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OST: Letters, Memoirs and Stories from Ostarbeiter in Nazi Germany
An extraordinary assemblage of moving and revelatory documents and testimony from the Nazi forced labour camps.
458 pages, Hardcover
Published October 19, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 19, 2024
”When Memorial first began holding conversations with former Ostarbeiter some years ago, we knew only the broad brushstrokes of their experience, for their fate had been largely disregarded in the broader history of the Great Patriotic War [World War II] . . . We had failed to appreciate the scale of this ‘forgotten’ episode in history and the consequences of the long years of silence endured by hundreds of thousands of people. There was no collective memory that Ostarbeiter could relate to, and since their accounts had been omitted from the war narrative, the magnitude of their trauma had been largely ignored. Little thought had been spared for the teenagers who had been forcibly taken from their homes, deported to the country of their enemy and condemned to servitude, hunger and humiliation. In sharing their stories with us, the hundreds of people we interviewed were finally shaking off the burden of a prolonged period of silence . . .”
During World War II, an estimated 3.2 million Soviet citizens were deported and forced to work for the Third Reich as slave labour. Known as Ostarbeiter, “eastern workers”, they have been mostly “forgotten victims” of the war. This book seeks to remedy that. It is a self-described “literary mosaic”, consisting of exposition interspersed with generous excerpts of interviews with multiple eastern workers, photographs, and passages from memoirs, letters, and other documents (all from the archives of Memorial , an international history and human rights organization).
The text is organized chronologically, divided into sections based on subjects’ life stages. It covers eastern workers’ early lives in peacetime, as World War II broke out and the Germans occupied Soviet territory, the workers’ deportation to and slave labour experiences in Germany, and, finally, their liberation and repatriation.
This is a clearly written and fluently translated book. It is factual, well documented, compassionate and sometimes poignant, but it has a fragmented quality. In each section, snatches of memories of 30 or more workers, identified by name and region, are typically presented. Overall, the testimonies of well over 100 survivors have been drawn on. As the pages turn, the reader becomes familiar with some of the names and can piece together a few individual histories, but there’s a choppy feel to the book overall. I would have preferred a collection of separate short autobiographical pieces (that is, entire narratives) from those taken to German work camps/settings, rather than a bits-and-pieces thematic approach, which prevented me from getting any single person’s unique story. Having said that, I understand the authors’ desire to create a panoramic view of the Ostarbeiter experience by having a symphony of voices. After all, these workers were placed in diverse settings—mines, factories, farms, and domestic situations—and they were overseen by very different types of employers.
Shortly after the Nazis aggressed on the Soviet Union in June 1941, over 60 million Soviet citizens found themselves living in German-occupied territory. The mass transports to Germany of young Slavic men and women (most between the ages of 15 and 18) began shortly after that—in the fall of 1941. The majority of deportees were impoverished peasants, who’d suffered during the politically motivated famine of the early 1930s and the Soviet collectivization of farms. These young people came from small towns and villages in Ukraine, Belarus, and southern Russia. They had little life experience and were not from a literate culture. Although ample postcards (with coded communication to get around censorship) are quoted, most of the information presented in this book is based on interviews collected by representatives of Memorial . The authors note that many Ostarbeiter destroyed paperwork and evidence of their time in Germany out of fear and shame. (Such documents were often used by authorities as Kompromat—damaging information to incriminate them.)
When the workers were repatriated after the war, they were treated as Third-Reich collaborators, traitors to the Motherland. The women were called prostitutes. (In Germany, they’d often been reviled as members of an inferior race.) Blamed by their own government for being conscripted by the fascist enemy, some were subsequently forced into Soviet “work battalions”, performing hard labour, such as felling timber and rebuilding Soviet mines and power plants that had been damaged in wartime. They weren’t allowed to settle in big cities (Moscow, Leningrad, Kyiv, and others), even if these centres were their original homes. For years they underwent interrogation by the secret police, with surveillance only ceasing after Stalin’s death in 1953. According to the authors (Alena Kozlova, Nikolai Mikhailov, Irina Ostrovskaya, and Irina Scherbakova), the Ostarbeiter weren’t the victims of one dictatorship but two. It took until the 1990s for them to feel some degree of liberty to tell what had happened to them.
Having read Natascha Wodin’s compelling 2022 biography of her eastern-worker mother, She Came from Mariupol, I was keen to read further accounts about these people. I am glad to have encountered OST: Letters, Memoirs, and Stories from Ostarbeiter in Nazi Germany . This is a comprehensive, exhaustively detailed text, but not an academic one. My only real criticism is that that the contents of a few too many postcards home are included. (Invariably, these communications request news of family, express the longing for home, and ask for clothing, food, or tobacco.) I’d recommend the book to those interested in learning about a relatively little known aspect of World War II which so many tragically endured and were profoundly altered by.
