) and the delight at seeing the body of an SS man killed by Allied bombing (Zoltan G.); a mother telling her son, who could have escaped from the ghetto by leaving his family behind: ‘Come with us. If we have to die, we will die together’ (the entire family was taken to Auschwitz: Zoltan G.); the rage after the war, the wish to kill and kill (Zoltan G.). Time seems to be on hold in these early narratives. It is as though everything happens concurrently. A narrative perspective that allows for putting all these events into the past is missing. The listener comes away with a sense of rawness: it all continues to go on as if it never ended. At the same time the impression of the speakers’ vulnerability is deep; it permeates their narrative. They seem barraged by fragments of memory, their testimonies delivered under enormous pressure as if they were running to escape this shelling. They seem to have no time; they rush through their own experience in an effort, as it were, to minimise contact and to avoid feeling and reflection. It is as if stopping, looking, asking, will restart the fatal haemorrhaging. It would take an entire lifetime to tell their stories and there is no such time in their lives.

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There are numerous allusions to physical deterioration, death, corpses, disappearances, public beatings and public hangings, but the feelings of terror and grief one might expect to accompany such observations remain mere words, lacking emotional resonance with the experience they refer to. Survivors are aware of their own state of detachment and describe having lived in a de-realised state through most of their persecution. They felt that none of it could really be happening to them. They lived in a daze, in a twilight zone. Even liberation was a non-event: ‘I do not think I was overjoyed that I stayed alive’, said Leon W., and when asked what he thought at the moment of his liberation, his answer was ‘Food.’ For him hunger had been the only all-encompassing sensation, numbing everything else. This detachment continued after the war. Many survivors talk of their parallel lives, of their double existence. On the one hand they manage to function here and now and live their lives, albeit with no enjoyment in sight; on the other hand they continue to be ‘back there’ and remain imprisoned in the past. There is, as Leon W. put it in his first interview, ‘something always in the back of my mind.’ Frequently there is no wish to create bridges between these parallel and separate lives. They have to be kept apart in the survivors in order for them to make it. This psychological divide between the Holocaust past and the life they have created for themselves after their emigration from Europe deeply marks the first testimony given by Zoltan G. Although it was recorded in his home, it reveals next to nothing about the person he has become since liberation. A reference point outside his Holocaust experience does not exist to provide connective tissue and create context for his narrative. The interaction between him and the interviewers is very warm, but there is an underlying uncertainty about what to expect and indeed, about expectations on both sides. The memories shared with the interviewers follow each other in staccato fashion. Zoltan G. describes his fear as a Jew to even cross the street under Hungarian occupation; how he was beaten up by a gendarme; his rage against his fellow Jews, who lacked the good advice of strong leaders and clung to their lives with so much fear that they were not willing to take risks and resist; his feeling of shame in response to such passivity; his isolation as one of the youngest among the prisoners in Auschwitz; his rage and bitterness after the war; his hatred for the Germans, who had been famed for their education before the Holocaust. Frequently these descriptions of difficult feelings are accompanied by a smile, which seems strangely displaced in the face of intense affect. In the more recent interview Zoltan G. may very well carry the marks of this rage in his aging face, and his narrative at times continues to be laced with that strangely displaced smile. However, his focus is much less

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on the description of feelings that otherwise remain out of touch with the present. His recollection is vivid and emotionally engaging and at times grips the listener with overwhelming force. This is especially true for the reoccurring report on things he ate as a camp inmate to survive his hunger. The most harmless food was perhaps the pears that an otherwise brutal SS-man would give the young Zoltan to reward him for his good work in the Auschwitz-Landwirtschaft farming detail. The inmates ate dogs and cats, which Zoltan helped to skin. Once he helped slaughter a horse and kept one of its hooves, which he chewed on for weeks. Once, having helped skin a cow that had broken a leg slipping on an icy path, he kept a large piece of raw fat from underneath its skin, carrying it under his shirt to warm his chest and to have something to eat. He scraped the remainders of sugar beets off of the walls of the freight car in which he was transported with other inmates towards the end of the war. Some of these foods are already mentioned in his first testimony, but it is only in the more recent interview that we find a narrative condensation of his hunger, which exposes both the horror of Zoltan G.’s state of starvation during his time in the camps and the extremes to which hunger drove him and other inmates. While this impossible menu may create, in his listeners, an acute awareness of the deep experiential divide that separates them from the survivor and the reality he remembers, Zoltan G. remains deeply in touch with himself as a starving camp inmate throughout his interview and occasionally comments on what he ate: ‘Was good.’ But our interviewee was not only remarkably present as the young boy he once had been. He had come to the interviewing session accompanied by his daughter Vivian, who became more active toward the end of the recording when her father described his life after the war, his career and the family he had built. Their interaction revealed a completely different side of Zoltan G.: it was obvious how deeply he cared for his daughter, whom he teased gently and playfully. Here was a man utterly charming and charmed by his offspring. Zoltan the loving father existed side by side with Zoltan the starving teenager. Another manifestation of emotional complexity was his relationship to Germans and Germany. He again mentioned the hatred he felt for the Germans right after the war, when he thought that every one of them above the age of five should be killed. But he also mentioned with pride that he had learned the old German script in school and that he was in love with the German language to this day. In the 1990s he had travelled to Germany, carefully avoiding revisiting the places of his persecution. It seemed that his hatred had not affected his ability to love, nor had his love blotted out his hatred. No matter how contradictory, they coexisted in the same person, who was able to hold all of it together in one narrative.

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In his more recent interview Zoltan G. is obviously much more in touch with the misery and degradation that his experience as a camp inmate brought him. Maybe his psychological defences, which typically help the ego to reject ideas and events that question and deplete it,7 are wearing thin with age, so that his narrative is no longer shielded by rage or repression and can become more transparent for emotional content that is less ‘in tune’ with his self (ego-syntonic) and his self-image as an angry hero who put his life on the line to win his fight. Zoltan G. was indeed such a hero when he went to Palestine shortly after the war and fought in the Israeli War of Independence. But while this heroic figure seems to be the guardian of the earlier narrative, in the second interview the narrative is presented by an old man who can only look back at himself as that hero. This is not to say that Zoltan G. is on the verge of losing control over his story. On the contrary: with age he seems to have achieved a mastery that allows for a much more detailed narrative display of his past as part of his life. The heroic figure has his share in this complexity but is no longer running the show.

Changing Interview Dynamics Of course, narrative shifts may also occur as a result of the interview dynamics. Differences may be observed between interviews with the same interviewee carried out by different interviewers. In our case, however, they can be attributed to the evolving and changing technique applied by the same interviewer (Dori Laub) in the course of his work with testimonies of Holocaust survivors. Since the following paragraphs rely exclusively on Laub’s experience they are written in a personal voice. On a conscious level I very much looked forward to meeting again the survivors whom I had interviewed twenty-five years ago. I went out of my way to find those early witnesses and to establish contact with them. I believed that our relationship had very much continued, even tacitly grown, over the years. To my utter surprise, I realised that I had completely forgotten four out of the eight survivors whom I could still find, although I had repeatedly met them at social functions over the years, particularly during commemorative occasions. Moreover, even if I could remember them, I had forgotten most of their stories, and only when they started to talk did these stories come back to me. In one case (Zoltan G.) I was unaware of having met the survivor before and discovered that I had been his interviewer twenty-seven years ago only after our interview in the fall of 2005, and only by chance through the catalogue of the Fortunoff Video Archive.

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The experience of an ongoing dialogic relationship and the excitement and expectation of a re-encounter, are part and parcel of the process of testimony itself. Once in motion, the processes of witnessing, contemplation and self-reflection continue to gain momentum and to assume a life of their own. The testimonial reencounter not only seemed to enhance these processes; it also served as a moment of taking stock of the work that has been done so far. The survivor and I were both partners in these processes. However, only for so long could I consciously be a vessel for what they told me. I had to rid myself of their stories so I could proceed with my life. My forgetfulness was in defence and self-protection against what, to me, was emotionally overpowering, incomprehensible and terrifying in the survivors’ narratives. Forgetfulness was my strategy to protect myself from my own fragmentation. The more recent interviews confirmed my premonition that our relationship had continued at a latent level. Though I had forgotten them, they had not forgotten me, and the sense of familiarity, of picking up the thread, was instantaneous. It felt as though we had left off yesterday and could only now take their stories a bit further, a bit deeper. Although there was no sense of completion or of closure this time, either, both of us knew that in all likelihood this would be the last encounter of this kind in our lifetime. Listening to myself, the interviewer of more than twenty-five years ago, on tape, I realise how I am carried away in those first interviews by the rush, acuteness, immediacy, the almost tangible quality of the memory fragments of my interviewees. I had no questions, then, that would have helped to slow down their narrative, or to enhance and deepen the description of their experience. Even when I ask questions, they seem to have little effect. The bombardment of their memory is going on at that very moment and I cannot stop it. I am unable to intervene, to be present, to forcefully create a safe space for their testimony. Only too frequently am I swept away by my sense of the immediacy of the events they describe. There are few moments of silence, few forays into the inner self, few enclaves of self-reflexiveness. Without wanting it and against my intention as the interviewer, I conspire with the woundedness and vulnerability of the survivors. Both of us seem so intimidated by their memories that neither of us can remain in touch with them for very long. I, too, got myself in the position of being rushed by planning too many interviews and scheduling them too closely to one another. It would take me months, if not years, to establish an empathic base within myself from which I could forge a working alliance, help to open perspectives, and create a frame that can contain introspection and self-reflection. Obviously this retrospective is informed by an understanding of the interviewing process, which I have developed over decades in the course

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of my work. I had to create for myself an interviewing position as an empathic listener. ‘Testimony is the narrative’s address to hearing: for only when the survivor knows he is being heard, will he stop to hear – and listen to – himself.’8 In this position as an ‘other’ whose listening facilitates the narrative process, I came to think of myself as a companion on the eerie journey of the testimony, as ‘someone who actually participates in the reliving and re-experiencing of the event.’9 The position of listening, therefore, is not merely receptive and passive but, on the contrary, intimately involved and active. It is paradoxical in that the interviewer has to be unobtrusively present, that is, nondirective yet imminently present. For lack of a better term, I have proposed that there is – from a psychoanalytic point of view – ‘a need for a tremendous libidinal investment in the interviewing situation with survivors: there is so much destruction recounted, so much death, so much loss, so much hopelessness, that there has to be an abundance of holding and of emotional investment in the encounter, to keep alive the witnessing narrative’.10 This holding capacity of the interviewer, which creates a safe space and provides a setting in which the interviewees can allow their memories to emerge, manifests itself in different ways. When I realised that in his more recent interview Ralph F. would not be able to relate to his experience under German occupation in eastern Poland other than by reading a written statement – there were hints that he had survived his own execution and dug himself out of a mass grave – I tried to steer the narrative toward firm ground where he could assert himself as a partisan and soldier, who eventually came to Berlin with the Red Army. I had to bring the interviewee back to safety, even if this prevented a more elaborate narrative, because the interviewee was at risk of collapsing under the burden of his memories, although it became never quite clear what this burden was. Another difficult moment, which may well illustrate my holding presence as an interviewer, this time sustaining the continuity of the narrative in a moment of rupture, occurred during Leon W.’s interview for the Forced and Slave Labour Project. By far the most painful experience for Leon was his postwar return to his hometown, Ło;dz;, hoping to find his family there. He waited four to five months for their return. Nobody came back. Whereas in his first testimony he mentions the blow of this disappointment and how he drifted through various DP camps in Germany for a number of years without any plan or sense of direction, in the second interview he breaks down: for a moment, the horror of entering his family’s empty apartment grips him. He is overwhelmed and bursts into tears. I continue the interview despite his protests that he has had enough and his body signals that he wants to leave. I know that he also wants to stay and recover his self-control. If he leaves now both of us will

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have been defeated in our endeavour. Both of us will feel utterly fragmented, abandoned and at loss. It took a few minutes, but he regained his composure and continued his narrative for a while. The interview not only opened up the pain of the loss of his family but also allowed Leon W. to move beyond this pain. The continuation of the narrative was fostered by the holding presence of an empathic listener who could feel the interviewee’s pain and at the same time sustained the survivor’s ability to hold on to his narrative and not surrender it to the overwhelming past. Thus the frame to his narrative remained solidified and did not break, although the pendular swing of his feelings was much wider and more dramatic. This time Leon W. did not skirt his experiences or his feelings. Although many of the more minute details from his first interview recede into the background and become vague in his more recent testimony, its contour is brought much more clearly into relief. The message he wants to convey is clear: he knows what his pain is all about.

Conclusion Testimony emerges as a dialogic form in interpersonal process – the narrative of the survivor can only emerge in the presence of a listener. The position of the interviewer is therefore crucial for the outcome of the interview, and subtle shifts in this position make an enormous difference. The interviewer can involuntarily become an accomplice of the interviewee or can act as his or her counterpart and vessel, able to represent the emotional strength that is needed to be present in the face of fear, grief, rage or humiliation. In the testimonies taken at different points (in history as well as in an individual lifetime) the flow of memory seems to take on a different gestalt. Where the first testimonies have a certain starkness to them and draw intensity from a focus on something that remains isolated and detached from the rest of the interviewee’s life, the more recent testimonies unfold with greater detail and contain a much wider range of affect and emotion. It is as though the interviewees’ capacity for containment becomes vastly enhanced as the life of the witness nears its end, allowing for a much more nuanced and richer degree of complexity, internal conflict and contradiction. Important figures in one’s life – parents, friends, a beloved sibling – become three-dimensional, have distinct personalities. Experience is more coherent and differentiated. The position from which observation and self-reflection can proceed is much more cemented and continuous. What started in the early interviews as uncertainty on both sides – interviewee and interviewer – as to what was expected of oneself

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and of the other became a matter of certainty and faith in the power of the testimonial process, once set in motion. Besides the difference that the interviewees’ stage in life seemed to make in respect to their testimony, the changing historical context in which each interview occurred needs to be taken into account as well. Today much more knowledge has been generated by historians and researchers, and – compared to the late 1970s and the 1980s – there is a heightened public awareness of the Holocaust. Over the past twenty-five years ‘the Holocaust’ has been conceptualised as a historical event. In the context of such an overarching narrative it has increasingly become possible for the interviewees to understand and listen to themselves as survivors. The early and more recent interviews document this development, which their testimonies have meanwhile helped facilitate. The two sets of interviews bookend a process that can be described as the evolution of testimony. Finally, it is important to stress that along with these shifts and differences we found an impressive narrative consistency in the interviews. No blatant contradictions occurred. There was practically no evidence of any blurring of memory over time. Rather there were two stories, told more than twenty-five years apart with a huge overlap, complementing each other and adding up to an even fuller description of their experience. It seems that twenty-five years of introspection, of listening to oneself and to others, and of living left their indelible mark on Holocaust survivors who, so to speak, entered into the ‘testimonial covenant’, although it may not have brought them any closer to coming to terms with their experience.

NOTES 1. Dori Laub and Nanette C. Auerhahn (eds), ‘Knowing and Not Knowing the Holocaust’, Psychoanalytic Inquiry 5(1) (1985), 164–189, and Dori Laub and Nanette C. Auerhahn. ‘Failed Empathy: A Central Theme in the Survivor’s Holocaust Experience’, Psychoanalytic Psychology 6 (1989): 377–400. See as well: Dori Laub, Testimonies in the Treatment of Genocidal Trauma. In: Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1, January 2002, pp. 63–87. 2. Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies (ed.), Guide to the Yale University Library Holocaust Video Testimonies, 2d ed. (New Haven 1994). 3. The early interviews of Eva B. (HVT-1), Leon W. (HVT-2), Shifra Z. (HVT11), Helene R. (HVT-15), Zoltan G. (HVT-35), Sidney G. (HVT-38), Ralph F. (HVT-110) and Leo G. (HVT-158) today are deposited in the Fortunoff Video

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4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

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Archive at Yale University. Originally they were recorded in the framework of the Holocaust Survivors Film Project. The early interviews of Joseph K. (HVT61) and Zahava S. (HVT-301) can also be found in the Fortunoff Video Archive; however, these testimonies were not taken by Dori Laub. Whereas historians such as Raul Hilberg and Lucy S.Dawidowicz regard testimonies of survivors as unreliable sources, Saul Friedländer, as a survivor and historian, has positioned his work between history and memory. For a short discussion of his position see James E. Young, ‘Between History and Memory: The Uncanny Voices of the Historian and Survivor’, Passing into History: Nazism and the Holocaust beyond Memory. In Honor of Saul Friedländer on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Gulie Ne’eman Arad, special issue of History and Memory: Studies in the Representation of the Past 9(1–2) (fall 1997), 47–58. Omer Bartov, ‘Inside, Outside’, The New Republic, 10 April 2000, and Christopher R. Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (Cambridge, New York and Melbourne 2000) have likewise tried to develop a methodology that allows them to incorporate survivors’ accounts without putting the accuracy of their research in jeopardy. See also Jan T. Gross’s exemplary study ‘Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland’ (n.p. 2002) on the murder of the Jews of the Polish village of Jedwabne. For a very sceptical discussion on the discourses of historians and survivors see also Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, trans. from the French by Jared Stark (Ithaca and London 2006), 96–144, which summarises the evolving awareness of the Holocaust in the United States and the discussions surrounding it. Martin Bergmann and Milton Jucovy (eds), Generations of the Holocaust (New York 1990). Such as Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (New York 1986) and Art Spiegelman, Maus. A Survivor’s Tale II: And Here My Troubles Began (New York 1991). Anna Freud, ‚The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense’, in International University Press (ed), Anna Freud, The Writings of Anna Freud, I–VIII, vol. II (New York [1936] 1966). Dori Laub, ‘Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening’, in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York and London 1992), 57–74, here 71. Dori Laub, ‘An Event without a Witness: Truth, Testimony, and Survival’, in Felman and Laub, Testimony, 75–92, here 76. Laub, ‘Bearing Witness’, 71.

 33 

IT WAS MODERN SLAVERY Some Results of the Documentation Project on Forced and Slave Labour

Alexander von Plato

Introductory Remarks: On History Written and Experienced It is amazing how different history – and particularly the history of persecution – looks, depending on whether it is seen through the lens provided by the archival record or from the point of view of those who experienced it. Sometimes ‘real history’ and ‘experienced history’ even contradict each other. National Socialist Germany’s forced labour, for example – in abstract terms – pursued three overarching goals: first, exploitation of millions of civilians, principally from the occupied territories, for the war economy; second, low-cost accommodation, exploitation and exhaustion to the point of death of prisoners of war principally from the Soviet Union, France, Poland and Italy (the Italian military internees);1 and third, racially motivated exploitation unto death of Jews as well as Sinti and Roma. In respect of their implementation, these goals did not always fit together: economic rationality and the killing of manpower seem to contradict each other. But the Nazis considered the creation of a ‘racially pure’ or Jew-free Volksgemeinschaft in the context of a European spatial order to be a higher value than economic efficiency. As cold and abstract as this account of the policy contradictions appears, we encounter the very same contradictions in autobiographical accounts of forced labour. It meant separation from home and family or the Notes for this chapter begin on page 479.

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loss of both, being transported – ‘like cattle’ – to a foreign world, being forced to work without basic rights and in the face of humiliations great and small, repeated sexual harassment or even rape, absolute exhaustion, burning hunger, mortal danger, losing friends and relatives to calculated murder. But it also meant a chance of escaping the machinery of extinction, particularly for the racially persecuted who suspected or knew that the Nazis might kill them at any time and who thus hoped (mostly in vain) to be able to save their lives through labour. In contrast to life-history interviews, statistics tell us little or nothing about personal experience, about how individuals came to grips with slave and forced labour, or about the effects of that experience on people’s later life. From statistics we learn nothing about ‘typical’ ways of managing this experience in the light of gender, religious, political or national positions and identities. At best, they provide an intimation of some of these processes. Statistics are not able to reveal coping strategies, which are of considerable significance for postwar society and remembrance culture in the different countries. It is here that oral history and qualitative research in general find their main tasks and display their particular strengths. In the light of the objectives of the National Socialist policy for ‘the wartime employment of foreign workers’, we can distinguish four principal groups of forced labourers, which also play a key role in the research and documentation presented here: – more than one million victims of racial persecution, most of them Jews, but also Roma and Sinti (‘gypsies’), who are termed slave labourers because they had to work in labour camps, concentration camps, subcamps or other similar camps and/or ghettos under life-threatening conditions with a high death rate, at first in the Reich but then also in the occupied territories or because, as concentration camp prisoners, they were lent or hired out to private companies in the Reich or the adjacent occupied territories; – roughly 700,000 other concentration camp prisoners who are termed slave labourers on the same grounds, among them political prisoners, members of the resistance in occupied territories, deviants and ‘asocials’, and homosexuals; – 4,585,000 prisoners of war. Of these, more than 885,000 had been transferred to civilian status in order to make their forced labour legal under international law. This latter group comprises around 205,000 Poles, 220,000 Frenchmen and 460,000 Italians, but only some thousand Soviet prisoners of war. Of the 5.7 million Soviet soldiers taken prisoner by the Germans about 3.7 million died, that is, about 58 per cent;2 the remaining two million plus were generally exploited as forced labourers although they were never transferred to civilian status;3 – more than 8,435,000 civilian workers, the great majority from Eastern Europe.4

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The bulk of Germans who were subject to compulsory labour during the war or forced to work on defence projects in the context of the Reichsarbeitsdienst (about 23 million) are not included in this account. Similarly, foreigners who entered the Reich as ‘foreign workers’ during the second half of the 1930s were taken into consideration for our interviews only if they were also working in Germany during the war and lost many of their previous rights in the course of the war. Of these millions of slave and forced labourers, we were able to include only about 600 voices from twenty-seven countries, voices of people who were young at the time of the events. Most slave and forced labourers were killed. Many survivors who were mature during the war have since died, most of them without the opportunity to leave a message behind. But these 600 voices are deeply resonant in that they allow us to see the interconnections between individual fate and individual experience on the one hand and the large-scale organised National Socialist policy of war and extermination on the other. A single voice telling us about the horrors of forced labour during the Second World War or even about positive experiences with Germans sounds lonely, subjective and hardly credible. A chorus of such voices is polyphonic, convincing in its variety, disturbing in its stories about how quite ordinary people contributed to humiliation, exploitation, suppression or murder, but also plausible in its narratives, which include ‘the positive within the negative’, tales of solidarity and sometimes even love. It is equally convincing in its basic message about what human beings are capable of doing to other human beings if political and social conditions not only permit racism and brutal selfishness but promote or even reward them. And indeed – only one or two generations later – this ‘woe betide us if …’ sounds to our ears like a message from times long gone. It is hard to imagine that these voices belong to people who were pressed to slave and forced labour little more than sixty years ago, not even a century past. In this sense – and only in this sense – the ensemble reminds us today of an archaic Greek chorus. On closer inspection, however, the modernity of the organisations that carried out the persecutions, of the way most transports from the occupied territories were organised by train or truck, and of how persecutors and murderers were armed becomes obvious, as does the modernity of extermination methods – shooting and gassing. Sometimes, however, the killing methods were something more archaic: victims were slaughtered with knives, hatchets, axes and pick-axes, as we learn from Bosnian Roma who survived the concentration camp of Jasenovac,5 or with clubs, as survivors of the Mauthausen concentration camp and its quarry tell us. These reports offer extreme cases of the kind that also feature in the testimony of Holocaust survivors who were interviewed in the context of this and other projects. Similar threats, brutality,

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exploitation and the justified fear of death – and this has been relatively rarely documented up to now – are found in the accounts of the large group with the second highest death rate after those murdered in the extermination camps, namely prisoners of war and particularly Soviet ones. In the narratives of civilian workers we find a wider range of ways in which they were treated, including some positive experiences as well as critical reflections on the extent to which their persecution was unique. Their personal dimension alone makes the reports from twenty-seven countries and the interviews with slave and forced labourers of both sexes almost indispensable for educational work with adults and particularly young people where the theme is National Socialism and the Second World War. In contrast to many historical or media presentations, the essays in this volume set these personal accounts in the context of National Socialist military and occupation policy, and of German administrative practice in the occupied territories on the one hand, and of subsequent national remembrance cultures on the other.

The Variety of Reported Memories and their Value for Scholarship It is the variety of stories and fates that catches our eye when we look through the interviews: the odysseys that saw young people transported from home to live and labour in a foreign country, in labour camps or for private firms or with the Organisation Todt (OT),6 with farming families or in prison, detention or concentration camps; the range of different kinds of experiences in Germany or the occupied territories; the harassment or rape of girls and women; the many different ways in which they were treated by German workmates, guards, public authorities, by ‘employers’, managerial staff and foremen in industry, by farmers, senior officers of the churches or public officials, by members of the armed forces, regular police or local militia. There is hardly any aspect of policy and persecution in which the extent to which substantial parts of the German population contributed to and profited from the crimes of National Socialism is more obvious than in the field of forced labour. While the death machine for exterminating the European Jews and Roma as well as the camps belonging to it were kept as far as possible from the consciousness of the German population, the situation was different for so called Fremdarbeiter (foreign workers) or prisoners of war – terms that were both used by the German population to characterise Soviet, French and Polish forced labourers, regardless of their actual status. Eastern European civilian forced labourers were equally visible in German society.

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As some of our interviewees reported and as historical research has also made clear, the first concentration camp prisoners, who were the first victims forced to labour, were political prisoners interned after the burning of the Reichstag in 1933. It was true for those prisoners, as for the first Jews to be arrested, that in the first two to three years after the Nazi takeover of power the agencies of persecution and the camp guards were not yet so uniformly ‘nazified’ or dominated by the SS as in later times. Even at that time, labour was or at any rate seemed to be a way of evading the guards’ brutality in the daily life of the camp. And even then Jews and so-called gypsies were singled out for physical violence and humiliation. At the same time solidarity on the part of ‘politicals’, most of whom had also experienced brutal violence, seems to have been more common in those days than during the war.7

Separating the ‘Gypsies’ The project has brought to light experiences in the context of persecution and forced labour that I have not been able to find recorded anywhere in the historical literature up to now. One Sinto from East Prussia reports how he, his sisters, and other gypsies were not only compelled to do forced labour but were also individually distributed among different places. As far as the gypsies are concerned, they were only allowed to work in agriculture. They weren’t allowed any training. So, just agriculture. … I was the only gypsy in town. They didn’t deploy gypsies all together in one place – they were deployed so that always, always there was just one there. And then you were all alone in the whole place … Well, I didn’t have anyone I could turn to. If there’d been one more gypsy there, I would have been able to talk to him, you know? – but I was alone and I couldn’t talk to anybody. And if there was a German who wanted a conversation, he wasn’t allowed. At least not when other people were around.8

In this narrative the heuristic function of oral history becomes particularly clear. It raises questions for research that the historiography has yet to ask, by bringing to light evidence that may contradict previous accounts based solely on archival research and suggesting working hypotheses that may then be pursued using a range of other methods. This aspect of oral history is particularly apparent when we have access to as many interviews as this project has assembled. When, in the light of Reinhard F.’s statements, I asked Michael Zimmermann, an expert on National Socialist ‘gypsy’ policy, about the practice of breaking up Roma families and distributing their members among different places and villages, he told me that he had heard about such cases but had not found any formal orders to that effect.9

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Jews Working Underground Although our project focused on forced labour, again and again we met cases of Jews or Roma who worked while living underground. For example, Hedwig G. came from an assimilated Jewish family. Her father, a chemistry professor from Riga who had held posts in Moscow and Warsaw, saw himself as a scientific atheist, and Hedwig shared his attitude, but her student identity card was stamped ‘Jewish’ by the University of Warsaw – even before the German invasion. Together with her first husband she tried to escape the Nazis by fleeing to the Soviet Union but returned after he failed to return from a reconnaissance trip to the Polish-Soviet border. After her father had been shot by the SS she went underground and worked illegally under a false name at low-paid jobs in various companies in Warsaw. In 1944 she fled to her German relatives in Leipzig, thinking – though it seems incredible from today’s point of view – that being Jewish and given her appearance and accent she was more in danger in Warsaw among Polish people than in Leipzig. One of her uncle in Leipzig threw her out of his house but did not inform on her despite threatening to do so, while one of her aunts helped her to survive until the end of the war, even during the bombings. This is one of the cases of underground Jews who were without rights and had to work for low pay. ‘Of course’ they do not appear as forced labourers in files and statistics, but we encounter them again and again in the course of oral history interviews. Hedwig G.’s story – like others – also shows that the experiences of victims of all forms of persecution that have been captured in interviews are more varied than readings of the written sources or official policy would suggest. She remarked upon how, in a Jewish DP camp in Berlin after the war, she was thought not to be Jewish because she did not know about Jewish holidays: ‘I’m one of the people Hitler made into Jews.’ Somewhat different is the narrative of Regina L., who was in grammar school in 1939 when her family had to move into a ‘disgusting little flat’ in the Warsaw ghetto. There her father and mother tried to find work but were barely able to organise enough to eat. In 1940, aged fourteen, she was ‘smuggled’ out of the ghetto together with her sister and had to survive underground, working for tradesmen, a farmer and a forger of identification cards, who all exploited her as cheap labour for all kinds of tasks. She was informed on by the latter’s wife, beaten in the Gestapo cellar near Cracow, and taken to the labour or rather concentration camp of Plaszów. There she was ‘selected’ for elimination but was saved by a friend who ‘made’ her two years older. She thus made it to the ‘right’ side, that is, the side of those who were able to work. From then on, she says, she worked there all the time, mainly in the household of an SS

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leader. At the beginning of 1945 Plaszów was dissolved and Regina L. was forced on an odyssey, sometimes on foot, sometimes in open cattle wagons under freezing conditions, accompanied by deaths and shootings, which finally took her to Mauthausen via Auschwitz-Birkenau, BergenBelsen and Gelenau.10 There she was supposed to work in the notorious quarry but could not even manage the hundred steps down to it. But still she was not killed and was liberated a short time later. Having returned to Warsaw to look for her relatives, she found that all of them had been murdered. ‘The cruellest thing is to be left behind on your own’, she explained in an interview that she was not able to finish. In later life she found it difficult to get along. Her marriage was difficult, and she had no children. In the 1970s she went to Germany, hoping for help, which she indeed partly received, but to a smaller extent than she had expected.

Sexual Harassment and Rape Regina L. is also an example of the sexual harassment that was experienced not only by girls living underground but also by those young women who had to work as civilian workers in industry or agriculture. Maria K. from South Russia reports – though only with the tape recorder switched off – that the true reason for her forced stay at a detention camp was denunciation by a foreman whose advances she had rejected. Like a number of other women, Z. N. from Serbia reports that the intensity of the humiliation she felt at the enforced nakedness upon her arrival at the camp was due most of all to the presence of uniformed men among those watching. These reports are more common in personal narratives than in the documentary record, although the women interviewed find it embarrassing and awkward to speak about this. This becomes particularly clear when rape is indicated (rape not only by German men but especially by Soviet soldiers when the women returned home).11 However, there are some examples of women who, following the motto ‘I will survive everywhere because men are the same everywhere’, were able to use male help.12

Children and Families German archival records contain relatively few references to children among forced labourers, and the deportation of whole families can only be inferred from lists of identical or similar names. In oral reports, however, they appear regularly, sometimes in the context of horror stories, sometimes as part of almost ordinary accounts of childhood experience. The stories thrown up by the forced labour documentation project in-

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clude that of Wladimir S. from Belarus, who speaks of children employed for forced labour at a sanatorium, a great number of whom were killed. Wladimir himself was able to escape this murder.13 The Russian Elena M., who had to work on a large farm in Germany together with her mother, experienced her time there as something truly dreadful. The farm owner was at the front, and his relatives, including his mother, wife and brother, each carried a number of weapons with them and threatened to use them, and indeed did so. Elena M. was used as a nanny by the farmer’s wife, who beat her repeatedly. Once she was shot at because the child for whom she was responsible claimed that she had stolen some chocolate, though it was the child who had actually eaten it. Elena fled to the outdoor privy, and her boss fired a sub-machine gun at the door. After that, Elena was permanently shocked and fearful. ‘Life on the farm was worse than in the camp’ where she was accommodated, she says.14 Elena M.’s account contrasts with the stories of other people who survived their periods as forced labourers in the countryside relatively unscathed. She belongs to that group of rural ‘foreign workers’ of both sexes who suffered lifelong trauma. Her example also shows that the experience of violence was all the more threatening and depressing because it was suffered at the hands of individuals who were not part of some anonymous, uniformed body of camp guards.15 This shows once again that personal contact with farmers or tradesmen did not necessarily result in a better relationship between forced labourers and Germans. It also explains why at the end of the war some farmers, tradesmen or entrepreneurs became personal victims of the fury of the liberated and others did not. Elena M.’s story and those of others lead us to the traces of children, whole families and half-populations of villages who were taken together to Germany and had to stay and work there. This happened to civilian forced labourers from Taganrog, in the district of Rostov in South Russia, who were transported to Lüdenscheid in Southern Westphalia. A generation later this inspired young schoolteachers to propose a twinning arrangement between the two places, which was effectively set up after prolonged negotiations. Most of the children who had been involved in forced labour with their parents were unable to understand the context; they simultaneously felt threatened by the situation and enjoyed the comfort of being at home with their parents. The story of Michail G. from Mjadel in Belarus provides an example of a whole family escaping from the ghetto at Mjadel where they had also to work. The father worked in road building and was able to survive only because he hid with the Polish workers when the Jews were selected and shot. Later, his family came to the ghetto of Dolginowo.

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Before the ghetto was liquidated in September 1942, his family and thirty other Jews managed to escape across enemy lines through the so-called Surash Gate, a gap in the front.16 Michail’s father, mother and one of his younger brothers were caught and shot. For about two and a half years he hid in the woods. In 1944 he joined the partisans. By the end of the war, when he was only fifteen, he had gained considerable combat experience against the Wehrmacht.17 A German filmmaker, Helmuth Bauer, has discovered that in 1944–45 Daimler-Benz employed more than 100 children from Ukraine and Russia as ‘unskilled labourers’ ‘at the main plant in Stuttgart-Untertürkheim alone. Among them were many children born in 1932, 1933 and 1934, although National Socialist legislation banned the employment even of ‘Russian children’ under 12.’18

On the Behaviour of the Hitler Youth Reinhard F., whom I have already cited, put us on another track: he spoke about violence and humiliation inflicted by boys from the Hitler Youth. One day his boss, who had beaten him again and again, sent him on foot to a nearby town to get blades for the harvester. On his way back, he says, he was attacked by a group of boys his own age who beat him so brutally that in the end I was completely exhausted. I couldn’t even cry anymore. I was tired just from crying. Then their leader said: Stop! And then he took out his whistle, he whistled and gave the command: Everybody over here! Then everybody – everybody over here! – had to relieve themselves. Then I was lying there and – everybody over here! – and they relieved themselves. That was a bloody disgrace what they did, these boys, and they were my age after all. They taught me the meaning of fear, these boys. Today I hear from government people – one of them was on TV the other day. He said: ‘I didn’t have anything to do with the whole thing. I was too young to have got anything to do with it. I was only a member of the Hitler Youth. That was all I was.’ But the Hitler Youth was tough. To us, they were the most-feared people in those days. The most-feared people. Wherever they saw us, wherever we bumped into them they caught us.

Indeed, the Hitler Youth is commonly depicted by its former members as an organisation for games, a place to meet children and youths from other social classes or a kind of modified Wandervogel association, apolitical in most cases, not racist, although its activities included military drill, arms training and hierarchical organisation. The way in which this organisation was perceived by the victims of racial persecution, in this case a young forced labourer, and what this reveals about the culture of National Socialist youth associations does not appear in the scholarly literature on the Hitler Youth.19

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Other people tell of similar experiences, for instance the Russian forced labourer Taissa T. who was working in the countryside and accommodated in a camp: It was a kind of village, not like our villages. There were houses with two storeys, the streets were very clean and paved, but the population was, well, somehow unfriendly. We didn’t have any contact to them. I don’t know about their attitude towards us. But always when we were going to work or were coming back from work we saw these youths and children, laughing at us, throwing stones at us, and even calling us ‘pigs’. We didn’t dare saying anything to them, we were afraid that if we said something to them we would be punished.

The story of the Italian military internee Vinicio M., however, has an ambivalent character, since it shows an aggressive Hitler Youth member being chastised by a German soldier: After I had recovered, my camp career went on. I was supposed to write down a list of sick people for the Red Cross in an office at the S. firm. On my way there I was accompanied by a soldier. A boy came up to us and spat into my face: ‘You Italian!’ The German soldier beat him off with the butt of his rifle, and whenever we saw each other again after that we waved at each other.

On Sandwiches and Other Assistance Just like many other forced labourers, in the midst of misery, fear and humiliating work like cleaning latrines, Vinicio M. also had positive experiences of German workmates and the commander of his firm’s camp: Then I went one step further with my camp career. I was cleaning the floor of the commander’s office. He was typing the Italian names into his typewriter using one finger, all of them wrong, and got angry. Then he got me to help, and was writing the names until midnight. As a reward the commander gave me a big piece of bread which I ate alone at night. Since I hadn’t eaten such a big piece of bread for a long time, I overate, so that I got a stomach ache and found it difficult to breathe. Soon the Italian camp doctor, Dr D., found out what was wrong with me, and he put two fingers into my throat, so that I had to vomit.

The French forced labourer Elie P. was employed at the OT and was always hungry because of the poor food supply. Against this background the impression made on him by a girl from whose family he and a comrade hoped to get potatoes is understandable. It was shortly before Christmas 1944, and the family was making biscuits. The girl looked at them ‘and went to the cellar. When she came back, she put potatoes into our bag, and the boy came with a sandwich with liver sausage. She stuffed the biscuits into our pockets. Well now, this is something I will never forget [very

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moved].’ Experiences of this kind put us on the track of the behaviour of ‘ordinary’ Germans, about whom – in contrast to most of the narratives about guards – rather ambivalent stories are told, ranging from aggression, insults and looking away through small gestures of assistance20 to offering protection against the excesses of ‘fanatical’ Nazis or SS men,21 friendship and, occasionally, sexual contact22 and even love. One other topos is that of helpful doctors. The Russian Maria K., for example, tells about such help from a doctor after terrible events. Her father, once a kulak (the owner of a large farm), had been driven from his farm in Russia during the persecution of kulaks in the mid 1930s. After her grandfather had died from hunger, the family hid at a lake where at first they survived by fishing and built up a new small farm, growing vegetables. Later the family went to a small town in South Russia. At the age of fourteen Maria K. was deported to Germany to do forced labour. She worked in a factory, and after having been informed on by the mentioned foreman who had made advances to her, she was sent to a detention camp near Düren. Unfortunately she was working quite close to the city when Düren was almost completely destroyed by bombardment on 16 November 1944. She was hit by a bomb that tore one of her legs away: ‘I woke up lying in my own blood. It was cold, and because of the cold I was able to stand the pain. Around me I saw nothing but blood. Then I saw [German] soldiers coming and I asked them to shoot me. I would not have been able to live without a leg.’ She was operated on at a hospital near Euskirchen: ‘The nun always said: “It was Dr. S. who operated on you, and he is a very good doctor. You will walk again.“’ The hospital in Euskirchen and the barracks were also partly destroyed by bomb attacks. After her liberation by the Americans and British she received further treatment at various German hospitals, and she received a wooden leg and a crutch. Later, having returned home, Maria K. herself received no training but had to work alongside criminals in a cardboard packaging factory for forty years. Still, she made a happy marriage and has a daughter and a grandson. Today she lives in Ukraine with her husband. Her story is one of the most terrible accounts of a surviving civilian forced labourer: deported as a child, her grandfather dead, and for all this she was treated as a traitor, just like the criminals at whose side she worked with a wooden leg, on crutches. She could not even get a prosthesis for her leg. In a Kafkaesque twist, on a visit to the city of her forced labour in Germany in 1993, she was given one by a young entrepreneur whose business had not even existed in 1945. The topos of helpful doctors is not only found among forced labourers or those persecuted by National Socialism. Especially notable are the many stories about Russian doctors helping German prisoners of war. The narratives of former prisoners of the Germans display considerable am-

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bivalence. Georg K., a prisoner of war, has many stories to tell about the miserable life in the camp, among them stories about the behaviour of the German military guards, which are almost all ambivalent. One example: In the camp there was a Soviet medical officer, Michael. The whole camp knew him. Once he saw a German guard beating a prisoner; he went to him and asked: ‘Why are you beating him, what did he do to you? He’s hardly alive, after all!’ And the guard drew his pistol and shot the medical officer. That was in 1943. The death of this medical officer, who had helped many people, stirred up the camp. Everybody in the camp was picking flowers – the Germans forced us to grow flowers in the camp. In the hospital barracks they set up a coffin for this medical doctor, and they laid him in it, decorated it with flowers, and held guard of honour there. The commander of the camp, Captain Lipp, a captain, a member of the armed forces, was told about this. He came running in irritation: ‘What is going on here?’, stopped by the shot Russian soldier and took off his cap with the German cockade. He gave the order to bury the Russian prisoner with military honours, or rather with basic military honours. And that’s how he was buried. This was one of the examples of the fact that a simple good deed, not an act of heroism, was able to stir up the whole camp.

Sandwiches given to forced labourers mostly in secrecy, cigarettes, old shirts and the like play a considerable role in the narratives of Germans and in most contexts seem to be ‘stories of exculpation’ and exaggerations. But when such experiences are also reported by forced labourers – which is not unusual – they show at least two things. First, these are important memories for forced labourers because in a situation of hunger, loneliness, fear and threat, ‘sandwiches’ were experienced as something like balm for their bodies and souls and are thus remembered with a particular vividness. But they also show, second, that such little acts of assistance and small gestures were indeed made by Germans, and that in this context women play a particular role. Maybe emphasising such stories also reflects the hope or wish on both sides for humanity under inhuman conditions. Dori Laub, an American member of this project and a psychoanalyst who works on historical subjects, emphasises that we need to investigate how far particularly positive images of Germany or Germans among forced labourers are part of ‘fighting off guilt’. It is in this sense, for example, that he chooses to interpret the statement by a Russian who called his time in Germany ‘the best time in his life’ – while ‘forgetting’ that several million of his fellow countrymen died in the process.23

Flight and Sabotage Another trail leads to a strange, at first seemingly unimportant, subplot that draws our attention to different judgments during the postwar era

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and to the different narrative cultures in the different countries: ‘The flight to the woods’. Many Roma, many Belarusians24 and other Eastern Europeans tell how they hid in the woods of their home countries when it became obvious that they were going to be deported or killed by the Wehrmacht or the SS. At home, in well-known territory, this is plausible behaviour, but if we follow these narratives we find that such flights to the woods were also tried in Germany or the occupied territories. They almost never succeeded on unknown territory. My sense is that thinking about running away, that is, the preparation for escape without in most cases actually doing anything – plays a more significant role in the narratives of Eastern Europeans in Germany during the war than in the written records. This may be because the idea of running away was normally abandoned before it could be put into effect, but it may also be because escapes were hushed up by the German side when the victims (were) quickly returned. An example of this is the case of the Red Army soldier Georg K., who tried to escape from the camp at Stukenbrok shortly before the end of the war and was caught but not shot: For a long time we thought about what might have happened. Only some years ago, when I was able to have a look at the archived documents of the 236th camp, I found a book where punishment for prisoners of war was written down. Among the entries I found my name and also that of my friend, Mischa R. And there it was written: ‘14 days of strict detention for leaving the workplace’. But we had been caught running away. I think that maybe it is a kind of resistance if our flight was simply labelled ‘leaving the workplace’. For running away we would have been shot, for leaving our workplaces without leave we received fourteen days of strict detention and stayed alive. These things happened.

One other possibility of explaining this difference between the written and oral records in respect of escape may be that in the Soviet Union in the postwar period, former forced labourers who were confronted with the suspicion of treason used stories of attempted escape to demonstrate their continued spirit of resistance in captivity. Still, this would not explain why stories of flight are often told even outside the Soviet Union, for example by Yugoslav Roma. Later suspicion of treason might also explain why there are numerous reports of acts of sabotage of one kind and another in German industry by forced labourers from Eastern Europe; sabotage, too, demonstrated their determination to resist their German captors. Stories like those about a ‘flight to the woods’ are almost certainly based on older traditions and forms. We cannot assume they developed only with the Second World War, and they may be supposed to have experienced a greater revival where national or ethnic minorities had long

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suffered from waves of repression or where marauding armies looted and threatened the local people. Such traditions created narrative patterns of their own that deployed the themes of threat, ambush, looting and murder, but also deceiving the superior enemy, friendship, solidarity, making a stand or even receiving unexpected help from the enemy camp.

Ambivalent Experiences of Being Bombed What the Russian Maria K. reports about bombardment is not atypical. For many forced labourers who had to work in cities or in industry, the experience of Allied bombing attacks was a very ambivalent one. On the one hand, the bombing indicated Germany’s imminent defeat and their own liberation; on the other hand they themselves were threatened by bombs that came from states allied to their home countries. In most cases they were more under threat than the local German population; many report that they were not allowed to run to shelters or basements like the Germans. At a company in Westphalia, for example, more than half of the Italian military internees were killed by bombs in their barracks. It was a terrible sight: many were burned alive, according to surviving Italian military internees like Vinicio M. Stories like this one are also found in narratives by other groups. But there are also stories of how the bombardments brought forced labourers and the German population together against the Allies. The story by the Serbian forced labourer Zdenka N. is one example of this. She had been arrested in Belgrade in 1944 and deported to Dresden via the camp of Maribor to do forced labour. Employed at the post office in Dresden, she lived in a ‘quasi-camp’ in an apartment block but was able to move around relatively freely. When the attacks on Dresden began on 13 and 14 February 1945, she was at the railway station and was able to get into the official basement shelter but, driven out by flames and smoke, had to run through the hot streets between burning houses. She perceives the British and American bomber pilots in the same way the German inhabitants did – as life-threatening enemies who killed thousands and thousands of civilians and destroyed a city of culture ‘pointlessly’, that is, for no good strategic reason. However, Zdenka N. describes her working conditions in Dresden as similar to those of her German colleagues during the war; she even states that she was treated ‘with respect’. Such conditions were rarely enjoyed by civilian forced labourers in industry. Many Germans however, particularly in the countryside, explain that ‘prisoners of war’ were seen as help on the farms if the husband or son was at the front. Because of this, and as long as they worked well, the foreign labourers were accepted, they say. Some of these forced labourers

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are even said to have identified with the Germans. Thus Mrs S. claims that a Polish prisoner of war who had actually taken over the role of administrator of the estate beat to death a member of a British bomber crew who was shot down over her village – a terrifying story.25 Such reports of good relationships between Germans and forced labourers are contradicted by other trends among those interviewed in the context of this project, particularly those who spent time in camps.

Contradictions within the Nazi System The interviews also invite us to investigate contradictions within the NS system, as far as forced labour is concerned. The Organisation Todt is most often mentioned in this context. The OT is described as having been particularly tough, in terms both of the working conditions and the frequent shifts of location of the OT camps themselves or of workers between camps. Meanwhile, the nature of work and the mobility of the camps was probably accompanied by a certain degree of protection, at any rate more than in industry, though probably less than on some farms. Thus the French forced labourer Elie P., a young Catholic from Champagne born in 1921, describes the special, if illegal, possibilities for mobility in the OT: ‘As we were so mobile and were employed at different places, sometimes the ID card of the Organisation Todt worked as a kind of permit. But this happened maybe one or two times, it was very risky.’ In this context, too, racist persecution came second to economic rationality at least for some of the time – at any rate according to reports by some survivors. The narratives of our interview partners reveal contradictions within other agencies and organisations and between them and the superior NS authorities, notably in the early concentration camps on German territory,26 when the organisation of persecution was not yet so much dominated by the SS as in later times. Interviews also show differences between German administrations in occupied territories, particularly between civil, military and SS agencies. The differences between these administrations arose less from differing approaches to racial or political persecution than from their competition to exploit the labour force of each territory, whether for their own purposes or for employment in the Reich itself.27 There were also differences in the way labour was organised between the authorities of states allied to Germany and those of occupied countries (see below), between work in industry and in the countryside, between the sexes and between war policy in Western Europe and in the East, where the racism of National Socialist occupation policy came into its own.

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Different Conditions in Germany, Different Paths after Liberation, Different Ways of Dealing with the Past The interviews show clearly both that people came to terms with their experience forced labour after the war and that they did so in many different ways, depending whether they were taken captive in the countryside in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union or whether they came from the urban centres.28 The interviews conducted by our colleagues from Voronezh in particular raise the question of whether the Church, religious ideas and Christian values had survived in rural Russian areas better than in the cities, where via Soviet schools the ideas of the Communist Party had made more inroads. The consequence of this for the experience of forced labour might have been that older, more positive images of Germany were (still) predominant or that conciliatory attitudes towards Germans can be observed even after the war. Also, among Soviet forced labourers there is more readiness than among those from other countries to distinguish ‘individual’ from ‘system’ – even in respect of the Germans of the ‘Third Reich’, in spite of the fact that Soviet rhetoric during the war described Germans only as fascists. At any rate, when looking through the translated interviews it becomes obvious that interviews from the Soviet Union include a concentration of relatively positive stories about ordinary people in Germany, about simple German soldiers or about cautious but helpful Communists. Probably these are interpretations of their experiences in Germany against the background of what they experienced under the Soviet dictatorship and on their return home, when they were confronted with the accusation of having been collaborators.29 In oral reports by former forced labourers, their respective ways back to their home countries or into emigration after liberation play a much bigger role than in the written record. Many of them, particularly Jews, chose the path of emigration to Israel, the US or other immigration destinations, often knowing that their entire families or great parts of them had been killed or were scattered to the four winds, or fearing antiSemitism in Germany or Eastern Europe. Karl B., for example, describes the terrible loneliness he felt, sitting among hundreds at the main station in Prague after liberation from the Mauthausen concentration camp, when one after another almost all of his comrades were called and taken home by their Czech relatives. He was the only one left behind; there was nobody there to take him home. In the territories of the Soviet Union most civilian forced labourers came to so-called filtration camps, where they were screened for evidence of collaboration or even treason. For years to come they were to be haunted by this attitude of the authorities, even if they ultimately

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returned to their homes: in many cases it determined their education or their further professional careers. Some of them had ‘to do service’30 again as soldiers, others had to work at other places in the Soviet Union under conditions close to forced labour for years to come. When, for example, Maria K. came home with only one leg, the house had burned down. The family was not there anymore. My father died in the war. … In the village there was a kolkhoz, and I went to the chairman and said: ‘I want to have some work. Could you maybe send me to a bookkeeping class or something?’ He answered: ‘You know what? We’ve got so many soldiers back from the front, they were in the war, they fought. And you’re a Fascist. You’ve been in Germany.’ He said: ‘They deserve to have a job. You won’t get anything!’ He had had a document from me from the hospital in Cologne. I had presented it to this kolkhoz chairman, these papers from Germany. Everything I had. And he simply tore it to pieces. Said: ‘We don’t need you!’

The fate of most of forced labourers even from Eastern Europe was not this brutal, but in addition to the persecution itself they had lost essential years of education or professional experience and had not seen their families, had not seen their children growing up. Some were severely traumatised. Of course, these different paths to their old or new homes influenced the ways in which they came to terms with their time in Germany. On this there will be more below.

Differences within Variety Within the variety are some overarching structural differences in the treatment of forced labourers that attract our attention. The most important is that between Jews and Roma on the one hand and the other forced labourers on the other; then there is the difference in comparison to prisoners of war, and of course the difference between forced labourers from Western and from Eastern Europe.

Slave Labour: Part of the Death Machine If anti-Semitism particularly in Western Europe had been mostly motivated by religion until the late nineteenth century, the ‘modern racism’ of National Socialism hardly needed this background anymore, although it could build on this pattern. Rather, it was now about the ‘value’ of races, about the rule of a master race over a supposedly inferior one, which was justified per se. It was about establishing an empire based on a ‘racially clean’ Volksgemeinschaft. Right from its beginning the Second World War was driven by this racist goal, but the full brutality of the repression of ‘in-

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ferior races’ and their extermination unfolded most radically in Eastern and South-east Europe after 1941. Our interviews with Roma, however, reveal extreme differences. There are above all reports, such as the one by Reinhard F., already quoted, on persecution up to and including extermination in death camps, yet there are also others that show that sometimes Roma surprisingly evaded the grip of the SS and went underground.31 Other Roma were deported to inhospitable areas where they were abandoned to their own devices. Still others stayed where they were and were employed as forced labour under humiliating treatment, and some were not even found ‘worthy’ to do forced labour in Germany.32 We also interviewed Bosnian Roma, persecuted both before 1945 and later, who escaped to Germany from renewed persecution and threat of murder during the civil wars at the end of the last century and were accommodated in Berlin as ‘tolerated residents’. In their narratives the two persecutions weave together, and their attitude towards Germany today is marked not only by these various postwar persecutions but also by their current situation: thankful on the one hand and anxious on the other, avoiding any kind of criticism as they must repeatedly renew their applications to go on being ‘tolerated’. These are depressing biographies.33 By the time the war began, the German Jews who eventually survived the Holocaust in most cases already had their experience of increasing persecution since 1933 behind them, starting with being banned from their occupations or dismissed from public schools and other educational institutions, through the ‘night of broken glass’ of 1938 – the first national, state-organised pogrom in Germany – and being forced to wear the Star of David, to forced labour at their place of residence or in a ghetto and deportation to concentration camps, to name only the most important stages. In other countries these stages of persecution were carried out in more rapid succession once the Wehrmacht had organised its advance in Eastern Europe and exposed Jews or Roma to slave labour and extermination. Some Jews who talked to us during the past few years as this project was being prepared had been afraid that the peculiar fate of Jews or also of Sinti and Roma might be drowned out by the general chorus of forced labourers or might be played down in this context.34 But just the opposite happened: against the background of the main trend of civilian forced labourers, the particular severity of the persecution of Jews and so-called gypsies becomes absolutely obvious in the course of the interviews. Most concentration camp prisoners who had been forced to do slave labour in the camp or sold to companies outside the camp understood this labour to be their only chance of survival. For them, getting away from the brutal camp life to some work, no matter how tough it was, was

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a chance to survive and escape being selected for death.35 By comparison, only rarely did civilian forced labourers who had to work on a farm, for example (I have deliberately chosen sharply contrasting examples), where they were treated comparatively well and at least were not driven to death, have experiences that were as brutal and threatening as those of slave labourers. In most cases the war was a relatively brief experience for them, and they were confronted again with its immediate horrors only when German rear-guard actions took place in the areas where they were working. However, if they were working in factories in the cities – as already mentioned – they were exposed to the horrors of the bombardments, often without being able to take refuge in shelters. In the countryside they watched the bomber squadrons passing over their heads with mixed emotions, but they were not bombed. Many of them, if they had been soldiers or present in combat areas, were quite happy to have experienced the war only for a short time or not at all, unless they were ‘politicals’ or particularly committed patriots. The experiences of a Polish Jew, Roman K.,36 were nothing like this. He came from a family that was Jewish but not particularly observant. In 1940 he was deported with his whole family to Łódź, where he lived outside the ghetto. In that same year all of them were taken and put into wagons. He was separated from father, mother and two sisters, whom he never saw again, and taken to a ‘Jewish camp’ near Cracow that was guarded by SS troops. Roman K. had to work with a construction team for the ‘Siemens-Bau-Union’ which built transhipment stations for the Wehrmacht and the railway system. In 1940 he tried to run away but returned to the camp after a few days because despite the punishment that awaited him, the camp was ‘safer [!]’ ‘than outside’ because of the anti-Semitism in Poland. In 1942 he was transferred to a camp near Radom, then to a third one nearby, where he had to produce depth charges on a pressing machine: ‘Depth charges from picric acid. I don’t know if you know the composition of picric acid. It’s a very poisonous material, a yellow powder. And anybody who worked these presses made it for only three weeks, maybe four, and then he was a doomed man.’ At first, Roman K. had to work at the construction site and thus had no contact with the deadly substance. But ‘[e]very month this camp received new people. It was always a transport of one thousand, one thousand and five hundred people, and within one month they were so to speak sent to the slaughter.’ All these people, he says, hoped to survive by labour – in vain. For the last fortnight, when there were no transports arriving anymore, everything around, every bit of human material available, was taken for the presses. I also had to work these presses for the last fortnight. And after a fortnight the camp was evacuated, and we came to Buchenwald.

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When I arrived at Buchenwald, from top to bottom I was as yellow as a lemon, due to the effect of this explosive.

From Buchenwald the journey was continued to Groß Rosen and then a wagon factory; then it became a march to Czechoslovakia, carrying the luggage of the SS guards. During this death march many of those who were no longer able to walk were shot. In Czechoslovakia, in May 1945, he was liberated by the Red Army and the Second Polish Army, and together with the Soviets he marched into the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany. Of his forty relatives he found no one; his immediate family were probably killed as early as 1940. He himself stayed in the Soviet zone, later the GDR, built up a private transport company and late in life became active in the Jewish community at the local and national levels. One more example, which apart from the horrible experiences it details also shows solidarity among political prisoners, is that of Karl B., a young man in those days, who came from Czechoslovakia. After the Sudetenland had been annexed his family moved to Prague and was then ordered to the ghetto of Litzmannstadt (Łódź).37 There, under miserable conditions, the family tried to survive by work. Everybody had to do hard work. I myself collapsed at work. And there I met a certain kind of solidarity for the first time, solidarity from the Communists [although he was a young Zionist]. Every person there worked at seventy workplaces of different kinds. That is, there were tailors’ shops, and shoes were made of straw, and there was a saddler’s department and a carpenter’s department. I myself was at my second workplace, after having left a nail factory where grenade boxes for anti-aircraft gunnery were made. As I said, the whole population of the ghetto was working, and that was the problem: Can you save yourself by work and make it through the war, or is it hopeless? It was hopeless, for in the year 1944, in August, the whole ghetto was liquidated; there were 60,000 people left [out of about 200,000].

The others had starved to death or been deported to be gassed. Hunger was terrible: his father, his mother and his younger brother died in the ghetto. He himself was deported to Auschwitz, where he survived with the help of Communist members of the underground movement, even making it through the death march. After the war he returned to Czechoslovakia and worked in a state agency. In 1968, after the troops of the Warsaw Pact marched in, he left Czechoslovakia and settled in Germany with his family. The futility of the hope of surviving through work is one of the basic themes in the accounts of surviving Jews and Roma. They themselves, they say, had been lucky, but the bulk of the others had hoped in vain. Most them died of starvation, were sent to the gas or were shot. A great number were killed without ever having done forced labour. Most of

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the male Soviet Jews, they say, were shot at once, whereas women and children were killed some weeks later. ‘After all, it was also the greatest murder of children in history’, Ulrich Herbert recently observed during a lecture in Vienna.38 All other European Jews in German hands, ‘maybe one third altogether – but this is only an estimate – were employed for forced labour for the Germans for a shorter or a longer period.’39 There were discussions or even arguments among Jewish families about whether one should emigrate or not before it was too late. The younger people may rather be supposed to have supported emigration. My father really liked it very much in this area [around the spa resort of Teplitz], and indeed it was a very interesting town, and even today I think of my lost home with regret and great pleasure. [Pause] In 1938 my father was a patriot and thus he missed something for which he later blamed himself very much, that is, trying to emigrate, as his sister did. She was able to emigrate to America in ’39; that was just what my father couldn’t do because he had failed to present an Affidavit [confirmation by a citizen of the receiving country that he would act as a guarantor for an immigrant] to the American consulate before October 1938. (Karl B.)

Then, at some point, it was too late, so that within and outside these families there arose an anxious question, intensified by rumours about extermination camps: If we cannot even survive by work in the ghettos, if all territories are supposed to be made ‘Jew-free’, where after all will we be able to live? And later: Or do they want us to survive at all? And in fact Nazi policy increasingly offered no place but the camp, and there was no country that would let the Jews in. The spatial order of Eastern Europe, according to the ‘General Plan East’, anticipated the ‘decimation and expulsion’ of Poles and later Russians, who were only allowed to stay as forced labourers for unskilled work. Jews no longer featured at all in this spatial order, as Ulrich Herbert states; as far as Jews were concerned the whole policy had aimed at only temporary accommodation in ghettos and forced labour until their further deportation towards the East. One after another, he states, the Nazi leaders had become convinced that ‘deportation to somewhere or other would in any case result in a massive reduction of the Jewish population.’40 But where were they supposed to be sent if they were turned away everywhere? In the end, the only destination was mass killing. On 20 January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference this became more or less official, while at the same time Soviet prisoners of war were mobilised for forced labour. Thus, racism or anti-Semitism was the essential driving force of the seemingly irrational policy of killing people who were able to work instead of letting them work. After the sustained effort of rendering Germany and the occupied territories Jew-free, all that was left, according to the logic of Nazism, was killing, whether by shooting, starvation, gassing or labour. This is at the core of what has

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often been called the rupture of civilisation (Zivilisationsbruch) embodied and realised by National Socialism. All this forms the background of the experiences with which Jews and Roma who survived slave labour had to come to grips. They and their relatives were marked out for murder as Jews or as gypsies – not as enemy soldiers, not as political or religious opponents, but on the basis of a racist label that not only contradicted every principle of tolerance enshrined in all modern constitutions and most Western European societies but also led to nprecedented industrialised murder. Those Jews and Roma of both sexes whom we interviewed count among the few who survived, but after the war they had to live alone, without most of their relatives. This was also a fate different from that of all other groups of victims, who could return to and be sustained by their families. Most Holocaust survivors, if they were not overwhelmed by depression or the effects of their traumas, tried to lead ‘ordinary lives’, often with an extreme lust for life, which for example in the DP (displaced person) camps resulted in an extremely high birth rate. Not wanting to live in Germany or Eastern Europe, many went to Israel, the US, Latin America, Canada or other countries of immigration, where they had problems with language and education. Those who stayed were often reluctant to reveal their Jewish origin to the outside world; some of our interview partners from Germany and Eastern Europe kept it a secret, and began to trace or to practise their Jewishness only in the 1990s, after the changes in the Soviet sphere of influence. Others were confirmed in their socialist convictions by the experience of Fascism and the Socialist and Communist resistance against it. There are also reports of other consequences, such as further traumatisation, long-term damage to health, difficult relationships and silence about one’s own experiences even within families. Many of the younger survivors felt that after these experiences they were too old ‘to go back to school’ and tried to find jobs right away. One question the project team debated was whether slave labour and Holocaust resulted in a secularisation of Jewishness. Obviously, in respect of this question there are two main trends. After persecution, some of the Jews we interviewed felt more Jewish than before and consequently turned towards religious Judaism again, some of the Eastern Europeans doing so at a very late stage, after the breakdown of the Soviet system. By contrast, other Jews were led away from Judaism, at least from Orthodox Judaism, by persecution, the death of parents and Jewish teachers, being torn out of familiar Jewish contexts, and by emigration and building up a new life in a new environment. Christoph Thonfeld describes how among Jewish interviewees a ‘cognitive incompatibility’ could be observed, as if their experiences in those days and their current judgments could not be reduced to a common de-

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nominator.41 Almost all Jews interviewed are haunted by questions such as ‘Why me? Why did I survive? Why not others?’ that sometimes result in the notion of ‘survival guilt’. The answer to the question ‘Why were we persecuted?’ is of course, ‘Because I am Jewish or was made Jewish.’ Sometimes this answer is felt to be particularly terrible, and sometimes it seems to offer a kind of consolation because it does not imply any kind of guilt but simply demonstrates Nazi racism.

Prisoners of War Soviet soldiers who were taken prisoner by the Germans and forced to labour did not receive compensation payments from Germany even sixty years later. They were considered soldiers, and as soldiers they were excluded from compensation, even the roughly 800,000 female prisoners of war. During the war they did not enjoy the protection of the Geneva Convention, unlike British and American prisoners of war. The official reason was that the Soviet Union had not signed the Geneva Convention. In the case of French and Yugoslav prisoners of war the Convention had limited application. Most Polish and French prisoners of war and Italian military internees were transferred to civilian status and employed for forced labour. About a thousand Red Army soldiers were transferred to civilian status, but more than two million had to do forced labour. As has already been pointed out, the provisioning and treatment of Soviet prisoners of war –particularly during the first year, from June 1941 to the spring of 1942 – was so disastrous that about two million of them died. Only then were millions of them deployed for forced labour in Germany and slightly better fed; initially they worked mainly building the camps in which they had to live, then for their own survival. In the context of this project twenty-three prisoners of war were interviewed. One example of those who survived the first year is Georg K. He not only survived, but was afterward active, in the Soviet Union and later in Russia, in supporting the interests of Soviet prisoners of war vis-à-vis Germany. Incidentally – like several of our Russian interview partners – he is a great storyteller. Georg K. was taken prisoner twice. Near Jelnia I became a prisoner of war for the second time, came to Camp Wjasma. It was one of the most terrible camps; although it was a fortified camp the conditions there were only slightly different from those in the field camp. After two or three weeks I was seriously undernourished, I swayed in the wind. Winter started, November, it was cold, and we lived in the unheated rooms of an old barracks. Here I learned that cannibalism doesn’t only happen in books. In this camp there were cases of cannibalism. … When spring began, the Soviet troops started a new offensive, also in the direction of Wjasma, and the Germans started evacuating the camp. I happened to get on the first train from this camp. We were

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driven to Minsk, to a camp which had become tragically famous, to Camp Masyukovshina. It was established in a former barracks, barbed wire and watchtowers with machine guns all around. I don’t remember the first time of my stay there, I arrived there half unconsciously. I woke up in a block for people suffering from typhoid, which was fenced off with barbed wire. Many were ill from typhoid, only a few of them survived. Hunger and typhoid did their work.

Later Georg K. was transported to Germany to Camp Stukenbrok. The closer the end of the war was, the friendlier the German guards became. ‘Georg, write me a paper that as a guard I was loyal to you, that I didn’t beat you or harass you. All right, I was forced to guard you, but apart from this I was loyal to you.’ – ‘What do you need a paper like that for?’ – ‘Your people will be coming, the war is over …’ – that was already the beginning of 1945 – ‘… or the Allies will be coming, then I can show the paper to them and exonerate myself.’ We started writing letters of indulgence. Of course this way the Germans’ attitude towards us changed, too. This way there developed strange kinds of resistance which have been written down nowhere, which have been recorded nowhere.

Like many Soviet interviewees, Georg K. was and still is proud to have defeated the Germans during the Great Patriotic War. With him, too, we find the distinction between ‘individual’ and ‘system’ referred to above. The Russian civilian worker Taissa T.42 speaks of differences between civilian workers in the village and at the factory, and between them and French prisoners of war, who were treated differently from Soviet ones. At that time [at the end of the war – A. v. P.] we didn’t know anything. We were a closed circle. We hadn’t talked to anyone, knew only our work and our barracks. They didn’t let us go anywhere, because the factory was a war factory, after all … , and that’s why they watched us. But the people working with the farmers, they were allowed to move freely and to talk to them.

She also tells of her friendship with a French prisoner of war. In Germany she had to work at a factory that had been newly erected near a village; at this factory and in the camp that belonged to it she was treated ‘not well’ until shortly before the end of the war. This changed after March 1945. Suddenly she and her workmates were allowed to go to the wood to pick berries. The foreman, ‘who wanted to be master and us to be his slaves, he became completely silent’. Sometimes they were also allowed to go to the neighbouring village, where there was a pub, along with other, French prisoners of war. These captured Frenchmen moved freely throughout the village. And our girls started making friends with these prisoners of war. … In March ‘45 I had already met this Frenchman. How did we talk at all? [she laughs]

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Well, what should I say, partly, that is some words, in German, some words in Russian and some in French, well, and in the way dumb people talk. It’s pretty difficult to talk to foreigners at all. … In May suddenly we heard airplanes roaring and firing and then, then something incredible happened. Suddenly tanks were coming, motorbikes and everything. The Americans had already occupied the village where the Frenchmen were [sighs], and the Frenchmen came running behind the tanks. And the section where we lived was already rumbling, and they occupied it, the policemen had gone, everybody was gone, we were all on our own [sighs]. And the Frenchmen came running to us, to our barracks … Oh, and we embraced each other and kissed, we were free. And then the Americans occupied the dining room and started playing some kind of music, the kind Americans usually have: tam, tam, tam, ta, … somehow it was … , well, it was such happy music, we heard drums for the first time.

Taissa T. was taken back to Ukraine at the end of May. She was one of those who were subject only to a brief investigation of their wartime history; unlike many returnees, she encountered sympathy everywhere. She attended university with the goal of becoming a French teacher, but she was told: ‘You know, over here French is rarely taught, the main thing is German.’ – Oh my, I don’t want German! I don’t want that! Even today I remember it as a language of cursing and swearing – ‘Hände hoch und Schwein rein!’ I couldn’t do that, I didn’t want that. I couldn’t stand German, no, no, neither German nor the Germans, I couldn’t! ‘I want French.’ ‘But French is very unusual, and where, in which cities? Over here people learn mostly German’.

Slave and Forced Labourers from Allied and Occupied Countries In Eastern Europe during the postwar period, differences in respect of treatment during the war between forced labourers from countries allied to Germany and those from ‘enemy countries’ were blurred. But these differences were in fact considerable; today, for example, there is a debate in Bulgaria on whether its wartime status as an ally of Germany had resulted in fewer Jews and Roma being murdered there than in occupied countries.43 However, from 1942 to 1944 all Jewish males between the ages of twenty and forty-six in Bulgaria had to report for forced labour. They were assigned to labour groups (100 to 300 people) that were concentrated into twelve so-called battalions. Also in Bulgaria Jews had to wear the Star of David, their mobility was restricted and most of their businesses were closed down. The files of the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry indicate that the decision to ‘resettle’ Jews ‘in the East’, taken under pressure from Germany, was finally accepted by Bulgaria but realised only very reluctantly after 1943.44 But the situation was different in the regions of Thrace and Macedonia, which had been given to Bulgaria dur-

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ing the war.45 Moreover, Bulgaria provided a comparatively small number of forced labourers; forced labour in Germany was imposed primarily on university students studying there who did not agree with their government’s pro-Fascist policy. How far a country maintained an independent policy towards the German Reich may not have depended only on whether or not it was allied to Germany. Slovakia’s status as a ‘protectorate’ meant that after 1942 the Slovak authorities deported 57,628 Slovak Jews to Poland, of whom probably only 800 returned after the war.46 Although at first most forced labourers from Slovakia had special rights and were sent to Germany by Slovakian job centres, the more urgent the demands of the German Reich became in the course of the war, the more the Slovaks lost their special rights. Whether the Foreign Office and the SS were able to enforce their policy towards Jews in an allied country probably depended most of all on that country’s strategic importance for the military and civilian leaders of the ‘Third Reich’, what means of enforcement were available, and the extent to which the country’s elites themselves favoured a policy of anti-Semitism or one of elementary justice towards Jews and Roma.47 The longer the war went on, the more resistance there was on the part of the governments or elites of other allied states against the Jewish policy of the ‘Third Reich’. Another special case – as already described – is represented by the Italian military internees, but also by those French forced labourers who had to go to Germany under Marshal Petain’s Vichy regime, in accordance with its contracts with the Reich.48 Among them were Elie P., who started an apprenticeship as an assistant pharmacist at the age of thirteen, although he was musically gifted and really wanted to be a professional saxophone player: ‘At the beginning of February 1943, I received my call-up papers for work with the Organisation Todt. But I didn’t go at once. I tried to stay. Only unfortunately the city council did not provide us with food ration cards.’ He obeyed his second call-up to the larger, neighbouring town of Soisson because his parents hoped that this would mean he would not have to go to Germany. Being a Christian, he saw this as a test of his faith. But then he had to go to Germany after all, to join the Organisation Todt (OT) working on the reconstruction of the bombed Möhne Dam. ‘We were under the OT headquarters in Hagen. They also sent our wages to France. We received only fifteen Marks, the rest was given to our families.’ Work was hard, the camp uncomfortable, food in short supply: What was really bad was that with the OT we got soup only once a day. One litre of soup with a small ration of bread. There we suffered enor-

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mously, most of all from hunger. I suffered also from the work being so hard, from the more or less bad treatment by OT leaders who were pretty hard people, pretty rough. Then also very much from the cold during winter time, from the living conditions in the barracks – but of course that was the fate of all deported workers. Everybody was equal. … On December 2nd our camp was completely destroyed [by bombs]. When we came out of our shelter … We put out the fire. Some comrades burned to death. There were seventeen dead.49

He states that there was passive resistance in the form of working as ineffectively as possible or even sabotage: ‘After all, 15,000 of our comrades were shot or killed for sabotage or open resistance.’ When the war was over, he and his Catholic comrades held a thanksgiving service. Then he returned home, worked as an assistant pharmacist, ‘then among other things as the manager of a cinema and as the headmaster of a music school’. Later he and all those who had been called up from Vichy France found it difficult to be recognised as forced labourers on the same basis as those who had been recruited from occupied France. Even today, he says, there is hidden resistance against us being recognised. Whenever something like a project for a new law is started, something happens – bang! – there, there’s something like a wall … because it was the Vichy government in Hitler’s service which sent us workers to Germany – to the enemy. … But we contributed to the Résistance, to resistance. We resisted passively – with more or less substantial means, but we were resisting. Thus, we were made to go – conscripted, in some cases even arrested in the course of raids, but with our families under threat and no possibility of staying anywhere else.

Once again, it becomes obvious here how much the long-term neglect of research on the history of the Vichy government and the problem of collaboration has been and continues to be at the expense of forced labourers from this part of France – a fundamental problem of the remembrance policy and remembrance culture of postwar France. The situation was similar in countries that were allied to the German Reich, where, after an early wave of convictions in the immediate postwar period, the theme of collaboration played only a minor role. This problem has a different quality in Israel, where the policy of Jewish Councils in the occupied countries, particularly in the ghettos, has been given close attention (as it has been by Jewish scholars in the United States). Their policy towards the Nazis developed under enormous pressure and was also based on the hope that work, whatever the conditions under which it was carried out, might prevent murder or deportation to

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the extermination camps or might at least postpone this until liberation by the Allies – again in vain.

On the Validity of the Memories of Interviewees Among German historians (less so in Anglo-American scholarship), there is still controversy over the value of supplementing the documentary record with qualitative biographical research, memories and life-history narratives, when the objective is a reconstruction of historical data, facts and processes. The members of the research group on forced labour share the view that memories are sources above all for the investigation of the way in which history is processed, rather than for historical data as such. This is where this method has its main strength – that is, for example, if the effects of certain experiences – such as the traumatic experiences in the period of National Socialism and the Second World War, socialisation (e.g.) within Jewish milieus, or education and its consequences, for example in youth groups – are what we want to know about, or, more generally, when the object of study is the a-synchronicity between a break in the political system and the ideas and orientation of a society or the persistence ‘beyond their time’ of attitudes characteristic of old political systems and their influence on new political systems and societies. At the beginning of our documentation project we saw the strengths of oral history less in the empirical reconstruction of forced labour than in its capacity to illuminate processed history and the ways in which the consequences of certain experiences, including forced labour, are reworked to make them ‘usable’ in the construction of later life. Precisely because of this, we now have to correct ourselves slightly and acknowledge oral history’s value for the reconstruction of historical processes as such. The former forced labourers were able to remember with surprising precision the names of companies and places, facts and events, sometimes even dates. This may be because, on the one hand, their time in Germany fell during a clearly demarcated period of their lives and was of great significance, or because (on the other) the possibility of gaining compensation meant they had to find out about the circumstances in which their experiences took place and thus exchange information with each other. Moreover, many of them had applied for recognition before, for example to the Soviet authorities. In addition, a significant proportion of research on the concentration camps, particularly the early research, is based on memories or eyewitness reports and initially had to be based on individual memories because otherwise the only sources on record would have been materials and documents produced by the state or SS institutions, that is, the perpetra-

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tors. Later, increasing research on specific topics was able to substantiate key elements of these subjective memories, large numbers of which were recorded and analysed. These memories also put historians on the track of many other questions and thus stimulated further research, confirming the heuristic value of eyewitness reports, to which I have already referred. Memories were similarly valuable for compiling lists of names and death-rolls of those persecuted and murdered under Nazi (and Soviet) dictatorship in Western and Eastern Europe, for research on POW camps in various countries,50 for the investigation of Soviet camps in various Soviet republics,51 such as the studies carried out by the Memorial Society in the successor states of the Soviet Union (and also in the former Soviet zone of ocupation in Germany52), for migration research in the relevant countries and for many other fields of research in contemporary history. But precisely because there are considerable differences in research on slave and forced labour depending on the sources used, there are also differences that reflect differences in interest, generation, political or religious orientation, ethnicity or even identification with certain groups of victims or perpetrators. In general, the experience with subjective (memory) sources may be summarised as follows: the more intimately a report is linked to the reporter’s own experiences, the more concrete the questions and answers are, the closer the connection is to the event and the closer the connection is to the speaker’s own biography, the more valid the statements are.53 The other way round is also true: the more abstract the questions, the further away from individual experience, the less connected to the speaker’s own biography, then the less valid for the purpose of historical reconstruction are subjective testimonies of memory such as interviews, diaries, photo albums, letters and the like. At the same time, it is true that where the sources are incomplete, the methodologies incommensurate, and the pressure for legitimation, (self-) justification or exculpation strong, and/or where there is a high degree of emotional or religious identification (including with the victims of persecution), the outcomes of the research will match the intentions of the researchers and be fiercely defended against one another. Here, a large number and variety of interviews about the same events is unquestionably helpful. What is always essential is the use wherever possible of a variety of sources and methodological approaches. If a variety of methods is applied, if the contexts and influence of different remembrance cultures are taken into account, the results of both, oral history as well as conventional historical research, will achieve a high level of plausibility. But for the study of the ways in which the various aspects of historical developments are processed by individuals, subjective testimonies are the main sources.

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Remembrance Cultures Ways of Narrating Narratives on slave and forced labour not only differ from one another in terms of the actual extent of persecution or the nature or type of work carried out in town or country, but are also marked by the cultures from which they come or to which they return. Our interviews display marked differences among individuals in respect of narrative style, and there also seem to be narrative or literary patterns specific to the cultures from which the speakers come, for example in the balance between the visual and the verbal, the specific and the general, example and precept, and between delight in the vivid plasticity of the narrative and commitment to a didactic intent. In the context of a summary like this we can only point to the fact that the biographical narratives we collected are a rich treasure for literary studies, linguistics, autobiography research or ethnology – not only for the historical sciences. Numbering among our interview partners are real storytellers who sometimes make it difficult to decide whether they are more interested in the art of storytelling or in conveying accurate information, or both. After having looked through interviews for this and other projects, I have the impression that such artists of storytelling are found particularly often in Eastern Europe, and especially among speakers of Russian. On this, let me cite one example of many, the example of how a Russian prisoner of war and forced labourer tries to bring life into the dry and highly compressed enumeration of the points he thinks are important by the near-literary account of an exceptional moment: Half your life fits within thirty minutes. Which experiences from imprisonment in the Minsk camp am I supposed to tell? There were astonishing attempts to escape with the help of military vehicles. Weapons were smuggled into the camp to prepare a rebellion. Soviet flyers appeared, and in the camp a handwritten newspaper was published, to which for example the author Zlobin contributed. There were lots of things, but I want to talk about a sparrow. I was lying in the shack, right next to the door. Through the door a sparrow came flying, sat down in a corner, and from this corner directly onto my hand. I felt the trembling and the warmth of this bird. And I thought: ‘It’s hard enough for me, a strong, big human being – how is this little sparrow going to get along here?’ Full of envy, my fellow-prisoners were looking towards me: this piece of meat had flown directly into my hand. But I released the sparrow. One ‘Tsachip’, out the door it flew, and it was gone. Maybe this sparrow showed us that we’ll survive, that we’ll defeat all these difficulties and survive imprisonment, because we still have the strength to help others. (Georg K.)

The cultures of origin of our interviewees possessed their own literary forms, epic tales of heroes and victims or myths of national defence (like

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stories from the Jewish diaspora or, completely different, from Russia’s Patriotic War against occupation by Napoleon) that furnished templates or models for narratives from the time of Nazi persecution and forced labour. Beyond this, slave and forced labourers who returned home, or those who had been forced into emigration and recently liberated, were offered very different ways of coming to terms with their experiences by the societies and governments of their respective home countries. These ranged from fundamental support, special access to material assistance and health care and special institutions of solidarity, which also collected testimony, through indifference amid the general postwar suffering, to rejection arising from the general suspicion that all forced labourers had been collaborators or even traitors. Of course, compassionate recognition or brusque rejection elicited explicit and implicit reactions from those concerned. For example, in the context of interviews with former Soviet prisoners of war in Germany, it came to my attention that there is a pattern of interviewees telling of having been unable to fight, half-buried or unconscious at the point when they were taken prisoner, so that they were not able to use their pistol any more or to commit suicide. For, as some explain elsewhere during the interview, there was the order, at least for officers, to save one bullet for oneself, to die rather than be taken prisoner. As is well known, there also developed ‘victims’ groups’ during the postwar period, where people were told about the fate of others, listened to stories, told about themselves, compared themselves and their own fates as well as their own narratives to those of others. This certainly resulted in their own narratives being influenced or even in taking over other people’s stories (which, by the way, does not necessarily mean that they are reporting something ‘untrue’). Moreover, there was and still is competition among the different victims of the National Socialist dictatorship,54 and later also and particularly between the victims of Nazism and the victims of the Soviet dictatorship. This competition among victims has been very different in the various countries, depending on the respective political systems and particularly on the degree of rejection or acceptance experienced by forced labourers in society and politics, but also as a reflection of the country’s status as enemy or ally of Nazi Germany. For Germany one may say that ‘Auschwitz’ became a touchstone, the symbol of the most terrible degree of persecution, which meant that by comparison to it, or to surviving Jews from the extermination camps, survivors of other types of ordeals – such as deserters condemned by Wehrmacht tribunals, or those who were imprisoned in Soviet special camps after the war without having been Nazis – sometimes felt like ‘secondclass victims’. With Auschwitz as a touchstone, stories about one’s own

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persecution were and are often implicitly and sometimes even explicitly compared to the threat of being gassed. The state of Israel and the memorial centres and historical institutes there enabled the survivors of the Holocaust, who often had had to do slave labour, to give testimony on their persecution. They did this, among other reasons, for the purpose of researching the Holocaust, to keep the memory of the murdered alive and to erect a monument to them; moreover, many survivors had remained silent about the deadly threats, humiliations, loss of relatives. The examples of others were intended to encourage them to tell their stories. Yad Vashem in Jerusalem has been working for more than thirty years. In the United States, too there have been a variety of interviews in the course of the past three decades, for example those conducted by the Fortunoff Archives at Yale University, by the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., or by Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles. All this has surely increased the victims´ self-confidence and thus also their readiness to speak about their own fate. In Germany, Holocaust survivors were interviewed at every memorial to national-socialist persecution and every history workshop, many historical institutes (including ours at the Fernuniversität Hagen) have conducted interviews and private individuals like the filmmaker Loretta Walz have created significant video archives, in this case on former female inmates of the Ravensbrück concentration camp.55 Around the world there developed a culture of giving testimony on the Shoah, focused on persecution and a narrative culture of ‘sacrifice’. Notwithstanding the fact that this culture was and is of high significance for research on the Holocaust, for Jewish identity and for the conviction of the perpetrators,56 there developed a progressive anxiety that survivors might be restricted to their victim status, a development that would not do justice to the variety of their former and later lives. In the context of this documentation and research project the history of persecution is understood as a segment of a whole biography. This did not go undebated, as some were anxious that attention to the prehistory and aftermath might water down the central position of persecution by National Socialism in the context of the interviews. This was not true, not least because our narrators themselves often relate the history of their persecution to their later biographies – whether to long-term effects on their health or to later difficulties with starting relationships or speaking about the history of their persecution. Also, skills acquired during the period of persecution are mentioned again and again, for example the ability, learned in the camp, to judge one’s own strengths and weaknesses, or to compare later life crises to the past horrors and see their true (i.e. relatively minor), significance.

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Before our project began there was also a fear that the postwar dictatorships of Eastern Europe might move to the foreground and challenge the uniqueness of the Shoah. In practice, this kind of ‘relativisation’ did seem to be present at some points because former Eastern European forced labourers had to come to grips with the experience of two dictatorships, but at the same time the history of persecution during the period of National Socialism was not watered down. Quite the contrary: if, in the Soviet Union after 1945, a former forced labourer like Maria K. was denied vocational training because she was suspected of being a traitor and with her wooden leg had to work at a cardboard packaging factory alongside criminals for forty years, then in my experience the significance of persecution during the period of National Socialism is actually increased by this injustice in the Soviet Union. But I understand that there may be different opinions on this, and in some countries of Eastern Europe today there are examples of the National Socialist dictatorship being trivialised by comparison with the Soviet one. This is less the case in private narratives than in public museums and media, as our project demonstrates.

A Rag Rug of Remembrance Cultures of the Second World War In terms of cultural memory, or more exactly, in the cultural memories of the different countries of both Eastern and Western Europe, the United States, Israel and other countries of immigration, the role of forced labourers in the postwar period differs greatly. Depending on the opportunities they were given to articulate, on the degree of acceptance or rejection they experienced and on the ways in which their experiences were mixed up with those of others – or dominated by them, as in the case of the Shoah or the Soviet Union’s heroic victory in the Great Patriotic War – a shift of emphasis occurred in the memories of contemporary witnesses and their retrospective judgment on forced labour under National Socialism.57 Predominant for decades in countries of the former Soviet Union58 was the state-determined ‘policy on the past’,59 which emphasised the heroic role of the Red Army, the Communist partisans, and the political leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and their allied parties during the Great Patriotic war against the German Reich. Although this attitude is understandable after victory over an aggressor who was felt to be superior, one effect of the policy was that any less heroic elements of this war went by the board: for example the rule of dictatorship and the gigantic losses of Red Army soldiers, or the crimes committed during their advance to other countries, most of all in Eastern

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Europe. The extermination of European Jews was also subsumed under this predominance of heroic fighting, and the story of the suffering of Soviet prisoners of war60 was as neglected as that of forced labourers, even when they were not treated as potential traitors. Forced labourers were refused any kind of recognition by the Soviet government under Stalin. Having returned to the USSR, most of them went through the so-called filtration camps that investigated possible collaboration in Germany but were released after a short time. Others had to do forced labour again and came home at a later time, a third group had to go on at once to serve with the Red Army, sometimes for years, and a fourth group was put into detention camps. The director of the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow, Sergej Mironenko, estimates that no more than 10 per cent of homecoming forced labourers had to stay longer than three months at filtration, labour or detention camps, but that those who had to serve in the Red Army or were ordered to labour far from their homes probably did so for longer periods.61 Still, most of them felt that in principle they were already suspected of being collaborators or traitors upon returning and were deeply disappointed and worried. But even those countries in Eastern Europe that recognised forced labourers, or at least did not suspect them of having been collaborators, marginalised them with their remembrance cultures. Cultures of adoring Communist fighters and partisans as heroes were predominant. In Poland, by contrast with the Soviet Union, neither returning prisoners of war nor forced labourers were treated as potential traitors and collaborators;62 the situation was similar in Czechoslovakia (and thus also in the former Slovakian Republic,63 a former ally of the German Reich that had just been dissolved again). In Yugoslavia, some of the forced labourers were even equated with partisans in several respects. Slovenia, however, differed during the early postwar period: during the Dachau trials there, it was precisely liberated forced labourers who were sentenced as collaborators or perpetrators.64 Otherwise, in Socialist Yugoslavia there were ways to take pride in having been victorious over National Socialist Germany that in most cases included forced labourers, whereas in the Soviet Union the pride in soldiers was contrasted to the recognition of prisoners of war and forced labourers as having been persecuted by National Socialism. But it was not only states that had been allies of the Soviet Union during the war against the German Reich that belonged to the Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe during the postwar period. Also within the Eastern bloc were those that had waged war against the Soviet Union together with the German Reich, such as Bulgaria, Slovakia, Croatia and others.65 Nowadays, it is astonishing that the predominant image of

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the heroic Soviet army and the Communist Party was enforced in these countries as well and for decades determined the policies of history. In my opinion, the success of this Communist ‘master narrative’ in Croatia, Bulgaria and the like, and also in occupied and divided Slovakia, cannot be explained by the lone fact that parties allied with the Soviet Union grasped power there after 1945. Also influential was the fact that after a short but definitely harsh period of punishment a tacit, almost secret non-official amnesty of former enemies was granted in the ruling ideology and practice of the state. This meant that former enemies were living in these states and were even able to make restricted careers if they did not openly support or speak out for another view of history. Thus, precisely the predominant image of the history of heroic soldiers and Communist partisans made inner peace possible in these former enemy states of the Soviet Union – at least for the limited time of one or two generations. It was not only in Eastern Europe that the image of the history of the Second World War during the first years of the postwar period was dominated by the heroism of the war against the National Socialist German Reich and resistance against fascism. Similar ideas predominated in most Western European countries too, while some less heroic aspects came second. In France, for example, the role of de Gaulle’s government in exile and the actions of the Résistance dominated the images of French remembrance culture for decades. Yet while the bulk of the French people had had to live and cope under German occupation or in Marshal Petain’s Vichy France, only a very small number of them had been resistance fighters. Ultimately, however, collaboration, adaptation and opportunism were less suitable for building up the national identity that had to be regained.66 It was even more difficult to integrate complicity and collaboration with the extermination of French Jews into this image. In this as well, the ‘master narrative’ of Résistance and government in exile was helpful – intentionally or not – to those who had collaborated with German occupiers, had committed crimes against humanity or had adapted. Only later – after some early cases of punishment in the immediate postwar period – was there a debate on collaboration in France. But even today, for example in the case of forced labourers, differences are drawn between those who were transported to Germany from occupied France and those who were taken to Germany from Vichy France while having French passports. The former are treated as Nazi victims or members of the resistance movement, the latter are not. There are similar contradictions in other countries of Western Europe, for example in Denmark, where there were alliances with Nazi Germany, in Norway, whose forced collaboration government under Quisling provided the eponym for collaboration regimes, or in Belgium. Particularly remarkable is Italy, which was an ally of the German Reich at least un-

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til the separate truce of 8 September 1943, but which nevertheless in the postwar period emphasised resistance and the overthrowing of Mussolini’s Fascism, although resistance had been rather weak and initially King Vittorio Emanuele III and the new government had to flee from the Germans. The really heroic achievement was that of the bulk of Italian soldiers who then did not take sides with the German Wehrmacht as they were encouraged to do almost everywhere by the German armed forces, but instead chose captivity and as ‘Italian military internees’ had to do forced labour in Germany and the occupied territories. Compared to the story of resistance, of removing Mussolini from office and of declaring war on Germany, their history was also marginalised.67 Spain has only recently begun to deal with the history of the Franco regime and its victims. For years after Franco’s death and the introduction of democracy under a constitutional monarchy, the history of the victims of the civil war and of dictatorship was hardly addressed at all. Now, since the passage of the ‘Remembrance Act’ by the Spanish parliament on 12 December 2006, this is supposed to be changed.68 Austria is mostly forgotten in this context, although it was the destination of every tenth person taken to Germany for forced labour,69 a total of at least one million.70 The concentration camp of Mauthausen with all its subcamps and its notorious quarry was one of the worst concentration camps for slave labour. There also were institutions of persecution that were headed by Austrian SS members, such as the leadership of the euthanasia programmes by ‘T4’.71 For decades Austria was able to hide behind the policy that the country had been the first victim of National Socialist expansion, a policy that was initiated early on by the Allies in Moscow and subsequently supported. Only the debate in 1986–87 on the past of Kurt Waldheim, UN Secretary-General (1976–81) and Austrian Federal President (1986–92), resulted in a more differentiated view. Also in Germany itself, particularly slave and forced labourers were not recognised for decades and had to fight in vain for compensation even longer, as did the ‘politicals’ or sentenced former deserters who had been forced into labour. It took almost a full generation for the first changes to be made in this respect, and two generations until recognition and compensation could be politically enforced.72 In stark contrast to this is the high degree of recognition in Israel and the United States – and to a limited degree also in countries of immigration – through their own organisations and remembrance policies. In summary this means that even today, if one looks at memories of the Second World War, the Holocaust and resistance, or of prisoners of war and forced labourers, Europe looks like a colourful rag rug: earlier fronts of the war still resound, different political systems and postwar societies have created different remembrance cultures in different regions,

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a practice that increased with the Cold War, and the respective governments use the history and the memory of the war for a ‘policy on the past’. Remembrance cultures in Western Europe are much more split than the ‘policies on the past’ of the postwar period suggest. Their main narrative of the anti-fascist war and of resistance was – to reiterate – very successful because it covered up the less heroic aspects of the war, collaboration and participation in other crimes and thus made at least superficial reconciliation possible for postwar societies. But underneath these policies on history remain other, covered, informal, particularly family-related memories that now conflict with the official ones – particularly in Eastern Europe, though not only there. And it is unclear which ‘alliances of remembrance’ are now effective in Eastern and Western Europe, and in politically united Europe, by new generations at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Cultural Memory or Split Remembrance Cultures? The very different kinds of remembrance cultures through which the wartime experience of slave and forced labour is variously summarised, processed and contextualised are upheld not only by the respective governments but also by numerous contingents among the societies of the relevant countries. Germany itself is the perfect example of this: it is a country with split remembrance cultures concerning the ‘Third Reich’ or National Socialism, the war, the Soviet zone of occupation and the SED dictatorship. These have lasted for decades between, among others, East and West,73 parents and children, conservatives and emerging students’ movements, German prisoners of war and victims of National Socialism, Jewish survivors and victims of Soviet arbitrariness. These contradictions have also resulted in different hierarchies of victims in the GDR and FRG. Whereas in the Soviet zone of occupation and the GDR Communist fighters against fascism were particularly respected, ‘only-victims’ experienced a lower degree of recognition and support. During the postwar period in the West, on the other hand, Communist resistance fighters, who made up the biggest resistance group in numbers, were considered victims to only a limited degree or not at all; sometimes they were even criminalised, and not infrequently they were left without any compensation. In contrast to this, it was the members of the armed forces of 20 July 1944 who were particularly appreciated in the FRG, just as the opposition of young Christian people, the ‘Weiße Rose’ (White Rose) was esteemed in Munich. These split remembrance cultures with different hierarchies of victims are more than obvious in Germany, but they are also observed in other societies and perhaps are even the ‘normal case’ in the twentieth century

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and perhaps in the 21st century as well. They become particularly visible where National Socialism is embedded in the experience of double dictatorship under National Socialism and Stalinism (as is the case almost in all of Eastern Europe, particularly Poland, in the Baltic states,74 the Czech Republic, and also Hungary), in vivid contrast to the situation in Western Europe or Israel.

Internationalisation of the Holocaust: Nationalisation of Forced Labour? Throughout the project on slave and forced labour presented here, one thesis has become more and more obvious: that an astonishing internationalisation of the depiction of the Holocaust is to be observed, along with a similarly remarkable ‘nationalisation’ of the experience of war and forced labour. The models of Yad Vashem or the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., find expression also at museums and exhibitions on the Shoah in Eastern Europe. True, also in this context some national particularities must be taken into consideration.75 But forced labourers have very specifically been dealt with by public presentations at the national level, as well as through classification, in very different ways, as having been persecuted by National Socialism if compared to Communist resistance fighters. At some museums in the Baltic states and Hungary, the Soviet-Stalinist dictatorship is sometimes condemned to the same degree as the German National Socialist one, if not more strongly,76 which sometimes results in friction vis-à-vis treatment of the Holocaust – for example in Budapest, where the sentencing of collaborators of National Socialist extermination policy during the postwar period is treated as a Stalinist judicial crime. Independent of ‘big politics’ in the East and the West after 1945, it was personally significant to all who had endured slave and forced labour to be taken seriously as victims, to be recognised and helped to cope with their past – or not. Being recognised as a victim alleviates the pain of one’s own suffering and the mourning for fellow sufferers. Recognition implies a hope that their suffering was not in vain, that maybe their societies will learn from this past, even if they know that their experiences became elements of self-presentation and stabilisation for subsequent political systems, in both the positive and the negative sense. Recognition means also that their personal biographies gain significance when contemporary history, politics, memorial centres and teachers are interested in their experiences. Vice versa, one is able to get an idea of what it means to forced labourers and other persecuted groups alike, when all this is lacking. It is in this sense that we understand our project, and we hope that our documentation and research will contribute to supporting the posi-

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tion of those who were transported to Germany and the occupied territories for slave and forced labour. What we wish to create is a memorial of quite a special kind – made not of stone or bronze, but of their own narrations and biographies.

NOTES 1. About 700,000 Italian military internees were deported to Germany for forced labour after the armistice of 25 September 1943; see the account by Doris Felsen and Viviana Frenkel in this volume. In contrast to this Mark Spoerer, apart from Ulrich Herbert the most important author on the history of forced labour during the Second World War, speaks of 495,000 Italian ‘prisoners of war’, 460,000 of whom had been transferred to civilian status. Mark Spoerer, Zwangsarbeit unter dem Hakenkreuz (Stuttgart and Munich 2001), 223; and Lutz Niethammer, ‘Von der Zwangsarbeit im Dritten Reich zur Stiftung ‘Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft“’, in Michael Jansen and Günter Saathoff (eds), ‘Gemeinsame Verantwortung und moralische Pflicht’. Abschlussbericht zu den Auszahlungsprogrammen der Stiftung ‘Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft’ (Göttingen 2007), 23. 2. Christian Streit, who has been doing pioneering work on the history of prisoners of war, particularly Soviet ones, for thirty years (Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941–1945 [Stuttgart 1978]), has recently repeated these figures and added that by 1 February 1942 about two million Red Army soldiers had already died in captivity. See his paper on forced labour by Soviet prisoners of war delivered at the Arbeitskammer, Vienna, on 28 July 2007, in the context of the Holocaust Studies Conference ‘Arbeit und Vernichtung (Labour and Extermination)’. The papers from this conference can be listened to and read in their original version at www.vwi.ac.at/aktagung/ starttagung_ak.htm, retrieved March 21, 2010. 3. Only a few thousand Soviet prisoners of war were transferred to civilian status. On the whole, of about 4.6 million prisoners of war employed for forced labour, 3,425,000 are thought to have survived (Spoerer, Zwangsarbeit unter dem Hakenkreuz, 259). 4. Spoerer, Zwangsarbeit unter dem Hakenkreuz, 222. In his paper ‘Arbeit und Vernichtung. Über Konvergenzen und Widersprüche nationalsozialistischer Politik’ delivered to the ‘Arbeit und Vernichtung’ conference (see note 2), Ulrich Herbert is clearly assuming lower figures: five to six million civilian labourers. 5. As reported by Husnija A. from Bosnia, who lives in Berlin as a ‘tolerated’ foreigner today. See the essay by Birgit Mair on Bosnian Roma in this volume. 6. Organisation Todt (OT), named after the former Inspector General of German Road Organisation (1933) and later Minister of the Reich for Armament and Ammunition (1940), Dr Fritz Todt. The OT was in charge of maintaining and reconstructing plants that were vital for war and infrastructure. Up to 800,000 forced labourers are said to have worked for the OT, sometimes under extreme working conditions.

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7. On this see my essay on forced labour in Germany in this volume. 8. Reinhard F. from Aschaffenburg, Germany, interviewed in 2005 by Alexander von Plato and Elena Dantschenko (camera). 9. Michael Zimmermann during a lecture at the Institute of History and Biography in the context of the series ‘Liebenscheider Gespräche’ on 13 September 2006. 10. Gelenau was a women’s subcamp of Flossenbürg, also called Venusberg, is often mixed up with Gellenau, a subcamp of Gro Rosen. 11. E.g. Olga D., who came from a territory that until 1939 had been part of Poland and was then annexed by the Soviet Union; her father had told her about the shooting of Jews among their neighbours. In 1942 she was deported to Germany. At the beginning of 1945 she was liberated by the Red Army; shortly afterwards she was raped by a Soviet officer. She came to a filtration camp and was again interrogated in 1947. From that point on it was clear to her that she was going to be ‘blamed for something’. 12. See the essay by Irina Scherbakowa in this volume. 13. The interview with Wladimir S. was conducted by Alexander Dalhouski (Belarus). 14. On this see the essay ‘Women’s Biographies and Women’s Memory of War’ by Olga Nikitina, Elena Rozhdestvenskaya and Victoria Semenova in this volume. 15. Ibid. 16. On this see also Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde (Hamburg 1999), 131. 17. Interview with Michail G., conducted by Alexander Dalhouski. In the ghetto of Dolginowo, district of Wilejka, on 12 April 1942 and then in June 1942, two thousand Jews were shot. National Archive, Minsk: Stock 4, List 29, File 112, S. 456–457; B. 845, V. 1, File 63, S. 17; National Archive, Russia: St. 7021, L. 89, File 7, S. 27–35, 105. See also the essay by Alexander Dalhouski in this volume. 18. See Hellmuth Bauer’s application to the Foundation ‘Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft’, Ms. 2004, 2. 19. This is partly true also for Nori Möding‘s and my own works on the Hitler Youth or the BdM (Association of German Girls): Nori Möding and Alexander von Plato, ‘Siegernadeln: Jugendkarrieren in HJ und BDM’, in Deutscher Werkbund e.V. and the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart (eds), Schock und Schöpfung: Jugendästhetik im 20. Jahrhundert (Darmstadt and Neuwied 1986), 292–301; Nori Möding: ‘Ich muß immer irgendwo engagiert sein. Fragen Sie mich blofl nicht, warum? Überlegungen zu Sozialisationserfahrungen von Mädchen in NS-Organisationen’, in Lutz Niethammer and Alexander von Plato (eds), ‘Wir kriegen jetzt andere Zeiten’: Auf der Suche nach der Erfahrung des Volkes in nachfaschistischen Ländern (Lebensgeschichte und Sozialkultur im Ruhrgebiet, vol. 3) (Berlin 1985), 256–304; Alexander von Plato, ‘The Hitler Youth Generation and its Role in the Postwar German States’, in Mark Roseman (ed.), Generations in Conflict: Youth Rebellion and Generation Formation in Modern Germany 1770–1968 (Cambridge 1995), 210–226. 20. In the course of several projects with groups of visitors in Germany, people asked for the addresses of certain Germans who had helped them; on two occasions we were indeed able to arrange such meetings for the Hagener Historisches Centrum. 21. See, among others, the interviews with Maria K. (Russia), Josef B. (Ukraine), today in Germany, or with Julijana P (Serbia/Montenegro). 22. A Ukrainian civilian worker in Kiev said: ‘The German woman was easy to get’, but at the same time emphasised that as he grew older his original contempt was

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25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

36.

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replaced by understanding for such women, for they too had been lonely and young during the war. In conversations with me on 17 and 18 August 2007. See for example the interview with Belarusian Iwan G. from Baranovitshi (then Poland). A forced labourer in Salzgitter, he escaped several times before finding refuge with a farmer. After 1945 he was conscripted to the Red Army, then to a metal plant near Gorki, and as late as in 1948 he returned to his home, which now was a part of Belarus. Similarly, the Roma Marija G. from Postavy escaped to the woods because her village elder had suggested this to her – but in vain; she was forced into labour (as a woodcutter) near Smolensk. On this see also the essay by Alexander Dalhouski on Belarus as well as the article by Imke Hansen and Alesja Belanovich, also on Belarus, in this volume. This flight to the woods – as Alexander Dalhouski states – seems to be associated with the narrators’ rural, non-industrial background. During an interview from the year 1986. See my essay on memories of forced labour in Germany in this volume. On this, as on Ukraine on the whole, see the essays in this volume by Gelinada Grinchenko on Eastern and Central Ukraine and by Tetyana Lapan on Western Ukraine. These different ways of dealing with the experience and the reasons for them will be taken up again at the conclusion of this essay. There are a number of examples of this experience of return to the Soviet Union. Konstantin A. from Belarus proved a natural anarchist in his resistance to all forms of control. As a young man he was arrested and taken to Germany because he had stolen the pistol of a German officer. Once in Germany he was placed in a penal camp for running away and theft, got into the same situation after liberation with the Americans and was handed over to the Soviets. He returned to his home town only in 1948, after having to work as a clerk in another town for three years. For example, Iwan G. from Baranovitshi (then in Poland), a forced labourer in Salzgitter, was first conscripted to the army, then to the Gorki metal plant, and only returned to his home, which had by then become a part of Belarus, in 1948. Christoph Thonfeld has pointed this out in his essay ‘The International Forced Labourers Documentation Project – Preliminary Results’, (unpublished Manuscript) 2006. Interview with Andrei C. from Moldova, or with Michail B. (History Workshop in Minsk in July 2007). I owe this point to Christoph Thonfeld (ibid.), 3. On this see the essay by Birgit Mair in this volume. Thus, Christoph Thonfeld in Minsk and I at the Museum of the Minsk Ghetto were asked by Jewish survivors if a study of forced labour was being carried on in Germany because it would leave the Germans looking better and allow the Holocaust to be forgotten. We were able to convince our questioners that, according to our experiences with the interviews, the opposite was the case – that against the background of the fate of forced labourers the situation of the bulk of slave labourers looked clearly very different, and also that it becomes more obvious that forced labour by Jews and Roma was a part of the machinery of killing. See above all the article from Israel by Margalit Bejarano and Amija Boisson as well as the articles from the United States by Dori Laub and Johanna Bodenstab, and Sara Ghitis and Ruth Weinberger (Atlanta) in this volume. Interview conducted by Alexander von Plato.

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37. See above all Andrea Löw, Juden im Ghetto Litzmannstadt: Lebensbedingungen, Selbstwahrnehmung, Verhalten (Göttingen 2006). 38. Herbert, ‘Arbeit und Vernichtung’. www.vwi.ac.at/aktagung/starttagung_ak.htm, retrieved March 21, 2010. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. On this see the essay on Great Britain by Christoph Thonfeld in this volume. 42. Taissa T. was interviewed by our colleagues of the Memorial Society in Moscow. Although she comes from Ukraine, today she lives at Pensa in Russia. 43. See the essay on Bulgaria by Ana Luleva in this volume. 44. During a conversation with the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, the king of Bulgaria is said to have agreed only to deport BolshevistCommunist ‘elements’. It is said that he wanted to intern the 25,000 Bulgarian Jews in concentration camps in his own country, as he needed them for road building. Ribbentrop is said to have answered that ‘in our view, the only correct solution to the Jewish question is the most radical one.’ Akten zur deutschen Auswärtigen Politik Series E, Vol. V, No. 273, as cited at: http://www.holocaustchronologie.de/glossar.html (retrieved 27 July 2007]. 45. It was reported that of the 25,000 Jews who were due to be resettled, the ‘resettlement’ of 20,000 people was ordered only in March 1943, including first of all non-Bulgarians from the annexed territories – 7,240 Jews from Macedonia and 4,219 from Thrace. Six thousand Jews, half of them from Sofia, were supposed to be deported from Bulgaria proper. The Foreign Office records state: ‘The decision for resettlement in the East was taken only after some resistance.’ They record further that there had recently been a motion before the Bulgarian parliament to stop the deportations, ‘as the fate awaiting the Jews in the German eastern territories violates the most elementary rules of humanity’, ibid., No. 275. On 7 April 1943, the Foreign Office reported to the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) that the Bulgarian government had agreed to allow 4,000 Jewish children to go to Palestine, and had also allowed the transit of Romanian Jewish children – despite statements to the contrary made to the Germans. ‘These observations fit well into the pattern of a general turn away from strict measures against the Jews, which is also occurring in other southeastern territories’, ibid., No. 282. 46. See the essay on Slovakia by Viola Jakschov. 47. Such ambivalences are also clear in the case of the Danish policy. 48. On this see the essay by Anne-Marie Granet-Abisset. 49. Hagen was bombed intensively because its Klöckner-Humboldt-Deutz plants made it a steel and metalworking centre, like Essen where the Krupp works were located. 50. See the numerous publications by the Institut für Kriegsfolgenforschung in Graz (Austria). 51. See the multi-volume documentation on camps by the Memorial Society. 52. ‘Sowjetische Speziallager in Deutschland 1945 bis 1950’, series published by S. Mironenko, L. Niethammer and A. v. Plato (coordination) in connection with V. Knigge und G. Morsch (Berlin 1998), vol. 1 edited by Alexander von Plato, vol. 2 by Ralf Possekel. 53. For example, it is useless to ask citizens of Dresden or foreign forced labourers about the overall number of the victims of air raids, something they are unable to judge, but it was extraordinarily useful to ask Dresden eyewitnesses about the names of those who died in neighbouring flats and houses and in this way to

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55.

56. 57.

58.

59.

60.

61. 62.

63. 64. 65.

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investigate the ‘death rate’ in the streets that were most affected. See my article ‘Erinnerungen an ein Symbol: Die Bombardierung Dresdens im Gedächtnis von Dresdnern’, BIOS – Zeitschrift für Biographieforschung, Oral History und Lebensverlaufsanlysen 20 (2007): 123–137. See my essay ‘Opferkonkurrenten?’, in Elisabeth Domansky and Harald Welzer (eds), Eine offene Geschichte: Zur kommunikativen Tradierung der nationalsozialistischen Vergangenheit (Tübingen 1999), 74–92. In English under the title ‘Victims competition?’ International Journal on Audio-Wisual Testimony – Fondation Auschwitz Bruxelles (December 1998): 7–14. See Loretta Walz, Und dann kommst du dahin an einem schönen Sommertag: Die Frauen von Ravensbrück (Munich 2005); or also her film Die Frauen von Ravensbrück, which received a Grimme-Preis in 2006. On this see Dagi Knellesen’s essay on witnesses at the Auschwitz Trials 1963–65 in Frankfurt am Main in this volume. On this see most of all the essays by Irina Sherbakova (Memorial Moscow) and Anna Reznikova (Memorial St Petersburg), or that by Alexander Dolhouski (Belarus). On Russia for this context see, apart from other contributions in this volume, Jörg Osterloh, ‘Die Lebensbedingungen und der Arbeitseinsatz von Kriegsgefangenen im Dritten Reich und in der Sowjetunion’, in Hans-Christoph Seidel und Klaus Tenfelde (eds), Zwangsarbeit im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts – Bewältigung und vergleichende Aspekte (Essen 2007), 155–186. See also n.a., ‘Ostarbeiter’ – ‘Остарбайтеры’’, Weißrussische Zwangsarbeiter in Österreich, Sonderband 2 (Graz and Minsk 2003) and Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde. On Russia see Pavel Polyan, Zhertvi Dvuckh diktatur: Zhizn’, trud, unishenie i smert’ sovetskikh voennoplennikh i ostarbaiterov na chuzhbine i na rodine (Moscow 2002); Pavel Poljan, ‘Die Erinnerungen an die Deportationen während der deutschen Besatzung in der Sowjetunion’, in Seidel and Tenfelde, Zwangsarbeit im Europa, 59–74. In Seidel and Tenfelde also see Tanja Penter, ‘Zwangsarbeit im Donbass unter stalinistischer und nationalsozialistischer Herrschaft, 1929–1953’, 227–252. In my opinion this term, coined by Norbert Frei, is most suitable for giving a name to the way in which politics dealt with history. See Norbert Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik: Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die NS-Vergangenheit (Munich 1996). On Soviet prisoners of war see the pioneering work in Streit, Keine Kameraden. On forced labour see Ulrich Herbert, Fremdarbeiter: Politik und Praxis des ‘Ausländer-Einsatzes’ in der Kriegswirtschaft des Dritten Reiches (Bonn 1985); Mark Spoerer, Zwangsarbeit unter dem Hakenkreuz (Stuttgart and Munich 2001). On the compensation debate see Niethammer, ‘Von der Zwangsarbeit im Dritten Reich“’, 13–84; also Seidel and Tenfelde, Zwangsarbeit im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts. Several times during conversations with the author. See in general on returning from slave and forced labour the contribution by Christoph Thonfeld in this volume, as well as the report by Piotr Filipkowski and Katarzyna Madon;-Mitzner (KARTA) on Poland. See the articles by Šárka Jarská (Czech Republic) and Viola Jakschov (Slovakia) in this volume. On this see most of all the chapters in this volume by Monika Koevar on Slovenia, by Christian Schölzel on Croatia, and by Barbara Wiesinger on Serbia. On this see among others the essays by Ana Luleva on Bulgaria, by Viola Jakschov on Slovakia, and by Christian Schölzel on Croatia.

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66. See the contribution by Anne-Marie Granet-Abisset in this volume and also her study ‘Témoins et témoignages en situation limite’, in Annette Wievioka and Claude Mouchard (eds), La Shoa, oevres et témoignages (n.p. 1999), 189–202; Helga Bories-Sawala, Franzosen im ‘Reichseinsatz’: Deportation, Zwangsarbeit, Alltag – Erfahrungen und Erinnerungen von Kriegsgefangenen und Zivilarbeitern (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, New York, Paris, Vienna 1996). 67. This was the case quite early on. See Claudio Sommaruga, ‘Cifre della resistenza degli ufficiali italiani internati nei lager nazisti’, Quaderni di storia contemporanea 6 (1986): 21–38; Gabriele Hammermann, Gli internati militari italiani in Germania 1943–1945 (Bologna 2004). See also the contribution by Doris Felsen and Viviana Frenkel in this volume. 68. On this see Walther I. Bernecker and Sören Brinkmann, Kampf der Erinnerungen: Der Spanische Bürgerkrieg in Politik und Gesellschaft 1936–2006 (Heidelberg 2006). See also the essay by Mercedes Vilanova on Spain in this volume. 69. Stefan Karner, Peter Ruggenthaler and Barbara Stelzl-Marx (eds), NS-Zwangsarbeit in der Rüstungsindustrie: Die Lapp-Finze AG in Kalsdorf bei Gaz (Graz 2004), 8. Also see Oliver Rathkolb (ed.), NS-Zwangsarbeit: Der Standort Linz der Reichswerke Hermann Göring AG Berlin 1938–1945, 2 vols. (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar 2001). The second volume, organised by Karl Fallend, deals with ‘(Auto) Biographical Insights’. 70. Accordingly, Bertrand Perz at the Holocaust studies congress ‘Labour and Extermination’ of the Workers Chamber in Vienna from 27 to 29 July 2007, in his introduction on 27 July, www.vwi.ac.at/aktagung/starttagung_ak.htm, retrieved on March 21, 2010. 71. The decisive leadership positions of the National Socialist euthanasia programme were occupied by Austrian SS members, and the headquarters were at Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin (thus ‘T4’). 72. See the introduction by the editors of this volume. 73. Even today there are considerable differences between East and West Germans in respect of the significance of coping with National Socialism. Accordingly the results of surveys by the Allensbach Institute of opinion polling see Renate Köcher (ed.), Allensbacher Jahrbuch der Demoskopie 2003-2009. Die Berliner Republik. (Allensbach 2010). 74. See the essay by Rose Lerer Cohen on forced labour in Lithuania in this volume. 75. At the Holocaust Museum in Budapest, for example, remarkable consideration is shown for Horthy and his governments. 76. For example, at the big national museums of Riga and Tallinn.

 Appendix 1 

INTERVIEW GUIDELINES Alexander von Plato

Basic Principles

Interviews with former slave and forced labourers should ideally provide a free space for the interview subjects to tell their story as they want to present it. From our point of view these are life history–orientated memory-interviews intended to help the interviewees activate memories that go back a long way and have been overlaid by many new experiences – memories that the speakers have already processed, whether in isolation or in communication with others. At the centre of the questioning stands their experience of a particular set of events, but also the background, consequences and effects of those events, and the way they have been dealt with in a great variety of familial, societal and political situations and contexts. It must be remembered here that these conversations can be very strenuous and even potentially re-traumatising for some of our respondents. The following guidelines should help to make it possible for all of us to carry out interviews that are structured so as to enable comparisons between the data they generate; they should also help us to choose interview partners and to respond appropriately to problems.

The Choice of Interview Partners In most of the countries the likelihood of finding former slave and forced labourers is high. Many formed organisations after the Second World Notes for this chapter begin on page 494.

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War, are involved in providing social services to fellow persecutees or have established contacts with political or other relief organisations. Some victim groups – Roma and others, as well as Jews – have organised on an international scale. Through these we can also try to approach individuals with our request for an interview. There are other ways, such as for example appeals in newspapers, broadcast media or publications of the relevant victim organisations, or using the ‘snowball’ approach, which leads us from one person to the next. The route of using the databanks of our partner organisations is also open to us, though we need to bear in mind that the individuals listed there are those who are eligible for claims or who have submitted claims that have been rejected. But we also want to carry out interviews in, for example, Western Europe, where very few former forced labourers obtained benefits from the ‘Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft’ foundation and its partner organisations. Institutions that have already conducted interviews with other victims of National Socialist persecution in different countries will certainly have little difficulty in establishing contacts with slave and forced labourers as well. The aim should be to interview as varied as possible a group of respondents, even if we cannot hope to establish a fully representative sample. At the same time, the basic objective is to put together a sample whose composition corresponds as far as possible to that of the whole population of slave and forced labourers at the time, in terms of sex, national and social origin, religious orientation, type of persecution, grounds and method of deportation, type of work done (in the countryside, in industry etc.), nature of camps or places of internment, timing and nature of liberation, experience of homecoming and later life. We obviously know that today we can interview only people who were young at the time. That is all the more reason to attach great importance to reaching as many older people as possible. The central coordinating body, the Institute for History and Biography, University of Hagen, will give particular attention to ensuring that the composition of the international sample of interview subjects is as representative as possible.

Preparation for the Interviews The interviewers should obviously have read as much as possible about slave and forced labour in general and in their respective countries in particular. They should have at least a rough understanding of the circumstances the respondents had to live under at the time: general conditions like the war, National Socialist persecution, the concentration

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camp system and others, as well as specific circumstances like their family of origin, work, personal persecution etc. This previous knowledge is of course important for the conduct of the interview. However, we should not put it on show in a manner that would give the interviewees the impression that we already know so much that they do not have to tell us anything more. After the names and addresses of potential interviewees have been identified, we should call them – assuming they have a telephone – write a letter briefly describing the project and ask them to agree to an interview, preferably at their home. They should be prepared for the fact that we are going to record the interview. We will have to tell the interview partners at an early stage that the interview is going to last several hours, and that archive and data protection law dictates that we need their written consent to the archiving and use of their interview (the so-called letter of consent, which we will give the interviewers to take with them). The technical preparation is important too. In general, we use analogue audiocassette recorders and not digital ones, because – by contrast with digital equipment – there are playback devices for analogue cassettes that allow easy transcription and also – not to be underestimated – rapid copy devices on which 20-speed copying can be carried out to at least two cassettes simultaneously. Furthermore, in our experience on various projects the kinds of errors that can creep into the recording process become more frequent with digital devices. A further reason for the choice of analogue recorders lies in the fact that there is no common format among the different manufacturers yet. Tests carried out in our data processing centre have shown that analogue iron cassettes have a long life, and we have no such evidence of the longevity of the digital ones – leaving aside the fact that there is no international standard format for digital technology. Even more important than a good recorder is an excellent external microphone. Under no circumstances should internal (built-in) microphones be used. We favour the use of BETA SP, either analogue or digital, as the format for video interviews. BETA still is the international format for television and exhibition quality. Mini-DV devices do not meet the quality standards that are necessary for later use of the interviews in films, television documentaries, exhibitions etc.

Attitude Our interviewees are normally very old and may be ill and traumatised. We should signal before the interview that we know that the interview

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may be exhausting for them, that they may have trouble sleeping afterwards, that we will come to their homes, potentially over two sessions, that we can have breaks if they feel like it to ease the strain. Sometimes it may even be useful to say them: ‘We know that it will be difficult to touch these memories, that there may even be tears. But please let us conduct this interview, to bear testimony to the persecution.’ We can offer consolation to the interviewees, if that seems to make sense, by sitting next to them; we may put our arm around them; we may switch off the recorder and offer to take a break whenever they wish. After a while, though, we should ask whether we may continue. In most cases it is not particularly helpful for our interview partners if they have to console us.1 If we notice during the conversation that the interviewees are feeling very bad – in whatever respect – we should seek help from people who are more professionally trained than we usually are, or from local agencies. The interviewers should be aware, as well, that social competence is one of the essential qualities of an interviewer, that they have to combine empathy with serious interest in the interviewees and their stories, and that we have to make appropriate decisions in tense situations. This has almost always turned out to be the most important thing: to show clearly and sincerely that we are really interested in the individuals and their experiences. On the other hand, we should keep in mind that the lives of these respondents have encompassed not only victimhood, suffering and tears, but also many other facets. At the same time, it is not easy for interviewers to remain attentive and critical enough in the face of potentially horrendous stories to ask, for example, for the origin of a piece of information or to clarify contradictions in the reports and be able to lead the interview as a whole.

The Interview The interview form we use is the semi-open narrative life history interview. This means that the interviewees initially have the opportunity to present their stories and their experiences in the way they want to, for as long or as briefly as they please, without being interrupted by us. Only after this should the interviewer begin to pose questions on the basis of a prepared list, but even then the questions should not simply be put one after the other. Rather, they should be deployed in a way appropriate to the conversational context, in a way calculated to prompt

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further narratives rather than simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers. Thus the ‘ideal typical’ conversation will be conducted in three or four phases.

First (Open) Phase In the first phase, we ask the interviewee only one question, for instance: ‘Would you please tell me (us) your life story?’ After that we listen closely without disturbing the interviewee, until the interviewee gives us a sign that he or she is ready to be questioned. Of course, all the interviewees know that the reason we are there is to find out about their forced labour experiences. But we tell them in advance that we also want to learn about the prehistory and the aftermath, so that we and the younger generations can understand what happened before, get to know where they came from, their family background, their educational and occupational history, what they knew about National Socialist persecution before they became subject to it themselves, and so on. It is obvious, too, why we are interested in what happened afterwards: namely to learn what – mainly health-related – immediate and long-term consequences the slave or forced labour has had, what their subsequent occupational and family histories were, in what social context they made their lives and what positive or negative mechanisms for dealing with the past were available in that context. Still, the interviewees will place the emphasis on the actual forced labour story. The object of this first, open phase is to give the interviewees the opportunity to emphasise and make connections between various phases and details of their story as seems appropriate to them. The interview is a dialogue. We will never be neutral, but we can give the interviewees as much room as we can for their own narratives and constructions. They may, indeed, tell their story as a spontaneous chain of associations – without being interrupted by our questions. We should not pose leading questions or provoke expectations. Even if we know that we cannot achieve neutrality and that the interview is a dialogue in which we generate certain prejudices by the very fact that we belong to a different generation, that we want to document the interview and so on, we should still act in a way that is as neutral as possible, and at the same time empathetic.2 If it happens that the interviewees tell their story only briefly as a series of dates, or cannot speak coherently for fear of reliving their past, we should ‘switch’ and ask early on whether they would rather that we ask them questions now. But we should not be too impatient. Normally, the respondents tell us a lot, sometimes for hours on end, without our having to pose a single follow-up question. In any case, here too we should make it absolutely clear that we are interested in their stories.

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Second (Clarifying) Phase In a second phase we start actively questioning, but only to clarify individual points we did not understand or to give the interviewees the opportunity to correct dates that we know have been cited wrongly, misunderstandings or incorrect formulations on their part. This part should be very brief, and if there are only one or two points of clarification we should proceed directly to the third phase. If the interviewees are tired or exhausted and circumstances allow for a second session we should at least take a break here, or even leave the rest of the conversation for the following day. In this case we could listen to or watch the recording at home (or in our room if we have travelled to the interview) and identify for the next day, or rather for the next phase of the interview, which items from our question list have already been covered and which remain to be answered.

Third Phase (Open Questions) Even without a break or a prolonged interruption, interviewers have to decide after the second phase which essential topics or questions from our list are left and in which order they should be raised. This is a sensitive point in the interview because it is always difficult to decide when a question can be regarded as answered and when not. It is, of course, easier to do this at home or after listening to the interview than immediately during the interview. Once this problem has been clarified, spontaneously or through deliberation, in the third phase we should ask questions or address issues that are on our list. However, even in this questioning phase it still holds true that we should not get ‘hung up’ on particular formulations or the order in which the questions are listed. We should have the list in our mind, not on the table, so that it can be deployed according to the situation. We should ask the questions in a way that evokes stories, anecdotes and episodes, and that moves the interviewee to describe people (friends, relatives, policemen, guards, superiors etc.), conflicts, hierarchies or routines like the course of a day at work or in the camp, the day when they were arrested or deported, the route the transport took, the day of arrival and so on. In these concrete stories and descriptions, the attitudes, emotions, concerns and fears that the interviewees harboured at the time will come to light more than if we ask directly what they felt and thought. Here, too, leading questions should be avoided.

Fourth Phase (Critical Points) Only at the end, and not before, should we raise with the interviewees any critical points we absolutely feel we must mention. If we know we

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can do that at the end, we will generally be more relaxed in the earlier phases and will not be constantly on the verge of expressing our own dissent or objections. With perpetrators, it is rarely difficult to express criticism or rejection, but this usually happens too soon. We do not want the fountain to run dry after we have only just found it. It might be more difficult with concentration camp inmates, forced labourers or other victims of persecution. But with them too, we will encounter political opinions or even racist beliefs, perhaps examples of collaboration with perpetrators, that we want to object to. The normal reaction on the part of the interviewers is that they hardly dare to mention attitudes or actions of that kind or openly discuss them – whether out of embarrassment, for fear of the reaction of the interview partners or out of general sympathy for the victim of persecution in front of us. Another common reaction is to adopt an adversarial stance towards the respondent early on, maybe even too early. We must be patient and avoid hasty judgements on the one hand, and on the other have the courage to ask at the end for clarification of the attitudes we reject.

Post-processing After the interview we must write a brief report in which we summarise how the interview came about and other aspects of the background, the atmosphere during the conversation, who was present, the key themes of the conversation and characteristic features of the interviewee’s biography or narrative. In this report, problems of the interviewees should be noted, as should the interviewer’s own emotions and difficulties. A short biography of the respondent must also be provided, making clear the key stages in his or her life and his or her story of persecution as well as the family background. Finally, we should submit a data sheet supplying quantifiable data for a relational databank. This data sheet enables us to search for persons or groups, for example, according to certain criteria. The interviews should be transcribed in the respective languages of the interviews and the video interviews translated into German as well.

Some Remarks on Interview Techniques Life History Interviews The interviews should ideally encompass the whole life history, even though we are mainly interested in the experience of forced labour, which is a specific, limited phase. The main reasons for this have already

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been mentioned. National, social and family background and education or religious or political orientation played a large role in the story of the persecution, as we all know. Therefore, it will make a difference whether, for example, the interviewees faced these experiences with a religious or political grounding or not, whether they did not feel Jewish but were nevertheless treated as Jews by the Nazis, whether there were gender-specific persecutions etc. And of course we need testimony about whether and how this persecution affected their later life: about health or psychological problems, losses (or indeed gains) of friends and family, lessons learned or changes of religious or political orientation, practices of remembering and forgetting, the social or communicative surroundings in which coping processes developed in the postwar period. Also, some other things should be made known to posterity, for example, partners, children, later career etc. If interviewees happen to be to weak or want to share only one or two hours with us, then we should move on rapidly from the life history approach and to targeted questions.

Different Memories and Different Accesses to Memory in Interviews We have to be aware that memory is ‘overlaid’ by new experiences and new incidents. It is influenced by cultural forms of narrative, communicative practices and ways of speaking about dreadful memories, personal achievement and personal failure. It is also influenced by the way a society deals with the past (compare, for instance, Israel, Germany and Russia), by the language we use, by traditions in different communities. This is one reason, among others, why the interviews should be conducted by people from the same country in the interviewee’s own language. Almost more important is that memory is not a single system but, according to current memory research, consists of different ‘memories’ that are ‘networked’ with each other. There are memories for dates and experiences, for language and the senses and various others. Roughly summarising, this means for example that there is a memory for numbers and facts and an episodic memory for biographical events and experiences. In my experience the attempt should be made to assist the interview partners in finding access to these different memories and to their mutual influence. For instance, if we ask for names or dates in a story of persecution or in a specific conflict, we will encounter insecurity or a failing memory right at the start. However, if we ask about the story of persecution or about the conflict, most of the interviewees will have a lot to say about the constellations of and reasons for the conflict. And as they talk, many of the names, places or dates may come back to them.

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That means that during the course of an interview we have to address these different memories alternately, instead of constantly and repeatedly targeting a certain memory with the same questions. While we are trying different means of access we get more data, stories and ‘material’ that may be important for our analysis. We have to learn to vary the topic, to help to activate certain recollections from different angles and by way of different kinds of memory. Then a lot of other recollections will be evoked, and maybe former attitudes and fears will become clear, too. This is another reason why we should at some stage in the conversation ask for photos, photo albums, letters, documents, certificates, diaries etc. This kind of visual material, along with reports and certificates, is especially good for prompting reminiscences. In a different way, diaries can be the starting point for conversations about past attitudes, fears and language. These documents and pictures are usually kept at home, so as far as possible the interview should be conducted there. Moreover, the respondents usually feel most secure in the privacy of their own homes. It bears repeating that it is of utmost importance that we not only question people about particular experiences but draw out stories, anecdotes, episodes, descriptions of individuals, accounts of actions and behaviour (routine as well as exceptional ones). Only in this way will we help the interviewees to remember by activating their different kinds of memory singly and in interaction with one another. It thereby becomes easier to learn something about their past attitudes. When conducting interviews, there is always a contradiction: on the one hand, we know that we can access past experiences only via today’s memory, via retrospective constructions of history, via a ‘digested’ past. On the other hand, we want to have as much information as possible about the history of the National Socialist racist and repressive system. So we have to be aware of this contradiction. We have to take the memories of our interviewees seriously, even if we do not believe a certain story or particular dates they report or regard them as improbable. In any case, we should not be too quick to interrupt or correct the stories or argue with the interviewees. Patience is one of the major virtues, even if a story is told twice or three times. Such ‘repeated stories’ are generally ‘success stories’, that is, they are told because by telling them the interviewees have been able to make some things clear or have met with approval from those around them by telling these stories. They usually have a punchline, sometimes a moral. They may thus tell us something about the environment of the interviewees. Finally the supreme command holds true: our interviewees should have the sense during and after the interview that they are part of a late, but not quite yet too late, significant documentation project. We should

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contact them at least once, perhaps even several times after the interview. Each interview partner should receive a copy of the recording.

NOTES 1. We are not therapists and should therefore identify before the interview the addresses of people who could be consulted for appropriate support in the interviewee’s town or area. Victim groups themselves have provided this kind of support facility in almost every country. 2. Klaus Schütze uses these freewheeling parts of the interviews almost exclusively for his interpretations.

 Appendix 2 

TIMELINE Forced Labour and Compensation

Joachim Riegel

1933 – Adolf Hitler appointed Chancellor of the Reich on 30 January. – Abrogation of civil rights by decree of the President of the Reich for the Protection of People and State or 28 February (‘Reichstagsbrandverordnung’ [‘Reichstag Fire Decree’]). – Establishment of the first concentration camp in Germany, in Dachau (beginning 20 March), with Oranienburg, Osthofen and others to follow. – The leader of the Reich Labour Service (RAD), Konstantin Hierl, an advocate of compulsory labour service, becomes Reichsarbeitsführer (Reich Labour Leader) and State Secretary first in the Ministry of Labour, then the Interior Ministry.

1934 – The ‘Law for the Prevention of Congenitally Defective Offspring’ (‘Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses’) comes into force as of 1 January. – Assassination of Ernst Röhm and the SA leadership around him, 30 June to 2 July.

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– Following the death of President of the Reich Hindenburg the ‘Law Concerning the Head of the German Reich’ of 1 August makes Hitler President as well as Chancellor of the Reich; in consequence the armed forces routinely take an oath of personal allegiance to Adolf Hitler.

1935 – Introduction of general conscription (in breach of the Treaty of Versailles) on 16 March. – Introduction of a six-month period of compulsory Labour Service (preceding conscription) for all German men between 18 and 25 years of age through a Law of 26 June. – Nuremberg Racial Laws unanimously adopted in the Reichstag on 15 September.

1936 – Occupation of the demilitarised Rhineland.

1938 – Enrolment of Italian agricultural and construction workers for work in Germany. – Foundation of the first SS economic enterprises in Germany. – Anti-Jewish laws in Hungary. – Promulgation of the ‘Decree on Compulsory Service’ (‘Dienstpflichtverordnung’) in Germany in June. – Conference at Evian on international refugee policy from 6 to 15 July. – Promulgation of the ‘Ordinance on the Policing of Foreigners’ (‘Ausländerpolizeiverordnung’) in Germany in August. – Munich Agreement; cession of the Sudetenland territory by Czechoslovakia to the German Reich on 29 September. – Anti-Semitic pogroms throughout Germany on 9 and 10 November (‘Reichskristallnacht’ [Crystal Night]). – Introduction of a compulsory service year (‘Pflichtjahr’) by law for young women, initially for work in agriculture and domestic service.

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1939 – Redraft of the ‘Dienstpflichtverordnung’ issued in Germany on 13 February. – Creation of the Labour Service in Hungary in March. Those born 1894 to 1924 become liable for Labour Service. – Occupation of the remaining Czech territories of Czechoslovakia (‘Rest-Tschechei’) by the German army on 14 March; creation of the ‘Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia’. – Declaration of Independence of Slovakia on 15 March. – Enrolment of Hungarian workers for work in Germany in the summer. – Allocation of 52,000 ‘voluntary’ Czech labourers for work in Germany in June; for them, stricter legal sanctions apply than for Germans. – Introduction of compulsory labour of up to two years for 16- to 25-year-olds in the Czech territories in July. – The return of Czechs working in Germany becomes subject to official approval in August. – Molotov-Ribbentrop or Hitler-Stalin Pact: pact of non-aggression and division of Eastern Europe between the German Reich and the Soviet Union on 23 August. – German incursion into Poland on 1 September. – First German labour office in Poland established on 3 September. – Registration of the population between 14 and 60 years of age in Upper Silesia in September. – Promulgation of the ‘Decree on the Treatment of Foreigners’ (‘Verordnung über die Behandlung von Ausländern’) in Germany in September. – Beginning of round-ups in Poland in September. – Occupation of Eastern Poland by the Red Army on 17 September. – Order for the establishment of ghettos for Polish Jews on 27 September. – Surrender of the city of Warsaw after heavy aerial bombardment and shelling on 27 September. – German-Soviet Border Treaty (Lithuania becomes part of the Soviet sphere of influence) on 27 September. – Poland surrenders on 28 September. – Deportation of 3,400 Poles from Kattowice to Germany at the end of September.

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– Deportation of Austrian Jews for forced labour in Poland in October. – Creation of the Government General in Poland (term for the occupied, but not annexed Polish territories) on 26 October; compulsory labour for 18- to 60-year-old men within cities, extended to 14- to 17-year-old male children and the rural population in October. – Compulsory labour in Poland for male Jews, later for 12- to 60-yearold Jewish men and women in October. – Establishment of ghettos in Poland in October. – Work and layoffs became subject to approval in the Czech territories from December on.

1940 – Transfer of 85,000 Polish-Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs) to civilian status at the beginning of the year. – Creation of the facility to allocate jobless Poles between 16 and 50 years of age for labour in Germany in January. – ‘Decrees on Poles’ (‘Polenerlasse’) in Germany in March (strict surveillance of Polish labour force). – Occupation of Denmark by the German Reich on 9 April; subsequently, almost exclusively voluntary enrolment of Danish labourers. – Beginning of the occupation of Norway by the German Reich on 9 April. – Poles born 1915 to 1925 required to work in Germany from April onwards. – German invasion of Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France on 10 May. – Surrender of the Netherlands on 15 May. – Transfer of the vast majority of Polish POWs to civilian status on 14 and 22 May. – More than one million French POWs are taken to the German Reich for compulsory labour. – Surrender of Belgium on 28 May. – Surrender of Norway on 10 June. – Italy enters the war on 10 June. – Occupation of Lithuania by the Red Army on 15 June; two days later, occupation of Latvia and Estonia, also by the Red Army.

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– Resolution not to deploy Belgians by force for labour in Germany and to put Belgian workers on an equal footing with German labourers, in June. – Armistice between the German Reich and France signed at Compiegne on 22 June. – Installation of the concentration camp Auschwitz I. – Establishment of Vichy-France, the ‘French State’ (État français), under Marshal Petain in Southern France (c. 40 per cent of the national area) by constitutional amendment on 17 July. – Organisation Schmelt takes over the organization of forced labour of Jews in Silesia and in the Sudetenland in October (until 1944). – Italian invasion of Greece on 28 October.

1941 – Forced conscription of Italian labour force for work in Germany in 1941. – ‘Law for the Protection of the Nation’ in Bulgaria in January. – End of the compulsory registration for the unemployed in the Netherlands in February. – Accession of Bulgaria to the Three Power Pact on 1 March. – Compulsory labour service for the unemployed becomes possible in the Netherlands in March. – First deployment of concentration camp inmates in private armaments factories in March. – German and Italian attack on Yugoslavia on 6 April; Hungarian attack on Yugoslavia on 11 April. – Surrender of Yugoslavia and its division into occupation zones on 17 April. – ‘Law on the Protection of the Aryan Blood and the Honour of the Croat People’ and ‘Law on Racial Identity’ in Croatia on 30 April. – Proclamation of the ‘Independent State of Croatia’ (NDH) as a satellite state of the German Reich on 10 April. – Croat-German agreement on registration of Croat labourers for work in Germany and deportation of ethnic minorities, mostly Serbs from Croatia, to Germany in May. – Installation of the concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau), ordered on 26 September.

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– Establishment of the Rijksarbeidsbureau (Reich Labour Office) for the administration of labour in the Netherlands in May. – Meeting between Croatian‘racial policy’ measures in June. – German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June, with support from Romania and Italy. – Slovakia enters the war on the German side on 23 June. – Hungary enters the war on the German side on 27 June. – Labour conscription introduced for local construction projects on Crete in the summer, followed by conscription for work in collieries and construction projects in the North of Greece. – Change of workplace subject to approval in the Netherlands in August. – Installation of the concentration camp Jasenovac in Croatia at the beginning of September. – Appointment of Reinhard Heydrich as Deputy Reich Protector in the ‘Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia’ in September. – First labour education camp on Dutch soil established in Amersfoort in September. – Labour enlistment measures introduced in Spain in September. – Deportation of 102,000 Soviet and Polish POWs to Norway in September. – Decision by Hitler to deploy Soviet POWs as forced labourers in October. – Decree on a criminal code for Poles (‘Polenstrafrechtsverordnung’) in Germany in December. – Requirement to work introduced in Serbia in December. – Requirement to work introduced for all men from 15 to 65 years of age and women from 15 to 45 years of age in the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union on 19 December. – ‘Enlistment’ of Eastern workers (Ostarbeiter) introduced in Belarus in December. – Requirement to work for all men and women between 18 and 50 years of age introduced in the Czech territories 1941–42. – Dismantling and liquidation or consolidation of ghettos in Poland (altogether c. 500) between 1941 and 1944.

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1942 – First trains with Eastern workers leave Ukraine in January. – Wannsee Conference (agreement on the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’) on 20 January. – Beginning of the mobilisation of all Jewish men between 20 and 46 years of age for labour battalions in Bulgaria in the summer 1942. – Deportation of 4,300 Serbian resistance fighters for forced labour for Organisation Todt in Norway in 1942. – Enlistment of Greek workers for labour in Germany in January. – ‘Decrees on Eastern Workers’ (‘Ostarbeitererlasse’) in Germany in February. – Deportation of 4,000 Croatian and Serbian POWs to Norway in the spring. – Forced recruitment of labour in German-occupied parts of the Soviet Union in the spring. – Appointment of Fritz Sauckel as General Plenipotentiary for Labour Allocation (GBA) on 21 March. – Dutch citizens can be required to carry out their labour service outside the country from March onwards. – Compulsory labour service for all adults introduced in Belgium in March. – Dutch companies required to deliver a certain proportion of their workers for assignment in Germany (‘sauckeln’) from April onwards. – Revocation of ration cards for anyone not reporting for labour allocation in France in April. – Relaxation of the regulations for surveillance and control of Eastern workers in Germany in April. – ‘Decree on Compulsory Service’ (‘Dienstpflichtverordnung’): Poles can be forced to change their workplace from May onwards. – First transport of Dutch workers diverted from Dutch industry on a quota basis to Germany in June. – Relève in France: exchange of 50,000 French POWs for 150,000 French civilian workers in June. – Increase of fees payable to Eastern workers in Germany in June. – Installation of a penal camp near Cracow for Polish noncommissioned officer POWs who refuse to be deployed for labour in June.

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– Attempts to reactivate industrial plants in German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union in July. – Liquidation of Ukrainian ghettos in the middle of the year. – Introduction of a compulsory two-year period of labour service in Germany for all 18- to 20-year-old Ukrainians in the summer. – Comprehensive deployment (‘Totaleinsatz’) in Czech territories in September: compulsory labour for Czech men born 1918 to 1922 and in 1924 and for Czech women born in 1924. – Compulsory labour introduced in Vichy-France for men between 18 and 50 years of age and women between 21 and 35 in September. – Repeal of the age limit for labour conscription in the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union in the autumn. – Deportation of civilians suspected of being partisans (instead of execution) in the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union in the autumn. – Liquidation of further Jewish ghettos in Poland; deportation of men fit for work to labour camps in October. – Requirement that Belgian men between 18 and 50 years of age and women between 21 (later also 18) and 35 report for work in Germany in October. – Compulsory labour service introduced for foreigners in Germany in October; foreign civilians from states not allied with Germany can be prevented from returning home after their contracts run out. – Increase in the recommended food rations for Eastern workers in Germany in October. – Occupation of Tunisia by German and Italian troops in November; confinement of 5,000 Tunisian Jews born 1900 to 1915 in forced labour camps. – Occupation of Vichy-France by German troops in November. – Further relaxation of the regulations on surveillance and control of Eastern workers in Germany in December.

1943 – Registration of men born 1912 to 1925 and women born 1914 to 1922 for labour in the Baltic states during the course of the year. – Mobilisation of all Jewish men between 20 and 46 years of age for labour battalions in Bulgaria during the course of the year.

Timeline: Forced Labour and Compensation

503

– Closure of private firms to release workers in the Netherlands at the beginning of the year. – Deportation of prisoners of all nationalities from Croatia in January. – Introduction of compulsory labour service for all Greeks aged 16 to 45 leads to strikes and uprisings in January. – Introduction of the Service du travail obligatoire [compulsory labour service, STO] in Vichy-France on 16 February: two-year service obligation for men born 1920 to 1922, later also 1919. – First round-ups and deportations in the Netherlands in February. – Requirement to register for and undertake labour deployment introduced in Norway for men aged 18 to 55 and women aged 21 to 40 in February; compulsory labour service for those born 1921 to 1923; both measures without major success. – Withdrawal of Italian workers from Germany in February. – Denial of ration cards to those who refuse labour service in Belgium in March. – Facility for forced deportations to Germany introduced in Serbia in March; quotas set for some municipalities. – Call-up of Dutch POWs released in 1940 to return to work in Germany in April. – ‘Transformation’ in France in April: for every worker in STO in Germany a French POW is given civilian status. – Compulsory labour service for all Dutch citizens born 1922 to 1924 introduced in May. – Deportation of all persons fit for work from parts of the German-occupied Soviet Union with strong partisan activity to the German Reich in July. – Deportation of Serbian resistance fighters for forced labour in Germany in July. – Overthrow of Mussolini on 25 July; armistice on 8 September; German occupation of Northern and Central Italy; ban on return of Italian workers. – Deportation of Hungarian Jews to the Serbian copper mines near Bor in July. – Liquidation of the Baltic ghettos in August. – Production contracts withdrawn from German firms and given to SpeerCompanies (‘Speer-Betriebe’) in Western Europe whose workers were exempted from the compulsion to work in Reich, in the autumn.

504

Appendix 2

– Revolts in Jewish forced labour camps and in the concentration camps Treblinka and Sobibor in autumn. – Deportation of Greek civilian labourers to Germany in autumn. – Compulsory labour service for Belgians born in 1920 and 1921 introduced in September. – ‘Slave hunt’ in Southern and Central Italy in September; deportation of the Italian Military Internees (IMIs), mostly from Italian-occupied territories of Southeastern Europe and from Italy, to Germany and to the occupied territories. – Compulsory labour for Italians born 1910 to 1925 introduced in October; labour service to be carried out either in Italy or in Germany. – ‘Harvest Festival Campaign’ (‘Aktion Erntefest’) on 3 and 4 November. After revolts in concentration camps 42,000 labour camp inmates are shot. – Deportation of non-Jewish Greek civilian labourers to the German Reich at the end of the year. – Dismantling of forced labour camps for Jews in the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union at the end of the year. – Establishment of civilian labour service units (‘Zivilarbeitsdienstabteilungen’, ZADA) in association with the Army Group Centre (Heeresgruppe Mitte) to mobilise the civilian population of the rear military area (Rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet) for fortification work at the end of the year.

1944 – Renewed mobilisation of all Jewish men aged 20 to 46 for labour battalions in Bulgaria during the course of the year. – Compulsory labour service for Belgians born 1922 to 1924 introduced in March. – Beginning of the ‘SS and Anti-Aircraft Gun Assistant Campaign’ and ‘Hay Campaign’ (‘SS- und Flakhelferaktion’, ‘Heu-Aktion’) in March: deportation of 28,000 youths between 10 and 18 years of age from the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union for the air force and armament industry in Germany. – All Italian men born 1900 to 1920 are conscripted and immediately given leave so as to be deployed for labour in March. – German occupation of Hungary on 19 March.

Timeline: Forced Labour and Compensation

505

– Social insurance made obligatory for Eastern workers in March. – Ghettoisation and deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in April; from there, transport onward to Germany; conscription of Jewish women aged 18 to 30 for labour service. – Conscription of all Italian men born 1921 to 1926; they are immediately given leave so as to be deployed for labour in May. – Deployment of all prison inmates in the armaments industry in Germany in May. – The badges worn by forced labourers from the Soviet Union are changed to indicate their ethnicity in June. – Cancellation of forced recruitment in Italy in July. – The Hungarian government prohibits deportations from Hungary in July. – Joseph Goebbels becomes General Plenipotentiary for the Total Deployment for War (Generalbevollmächtigter für den totalen Kriegseinsatz) on 25 July. – Transfer of Italian Military Internees (IMIs) to civilian status in August. – The recommended food rations for Eastern workers and Soviet POWs are adjusted to match those of other POWs in August. – Liquidation of the gypsy camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau on 2 August. – Slovakian national uprising on 29 August. – Bulgaria declares war on Germany on 9 September. – Complete liberation of Belgium in September. – Relocation of the central Dutch labour administration to Groningen in September. – Compulsory labour service introduced for Jews aged 14 to 70 in Hungary in September. – American troops reach the Siegfried Line (‘Westwall’) in September; Aachen is the first major city in western Germany to be liberated, on 21 October. – Dismissal of the Hungarian government in October. – Deportation of the Budapest Jews and of the Hungarian (Jewish) Labour Service to the Reich in November. – Deployment of young Czechs to build fortifications against the Red Army in the winter of 1944–45.

506

Appendix 2

1945 – Transfer of Italian officers to civilian status in January. – Major Soviet offensive in East Prussia in January. – Liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops on 27 January, of Buchenwald by American forces on 11 April, of Bergen-Belsen by British troops on 15 April, of Dachau by American forces on 29 April. – Repeal of all special regulations for Eastern workers in March. – Complete liberation of the Netherlands on 5 May. – Germany surrenders unconditionally on 8–9 May. – Beginning of trial of principal war criminals before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg on 20 November.

1946 – Conclusion of the Nuremberg trial of the principal war criminals on 1 October; among others, Fritz Sauckel is sentenced to death and executed on 16 October.

1952 – Reparation Treaty (Wiedergutmachungsvertrag): Luxembourg Agreement between Germany, Israel and the Jewish Conference on Material Claims against Germany concluded on 11 November.

1953 – London Debt Agreement on German foreign debts concluded on 27 February.

1956 – German ‘Law for the Compensation of Victims of National Socialist Persecution’ passed on 29 June.

Timeline: Forced Labour and Compensation

507

1958 – Operation Groups Trial (Einsatzgruppen-Prozess) against members of the Security Service (SD), the Secret State Police (Gestapo) and the police forces who are accused of murder and shooting of Jews in the Lithuanian-German border area, begun at Ulm in 1957, ends in convictions for murder and complicity with murder in 4,000 cases. – Establishment of the Central Office for the Prosecution of Nazi Crimes at Ludwigsburg on 1 December.

1959–1964 – General agreements on compensation between Germany and eleven mainly Western European countries.

1961 – Eichmann Trial in Israel from 11 April to 15 December.

1963 – Beginning of the first Auschwitz Trial in Germany on 20 December.

1965 – Final Federal Indemnification Law (Bundesentschädigungsschlussgesetz) in Germany on 14 September.

1965–1969 – Debates in the Bundestag (Lower House of the West German Parliament) about the statute of limitation for murder.

1990 – Reunification of Germany on 3 October.

508

Appendix 2

1995 – Indemnification Agreement between Germany and United States on 19 September.

1999 – Agreement between German industry and the German government on the creation of a compensation fund for former forced labourers on 16 February.

2000 – ‘Law on the Creation of a Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”’ (‘Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft’) passed on 10 August.

2001 – Final deadline for applications for compensation from the fund of the Foundation ‘Remembrance, Responsibility and Future’ on 31 December.

2006 – Termination of all eligibility for benefits for all former forced labourers according to the ‘Law on the Creation of a Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”’ on 30 September.

2007 – Official conclusion of payments from the funds of the Foundation ‘Remembrance, Responsibility and Future’ on 12 June; in total, T4.4 billion was paid to 1.66 million people.

 Appendix 3 

INTERVIEW PARTNERS First Name

Name

Year of birth

Aleksandra Anatolij Aurel

A. A. A.

1920 1926 1932

Boris Bronislava Dervisa Dušan Ekaterina Fedr Galina Husnija Iosef Jakov Jean Judith Konstantin Ladislava

A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A.

1912 1930 1936 1923 1926 1921 1928 1928 1922 1920 1922 1924 1925 1924

Libuše

A.

1924

Maria Melinda Omer Petr Shain Shalom Andrij Andrija Anut*a Aron Bedr=ich

A. A. A. A. A. A. B. B. B. B. B.

1927 1921 1926 1925 1928 1923 1925 1924 1934 1919 1918

Ella Emilia

B. B.

1931 1921

Country of Origin

Country Today

USSR, Ukraine USSR, Russia Transnistria (then Romania) Bulgaria USSR, Belarus Bosnia Slovakia USSR USSR, Belarus USSR, Russia Bosnia USSR, Russia Croatia (‘NDH’) France Hungary USSR, Ukraine ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ USSR, Ukraine Slovakia Bosnia USSR, Ukraine Macedonia Libya USSR, Ukraine Croatia (‘NDH’) Romania Bulgaria ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ Poland Poland

Ukraine Russia Romania Bulgaria Belarus Germany Slovakia Russia Belarus Russia Germany Russia Croatia France United States Belarus Czech Republic Czech Republic Ukraine Czech Republic Germany Belarus Macedonia Israel Ukraine Croatia Romania Bulgaria Czech Republic South Africa Poland

510

Appendix 3

First Name

Name

Year of birth

Esther Eva

B. B.

1924 1924

Eva Galyna Giovanni Hanifa Helena Irena Iryna Janez Jaromir

B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B.

1931 1925 1921 1932 1928 1930 1918 1934 1922

Jerzy Jewdokia Josef Jože Jusuf Jutta Karol Katarina Kazimierz Kazimierz Kornelia Lidija Liviu

B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B.

1921 1924 1922 1930 1936 1922 1928 1933 1926 1918 1919 1928 1928

Maria Marie

B. B.

1924 1924

Michael Michail Michail Michail Michel Nikolaj Penina Radomir

B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B.

Raisa Semen Sergej Shmuel Simion Sinaida Sofia Stanisław Stanisława

B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B.

Country of Origin

Country Today

United States United States

1924 1928 1931 1921 1921 1925 1927 1923

Germany ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ Hungary USSR, Ukraine Dalmatia (IMI) Bosnia Poland Poland Poland Slovenia ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ Poland USSR, Ukraine Poland Slovenia Bosnia Germany Poland Lithuania Poland Poland Hungary USSR, Russia Transnistria (then Romania) USSR, Belarus ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ Poland USSR, Belarus USSR, Belarus USSR, Russia France USSR, Russia Hungary, Romania Yugoslavia

1925 1921 1926 1929 1928 1914 1925 1924 1922

USSR, Ukraine USSR, Ukraine USSR, Russia Hungary Moldova (Bessarabia) USSR, Ukraine USSR, Russia Poland Poland

United States Ukraine Italy Germany Germany Poland Ukraine Slovenia England Poland Ukraine Germany Slovenia Germany Germany Poland Lithuania Poland Poland Israel Russia Romania Belarus Czech Republic South Africa Belarus Belarus Russia France Russia United States Serbia and Montenegro Belarus Ukraine Russia Israel Moldova Ukraine Lithuania Poland Poland

Interview Partners

511

First Name

Name

Year of birth

Tadeusz Tadeusz Tatjana Vasile Wasyl Yehuda

B. B. B. B. B. B.

1925 1924 1925 1921 1923 1929

Zejfa Zofia Zoltan Zoltán Alfred Andrei David Enric Gheorghe Giselle

B. B. B. B. C. C. C. C. C. C.

1928 1923 1919 1927 1922 1914 1919 1919 1932 1927

Hilda Jan Jerzy Jožefa Jurij Karel

C. C. C. C. C. C.

1928 1938 1927 1914 1926 1919

Konstantins Maria Michał Neus Paul Paul Roger Uri Warwara Ya’akov Alexandra André Angela Christo Danuta Emilija Gheorghe

C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. D. D. D. D. D. D. D.

1926 1921 1919 1916 1922 1922 1921 1928 1926 1927 1927 1922 1926 1928 1925 1933 1929

Josep Jože Lidija Milan

D. D. D. D.

1915 1914 1924 1925

Country of Origin

Country Today

Poland Poland USSR, Ukraine Moldova (Bessarabia) USSR, Ukraine ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ Bosnia Poland Hungary Poland Poland Moldova (Bessarabia) Bulgaria France (Exile) Moldova (Bessarabia) ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ Latvia Poland Poland Slovenia USSR, Russia ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ Latvia USSR, Ukraine Poland France France Romania France Lithuania USSR, Russia Greece USSR, Belarus France Slovenia Bulgaria Poland Slovenia Transnistrien (then Romania) Spain Slovenia USSR, Russia Yugoslavia

Poland Poland Ukraine Moldova England Israel Germany Poland Romania Romania Poland Moldova Bulgaria Spain Moldova Israel Latvia Poland England Slovenia Russia Czech Republic Latvia Ukraine Poland Spain France Romania France Israel Russia Israel Belarus France Slovenia Bulgaria Poland Slovenia Romania Spain Slovenia Russia Serbia and Montenegro

512

Appendix 3

First Name

Name

Year of birth

Mirko Miroslav

D. D.

1913 1920

Nina Olga Onufriy Peter

D. D. D. D.

1932 1925 1926 1922

Wera Zbigniew Zdzisław Anna Bjoern Bloeme Chernova Donato Meir Mikhail Roger Alessandro David Dedy Gabriel Henry Ivan Ivan Mina Ralph Reinhard Salvador Valerija Violette Vladimír

D. D. D. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. F. F. F. F. F. F. F. F. F. F. F. F. F. F.

1923 1929 1924 1927 1918 1926 1928 1921 1930 1924 1922 1920 1926 1922 1922 1923 1930 1925 1912 1926 1923 1918 1924 1911 1921

Wera Zora Adéla Alexandra Alexsandra Anna Anna Iwaniwna Annie Antoni Charles Edmund Elka František

F. F. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G.

1925 1924 1926 1925 1935 1929 1922 1924 1922 1923 1923 1928 1925

Country of Origin

Country Today

Croatia (‘NDH’) ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ USSR, Russia USSR, Belarus USSR, Ukraine ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ USSR, Russia Poland Poland USSR, Russia Norway Poland Lithuania Italy Poland USSR, Belarus France Greece USSR, Belarus Romania France Hungary Croatia (‘NDH’) USSR, Ukraine Netherlands Lithuania East Prussia Spain USSR, Belarus Greece ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ USSR, Ukraine Slovenia Slovakia USSR, Ukraine USSR, Ukraine Poland USSR, Ukraine Poland Poland Poland France (exile) Slovenia ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’

Croatia Czech Republic Russia Belarus Ukraine United States Russia Poland Poland Russia Norway Netherlands Lithuania Italy Israel Belarus France Italy Belarus Romania France United States Croatia Ukraine Netherlands United States Germany Spain Russia South Africa Czech Republic Russia Slovenia Czech Republic Ukraine Ukraine United States Ukraine United States Poland United States Spain Slovenia Czech Republic

Interview Partners

513

First Name

Name

Year of birth

Country of Origin

Country Today

Galyna Genowefa Georgij Gunnar Hannelore Henry Ignacy Igor Imre Inger Iosif Isaac Iwan Jakov Jan Janina Joaquín Leo Ludmilla Luka Mychajlowytsch Marcelli Maria Marija Michail Miriam Mirjana Nikolai Olga Omelyan Pálné Petro Pinchas Ronnie Sidney Urszula Vasilii Vinko Walentina Walter Zoltan Adriana Anna Ellis Emilie

G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G.

1925 1928 1926 1923 1931 1930 1922 1921 1925 1923 1926 1924 1926 1914 1920 1926 1923 1923 1927 1923

USSR, Ukraine Poland USSR, Ukraine Norway Netherlands Hungary Poland USSR, Russia Slovakia Norway USSR, Belarus Poland USSR, Belarus Bosnia Poland Poland Spain Poland USSR, Russia USSR, Ukraine

Ukraine Poland Lithuania Norway Netherlands United States Poland Russia Israel Norway Belarus United States Belarus Croatia Poland Poland Spain United States Russia Ukraine

G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. H. H. H. H.

1916 1926 1912 1929 1922 1922 1928 1923 1925 1922 1928 1932 1921 1927 1925 1915 1929 1930 1928 1925 1926 1923 1914 1920

Spain Ukraine Belarus Belarus Israel Croatia Russia Russia Ukraine Hungary Ukraine South Africa Netherlands United States Poland Moldova Slovenia Russia Israel United States Ukraine Ukraine Netherlands Czech Republic

Grigorij Gyuláné

H. H.

1924 1924

France (exile) USSR, Ukraine USSR, Belarus USSR, Belarus Hungary Croatia (‘NDH’) USSR, Russia Hungary USSR, Ukraine Hungary USSR, Ukraine Poland Netherlands Poland Poland Moldova (Bessarabia) Slovenia USSR, Russia Netherlands Hungary USSR, Ukraine USSR, Ukraine Netherlands ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ USSR, Belarus Hungary

Belarus Hungary

514

Appendix 3

First Name

Name

Year of birth

Jeno˝ Libuše

H. H.

1920 1924

Lilly

H.

1925

Milena

H.

1929

Nándor Osman Passynkowa

H. H. H.

Ruth Shabsai Sofia Sofija Vadym Victor Yaffa Zdene=k

H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H.

1907 1936 1941/ 1942 1921 1925 1922 1925 1923 1927 1920 1925

Alexander Jan

I. I.

1926 1921

MUnited States Niculae Stanisława Vladimir Alexandra Ermı \ne František

I. I. I. I. J. J. J.

1925 1933 1923 1940 1921 1927 1924

Galyna Jože Karel

J. J. J.

1927 1923 1923

Malka Marie

J. J.

1929 1924

Nada

J.

1935

Polina Sara Alicja Andrej Anna Anna

J. J. K. K. K. K.

1926 1920 1927 1925 1926 1927

Anton Apolonia

K. K.

1930 1921

Country of Origin

Country Today

Hungary ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ Yugoslavia Bosnia USSR, Russia

Slovakia Czech Republic

Norway Lithuania Poland USSR, Ukraine USSR, Ukraine USSR, Russia Hungary ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ USSR, Ukraine ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ USSR, Belarus Romania Poland USSR, Russia USSR, Belarus Latvia ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ USSR, Ukraine Slovenia ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ Romania (Transylvania) ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ Yugoslavia USSR, Ukraine Greece Poland USSR, Ukraine USSR, Russia ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ Slovenia Poland

Israel Czech Republic Slovakia Germany Ukraine Norway Lithuania England Ukraine Ukraine Lithuania Israel Czech Republic Ukraine Czech Republic Belarus Romania Poland Russia Belarus Latvia Czech Republic Ukraine Slovenia Czech Republic Israel Czech Republic Serbia and Montenegro Ukraine South Africa Poland Ukraine Russia Czech Republic Slovenia Poland

Interview Partners

515

First Name

Name

Year of birth

Bogdan Boris Cvetko David Ekaterina Ekaterina Elisabeth Elling Emı \ls Fedor Galyna Genovefa Gregor Gregorij Israel Ivan Ivan Iwan Iwan Ján Jelizaveta Jindr=ich

K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K.

1921 1925 1921 1930 1915 1923 1919 1918 1933 1927 1924 1924 1922 1925 1917 1925 1924 1923 1925 1929 1925 1919

Joseph Josif Judit Karl Kazimiera Ljudmila Maria Mária Mária Marija

K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K.

1925 1922 1936 1920 1924 1930 1927 1937 1929 1925

Martin Matriona Max Michailo Miloš Olga Petr Petro Iwanowytsch Raissa Regina

K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K. K.

1925 1933 1927 1923 1922 1923 1918 1925 1926 1915

Sergij Stanislaus Stefan

K. K. K.

1923 1927 1923

Country of Origin

Country Today

Poland USSR, Belarus Slovenia Poland USSR, Belarus USSR, Russia Germany Norway Latvia USSR, Ukraine USSR, Ukraine Galicia Greece USSR, Russia Netherlands USSR, Russia USSR, Russia USSR, Ukraine USSR, Ukraine Slovakia USSR, Ukraine ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ Poland Bulgaria Hungary Bulgaria Poland USSR, Russia USSR, Ukraine Slovakia Hungary Yugoslavia

Poland Belarus Slovenia South Africa Belarus Russia Germany Norway Latvia Russia Ukraine Slovenia Slovenia Russia South Africa Russia Russia Ukraine Ukraine Slovakia Russia Czech Republic

United States Bulgaria Hungary Bulgaria Poland Russia Ukraine Czech Republic Hungary Serbia and Montenegro Romania (Transylvania) Israel USSR, Belarus Belarus Netherlands Netherlands USSR, Ukraine Ukraine Slovakia Slovakia USSR, Ukraine Russia USSR, Ukraine Belarus USSR, Ukraine Ukraine USSR, Russia Russia Yugoslavia (BosniaCroatia Herzegovina) USSR, Ukraine Ukraine USSR, Ukraine Ukraine Poland Poland

516

Appendix 3

First Name

Name

Year of birth

Sylwester Tamara Vera Walentina Zdzisław Anita Esther Henny Milivoj Murray

K. K. K. K. K. L. L. L. L. L.

1922 1925 1925 1928 1922 1925 1928 1927 1925 1930

Nikolaj Noach-Noiosch Nora Regina Regina Sylvain Victor Zofia Alfreda Andrija

L. L. L. L. L. L. L. L. M. M.

1921 1924 1918 1929 1922 1920 1921 1927 1926 1933

Anna Anna Anna Antonie

M. M. M. M.

1926 1930 1923 1928

Antonina Barbara Bratu Carla Chava Dus*an Elena Emile Eugenia Eva

M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M.

1923 1925 1912 1926 1928 1924 1935 1922 1925 1920

Finn Imréné Inessa Janina Jean Jerzy Józef Józef Ladislav

M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M.

1922 1913 1933 1923 1918 1928 1919 1914 1922

Country of Origin

Country Today

Poland USSR, Russia USSR, Russia USSR, Belarus Poland Germany Poland Netherlands Croatia (‘NDH’) Hungary (today Ukraine) Estonia Poland Lithuania Netherlands Poland France France Poland Poland Croatia (‘NDH’)

Poland Ukraine Russia Belarus Poland England South Africa Netherlands Croatia United States

USSR, Russia USSR, Ukraine USSR, Ukraine ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ USSR, Russia Poland Transnistria Italy Yugoslavia Romania USSR, Russia France Poland ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ Norway Hungary USSR, Ukraine Poland France Poland Poland Poland ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’

Russia Israel United States Netherlands Poland France France Poland Poland Serbia and Montenegro Russia Ukraine Ukraine Czech Republic Russia Poland Romania Italy Israel Romania Russia France Poland Czech Republic Norway Hungary Ukraine Poland France Poland Poland Poland Czech Republic

Interview Partners

517

First Name

Name

Year of birth

Country of Origin

Country Today

Leonid Lew Maciej Maria Marija Mykola Mykola Natalia Nina Uroš Varvara Wasyl Mychajlowytsch Wolodymyr Zdislav Zofia Anton Boris Genowefa Jaroslav

M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M.

1926 1917 1918 1924 1924 1920 1925 1928 1930 1920 1923 1920

Poland USSR, Russia Poland USSR, Ukraine USSR, Russia USSR, Ukraine USSR, Ukraine Poland USSR, Belarus Croatia (‘NDH’) USSR, Ukraine Poland

Ukraine Russia Poland Ukraine Russia Ukraine Ukraine Poland Belarus Croatia Ukraine Ukraine

M. M. M. N. N. N. N.

1925 1926 1915 1930 1922 1914 1921

Ukraine Czech Republic Poland Slovenia Bulgaria Poland Czech Republic

Jehoshua Jitka

N. N.

1930 1924

Lev Louis Pjotr Roma

N. N. N. N.

1925 1920 1924 1926

Poland Czechoslovakia Poland Slovenia Bulgaria Poland ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ Hungary ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ Estonia Romania USSR, Ukraine Poland

Ruth Ružica

N. N.

1919 1929

Norway Croatia (‘NDH’)

Sławomir Vadim Wilhelm Anna Harald Iwan Leonid Mária Pierre Piotr Simon Srec;ko Stefania Torbjoern Vira Alla

N. N. N. O. O. O. O. O. O. O. O. O. O. O. O. P.

1928 1923 1922 1925 1915 1927 1930 1921 1921 1926 1915 1925 1932 1920 1916 1937

Poland USSR, Russia Germany USSR, Russia Norway USSR, Ukraine USSR, Belarus Slovakia France USSR, Russia Norway Croatia (‘NDH’) not specified Norway USSR, Ukraine USSR, Belarus

Israel Czech Republic Russia Romania Ukraine United States und Israel Norway Serbia and Montenegro Poland Russia Germany Russia Norway Ukraine Russia Slovakia France Russia Norway Croatia Poland Norway Ukraine Belarus

518

Appendix 3

First Name

Name

Year of birth

Anna Anna Anna Pawliwna Arie Barbara Branko František

P. P. P. P. P. P. P.

1929 1918 1923 1930 1936 1924 1917

Freida Hanna Hartog Jaroslav

P. P. P. P.

1927 1921 1925 1921

Jerzy Jewdokija Joseph Julijana

P. P. P. P.

1923 1926 1924 1926

Leonid Lucjan Maria Marin

P. P. P. P.

1937 1925 1921 1924

Milan

P.

1921

USSR, Belarus Poland USSR Transnistria (then Romania) Serbia

Moïse Oxsana Pere Petr Poli Sofija Stanisław Stefan Stjepan

P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P.

1922 1925 1921 1926 1921 1926 1924 1927 1924

France USSR, Ukraine Spain USSR, Belarus Bulgaria Poland (Galicia) Poland Poland Croatia (‘NDH’)

Viktor Vladimir Volodymyr Waleria Zelig Zygmunt

P. P. P. P. P. P.

USSR, Ukraine USSR, Belarus USSR, Ukraine Poland Poland Poland

Alexandra Alexandru Alexej Béla Ctibor Elmaz

R. R. R. R. R. R.

1923 1923 1922 1920 1924 1920/ 1921 1925 1930 1922 1919 1920 1923

Serbia and Montenegro France Ukraine Spain Belarus Bulgaria Ukraine Poland Poland Serbia and Montenegro Ukraine Belarus Ukraine Poland United States Poland

USSR, Belarus Romania USSR, Ukraine Hungary Slovakia Macedonia

Belarus Moldova Belarus Hungary Czech Republic Macedonia

Country of Origin

Country Today

USSR, Belarus Poland USSR, Ukraine Romania Poland Croatia (‘NDH’) ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ USSR, Russia USSR, Ukraine Netherlands ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ Poland USSR, Russia Romania Croatia (‘NDH’)

Belarus Poland Ukraine Israel Poland Croatia Czech Republic Russia Ukraine Netherlands Czech Republic Poland Russia Israel Serbia and Montenegro Belarus Poland France Romania

Interview Partners

519

First Name

Name

Year of birth

Harry Helene Ján Janez Jevgenij Jozef Judith Kurt Maria Miloslava

R. R. R. R. R. R. R. R. R. R.

1920 1923 1929 1929 1937 1924 1916 1920 1930 1925

Mykola Paul Radojka Raoul Trinitario Wladimir Władysław Adam Alexandra Anastasija Andrejs Angelo Anita

R. R. R. R. R. R. R. S. S. S. S. S. S.

1921 1925 1932 1922 1921 1928 1916 1920 1925 1926 1925 1926 1930

Antanina Barbara Bogusław Bohdan Chava Claudio Daut Dina Jevstaf’evna Dušan Edit Edward Ekaterina Georgievna Emanuel Emin Feodossia Gad Galina Georgij Gilberto Guy György Hans-Jürgen

S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S.

Country of Origin

Country Today

United States United States Slovakia Slovenia Ukraine England Israel United States Ukraine Czech Republic

1925 1929 1924 1927 1930 1920 1924 1920 1927 1930 1919 1924

Poland Poland Slovakia Slovenia USSR, Ukraine Poland Netherlands France USSR, Ukraine ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ Poland France Croatia (‘NDH’) France Spain USSR, Belarus Poland Poland USSR, Russia USSR, Russia Latvia Italy ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ USSR, Russia Poland Poland USSR, Ukraine Poland Italy Macedonia USSR, Ukraine Slovenia Hungary Poland USSR, Russia

1919 1929 1924 1923 1924 1924 1928 1921 1922 1920

Netherlands Macedonia USSR, Ukraine Tunisia USSR, Russia USSR, Ukraine Italy France Hungary Germany

Ukraine France Germany France Spain Belarus Poland Poland Russia Germany Latvia Italy United States Russia Poland Poland Ukraine Israel Italy Macedonia Russia Slovenia Slovakia Poland Russia Netherlands Macedonia Ukraine Israel Russia Ukraine Italy France Hungary Germany

520

Appendix 3

First Name

Name

Year of birth

Iwan Iwan Iwan Jacques Janina Jaroslav

S. S. S. S. S. S.

1925 1923 1924 1913 1924 1922

Jaroslava

S.

1926

Jorge José Josefa

S. S. S.

1923 1920 1925

Józef Józef Karel

S. S. S.

1917 1933 1923

Karol Kristina

S. S.

1924 1920

Kve=tuše Ladislav

S. S.

1925 1921

Larissa Liliana Ljubov Łucja Maria Marija Marija Meir Mieczysław Mihály Mychajlo Olexandr Olga Olga Ippolitovna Paul Pavlo Radoslavka

S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S.

1926 1930 1924 1927 1939 1925 1929 1925 1926 1922 1928 1923 1932 1923 1924 1933 1920

Regina René René

S. S. S.

1928 1922 1923

Reshat Roman Stane

S. S. S.

1926 1925 1923

Country of Origin

Country Today

USSR, Ukraine USSR, Ukraine USSR, Ukraine Greece Poland ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ France Spain ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ Poland Poland Czechoslovakia (Sudetenland) Poland Yugoslavia

Ukraine Ukraine Ukraine Israel Poland Czech Republic

Czechoslovakia ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ USSR, Russia Italy USSR, Ukraine Poland Poland USSR, Russia Slovenia Hungary Poland Hungary USSR, Ukraine Poland USSR, Belarus USSR, Russia France USSR, Ukraine Hungary Lithuania France ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ Macedonia USSR, Ukraine Slovenia

Czech Republic France Spain Czech Republic Poland Poland Czech Republic Poland Serbia and Montenegro Czech Republic Czech Republic Russia Italy Russia Poland Poland Russia Slovenia United States Poland Hungary Ukraine Ukraine Russia Russia France Ukraine Serbia and Montenegro Lithuania France Czech Republic Macedonia Ukraine Slovenia

Interview Partners

521

First Name

Name

Year of birth

Tatjana Teodor Tetyana Tosia Ustinia Valentina Vassyl Vera Wacław Wacława Wiktor Wladimir Wladimir Zahava Zdenka

S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S. S.

1924 1916 1921 1929 1923 1925 1924 1922 1919 1927 1929 1930 1927 1930 1927

Zecharja Adam Alexandra Anna Antonina Bernard Georgij Hristache

S. T. T. T. T. T. T. T.

1925 1925 1925 1925 1919 1932 1928 1928

Iancu Ivan Janina Lev Lidia Ljudmila Ludmila Mintscho Nikolaj Nona Pawel Piero Roman Sofija Stepan Taissa Tatjana Ferenc Ferencné Galina Marie

T. T. T. T. T. T. T. T. T. T. T. T. T. T. T. T. T. U. U. U. U.

1922 1916 1927 1928 1921 1929 1921 1922 1927 1931 1928 1928 1922 1927 1927 1924 1927 1922 1924 1934 1924

Pavel

U.

1924

Country of Origin

Country Today

USSR, Ukraine Slovakia USSR, Ukraine Poland (Galicia) USSR, Ukraine USSR, Ukraine USSR, Ukraine USSR, Ukraine Poland Poland USSR, Russia USSR, Belarus USSR, Belarus Hungary Czechoslovakia (Sudetenland) Poland USSR, Belarus USSR, Belarus USSR, Ukraine Poland Poland USSR, Russia Transnistria (then Romania) Romania Poland Poland USSR, Russia USSR, Ukraine USSR, Ukraine USSR, Russia Bulgaria USSR, Belarus USSR, Belarus USSR, Ukraine Italy Poland USSR, Belarus USSR, Ukraine USSR, Ukraine USSR, Russia Hungary Hungary USSR, Russia ‘Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren’ Slovakia

Ukraine Slovakia Ukraine United States Ukraine Ukraine Ukraine Russia Poland Poland Russia Belarus Belarus United States Czech Republic Israel Belarus Russia Ukraine Poland Poland Russia Romania Romania Ukraine Poland Russia Ukraine Ukraine Russia Bulgaria Belarus Belarus Ukraine Italy Poland Belarus Ukraine Russia Russia Hungary Hungary Russia Czech Republic Slovakia

522

Appendix 3

First Name

Name

Year of birth

Walentina Albina Alexandr Ali Amalija Andrei Andrei

U. V. V. V. V. V. V.

1926 1927 1927 1929 1920 1920 1922

Antonina Dragica Ferenc Györgyné Marja Maurice Sonja Arne Binem Bogdan Boleslav János Kazimiera Leon Ljudmila Moshe Philipp Rivka Robert Wera Wiesława Zdzisława Alojz Bolesław Ede Ivan Jacek Julia László Leszek Magda Mirko Shifra Viktor Władysław

V. V. V. V. V. V. V. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. Z. Z. Z. Z. Z. Z. Z. Z. Z. Z. Z. Z. Z.

1924 1919 1924 1920 1924 1921 1925 1920 1928 1919 1922 1920 1923 1925 1926 1925 1912 1922 1923 1924 1924 1928 1935 1923 1924 1930 1926 1936 1921 1924 1919 1936 1927 1928 1924

Country of Origin

Country Today

USSR, Russia Lithuania USSR, Belarus Macedonia Slovenia Romania Transnistria (then Romania) USSR, Ukraine Croatia (‘NDH’) Hungary Hungary USSR, Russia France Slovenia Norway Poland Poland Czechoslovakia Hungary Poland Poland USSR, Belarus Yugoslavia Germany Lithuania France USSR, Belarus Poland Poland Slovenia Poland Hungary Slovenia Poland USSR, Ukraine Hungary Poland Hungary Slovenia Poland USSR, Russia Poland

Russia Lithuania Belarus Macedonia Slovenia Romania Romania Russia Croatia Hungary Hungary Russia France Slovenia Norway Israel Poland Czech Republic Hungary Poland United States Belarus Israel Germany Israel France Belarus Poland Poland Slovenia Poland Hungary Slovenia Poland Ukraine Hungary Poland Slovakia Slovenia United States Russia Poland

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Margalit Bejarano, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary History (Israel, Jerusalem) Alesja Belanovich, Dolya – Verband der NS-Opfer (Belarus, Minsk) Amija Boasson, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary History (Israel, Jerusalem) Johanna Bodenstab, Yale Center for International and Area Studies (USA, Connecticut, New Haven) Rose Lerer Cohen, Lithuanian Names Project (Israel, Jerusalem) Ewa Czerwiakowski, Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt e.V. (Germany, Berlin) Alexander Dalhouski, RWTH Aachen, Lehr- und Forschungsgebiet Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte (Germany, Aachen) Elena Danchenko, Institut für Geschichte und Biographie (Germany, Lüdenscheid), Fernuniversität Hagen Doris Felsen, Instituto Luce (Italy, Rome) Piotr Filipkowski, Fundacja Os;rodka KARTA (Poland, Warsaw) Viviana Frenkel, Instituto Luce (Italy, Rome) Sara Ghitis, The William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum (USA, Georgia, Atlanta) Anne-Marie Granet-Abisset, Association des Amis du musée départemental de la Résistance et de la Déportation de l’Isère (France, Grenoble) Gelinada Grinchenko, Kovalskich-Ostinstitut for Ukrainian Regional Studies, University of Kharkiv (Ukraine, Kharkiv) Imke Hansen, Gemeinschaftsunternehmen Internationale Bildungs- und Begegnungsstätte Minsk GmbH (Belarus, Minsk; Germany, Dortmund) Viola Jakschová, Živá pame=t’ (Czech Republic, Prague) Šárka Jarská, Živá pame=t’ (Czech Republic, Prague) Dagi Knellessen, Fritz Bauer Institut (Germany, Frankfurt am Main)

524

List of Contributors

Monika Kokalj Koc=evar, Muzej Novoješe Zgodovine Slovenije (Slovenia, Ljubljana) Éva Kovács, Teleki Laszló Institut, Centre for Central European Studies (Hungary, Budapest) Tetyana Lapan, Educational Initiatives Centre (Ukraine, Lviv) Dori Laub, Yale Center for International and Area Studies (USA, Connecticut, New Haven) Almut Leh, Institut für Geschichte und Biographie (Germany, Lüdenscheid), Fernuniversität, Hagen Ana Luleva, Ethnographical Institute and Museum at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (Bulgaria, Sofia) Birgit Mair, Institut für sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung, Bildung und Beratung (ISFBB) Nürnberg e.V. (Germany, Nuremberg) Katarzyna Madon;-Mitzner, Fundacja Os;rodka KARTA (Poland, Warsaw) Olga Nikitina (now Olga den Besten), Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences (Russia, Moscow) Alexander von Plato, Institut für Geschichte und Biographie (Germany, Lüdenscheid), Fernuniversität, Hagen Artur Podgorski, Motór-Film Sp.z o.o. (Poland, Warsaw) Anna Reznikova, Regional Office Research and Information Centre ‘Memorial’ (Russia, St Petersburg) Joachim Riegel, Institut für Geschichte und Biographie (Germany, Lüdenscheid), Fernuniversität, Hagen Elena Rozhdestvenskaya, Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences (Russia, Moscow) Irina Scherbakova, Memorial – International Volunteer Public Organisation Memorial Historical Educational, Human Rights and Charitable Society (Russia, Moscow) Henriette Schlesinger, Institut für Geschichte und Biographie (Germany, Lüdenscheid), Fernuniversität, Hagen Christian Schölzel, Culture and More (Germany, Munich) Victoria Semenova, Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences (Russia, Moscow) Christoph Thonfeld, Institut für Geschichte und Biographie (Germany, Lüdenscheid), Fernuniversität, Hagen Natalia Timofeyeva, Educational State University Voronezh (Russia, Voronezh) Mercedes Vilanova, Asociatión Historia y Fuente Oral (Spain, Barcelona) Ruth Weinberger, The William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum (USA, Georgia, Atlanta) Gisela Wenzel, Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt e.V. (Germany, Berlin) Barbara N. Wiesinger, Fachbereich Geschichts- und Politikwissenschaft der Paris-Lodron-Universität Salzburg (Austria, Salzburg)

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INDEX

A AB action (Außerordentliche Befriedungsaktion), 72 Act for Protection against the State (Bulgaria), 188, 192 Adamkus, President (Lithuania), 206, 208 administration jobs, forced labour, 6, 410 AEG factory, 202 Agrarian Reform Party (BCP), 189 agriculture forced labour in, 5–6, 18n4, 61, 62, 144, 154, 169, 183, 201, 215, 219, 240, 244– 245, 255, 270–271, 279, 298–299, 459 views of Germans in, 171, 244–245, 258 Ahmetoviç, Dervisa, 179–180 Air Raid Protection Service, 50 air raids, 50, 55, 454–455, 482n53 Albini, Dusan, 64 Alexander, King (Yugoslavia), 178 Alexandrova, Ekaterina, 297–307 passim Alimanoviç, Omer, 183, 185 Aliyat Hanoar project, 342 Alliance of Associations of Veterans of the War of National Liberation (SUBNOR), 160 Amical de Mauthausen y Otros Campos y de Todas las Víctimas del Nazismo de España, 42 anarchists, 38, 42 anarcho-syndicalist trade union (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, CNT), 38 Angelakov, Boris, 191–197 Anti-Jewish Act for Protection of the Nation (Bulgaria), 188 anti-Semitism, 31, 32, 33, 34, 72, 124, 179, 188–189, 357, 423, 457–458, 461–462. See also Jews Fabrikaktion, 36n5 final solution, 201, 339 indirect extermination, 339 wearing Star of David, 192, 458, 465 “antisocial” people, 24, 33, 48

archives, 9 Ardèche (France), 117–118 Army Group Centre, Rear Zone (Belarus), 212–218 Arrow Cross movement, 125 Arsenyova, M., 243 artists, 24 Artyushenko, Anatoly, 276–277, 278, 281, 283 Asociación de Ex-presos (Spain), 43 Association des Amis du Musée de la Résistance et de la Déportation de I’lsère, 115 Association for the Victims of Military Justice (Vereinigung der Opfer der Militärjustiz), 31 Association of Anti-Fascist Fighters, 67 Association of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy, 95 Association of Inmates of Mauthausen and other camps and all the victims of Nazism in Spain, 42 Association of the Friends of Georges Brassens, 115 Atias, Jakov, 157, 158, 162 Auschwitz concentration camp, 25, 26, 73–74, 145, 201, 343–344, 351, 368 Auschwitz I, 52, 410 Auschwitz II (Birkenau), 53, 74, 124, 411 functionary prisoners, 410–411, 413–414 liberation of, 313 roles of prisoners, 410–411 as touchstone, 471–472 Auschwitz trials, 16, 34 exhibition of, 408 expectations of witnesses, 422 initiation of, 407 purpose of, 408 witnesses at, 407–408, 418–424 Austria, 476 Croatians in, 153 labour camps in, 302 Russians in, 302 Serbs in, 169

Index B Bacon, Yehuda, 409–415 passim, 417–424 passim Badganovitch, Katerina, 204–205 Badoglio, Pietro, Field Marshal 311, 314 (identical person!) Bajnorowitsch, Michail, 230 Balt Cygnet resettlement program, 325 Baltic countries, forced labour in, 4–5 banking industry fear of lawsuits, 35 forced labour, 6 Barcelona, fall of, 37 Basdorf camp, 115 Batriçeviç, Radomir, 168–174 Bauer, Fritz, 407 Bednarek, Emil, 421 Beganoviç, Hanifa, 184 Beganoviç, Jusuf, 183 Beganoviç, Zeifa, 183 Behar, Aron, 191–197 Bejarano, Margalit, 338 Belanovich, Alesja, 226 Belarus, 212–237. See also interview partners (Belarus) civil administration, 218–221 forced labour, 4–5 German occupation, 227–229 ghettos, 219 Jews in, 214–215 military administration, 212–218 recruitment of forced labour, 211–225 Roma in, 215 statistics, 222, 226 Belgium, 15, 475 forced labour, 4–5 Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, 340 Berlin, Germany, 25, 140, 216 Berlin History Workshop, 89, 97n7 Berner, Kornelia Judith, 409–424 passim biography, stages of life, 427, 430–435 Birkenau. See Auschwitz concentration camp Blas, Janez, 150n12 Blasko, Bedrich, 52, 56 BMW aeorplane factory, 193 Boasson, Amija, 338 Bobruisk camp, 217 Bodenstab, Johanna, 16, 364, 426 Bogdanov, S. N., 287–295 Bogdanoviç, Bogdan, 158 Bogovic, Jože, 144, 146 Bohemia, 47 Boiling concentration camp, 204 bombings, 50, 55, 454–455, 482n53 Bonhoeffer, Emmi, 419 Bonotto, Giovanni, 313–322 passim Bor, Yugoslavia, 125, 169 Boris III (Tsar of Bulgaria), 189, 196 Bosnia, 177–187. See also interview partners (Bosnia) guerrilla warfare in, 178 Jews in, 178 Muslims in, 177–179 as part of greater Croatia, 178

539 Roma in, 177–187, 458 Serbs in, 178 Braham, Randolph, 134 Brandenburg, Germany, 251 Brandenburg airplane factory, 204 Brassens, Georges, 115 Bratislava, 60 Brazauskas, Prime Minister (Lithuania), 208 Breman Museum Legacy Project, 352 Breslau, Germany, (today Wroclaw, Poland), 120 Bricha movements, 340 Bubalo, Andrija, 162 Buchenwald concentration camp, 29, 34, 38, 40, 162, 192, 193, 194, 201, 204, 235, 255–256, 340, 344, 369 Buchenwald museum, 194 building industry, forced labour in, 5–6 Bulanova, Raisa, 227–228, 229, 230, 231, 233, 236 Bulgaria, 188–198, 465–466. See also interview partners (Bulgaria) as ally to Germany, 188 anti-Semitism, 188–189, 465–466 Communist master narrative, 474–475 culture of remembrance, 194–197 forced labour in, 4–5, 189–190 government in exile, 193 historiography, 189, 191 Jews in, 188, 189, 196, 465–466 Bulgarian Anti-Fascist Union of War Veterans (BAU), 190, 191 Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP), 189, 195, 196 Bulgarian Orthodox Church, 189, 196 Bulgarian Socialist Party, 191 Bundzus, Kurt, 423 Burnin, Michail, 228, 232, 233 C Carniola, 134–140 Casañas, Enric, 45 Català, Neus, 42, 43, 46 Catalan Republican Left Party (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, ERC), 38, 39 Catholic Centre Party, 23 Central Institute of State Security (Slovak Republic), 59, 62 chemical industry, forced labour in, 5–6, 459 Chetniks, 178 children as victims, 75, 89, 140, 141, 215, 217, 242, 300, 447–449 civilian workers, 4, 215, 218–221, 297, 315, 329, 459, 464. See also forced labour; interview partners Göring’s directive of 1941, 251 statistics, 442 Claims Conference (Hungarian), 125, 134 Cohen, David, 191–197 Cohen, Rose Lerer, 199 Cold War, 6, 34, 37, 419 Cologne, Germany, 251 Committee of Fighters against Fascism and Capitalism (Bulgaria), 190

540 Communist Party of Germany (KPD), 27, 28, 29 Communist Party of Spain, 39 Communist Youth League (KJVD), 27 Communist Youth organisation (Juventudes Comunistas, JC), 38 communists, 23, 27, 28, 29, 33, 38, 39, 152, 178 in Bosnia, 178–179 in Bulgaria, 189 in Croatia, 152 in Germany, 23, 27, 28, 29 in Lithuania, 206 in Spain, 38, 39 in the United States, 357 compensation Russia, 283 Slovenia, 148 compensation issues, 6, 7–8, 378 Bosnia, 185 Croatia, 158, 159–161 Czech, 57–58 fear of lawsuits, 35 openness clause, 18n8 Poland, 79–80, 96–97 Roma, 109, 185 Spain, 43 statistics, 8 timeline, 495–508 Yugoslavia, 159–161 concentration camps. See also slave labour; specific camps erection of, 32 killing methods, 443 locations of, 189, 340 origins of, 23 prisoner hierarchy, 414 saving energy in, 146 statistics, 442 construction jobs, forced labour, 192, 215, 216, 217, 220, 341, 412, 459 coping strategies, 233–236, 343–344 resilience, 359–361, 372 Cracow, Poland, 72, 353 “Crimes of the Wehrmacht” exhibition, 35 criminals, 24, 33 Croatia, 151–165. See also NDH (Independent State of Croatia); Yugoslavia Communist master narrative, 474–475 communists in, 152 forced labour, 4–5 Italian occupation, 153, 156 Jews in, 152, 153, 155 Roma in, 152 Serbs in, 152, 153, 166 Slovenians in, 140, 153 statistics, 153 Cuerpo de Carabineros (border police), 39 Cukerman, Eta, 202–203 culture of remembrance, 14, 470–478. See also historiography; narratives in Austria, 476 in Bulgaria, 194–197 in Croatia, 158–159, 161–163 in Czech territories, 57–58, 474

Index East vs. West, 473–477 in France, 467, 475 in Germany, 6, 34–35, 476, 477–478 in Hungary, 135 in Israel, 472, 476 in Italy, 476 in Lithuania, 208–209 in Poland, 81, 82–83, 94–96, 474 for Roma, 108–109 in Russia, 473 (See also U.S.S.R., historiography) Soviet women’s memories, 296–309 in Serbia, 173–174 in Slovak Republic, 68–69, 474 in Slovenia, 148–149, 474 in Spain, 45, 476 split remembrance cultures, 477–478 in U. S., 16, 472, 476 “unity in death,” 159 in U.S.S.R., 296–309, 473–474 (See also U.S.S.R., historiography) cultures of commemoration. See culture of remembrance Czech territories culture of remembrance, 57–58, 474 forced labour, 4–5, 47–58 homecoming issues, 395–396 Czech Trust Fund, 325 Czechoslovak Republic, 47 as German protectorate, 47–58 Czechoslovakia, postwar, 418, 423, 460, 474 Czestochowa concentration camp, 340 Czerwiakowski, Ewa, 86 D Dachau concentration camp, 53, 145, 146, 192, 201, 340 Dachau trials, 147, 159, 474 Dadziz, L. Y., 287–295 DAG (German Settlement Society), 140 Daimler-Benz, 9 Dalhouski, Alexander, 211 de Gaulle, Charles, 475 death, views of, 146 death marches (1944–1945), 25, 61, 340, 370 Deçev, Christo, 191–197 Denmark, 15, 475 forced labour, 4–5 deserters, 24, 33 Deutsche Bank, 9 Di Karke ghetto (Lithuania), 203 Dimic, Lazar, 177 disabled people, 24, 33, 141 Disciplinary Battalions of Worker Soldiers (Batallones Disciplinarios de Soldados Trabajadores, BDST), 38 displaced persons, 324–337, 396–397 DIWAG (Deutsche Industriewerke), 169, 170 Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, 251 Documentation and Cultural Centre of German Sinti and Roma in Heidelberg, 32 Documentation of the Biographies of Former Slave and Forced Labourers. See

Index International Slave and Forced Labourers Documentation Project domestic service, forced labour in, 255 Donetsk, Ukraine, 251 Dora-Mittelbau camp, 157, 201, 202, 315, 340 Dragojloviç, Milan, 168–174 Dresden, Germany, 454, 482n53 Dresdner bank, 9 Drozdy, Belarus, 219 Dubnica nad Váhom camp, 55, 62 Duclos, J. C., 115 Dumiç, Mirko, 153, 162 Durán, Josep, 39, 46 E East Prussia, 355 Eastern Europe, 399, 461, 474–475. See also specific countries General Plan East, 461 split remembrance cultures, 477–478 Echinard, R., 120 Eichmann trial, 407 Einsatzgruppen, 200, 339, 365, 367 Ellermeier, Hermann, 140 emigration issues, 13–14, 31, 325–327, 401– 402, 456, 461 host countries, 333, 462 employment contract breaches, 48, 49, 167 Ergänzungswirtschaftsraum (supplementary economic space), 152 Ermacenko, Ivan, 220 Eschenbach factory, 193 Esposito, Donato, 313–322 passim Estades, P., 115 Esterwegen prison camp, 30 Estonia, 201, 325 European Volunteer Workers Resettlement Programme, 325 Evian Conference, 356 F Fabrikaktion, 36n5 factories, forced labour in, 144–145, 169, 193, 270–271, 302, 341 Farben. See IG Farben i.l. Farré, Salvador, 46 fate, construction of, 236–237 Fateless, 133 Federal Compensation Act (Bundesentschädigungsgesetz), 7 Felsen, Doris, 310 Férenc, Tone, 150n9 Ficowski, Jerzy, 99, 100, 109 Filipkowski, Piotr, 71 Flossenbürg concentration camp, 201 Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Déportation, 114 food supplies, 49, 53, 144, 171, 245–246, 269, 278, 280, 341, 412, 433, 434 forced labour. See also interview partners allied vs. occupied countries, 465–468 as chance for survival, 31, 369, 412–413, 458, 460–461

541 children deported for, 75, 89, 140, 141, 215, 217, 242, 447–449 in corrective labour camps, 166 extermination through labour, 51 families deported for, 447–449 functionary prisoners, 410–411, 413–414 German origins, 24 goals of, 441 international perspective, 3 as persecution, 50, 55, 94 private companies, 4 psychological consequences, 328–330 public agencies, 4 sabotaged production, 170 solidarity issues, 76 (See also solidarity) as spiritual regeneration, 40 statistics, 3–4, 18n2, 48, 166 timeline, 495–508 uniforms, 50 victim status, recognition of, 478–479 forestry, forced labour, 154 forgiveness, 109–110, 284 Foriel, G. Fortunoff Archive (Yale University), 16, 364, 428, 435 comparison study of interviewees, 426–439 France, 113–123. See also interview partners (France) collaboration, 467, 475 culture of remembrance, 467, 475 displaced persons immigrants, 396 forced labour, 4–5 homecoming issues, 399–400 Italian attack, 310 resistance, 121, 475 Roma in, 204 Spanish in, 38, 40 Vichy regime, 113, 466, 467, 475 Franco, Francisco, 37–45, 476 death of, 45 Frank, Hans, 353 German invasion, 353 Frankfurt, Germany, 407–408, 419 Frenkel, Viviana, 310 Friedland concentration camp, 52 Frigerio, Alessandro, 313–322 passim Fritz Bauer Institute, 408, 423n1 Fumiç, Ivan, 158, 162 functionary prisoners, 410–411, 413–414 G Galician Ukraine, 238–249. See also interview partners (Galician Ukraine) double German invasion, 243 views of Germans, 242, 243–244, 245 views of Polish, 242 views of Soviets, 242, 243–244, 245 voluntary vs. forced deportation, 239 Gálvez, Joaquín, 46 Gaon, Jakov, 154, 156 Garriga, Marcelli, 46 General Commissariat White Ruthenia (Belarus), 211–212, 218–221 gender issues, 13, 297–303

542 nakedness, 75–76, 342, 447 narratives, 297–307 rape, 77, 173, 206, 229, 256, 273, 342, 398, 442, 444, 447, 480n1 reaction to interviewing process, 352 sexual experiences, 305–307 solidarity among women, 171–172, 415–416 sterilisation, 31, 33 General Plenipotentiary for Labour Allocation (GBA), 88, 213, 216, 251 Geneva Convention, 4, 463 labour regulations, 17n1 POWs, 167 Genocide Studies Program (Yale), 428 German Communist Party (DKP), 27 German-Czech Future Fund, 57 German Reich. See Germany, National Socialist German-Soviet Friendship Treaty, 200 German-Soviet Pact (1939), 71 German-Soviet War, 238 Germanisation, 150n9 of Poland, 71–72, 75, 87, 93 “racial biology examination,” 89 of Slovenian territory, 135 Germans, view of, 450–452, 456. See also interview partners doctors, 452 Germany, National Socialist, 3. See also interview partners (Germany) anti-Semitism, 25, 26, 27, 31–32, 461 Belarus labour in, 212, 213, 215, 220–221, 227, 231–233 Bulgarian labour in, 190, 465–466 contradictions in system, 455 control of Ukraine, 250 (See also Galician Ukraine; Ukraine) Croatian labour in, 151–163, 154 French labour in, 113–123, 466, 475 Galician Ukrainian labour in, 239 Jews in, 25, 26, 27, 31–32 Lithuanian labour in, 200, 201 Polish labour in, 88–89 Polish policy, 86–96 (See also Poland) protectorate of Czech areas, 47 Roma labour in, 204 Russian labour in, 263, 266–275 Serb labour in, 155, 167, 169 Slovak labour in, 61–62 Slovenian labour in, 140, 143–144 Soviet women in, 297–303 Ukrainian Ostarbeiter labour in, 251–252 war economy, 5, 48, 61, 441 Germany (FRG – West Germany) Bosnian Roma Civil War refugees in, 186–187 culture of remembrance, 6, 34–35, 407, 476, 477 forced labourers who remained in, 400–401 victim hierarchies, 35, 477 Germany (GDR—East Germany), 6, 34 culture of remembrance, 477 victim hierarchies, 35, 477 Gestapo, 26, 28, 29, 60, 62, 75 prison in Charles Square, Prague, 52 Ghitis, Sara, 351

Index Gimeno, Edmund, 46 glasnost, 262 Glushko, Georgij, 207–208 Golik, Ignacy, 409–415 passim, 417–424 passim Gönczi, Imre, 409–415 passim, 417–424 passim González, Felipe, 40 Gordon, Michail Gerschenowitsch, 219 Gõring, Hermann, 201, 251 Gottberg, Kurt von, 219 Government General (Poland), 72 Graifer, Iosif, 228, 230, 231, 232, 234 Granet-Abisset, Anne-Marie, 113 Great Britain Austrian immigrants, 325 Czech immigrants in, 326–327 displaced persons immigrants, 324–337, 396 Estonian immigrants, 325 forced labour, 4–5 German immigrants, 325, 327 humanitarian immigration, 325 Jewish immigrants, 324 labour shortage, 325 Latvian immigrants, 325 Lithuanian immigrants, 325 mining industry, 325, 326 Polish immigrants, 324, 327 resettlement programs, 325 textile industry, 325, 326 trade unions, 326 Ukrainian immigrants, 324, 326, 327 Greece, 152 forced labour, 4–5 Italian attack on, 310 Greek-Catholic Church, 240, 241 Greiser, Gauleiter, 87 Grinchenko, Gelinada, 250 Groß Rosen concentration camp, 340 Grodno, U.S.S.R., 277 Gross, Mirjana, 157–158, 162 Gross-Breesen (Germany), 24 Gunskirchen concentration camp, 125 H Hague land war regulations, 17–18n1 Hansen, Imke, 226 Harmat, Éva, 128–129 Hasimoviç, Osman, 180–181, 184, 185 Hebrew Historical Museum (Bulgaria), 190, 191, 196 Herbert, Ulrich, 9, 461 Heydrich, Reinhard, 48 Himmler, Heinrich, 140, 201, 217 historiography, 133–134, 135, 141, 189 Bulgaria, 189, 191 Lithuania, 206 Soviet, 239, 241, 252, 262, 274, 283, 296, 303, 453 Hitler, Adolf, 23, 59, 134, 155, 179, 200 Hitler Youth, 30, 449–450, 480n19 Hlinka’s Guard, 59, 60, 62 Hodonín u Kunštátu camp, 52–53 Holem, Shabsai, 202 Holocaust, repression of, 262. See also antiSemitism; Jews; Shoah

Index Holocaust awareness, 426, 428–430 Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington, D. C.), 428, 478 Holocaust museums, 54, 135, 194, 208, 428. See also specific museums Holocaust revisionists, 423 Holocaust survivors. See interview partners (Jewish) Home Guards, 147 homecoming issues, 13–14, 394–406 Czech territories, 395–396 displaced persons, 324–337, 396–397 Eastern Europe, 399 France, 399–400 Italy, 399 Poland, 77–78, 399 repatriation, 397 Roma, 402–403 Russia, 272–274, 281–282, 305 Serbia, 172–173 Slovenia, 146–148 Spain, 44–45, 400 Ukrainian Ostarbeiter, 256–257 U.S.S.R., 13, 272–274, 395, 397–398 homosexuals, 24, 48, 442 Hosid, Grigorij, 231, 235–236 Hungary, 62, 124–137, 354–355 control of Ukraine, 250 forced labour, 4–5 German occupation, 125 historical background, 124–125 influence on Czech areas, 47 Second Hungarian Army, 124 hyper-compensation, 307 I identification numbers, 75, 114, 143, 410 tattooed, 53, 289 identity issues. See also Germanisation construction of fate, 236–237 construction of identity, 111n5, 131 erased experiences, 131 Holocaust survivor identification, 428 legitimacy, 134 loss of, 93 psychoanalysis, 132 self-perception, 236–237 IG Farben i.l., 7, 26, 227, 228, 341, 422 Ilava security camps, 60 Independent Republic of Slovenia, 148. See also Slovenian territory industrial companies aluminium, 301 archives, 9 armaments, 279, 415 fear of lawsuits, 35 forced labour in, 169, 240, 255, 270–271, 279, 300 Institute of History and Biography (Hagen University), 10, 11, 377, 423n1 Institute of the Memory of the Nation (Institut pamati národa), 68 International Auschwitz Committee, 419 International Brigades (Spain), 40

543 International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation in Lithuania, 205–206, 208 International Mauthausen Documenting Project, 11. See Mauthausen Survivors Documentation Project International Organisation for Migration (IOM, Geneva, Switzerland), 7–8, 15, 185 International Red Cross, 193, 227, 240, 291 International Refugee Organization (IRO), 325 International Slave and Forced Labourers Documentation Project, 252, 377–393. See also interview partners archive access, 9, 388–389 ethos, 17 interview partners (general), 11–12, 509–522 aftermath of interview process, 352 age, 385–386, 509–522 coming to terms, 13–14 country of origin, 509–522 country of today, 509–522 criteria, 11–12 culture of remembrance, 14–15 economic sectors, 386 emigration issues, 13–14 gender, 13, 384, 393n18–19 homecoming issues, 13–14 motivation, 352 problems, 12 solidarity, 40 validity of memories, 468–469 interviews for project (general), 378, 426–439 analysis, 384–389 audio, 10, 378, 381 biography, 11, 383 common ground, 99 countries conducted, 10, 379, 391 documentation, 382–384 dynamic of interview, 427, 435–438 guidelines for conducting, 380–382, 485–494 number, 10 payment, 101 qualified interviewers, 10–11 standards, 378 timescale, 11, 378 transcription, 383–384 translations, 384 videos, 10, 381 objectives, 13 organisation of project, 377–380 International Tracing Service (ITS), 93 interview partners (Auschwitz trial witnesses), 408–425 narratives, 409, 411–416 post-war experiences, 417–418 sample, 408–409 trial, 419–424 interview partners (Belarus), 213–237 child labour, 215, 217 civil administration, 218–221 coping strategies, 233–236 forced labour deployed locally, 215–216, 219–220

544 forced labourers, 227–229 Jewish slave labourers, 214–215, 219 liberation, 228 military administration, 212–218 solidarity, 227 trauma, 233–236 view of Americans, 228 view of Germans, 229–233 view of Soviets, 228 interview partners (Bosnia) compensation, 185 post-war, 184–186 Roma, 177–187 interview partners (Bulgaria) culture of remembrance, 194–197 Jews, 192 post-war biographies, 194–195 sample, 190–192 interview partners (Croatia), 152–163 compensation, 158, 159–161 culture of remembrance, 158–159, 161–163 health issues, 157–158 revenge, 163 solidarity, 157 violence in labour camps, 157 interview partners (Czech) aftermath of experiences, 55–56 compensation issues, 57–58 culture of remembrance, 57–58 forced labourers, 49–51 disarming bombs, 50 food supply, 49 special privileges, 49 friendships in camps, 55 nightmares, 55–56 slave labourers, 51–58 extermination through labour, 51 storytelling manner, 54 interview partners (France) Auschwitz trial witnesses, 408–425 bombings, 120–121 disjointed narrative, 114–119 guilt, 114–122 liberation, 120–121 sample, 115 silences, 117, 122 social class, 117 talk of parents, 117 view of Germans, 120 interview partners (Galician Ukraine), 241–249 agricultural workers, 244–245 children, 242 hunger, 245–246 industrial workers, 245 repatriation, 246–247 sample, 241–242 solidarity, 245, 249 interview partners (Germany), 24–35 foreign who remained after war, 34 former National Socialists, 33 importance of time periods, 32–33 “made Jews by Hitler,” 31, 446 political, 26–27, 31, 32–33 sample, 24

Index special duties in camps, 33–34 interview partners (Great Britain) culture of remembrance, 335 narratives, 330–335 psychological consequences of forced labour, 328–330 sample, 326–328 view of Germans, 331–333 view of home country, 331–333 view of host country, 333 view of Soviet Union, 332 interview partners (Hungary), 125–134 culture of remembrance, 135 forced labour accounts, 126, 128–129 sample, 125–126 slave labour accounts, 126, 127–130 working through Shoah narratives, 130–135 interview partners (Italy), 312–323 Italian military internees (IMI), 314–316 Jews, 312–313 military deportation, 316–322 political prisoners, 313–314 interview partners (Jewish) Auschwitz trial witnesses, 408–425 in Belarus, 214–215 in Bulgaria, 192 “cognitive incompatibility,” 462–463 in Germany, 25, 26, 27 “half Jews,” 31 in Hungary, 125–134 in Israel, 340–350 Auschwitz trial witnesses, 408–425 daily life, 341–342 forced labour experiences, 340–342 hunger, 341 interpretation of memories, 345–348 nakedness, 342 relation with grandchildren, 345 sample, 340 in Italy, 312–313 “made Jews by Hitler,” 31 in Poland, 73–74, 91–92 in the United States, 352–363, 364–374 adjusting to America, 356–359 comparison study (25 years later), 426–439 educational goals, 366–367 emotional impact, 369–371 hunger, 369 language issues, 372 motivation, 352 narratives, 365, 367, 368 post-war experiences, 366, 371–372 relation with children and grandchildren, 429 religious orientation, 367 resilience, 372 sample, 351–356, 365 social status, 367 violence, 369 view of Germans, 434–435 interview partners (Lithuania), 200–210 culture of remembrance, 208–209 Roma, 204–205

Index interview partners (Poland), 73–84, 353–354. See also interview partners (Roma) agricultural labour, 79 Auschwitz trial witnesses, 408–425 children labourers, 75, 89 compensation issues, 79–80, 96–97 concern for family members, 76 culture of remembrance, 81, 82–83, 94–96 end of war experiences, 77 escape narratives, 79–80 forced labour, 76, 79–80, 81–82, 90–91 homecoming issues, 77–78 from Lódz, 89–95 narratives, 75–84 sample, 73–75, 85n10–34, 89 slave labour, 75–78, 81–82, 91–92 views toward Germans, 78–79 interview partners (Roma), 63–64 Bosnian, 177–187 compensation, 109, 185 culture of remembrance, 108–109 Czech, 52–53, 55 difficulty in finding, 12 family importance, 102, 106 forced labour, 106–108 forgiveness, 109–110 Lithuania, 204–205 narrative style, 103, 104 oral history, 108–109 policy of separation, 445 post-war, 184–186 religiosity, 110–111 selection in Poland, 100–102 Slovak Republic, 63, 65 views of Germans, 107–108 views of Russians, 107–108 views of Ukrainians, 107–108 interview partners (Russia), 263–275, 276–285 biographical “break” or interruption, 293–294 camp life, 299–300 childhood experiences, 300 compensation, 283 deportation, 266–268, 278 experience of women in occupied territories, 303–305 food supply, 278, 280 forced labour, 270–271, 279–282, 298–299 forgiveness, 284 German invasion, 265 German occupation, 265–266, 278 health issues, 282, 300 homecoming, 272–274, 281–282, 305 journey to Germany, 268 labour camps, 279–280 liberation, 272–274 motivation for telling story, 288–289 narratives, 289–290 post-war experiences, 456 pre-war childhoods, 264–265, 298 punishment, 280, 300 recruitment, 266–267, 279 religious attitudes, 276–277 repatriation, 281–282

545 sample, 263–264, 276–277, 279, 286–288 sexual experiences, 305–307 slave market, 268–270 solidarity, 280–281, 300 target regions for interviews, 275n4, 277, 286 view of Germans, 271–272, 282–283, 284, 290–291 view of Soviets, 291–293 women’s experiences, 298–309 interview partners (Serbia), 167–174 accommodations, 170 arrests, 168–169 culture of remembrance, 173–174 deportations, 168–169 diet, 171 forced labour, 167–168, 169–170 health, 171 homecoming, 172–173 persecution, 168–173, 172 sample, 167–168 slave labour, 168, 172 solidarity, 171–172 view of Austrians, 171 view of Germans, 168, 171–172 view of Ustaše, 168 witnesses of violence, 168 interview partners (Slovak Republic), 63–69 culture of remembrance, 68–69 view of Germans, 67 interview partners (Slovenia), 141–149 compensation, 148 culture of remembrance, 148–149 food, 144 forced labourers, 142–145 homecoming, 146–148 sample, 142 separation of families, 144 slave labourers, 145–146 solidarity, 146 statistics, 145 view of death, 146 view of Germans, 144–145, 148 interview partners (Spain) evaluation of experience, 44 experience of, 40–43 homecoming, 44–45 profiles, 38–40 revisiting concentration camps, 42 social class, 39 solidarity, 40 subsequent careers, 44 survival, 43 interview partners (Ukrainian Ostarbeiter), 253–261 children, 255 deportation, 254 homecoming, 256–257 living conditions, 255 manner of investigation, 254 narratives, 257–261 practice of forcing labour, 254–257 punishments, 256 repression, 256

546 sample, 253 view of Germans, 258–259 work sites, 254–255 interview partners (U.S.S.R.), 276–285. See also interview partners (Poland); interview partners (Russia) interviewing process, 426–439. See also International Slave and Forced Labourers Documentation Project awareness of interviewer, 427, 435–438 awareness of society, 426, 428–430 biographical stage of life, 427, 430–435 creating safe space, 437 dynamic of interview, 427, 435–438 holding presence, 438 listening, 437 ISFBB (Institut für sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung, Bidung, und Beratung e. V.), 177 Israel, 338–350, 366. See also interview partners (Jewish) Bricha movement, 340 culture of remembrance, 472, 476 establishment of state, 340 historical background, 338–340 Italian army, 311 Italian military internees (IMI), 5, 314–316, 454, 466, 476 statistics, 314, 479n1 Italy, 310–323 bombing of, 310 culture of remembrance, 476 forced labour, 4–5 German invasion, 311 homecoming issues, 399 Jews in, 311, 312–315 Memorial Day, 313 policies toward Jews in Croatia, 156 racial laws, 311 resistance movement, 311, 475–476 RSI (Italian Social Republic), 311 Ivanov, Alexander, 297–307 passim Ivanov, Vladimir A., 286–295 Ivanova, Maria, 297–308 passim Ivanova, Musa, 229–230, 232, 233, 234, 237 J Jacobmeyer, Wolfgang, 9 Jakschová, Viola, 59 Jantschke, Harald, 177 Jarská, Šárka, 47 Jasenovac concentration camp, 169, 179–184 Jedicke, Major General, 204 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 24, 33 Czechoslovak protectorate, 48 Jewish Claims Conference, 7–8 Jewish Museum (Prague), 54 Jewish Museum (Vilnius), 208 Jews, 441. See also interview partners in Bulgaria, 188, 189, 196 in Croatia, 153 in Czechoslovak protectorate, 48, 364, 365 emigration issues, 401–402 in Germany, 25–27, 31–32, 364

Index “half Jews,” 32 in Hungary, 124–135, 364, 367, 368 in Italy, 311, 312–315 in Lithuania, 200–203 “made Jews by Hitler,” 31, 446 from Muslim countries, 347 in Poland, 72, 73, 74, 87, 364, 365, 367 resilience, 359–361, 372 in Russia, 304 in Slovak Republic, 59, 60 stages of persecution, 458 statistics of emigration, 23, 59 statistics of those killed, 23, 72 underground jobs, 446–447 in United States, 16, 351–363 Jurišiç, Nada, 168–174 K Kallós, Mária, 129–130 Kamhi, Regina, 156, 157 Kampor camp, 157 Kandulkov, Karl, 191–197 Kapos, 78, 119, 346, 414, 421 Karpov, Boris, 232, 234–235 Karta Centre, 73 Kharkov, Ukraine, 251 Khorzhempa, Yekaterina, 282 Khorzhempa, Yury, 277, 278, 279, 281, 282 Kiev, Ukraine, 251 Kjucukov, Josif, 191–197 Klines, Ján, 63 Klose, Heinrich, 213, 217 Knellessen, Dagi, 16, 407 Knyazev, Ivan, 281, 282 Kobal, Cvetko, 146 Kocevar, Monika Kokalj, 138 Kossakovskaya, O. R., 287–295 Kovács, Éva, 124 Kovaleva, Vera, 297–308 passim Kovko, Valentina, 236 Kozhevnikov, Georgy, 297–308 passim Armia Krajowa (!), 206 Krakow-Plaszów camp, 104 Kranjec, Marija, 168–174 Krasnodar, U.S.S.R., 277 Kremlyovska, T., 243 Krno, Milos, 64–65 Kruekova, Raijsa, 297–308 passim Kube, Wilhelm, 219 Kübler, Ludwig, 212 Kudinov, Ivan, 277 Kudinova, Yekaterina, 277, 279, 280, 282 Kuncicky camp, 55 Kvaternik, Eugen Dido, 155 L Laborie, P., 122 labour movement, 23 Labour Service System (Hungary), 124–137 Lalin, Milivoj, 159, 162 Langbein, Hermann, 418–419 Lapan, Tetyana, 238 Latvia, 201 Laub, Dori, 16, 364, 426, 435

Index Laville, Victor, 116 Law for the Protection of Aryan Blood and the Honour of the Croatian People, 179 Lebensraum, 87 Leh, Almut, 3, 16, 377 Leipzig, Germany, 446 Levi, Primo, 274 liberation, 77, 120–121, 228, 252, 272–274, 313, 433, 460 Libya, 339, 341, 342 Lileev, N. I., 287–295 literacy, survival and, 43, 306–307 Lithuania, 199–210, 355. See also interview partners (Lithuania) establishment of state, 199 ghettos, 200, 201 historical background, 199–200 historiography, 206 Jews in, 200–203 memorials, 208 Roma in, 203–205 Litzmann, Karl, 87 Litzmannstadt ghetto, 87, 97n1 Lódz, Poland, 86–98, 428, 431, 437, 459, 460. See also interview partners (Poland) displacement by Germans, 87–88, 92 German annexation, 87 German invasion, 86 ghetto, 87 industrial firms, 87 Jewish population, 87 relocations within city, 87–88, 92 statistics, 86 Lohse, Heinrich, 219 London Debt Agreement (1953), 6, 159 London Peace Conference (1953), 8 Lublin, Poland 353 Luleva, Ana, 188 Lvov, Poland (Lviv, Ukraine) 353 M Macedonia, 465 Madon-Mitzner, Katarzyna, 71 Mair, Birgit, 177 Majdanek concentration camp, 73, 201 Majstoroviç, Uroš, 153, 155 Maltseva, Alexandra, 279, 281 “March of the Living,” 345–346 Maribor relocation camp, 140 Mariciç, Andrija, 168–174 Martini, Carla Liliana, 313–322 passim Materatska, V., 243 materialism, 277 Mateur concentration camp, 340 Mauthausen concentration camp, 11, 32, 40, 42, 44, 60, 125, 145, 146, 201, 340, 476 Mauthausen quarry, 32, 146, 302, 443, 447, 476 Mauthausen Survivors Documentation Project (MSDP), 125, 352 Maxellon, Joanna, 177 Maximilian Kolbe Werk, 74, 80, 422 Mayevska, H., 242 medical experiments, 53, 145, 160 Meleschko, Nina, 228, 236

547 Memorial Day (Italy), 313 Memorial Society (Russia), 263, 276 memories, recorded. See narratives; oral history metal industry, forced labour in, 5–6, 301 Meyszner, August, 155 Mikusz, Józef, 409–415 passim, 417–424 passim mining, forced labour in, 5–6, 119, 125, 154, 169, 315 Minsk, Belarus, 219, 228 Mironenko, Sergei, 474 Mjadel, Belarus, 219 Moldavia, forced labour in, 4–5 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 200, 250, 262 Montredon, J., 115, 117 Moravia, 47 Roma, 52 MS St. Louis, 356 Mühsam, Erich, 24 Munich Agreement, 47 Murashova, Ekaterina, 297–308 passim Muselmänner, 344 Museum of Jewish Heritage (New York), 428 Museum of Roma Culture (Brno), 54 Muslims, Bosnian, 177–179 Mussolini, Benito, 310 death of, 311 escape from prison, 311 vote of no confidence, 311 Mykhaylov, M., 243 N narratives, 289–290 agricultural narrative, 258 anonymisation, 307 anti-fascist memory narrative, 161 artistic memory narrative, 161 autobiographical constructs, 257–261 biographical “break,” 293–294 challenging collective memory, 133–135 collective, 301, 304 Communist master narrative, 474–475 compensation, 307 competition among victimes, 471 compliance narrative, 257–258 confessional memory narrative, 161 educational goals, 333–334 emotional detachment, 307 escape narratives, 79–80, 452–454 ethnic memory narrative, 161 fragmentation, 114–119, 307, 432 gender specific, 297–307 global memory narrative, 161 heroine, 301 hyper-compensation, 307 individualised into wider narrative, 132–133, 429 individualised memory, 131–132 influence of external sources, 284, 429, 471 Jewish memory narrative, 161 leitmotifs, 411–416 normalisation, 307 professional narrator, 133 resistance narrative, 258, 431, 475–476

548 self-acquittal narrative, 258–259 Shoah, 130–135, 343–344, 373–374 stages of life, 427, 430–435 structures, 409 style literary forms, 470–471 story-telling style, 470–471 style (Czech), 54 style (French), 114–119 style (Jewish), 373–374 style (Polish), 75–84 style (Roma), 103, 104 traumatised accounts, 130–131, 427 validity of memories, 468–469 value for scholarship, 444–457 working through Shoah, 130–135, 343–344 National Memorial Day for Holocaust Victims (Lithuania), 208 National Museum of Contemporary History of Slovenia, 142 National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), 23 gypsy policy, 23 Natzweiler concentration camp, 201, 202 Nazi war criminals, 326. See also Auschwitz trials; Eichmann trial Nazis. See Germany, National Socialist NDH (Independent State of Croatia), 151–165. See also Croatia; Yugoslavia concentration camps in, 153 “enforced credit,” 156 historical background, 152–158 inflation, 156 Jewish policy, 155 statistics, 154 Nedeljkoviç, Ružica, 168–174 Nešev, Boris, 191–197 Netherlands, 15, 379 forced labour, 4–5 Neu Stassfurt satelllite camp, 29 Neuengamme concentration camp, 145, 201 Neustadt-Glewe concentration camp, 25 Nikitina, Olga, 296 Nikonova, Olga, 296 NKVD (Soviet Secret Service), 306 Norway, 155, 167, 169, 172, 379, 475 Nuremberg Racial Laws. See racial laws O Oberlanzdorf camp, 55, 200 Šírek, René, 50–51 Onténiente, Pierre, 116 Oracková, Mária, 65 oral history, 11, 108–109, 297. See also narratives interpretation of memories, 345–348 validity of memories, 468–469 value for scholarship, 444–457 versus written record, 444–457 Oral History Association, 11 Organisation Todt (OT), 38, 141, 167, 279, 444, 455, 466, 479n6 “orphanage campaign,” 89, 93 Oshmyany, Belarus, 203

Index Ostarbeiter, 49, 212, 216–217, 220–221, 241, 242–243 categories of, 248 Russian, 263–275, 276–285 Ukrainian, 250–261 Osthofen concentration camp, 26, 27 Ostland, 201, 213 Ostrikov, Petr, 277, 279, 281, 282 Štèpánková, Josefa, 52–53 OUN-UPA (Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists), 241, 243 Ozretiç, Sreçko, 162 P Palarczyk, Anna, 409–424 passim Palestine, 340, 366 Pantoviç, Milan, 167–174 Parchinskaya, Galina, 297–308 passim Paveliç, Ante, 152, 178 racial policies, 179 People’s Memory Speaks, The campaign, 195 Peshev, Dimitar, 196 Petain, Philippe, Marshal, 466, 475 Pi, Pere, 46 picric acid, 459 Pinkas, Poli, 191–197 Pištignjat, Stjepan, 168–174 Pius XII (pope), 241 Plaszów concentration camp, 340, 446–447. See also Krakow-Plaszow camp Podgorski, Artur, 99 Pokrajac, Julijana, 167–174, 169 Poland, 49, 71–112, 339. See also interview partners (Poland) AB action, 72 anti-Jewish policy, 72, 74, 87, 459 central region of, 72 control of Ukraine, 250 culture of remembrance, 81, 82–83, 94–96, 474 deportations to Germany, 72 forced labour, 4–5, 84n2, 88–89, 90–91. See also interview partners (Poland) German invasion, 71, 86, 92, 338–339, 353 Germanisation, 71–72 historical background, 71–73 homecoming issues, 399 liberation, 77 Lodz ghetto, 339 Lódz, Poland, 86–98 “orphanage campaign,” 89, 93 Polish elite, 72 post-war, 418 resistance movement, 71 Roma in, 99–112 Poliç, Branko, 153, 158, 162 Polictics of Genocide, The (Braham), 134 policy of refusal, 9 Polish Communists (PPR), 418 Polish-German Reconciliation Foundation, 74, 100 Polish Resettlement Corps, 324 political persecution, 31, 32, 152, 173–174 in Bulgaria, 189, 193

Index corrective labour camps, 53 in Czechoslovak protectorate, 48 in Galician Ukraine, 243 in Italy, 313–314 in Lithuania, 206 in Slovak Republic, 59–61 in Spain, 38 statistics, 442 political prisoners, 26, 313–314. See also interview partners; political persecution solidarity among, 460 Polyan, Pavel, 263, 271 Ponar concentration camp, 201 Poplavskyy, V., 243 Possekel, Ralf, 9 Prague Jewish Museum (Prague), 54 prison in Charles Square, 52 Pravieniskes camp, 204 printing industry, forced labour, 6 prisoners of war, 4, 454, 476 American, 17n1, 463 Anglo-American, 17–18n1 British, 326, 335, 463 escape narratives, 453 French, 17–18n1, 327, 393n20, 400, 463, 464–465 German, 9, 325, 451, 477 as goal for forced labour, 441 Italian, 318, 399, 479n1. See also Italian military internees (IMI) Polish, 17–18n1, 88, 474 Serbian, 167, 169 Soviet, 17–18n1, 215, 251, 262–263, 263, 273–274, 308n7, 396, 444, 461, 463–465, 471, 474, 479n3 Soviet women, 297, 302–303 Spanish, 38 statistics, 263, 392n6, 393n26, 442, 479n3 Yugoslavs, 17–18n1, 154, 463 Project for Social Assistance (Czech), 57 Pskov, Russia, 297, 303, 305, 306 public archives, 9 Q quarries, forced labour in, 29, 32, 145, 146, 193, 302, 443, 447, 476 Quisling administration (Norway), 475 R racial laws, 48, 52, 179, 339, 441. See also antiSemitism “inferior Slavic race,” 49, 88 in Italy, 311, 312 “orphanage campaign,” 89 “racial biology examination,” 89 Roma and, 179 Serbs and, 179 Rahimiç, Radojka, 181–182, 184–185 railroads, forced labour in, 255, 315, 341 Rajhenburg camp, 140, 143 rape, 77, 173, 206, 229, 256, 273, 342, 398, 442, 444, 447, 480n1 Ratschkowskij, Wladimir, 236

549 Ravensbrück concentration camp, 25, 28, 38, 39, 53, 56–57, 145, 157, 168–169, 201, 340, 472 Recklinghausen camp, 217 Red Army, 61, 63, 71 acts of rape, 77, 173, 206, 256, 273, 342, 398, 447, 480n1 as liberators, 34, 252 in Lithuania, 206 occupation of Ukraine, 243 “policy on the past,” 473 prisoners of war, 264 women in, 296 Reich Labour Service (RAD), 24 Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), 88–89, 166 Reichstag, 23 religious issues, 276–277, 344 religiosity of Roma, 110–111 secularism among Jews, 367, 462 Remembrance, Responsibility and Future (Foundation) (Stiftung “Erinnerung, Verantwortung, und Zukunft”), 7, 100 compensation issues, 378. See also compensation issues funding, 377 partner organisations, 7–8, 377, 378–379, 389–390, 523–524 projects, 8–15, 252, 377–393 Remembrance Act (Spain), 476 remembrance culture. See culture of remembrance Republican army (Spain), 39 resistance, 475 in concentration camps, 414 Czechoslovak protectorate, 48 escape, 452–454 French, 121, 475 Italian, 311 as narrative technique, 252 Polish, 71 sabotage, 452–454 Slovak Republic, 65–66 revenge, 421 Reznikova, Anna, 286 Riegel, Joachim, 16, 495 Riga, Latvia (!), 218 Road through Buchenwald, The (Boris Kandulkov), 194 Roma, 7, 23, 52, 441. See also interview partners (Roma) associations, 100 bans on nomadism, 62 in Belarus, 215 in Bosnia, 177–187, 443, 458 in Bulgaria, 190 Civil War refugees in Germany, 186–187 Czechoslovak protectorate, 48, 55 escape into woods, 453 in Germany, 31, 458 homecoming issues, 402–403 in Hungary, 136n8 in Lithuania, 203–205 in Poland, 99–112

550 policy of separation, 445 racial persecution, 32, 458 in Slovak Republic, 62–63 statistics, 185–186 underground jobs, 458 Romania, control of Ukraine, 250 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 356 Roschkow, Alexej, 237 Rosenberg, Alfred, 218 Rowna, Belarus, 218 Rozhdestvenskaya, Elena, 296 Rubio, Trinitario, 46 Russia, 262–275, 276–285. See also interview partners (Russia) culture of remembrance, 297. See also U.S.S.R., historiography forced labour, 4–5 German invasion, 265 German occupation, 265–266, 278, 303–305 historical background, 262–263 Jews in, 304 northwest region, 286–295 prisoners of war, 262–263. See also prisoners of war, Soviet statistics, 263 women’s role in World War II, 296–309 Ryapych, M., 242 S Sachsenhausen concentration camp, 60 Saint Petersburg, Russia, 286–295 Sajmište concentration camp, 169 Salmoni, Gilberto, 313–322 passim Sauckel, Fritz, 48, 88, 213, 216, 251 Sauckel Commissions, 215 Schaffer, Paul, 409–415 passim, 417–424 passim Schakutin, Wladimir Parfirewitsch, 216 Schenkendorf, Max von, 212 Scherbakova, Irina, 262 Schlesinger, Henriette, 16, 377 Schölzel, Christian, 151 Security Police - Sipo, 60, 62, 140 Security Service – SD, 60, 62, 140 Sedjenane concentration camp, 340 Segre, Liliana, 313–323 passim Seleznyova, Maria, 279, 283 Semenova, Victoria, 296 Semin, Vitaly, 271 Semprún, Jorge, 40, 42, 46 Šepšei, Kristina, 168–174 Serbs and Serbia, 155, 167, 169, 172. See also interview partners (Serbia) culture of remembrance, 173–174 forced labour, 4–5, 166–176 Slovenians in Serbia, 140 status of Serbs, 166 Seweryn, Józef, 409–415 passim, 417–424 passim ‘Shalom’ association (Bulgaria), 190, 191 Shipova, Ekaterina, 297–308 passim Shivkov, Teodor, 196 Shoah, 124 culture of giving testimony, 472 denial of extermination, 343 extermination through labour, 51

Index forced labour in context of, 332–345 narratives, 130–135, 343–344 Shoah Foundation, 352, 364, 428 Sicily, 311 Sidi-Azaz concentration camp, 340 Siedelce concentration camp, 340 Siemens-Bau-Union, 459 Siemens-Schuckert Werke AG, 415, 421, 423 Signorelli, Angelo, 313–323 passim silence, 117, 122, 158–159, 436 trauma and, 297 Simkuniene, Regina Stanislava, 206–207 Simon Wiesenthal Centre, 326 Sinti, 23, 441 Czechoslovak protectorate, 48 early persecution in Germany, 31 policy of separation, 445 racial persecution, 32 Skarzysko-Kamienna concentration camp, 340 Slajchart, Teodor, 65–66 Slansky trials, 34 slave labour, 48, 51–58. See also forced labour; interview partners abduction, 75 allied vs. occupied countries, 465–468 extermination through labour, 51, 457–458 functionary prisoners, 410–411, 413–414 markets, 75 nakedness, 75–76 racial motivations, 441–442, 457–458 Shoah and, 338–350 solidarity, 76 statistics, 442 Slovak national uprising, 60, 62 Slovak Republic, 59–70. See also interview partners (Slovak Republic) culture of remembrance, 68–69, 474 deportation statistics, 70n5 forced labour within, 62 forced labour without, 61–62 formation of, 59 German occupation, 60 “gypsy problem,” 62–63 Jewish population, 59 political oppression, 59–61 as protectorate, 59 resistance, 65–66 Slovak troops, 61 Slovakia, 47, 466. See also Slovak Republic Bulgarians in, 190 Communist master narrative, 474–475 forced labour, 4–5 Slovenian territory, 138–150. See also interview partners (Slovenia) collaboration issues, 147, 159, 474 culture of remembrance, 148–149, 474 divisions, 134–135 euthanasia in, 141 expulsion of children, 140, 141 expulsion of Slovenians, 139–140 expulsion to German military, 140–141 German occupation, 134–135 Germanisation, 135 settlement of German farmers, 139–140

Index statistics, 141, 149n8 Smorgonj, Belarus, 202–203 social democrats, 33 Socialist Party (Poland), 418 Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), 29 Socialist Worker’s Party, 26 socialists, 33 Sofia, Bulgaria, 191, 195 solidarity, 40, 76, 146, 157, 227, 245, 249, 329 among women, 171–172, 415–416 as narrative topos, 415–416 survival and, 43, 280–281, 346 Salonika, 343, 346 Sommaruga, Claudio, 313–323 passim Soviet People’s Commission of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic (LSSR), 200 Soviet Union. See U.S.S.R. Spain, 15, 37–46, 476 culture of remembrance, 476 homecoming issues, 44–45, 400 Spanish Civil War, 37–46 amnesia about, 45 exportations, 38 solidarity, 40 Speer, Albert, 27 Spielberg, Steven, 428. See also Shoah Foundation Stalin, Josef, 200, 291–292, 306 Stalingrad, U.S.S.R., 339 Stalino, Ukraine, 251 Stara Gradiška concentration camps, 155, 169, 179–184 statutes of limitation, 6 Stavropol, U.S.S.R., 277 Stefanenko, D. E., 287–295 sterilisation, 31, 33 Steven Spielberg Foundation, 54 STO (Service du Travail Obligatoire), 113–123 la Relève, 113 Stojkoviç,, Radoslavka, 168–174 Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Clark University), 428 Streit, Christian, 263 Stroumsa, Jacques, 343 Stutthof concentration camp, 66, 67, 75, 131, 201, 202, 203, 204, 340, 356 Styria, 134–140, 143 Subcarpathian Ruthenia, 47 Subirats, Joan, 40, 42, 45, 46 Sudetenland, 47 survival, 31, 43, 280–281, 346 doctors, 452 family members, 76 guilt, 55, 122, 130–131, 204, 430, 452, 463 kindness, 360, 450–452 knowledge of German language, 145–146 labour as means for, 73, 170, 369, 412–413, 458, 460–461 literacy and, 306–307 during repatriation, 282 resilience, 359–361, 372 solidarity and, 40, 76, 146, 157, 227, 245, 249, 329 Sweden, 15

551 Swerdlow, Wladimir Semenowitsch, 215 Switzerland forced labour, 4–5 Szálasi government (Hungary), 125 T Tebeleva, Alexandra, 297–308 passim Teplakova, Nona, 227, 228 Terekhova, Ludmila, 297–308 passim Terezín ghetto, 52, 365 Terracina, Pietro, 313–323 passim textile industry forced labour, 6 in Great Britain, 325, 326 Thonfeld, Christoph, 3, 16, 324, 394, 462 Thrace, 465 Tilsit concentration camp, 201 Timofeyeva, Natalia, 276 Tiso, Jozef, 59 Tito, Josip, 159, 162, 179 Todorov, Minco, 191–197 Tokarev, L. P., 287–295 Totaleinsatz, 48, 49. See also forced labour trades, forced labour in, 6 transport guards, 240 transport industry, forced labour in, 5–6 Transylvania, 339 Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, 6 Tripartite Pact, 188 Tunisia, 339, 341, 342 Tupis, S., 243 Turks in Bulgaria, 190 Turow, Nikolaj Adamowitsch, 217 Turtchinskaja, Sofija Bronislawowna, 221 U Udaltsova, Galina, 297–308 passim Uiberreither, Siegfried, 134–134 Ukraine, 124. See also Galician Ukraine; interview partners (Ukrainian Ostarbeiter) deportation methods, 239 forced labour, 4–5 historical background, 250–252 as Soviet Republic of Ukraine, 250 statistics, 250–251 zones of occupation, 250 Ukrainian Central Committee (UCC), 239, 249 Ukrainian Ostarbeiter, 250–261. See also interview partners (Ukrainian Ostarbeiter) historical background, 250–252 Ukrainian Regional Committee, 240 Ukrainian Service for the Motherland, 240 Ukrainskaya, Valentina, 278, 281, 282 Úkrop, Pavel, 66–67 underground jobs, 446–447, 458 Union of War Veterans (Bulgaria), 191 United States anti-Semitism, 357 culture of remembrance, 476 displaced persons immigrants, 396 immigration policies, 356

552

Index

U.S.S.R., 276–285. See also interview partners (Russia) anti-Semitism, 34 collaboration issues, 474. See also U.S.S.R., historiography control of Ukraine, 250 culture of remembrance, 296–309, 473–474 dechristianisation policy, 277 filtration camps, 456–457, 474 forced labour, 4–5 glasnost, 262, 274 historiography, 239, 241, 252, 262, 274, 283, 296, 303, 453 homecoming issues, 13, 272–274, 395, 397–398, 456–457 Italian soldiers in, 315 repatriation in, 246–247, 456–457 retribution after war, 34 women’s role in World War II, 296–309 Ústredna státnej bezpecnosti. See Central Institute of State Security (Slovak Republic) Ustaše movement, 152, 155, 163, 168, 174, 178

Wehrmacht, German, 60, 62, 212, 215, 216, 313, 314, 367, 459 Wehrmacht High Command (OKW), 167 Weimar, Germany, 28 Weinberger, Ruth, 351 Wenzel, Gisela, 86 Westerbork concentration camp, 340 Westward Ho resettlement program, 325 Wiesinger, Barbara N., 166 Witiska, SS-Obersturmbannführer, 60 Wolfer & Groebel, 341 women’s issues. See gender issues World War I, 117, 124, 199 World War II attack on Poland, 71 background, 353–354 historiography, 189 investigations of, 252 statistics, 3–4, 48, 141, 185–186. See also specific countries Worms, Germany, 27 Wroclaw, Poland, 418 WSW mutual assistance (Belarus), 220

V Vajnberger, Dragica, 156, 162 Varga, Vera, 128 Versailles camp, 204 Vichy regime, 113, 466, 467, 475 victim status, recognition of, 478–479 Victims of Two Dictatorships, 263, 271 Vienna, Austria Bulgarian government in exile, 193 Vienna Award (1938), 47, 59 Vilanova, Mercedes, 37 Vilnius, Lithuania, 200, 201, 203 Kirtimai district, 205 Vitkevich, M. I., 287–295 Vittorio Emanuele III (king of Italy), 311, 476 Vlassov army, 34 Volkswagen, 9 Volunteer Labour Service (FAD), 24 VoMi camps, 140, 143 von Löhr, Alexander, 141 von Plato, Alexander, 3, 10, 15, 23, 441, 485 Voronezh, U.S.S.R., 277, 278 Voronezh State Pedagogical University, 276

Y Yad Vashem, 472, 478 Yeltsin, Boris, 274 Young, James E., 135 Young Libertarian Association (Juventudes Libertarias), 39 Young Workers’ Association (YWA), 191, 195 Yugoslavia, 474 attacks on (1941), 178 compensation issues, 159–161 culture of remembrance, 158–159, 161–163, 173–174 origins, 177–178 statistics, 153, 185–186 under Tito, 184 Yugoslavian Civil War, 186–187

W Waldheim, Kurt, 476 Walz, Loretta, 472 Wannsee Conference, 461 Warsaw, Poland, 72, 353 uprising, 72

Z Zabrze, Poland, 418 Zádor, Ede, 127–128 Zagreb, Croatia, 179 Zamlynsky family, 242 Zaytsev, Nikolay, 297–308 passim Zemun concentration camp, 155 Zimmerman, Michael, 445 Zionism, 34, 162, 340, 366, 372, 460 Zivilarbeitsdienstabteilungen (ZADA civil labour service departments, Belarus), 215 Zivilisationsbruch, 462 Zolotaryova, Alexandra, 281, 282