During World War II, an estimated 3.2 million Soviet citizens were deported and forced to work for the Third Reich as slave labour. Known as Ostarbeiter, “eastern workers”, they have been mostly “forgotten victims” of the war. This book seeks to remedy that. It is a self-described “literary mosaic”, consisting of exposition interspersed with generous excerpts of interviews with multiple eastern workers, photographs, and passages from memoirs, letters, and other documents (all from the archives of Memorial , an international history and human rights organization).
The text is organized chronologically, divided into sections based on subjects’ life stages. It covers eastern workers’ early lives in peacetime, as World War II broke out and the Germans occupied Soviet territory, the workers’ deportation to and slave labour experiences in Germany, and, finally, their liberation and repatriation.
This is a clearly written and fluently translated book. It is factual, well documented, compassionate and sometimes poignant, but it has a fragmented quality. In each section, snatches of memories of 30 or more workers, identified by name and region, are typically presented. Overall, the testimonies of well over 100 survivors have been drawn on. As the pages turn, the reader becomes familiar with some of the names and can piece together a few individual histories, but there’s a choppy feel to the book overall. I would have preferred a collection of separate short autobiographical pieces (that is, entire narratives) from those taken to German work camps/settings, rather than a bits-and-pieces thematic approach, which prevented me from getting any single person’s unique story. Having said that, I understand the authors’ desire to create a panoramic view of the Ostarbeiter experience by having a symphony of voices. After all, these workers were placed in diverse settings—mines, factories, farms, and domestic situations—and they were overseen by very different types of employers.
Shortly after the Nazis aggressed on the Soviet Union in June 1941, over 60 million Soviet citizens found themselves living in German-occupied territory. The mass transports to Germany of young Slavic men and women (most between the ages of 15 and 18) began shortly after that—in the fall of 1941. The majority of deportees were impoverished peasants, who’d suffered during the politically motivated famine of the early 1930s and the Soviet collectivization of farms. These young people came from small towns and villages in Ukraine, Belarus, and southern Russia. They had little life experience and were not from a literate culture. Although ample postcards (with coded communication to get around censorship) are quoted, most of the information presented in this book is based on interviews collected by representatives of Memorial . The authors note that many Ostarbeiter destroyed paperwork and evidence of their time in Germany out of fear and shame. (Such documents were often used by authorities as Kompromat—damaging information to incriminate them.)
When the workers were repatriated after the war, they were treated as Third-Reich collaborators, traitors to the Motherland. The women were called prostitutes. (In Germany, they’d often been reviled as members of an inferior race.) Blamed by their own government for being conscripted by the fascist enemy, some were subsequently forced into Soviet “work battalions”, performing hard labour, such as felling timber and rebuilding Soviet mines and power plants that had been damaged in wartime. They weren’t allowed to settle in big cities (Moscow, Leningrad, Kyiv, and others), even if these centres were their original homes. For years they underwent interrogation by the secret police, with surveillance only ceasing after Stalin’s death in 1953. According to the authors (Alena Kozlova, Nikolai Mikhailov, Irina Ostrovskaya, and Irina Scherbakova), the Ostarbeiter weren’t the victims of one dictatorship but two. It took until the 1990s for them to feel some degree of liberty to tell what had happened to them.
Having read Natascha Wodin’s compelling 2022 biography of her eastern-worker mother, She Came from Mariupol, I was keen to read further accounts about these people. I am glad to have encountered OST: Letters, Memoirs, and Stories from Ostarbeiter in Nazi Germany . This is a comprehensive, exhaustively detailed text, but not an academic one. My only real criticism is that that the contents of a few too many postcards home are included. (Invariably, these communications request news of family, express the longing for home, and ask for clothing, food, or tobacco.) I’d recommend the book to those interested in learning about a relatively little known aspect of World War II which so many tragically endured and were profoundly altered by.
April 9, 2024
This book is incredibly eye opening to the challenges faced by the Ostarbeiter. It uses a wide range of personal testimony to allow for the experiences of Ostarbeiter to be fully understood. The section I found particularly interesting was the section that focused post war period. It was interesting and thought provoking to discover that the soviets treated their fellow comrades with such suspicion despite the fact that they had been forced to work in Germany.
February 7, 2022
Brilliant — I’ve been asked to write a Proper Review of this one, so I guess I’ll link it here once it’s up
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews