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‘And now imagine her or him as aslave, a pitiful slave with no rights’:child forced labourers in the cultureof remembrance of the USSR and post-Soviet UkraineGelinada Grinchenkoa

a V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, Kharkiv, UkrainePublished online: 25 Feb 2015.

To cite this article: Gelinada Grinchenko (2015) ‘And now imagine her or him as a slave, a pitifulslave with no rights’: child forced labourers in the culture of remembrance of the USSR and post-Soviet Ukraine, European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire, 22:2, 389-410, DOI:10.1080/13507486.2015.1008418

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2015.1008418

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‘And now imagine her or him as a slave, a pitiful slave with no rights’:child forced labourers in the culture of remembrance of the USSR and

post-Soviet Ukraine

Gelinada Grinchenko*

V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, Kharkiv, Ukraine

(Received 13 May 2014; accepted 30 December 2014)

This article examines the various components of the image of Soviet children, whowere deported to Nazi Germany during the Second World War to perform forcedlabour, within the culture of remembrance of the USSR and post-Soviet Ukraine. In heranalysis, the author emphasises that throughout the Soviet period the topic of forcedlabour had mostly instrumental significance and was used for a variety of propagandatasks: during the war, to mobilise the population to struggle against the enemy; in itsaftermath, to underscore and contrast the essence and policies of the post-war Western‘democracies’ and the USSR; and, from the late 1960s, to accuse capitalist countries,above all the Federal Republic of Germany, of preparing for undertakings such as anew war or an arms race. With the collapse of the USSR, the Ostarbeiters’ ‘territory ofmemory’ enlarged dramatically. In the new climate of democratic transformation, therewere socio-legal initiatives which aimed to regulate the status of forced labourers, andthe first steps were taken towards institutionalising Ostarbeiter associations. This, inturn, facilitated the process of analysing the construction and presentation of the imageof the child Ostarbeiter on the level of state-legal regulation, institutional support,public interest and scholarly research that is taking place in contemporary Ukraine.

Keywords: Ostarbeiter; child forced labourers; culture of remembrance; SecondWorld War

According to the Law of Ukraine ‘On the Social Protection of Children of War’1, a war

child is a citizen of Ukraine who experienced the war during his/her childhood and was

under the age of 18 at the end of the war, or ‘whose childhood coincided with the years of

the Second World War if s/he was born before 1927’. Passed in 2004, this law was

Ukraine’s recognition of the difficult lives of some of its citizens: children of war.

It established their legal status, outlined the foundations for their social protection and

guaranteed their social protection through state provision of benefits and social support.

Alongside other laws that recognised people who lived through the SecondWorldWar and

aimed to provide them social protection, the 2004 law fuelled public interest in the fate of

children of war and fostered the study, commemoration and honouring of their experience.

The lives and destinies of children of war varied and their collective experience of the

calamities of war also came to include life under German occupation (or ‘life with the

enemy’, according to the apt description coined by some writers), life in evacuation, daily

life on the home front and the heroics of the front. Among these children were those who

ended up against their will outside the borders of their native land, working as forced

labourers for the Nazi regime.

q 2015 Taylor & Francis

*Email: gelinada.grinchenko@gmail.com

European Review of History—Revue europeenne d’histoire, 2015

Vol. 22, No. 2, 389–410, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2015.1008418

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In this article I will identify the place that these children (called child Ostarbeiters in

contemporary literature) occupy in the culture of memory in the USSR and post-Soviet

Ukraine, and will indicate the main trends of how their experience of living in a foreign

country as forced labourers is remembered today.2

My research draws on sources ranging from agitational-propaganda materials

disseminated during the war and literary works published during and after the war, to

contemporarily published memoirs and recorded oral histories of former child

Ostarbeiters, various Ukrainian laws setting forth the status and rights of former forced

labourers, numerous announcements about the activities of civic organisations, and

various measures aimed at raising awareness of the history and memory of underage

Ukrainian slaves of the Third Reich.

Years, figures, definitions: the deportation of child Ostarbeiters and their exploitation

as forced labourers

For a general definition of the Ostarbeiters, I will use that of Mark Spoerer in his book

Forced Labour under the Swastika:

Ostarbeiter are workers of non-German origin who were registered (recruited) in theReichskommissariat Ukraine, Generalkommissariat Weissruthenien, as well as in regionslocated farther east of these Kommissariats and the former free states of Latvia and Estonia,who were deported after the occupation by the Wehrmacht to the Third Reich, including theprotectorates of Bohemia and Moravia, and who were engaged in labour there.3

Regarding other children who were deported for forced labour, I will refer to the 2004

law ‘On the Social Protection of Children of War’. Therefore, I will treat individuals born

in 1927 or later and who ended up as forced labourers as child Ostarbeiters. They include

pre-schoolers (up to seven years old) and adolescents (up to 16 years old).4 Children who

were born 1943–5 in places where their parents were forcibly detained and where they

carried out forced labour are also included, at the very least because of the post-war

attitude to them.

As the German scholar Johannes-Dieter Steinert aptly notes in his recently published

monograph, despite forced labour in the Third Reich being one of the most studied topics,

the exact number of forced labourers has yet to be established. This is also the case with

regard to people who were deported as forced labourers when they were children or

teenagers. Steinert devotes one chapter to examining many statistical estimates that have

yet to be fully established, settling on the approximate figure of 1.5 million Polish and

Soviet child forced labourers.5

Without delving into a discussion of figures, I will say, however, that in addition to

the other difficulties linked to establishing an exact figure, there is the problem of setting

an age limit: who should be regarded as a child forced labourer? If one follows the logic

of the above-cited Law of Ukraine concerning ‘children of war’, then the 1927 birth

year becomes ‘controversial’ in a certain sense. According to the data cited by Mark

Spoerer and Jochen Fleischhacker in their article ‘Forced Laborers in Nazi Germany:

Categories, Numbers, and Survivors’6, 3.9% of Soviet citizens who were born in 1928–

32 and deported as forced labourers to the Third Reich were men and 4.4% women.

However, in this same table, people born in 1927 are included in the largest age group

of Soviet citizens labelled ‘slaves of the Third Reich’. This group includes young

people who were born in 1923–7, comprising 35.4% of all male forced labourers

(citizens of the USSR), and girls, who comprised 49.9% of all female forced labourers

(citizens of the USSR).

G. Grinchenko390

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To conclude this brief survey of statistical difficulties and divergences, I will cite the

quantitative indicators proposed by the Russian scholar Pavel Polian, who states that of the

approximately 5.5 million Soviet citizens repatriated to the USSR after the war, nearly

30% were children aged 16 years and younger – in other words, close to 1.8 million

people. However, Polian also includes in this figure infants who were born in Nazi

captivity and after their parents’ liberation as a result of official and unofficial marriages

between Soviet citizens.7

Finally, a few words are needed about the dynamics of deportation and the specific

features of how the labour of ‘young Ostarbeiters’ was put to use in Germany. Between

spring 1942 and spring 1943, children from the occupied territories of the USSR aged 10

and older arrived in Germany mostly together with their families subject to mobilisation.

At the same time, according to the regulation in force, every second person in a family was

supposed to be fit for work. As of April 1943, physically strong children aged 10 and older

could be used for agricultural work, and from late 1943 it was permitted to use children to

clean up rubble after air raids. From mid-1943, children began arriving in Germany with

their families, who were refugees and evacuees. According to the regulations, a child over

the age of 14 was supposed to work only four hours a day. In late 1943, the age limit was

dropped to 10 years, and the four-hour limitation on child labour was abolished in May

1944. Child Ostarbeiters were put to work in almost every place where adult citizens from

occupied territories were forced to toil: in industry, agriculture, utility companies, and in

construction; specifically, building sites and railways (in some cases, children as young as

seven worked in the latter areas).8

Child Ostarbeiters in the Soviet culture of memory

In my earlier articles I postulated the artificiality of the post-Soviet theory about the

repression during the Soviet era of the history and memory of Soviet forced labourers in

the Third Reich, and discussed the dynamics and features of the construction of the

image of forced labour in the Soviet and post-Soviet culture of memory, as well as the

‘discourse of suffering’ as the main content-creating feature of this process.9 In singling

out the specific features associated with the exploitation of the image of the child

Ostarbeiter, I demonstrated that throughout the war this use was part and parcel of the

general efforts of Soviet war propaganda, which aimed to mobilise the entire Soviet

population in the struggle against the hated enemy who, owing to his attitude to the

civilian population, was depicted as a bloody monster, cannibal, slave owner and

exploiter with no trace of human characteristics. The image of children occupied one of

the central and ‘most emotional’ places in this propaganda campaign, as this image was

an endless source of potential tension and compassion. At the same time, it was precisely

the image of a child, whom the hateful enemy was maiming, killing, raping, trampling its

dignity and working it to the bone, which was supposed to underscore the anti-human

and evil essence of this enemy.

The mobilisational use of the image of a child who is exploited and oppressed by a

German slave owner lasted throughout the war years thanks to virtually every possible

propaganda device, above all, agitational brochures, posters, letters, accounts and

testimonies that were published in a variety of formats. One of the most distinctive

examples of how Soviet propaganda exploited the image of an enslaved child was the

agitational brochure, a phrase from one of which appears in the title of this article.

Published in 1943, the brochure10 contains a passionate and extraordinarily emotional

appeal to all Soviet people, both those who are fighting and those working on the home

European Review of History—Revue europeenne d’histoire 391

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front: ‘Beat to death the slave traders and child-killers in German uniforms! Beat them

with fire and work! We did not raise our children for the German butchers to test their

knives on their bodies! Nor did we protect and cherish our children so that they would

perish in fascist servitude!’ (Figure 1). This appeal, which was meant to strike a chord with

every Soviet citizen, resounded against a background of the image of a young child

deported into slavery, who does not sleep at night and calls out for mama; in the daytime

this child works his fingers to the bone for the accursed enemy, is whipped and hears only

abusive language. The bestial essence of the enemy was also underscored in phrases

recounting the rape of Soviet schoolgirls by drunken Germans, girls being infected with

venereal diseases and the sale of Soviet girls to German brothels.

The emotional co-experience and compassion for the fate of an enslaved child, based on

visual perception, was also designed to be conveyed by posters. The most popular and

widely disseminated examples of agitational propaganda on this topic were two posters

from1942:ViktorKoretsky’s poster captioned ‘Fighter, saveme from slavery!’ andDmitrii

Shmarinov’s poster emblazoned with the words: ‘I am waiting for you, warrior-liberator!’.

Both of these posters portray children, whose enslavement is symbolically emphasised by

small tablets with numbers hanging around their necks; the expression on the children’s

faces leaves no doubt about their dire straits and their excessively arduous work.

Figure 1. The cover of a brochure authored by E. Kononenko, Otomsti nemtsu (Moscow: OGIZ,1943).

G. Grinchenko392

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Another popular device for implanting a certain image of forced labour in the Soviet

consciousness was the publication of first-hand reports from forced labourers, such as

letters sent from slavery, narratives and testimonies of those who managed to return

from slavery either by escaping, or due to illness.11 Of course, small children did not send

letters or write their reminiscences. Despite the fact that a certain collective image of

young people who had been sent into ‘Fascist slavery’, including adolescents and youths,

was predominant in Soviet times, in these publications the school age of the narrator or

author of a letter was emphasised both in the opening lines (‘When the Germans came I

was in seventh grade’) and signatures (account/letter written by a senior pupil, schoolchild

and so on).

In contrast to agitational brochures and posters, such publications were issued both

during the war and in the early post-war years. Their goal was not so much to mobilise the

population in the fight against the enemy as to reinforce a certain image of forced labour in

the public consciousness (or collective memory). It was impossible to ignore this question

and expunge it from people’s awareness. After all, at issue here, according to many

researchers today, were several million Soviet citizens who were supposed to integrate

themselves into the post-war society on their return to the Soviet Union and, most

importantly, to work – but this time for their own country, which was then in desperate

need of manpower. This intention to integrate and further exploit this group’s labour

potential was embodied in the marginal, yet absolutely legitimate, place that the memory

of forced labour in Nazi Germany came to occupy in the general Soviet memory of the

war. Throughout the post-war years, various materials were published and became

accessible to a large number of Soviet citizens: letters, works of folklore and

autobiographical writings by former Ostarbeiters, along with the poetry and prose of

Soviet writers, and scholarly research on forced labour by Soviet academics. As for the

content of the Soviet ‘memory project’ about forced labour in the Third Reich, its main

components were elevated suffering and the heroic spirit of rebelliousness and feats. One

distinctive feature is that the main heroes of this project (chiefly a slave girl and a

rebellious youth; however, there were other combinations and exceptions) were frequently

under 16, i.e. they were children rather than youths on their way to becoming ‘adults’.

Also, the experience of Soviet citizens who had been deported for forced labour as

adolescents formed the nucleus of a small number of extraordinarily significant creative

works that offered Soviet readers a complex and specific picture of exhausting labour in a

foreign country, and the unfamiliar and often unendurable conditions of daily life and

survival.12 It is no exaggeration to say that the experiences of these children were twice as

difficult as those endured by adults; as the Russian novelist Vitalii Semin noted appositely,

in those circumstances ‘the entire system of a child’s orientation in this world was ruined.

Children were taken in by the most reliable signs of sound judgment, mercy, goodness,

which were defined by instinct itself: an elderly person, an intelligent person, a person

wearing a white smock . . . ’ In this example about the system of signifiers in childhood,

which was turned upside down in the conditions of forced labour, the author describes the

abuse of children by elderly guards:

Nearly all the camp policemen were elderly people. They had reached the age where a personis called opa in Germany. An opa is a grandfather, an old person, a father. This is arespectfully familiar word that one can use to address an elderly person on the street. I firstheard it in a transit camp. That’s how camp policemen were called . . . Here everythingcollapsed at once: the loss of loved ones, starvation rations [aimed] at extreme emaciation, thevile, thin gruel – an insult. The unsystematic walloping [administered by policemen lined up]abreast came to an end, and systematic beatings began. The opas acted swiftly, brutally, and

European Review of History—Revue europeenne d’histoire 393

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cheerfully. They not only beat with a special device for beatings – rubber, a rubber truncheon– but also with [their] legs, hands, and whatever they could lay their hands on at themoment.13

In contrast to Semin’s novel, a unique confession about suffering, pain and survival in

the conditions of so-called ‘everyday, commonplace fascism’, in the writings of other

Soviet writers about forced labour, erstwhile schoolchildren wage a struggle or mount some

kind of resistance for the most part: they sabotage mobilisation and evade the deportations,

in their workplaces they try to break something, cause some sort of damage, set something

on fire; that is, they do whatever they can to raise a protest. All these children are active

subjects, that is, they are active individuals in the literal sense. Here the image of a

schoolchild living in a hostile situation and struggling against the enemy in all

circumstances shared the same semantic space as the heroes of the Young Pioneer

Organisation of the SovietUnion, figures that were familiar to every Soviet child of the post-

war generations: a symbol of the steadfastness and courage of Soviet childrenwho, shoulder

to shoulder with adults, championed the liberty and independence of their fatherland.14

Throughout the Soviet period, the topic of forced labour had a primarily instrumental

significance, and it was used for various types of propaganda tasks: during the war, to

mobilise the population in the struggle against the enemy; in the war’s aftermath, to

underscore and contrast the essence and policies of the post-war Western ‘democracies’

and the USSR; and from the late 1960s, to accuse the capitalist countries, above all the

Federal Republic of Germany, of preparing for a new war and an arms race, and other such

undertakings.15 In addition – and this fact must be taken into consideration – topics

dealing with Soviet citizens, including children, who performed forced labour in the Third

Reich, were reflected in ‘official’ Soviet literature whose precise target audience was

children; these books were published under the rubric of ‘children’s literature’ or were

accompanied with the recommendation ‘for schoolchildren in the middle and upper

grades’. In other words, besides its propaganda use, the image of the child forced labourer

also played a patriotic and educational role. Naturally, this image was not so much a mass-

produced one that, as a result of this, was literally drummed into the heads of Soviet

schoolchildren as it was an image of the Pioneer-hero16; it supplemented, or rather defined,

the limit of the official ‘space of memory’ about the war and constituted a legitimate, albeit

marginal, personage.

In any discussion regarding Ostarbeiter children in the Soviet memory project, it is

crucial to highlight the practical absence of any mention of children who were born in

slavery. This is not surprising given that, in the semantic framework of the Soviet version

of the memory of the Third Reich’s slaves, forced labour either caused suffering or gave

rise to resistance but under no circumstances facilitated the emergence of children,

especially those who were the products of parents of different nationalities. In its turn,

Soviet creative literature, if it even mentioned the presence of infants in the work camps,

did so parenthetically and elliptically. The sole exception is the novel Ostarbeiter, co-

written by the Ukrainian authors Ivan Zozulia and Ivan Vlasenko, in which, in keeping

with the slavery topic, such a child is born, but it is the product of the extramarital relations

between the protagonist and his lover, the wife of a Gestapo officer. Of course, this was a

highly untypical situation, considering the realities of forced labour, and in my view it was

simply invented by the two writers. But, at the very least, they tried to broach this topic in

order to draw attention to the phenomenon of forced labourers returning from Germany,

accompanied by their children who were born there.17

I will underscore once again the age question with regard to Soviet Ukrainian citizens

who were deported for forced labour and the problem of recreating the experience and

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memory of these young people in the Soviet discourse of the Great Patriotic War. If we

consider individuals aged 18 and younger who were sent to perform forced labour as child

Ostarbeiters, as Professor Johannes-Dieter Steinert proposes, this will necessitate viewing

nearly the entire forced-labour discourse that was created in Soviet times as one based on

subjects connected precisely with ‘children’. However, this Soviet discourse of forced

labour mostly functioned through the definition of ‘youth’, not ‘children’, not least of all

because at that time in the USSR people of 16 years and older were viewed not as children

requiring care, but as citizens fully capable of work. As regards certain types of crimes, the

age of criminal responsibility was 12.18

Finally, as regards the discussion of the realities of social existence and daily life rather

than the created world of collective memory and its representations, it is high time to

correct a notion that became widespread in the post-Soviet period: that after the war the

Ostarbeiterswere generally persecuted. If such persecution did indeed take place, it was of

a non-criminal nature and unsystematic, and cases were exaggerated and hyperbolised

during the first years following the collapse of the USSR. Current research indicates that

after the war the Soviet government worked to gradually restore the political status of the

Ostarbeiters, who were no longer subject to criminal prosecution for ‘working’ for the

enemy, awarding social-protection guarantees, among other measures. Moreover,

Ostarbeiters had retained their uninterrupted general seniority, while the seniority of

invalids was supplemented by their period of work in Germany. Repatriated Soviet women

with large families had the right to obtain assistance and benefits.19 However, for a certain

period of time after their repatriation former forced labourers did not have the right to

choose their place of residence, and they faced restrictions when they applied for jobs (if

they were adults) or registered for studies (if a former child forced labourer wanted to

study); for a long time they were closely controlled and supervised by the state.20 Thus,

those trainloads ofOstarbeiters heading from Germany straight to Siberia – as was widely

believed in the 1990s – were not a characteristic or routine phenomenon.

Child Ostarbeiters in contemporary Ukraine’s culture of memory

The early 1990s were marked by immense changes both of a geopolitical and

socioeconomic nature, as well as by the transformations that took place in the sphere of the

culture of memory, including its content richness, and commemorative strategies and

practices. From the standpoints of the culture of memory and memory politics, the main

feature of that period for post-Soviet countries was the scathing criticism of the Soviet past

and the search for and ‘filling in’ of a large number of ‘blank spots’ in this history. In those

years, the memory of forced labour during the Second World War, among other topics,

gained new life and new expression, which coincided with monetary payments that began

to be issued to this category of citizens.21 In my view, it is this very combination of

circumstances that triggered the emergence and continuing coexistence of several levels of

(re)creation and (re)presentation of memory about the Ostarbeiters: state-legal (this

served as the driving force for (re)creating an appropriate memory including the urgent

need for legal regulation and the creation of a normative base for obtaining monetary

compensation from abroad); institutional (a distinctive feature of which was the creation

of a certain number of civic organisations, unions and associations, firstly, those uniting

former forced labourers, and, secondly, citizens who saw their main task as providing

assistance and protection and honouring the memory of this category of war participants);

public (where the policy of issuing compensation and granting, initially, war-veteran

status to Ostarbeiters and, later, the status of victims of Nazi persecutions determined

European Review of History—Revue europeenne d’histoire 395

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significant public interest in their history and memory and thereby stimulated the writing

and publication of memoirs, participation in projects to record oral histories, the fate and

experiences of former forced labourers received much attention in documentary films,

theatre productions, museum exhibitions and travelling exhibits, as well as the publication

of popular books and literary works); and scholarly (top priority continues to be given to

new sources published by academics while the study of the topic is based on a blend of

political and social histories of forced labour, with a clear-cut emphasis on the latter: the

daily practices of existence in the conditions of forced labour exploitation and post-war

adaptation, as well as the subjective attitude to these processes on the part of their direct

participants – Ukrainian Ostarbeiters).22 The memory of child Ostarbeiters occupies a

place in each of these levels, each with its distinctive features.

The state–legal level

From the early stages of its independence, Ukraine actively took part in the negotiations

started during Soviet times about humanitarian assistance to the victims of Nazi crimes,

and the right of people who worked on German territory during the Second World War to

receive this assistance. As a result of these negotiations, held in 1993, the Ukrainian

National Fund for Mutual Understanding and Reconciliation was founded in accordance

with Decree no. 453 issued by the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine on 16 June 1993. Until

2007 this fund issued compensation payments to former UkrainianOstarbeiters. However,

these payments required an appropriate legal foundation and special legal status for the

Ostarbeiters, for which purpose the following resolutions were passed in Ukraine: the first,

in 1995, was the Resolution of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine concerning amendments

and supplements to the 1993 law ‘Concerning the Status of War Veterans, Their Social

Protection Guarantees’ (in which Ostarbeiters were also named as war veterans); and the

second, ‘Concerning the Victims of Nazi Persecutions’ handed down on 23 March 2000

(in which Ostarbeiters were named among the victims); this latter piece of legislation was

indispensable for obtaining compensation from the German ‘Memory, Responsibility, and

the Future’ fund.

One issue that is crucial to the topic examined in this article is that the standards of the

first of the above-named laws established social and legal protection for individuals who

were minors during the war and now have the status of war veterans. Included among war

veterans were combatants, war invalids and participants of the war. In accordance with the

law, henceforth former underage inmates (under 16 when they were imprisoned) of

concentration camps, ghettos and other places of forcible detention created by Nazi

Germany and its allies during the SecondWorld War, as well as children born in the places

where their parents were forcibly detained, were considered on par with combatants.

A separate point in the list of individuals considered victims of Nazi persecution in the

2000 law on victims of Nazi persecution focused on ‘children who were born in the places

of their parents’ forcible detention and in the places where their parents carried out forced

labour’. In discussing the various levels of public interest in the memory of child

Ostarbeiters in post-Soviet Ukraine, it must be stressed that the very existence of such

children was first defined and acknowledged on the state level; as mentioned earlier, these

children were absent from the Soviet space of memory.

The current social protection for this category of war participants and victims of

Nazi persecution is one component of the state’s care for its citizens. It includes

monetary payments, aid in kind, benefits, subsidies, medical assistance, medical

products, rehabilitation devices, assistive mobility devices and social services, as well

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as compensation payments, humanitarian aid from civic organisations, and other forms

of support.23

The institutional level

To this day, various institutions, such as associations, unions and civic organisations,

continue to play a leading role in forming the contemporary culture of the memory of

forced labour in general, and the labour performed by child Ostarbeiters in particular.

The main organisation is the Ukrainian Union of Prisoners–Victims of Nazism

(USVZhN), the first to highlight the existence of and need to honour the experience of

children who were imprisoned during the war. This organisation’s activities date back to

1988, when, on the initiative of the Ukrainian writer and journalist Volodymyr Lytvynov,

an initial meeting was held in Kiev, followed by the founding of the World Union of

Former Underage Prisoners of Fascist Concentration Camps as part of the V. I. Lenin

Soviet Children’s Fund. Over a three-year period (until the collapse of the USSR) the

energetic efforts of the Fund and the Union led to the passage of two government decisions

in favour of this category of war participants, as well as to the creation of the Inter-

Departmental Commission of the USSR, whose mandate was to establish facts related to

the incarceration of children in concentration camps, prisons and ghettos.24 In early 1991

the Ukrainian Union of Former Underage Prisoners of Fascist Concentration Camps was

created on the initiative of Ukrainian oblasts and municipal branches of the World Union

of Former Underage Prisoners of Fascist Concentration Camps. In June 1993 it was

reregistered as an organisation of ‘former underage prisoners of fascism’, and renamed in

October 1998 as the Ukrainian Union of Prisoners–Victims of Nazism. A new statute was

adopted, according to which members of the Union, regardless of age, ‘could be former

prisoners of fascist concentration camps, ghettos, and other places of forcible detention

who were deported under duress to perform forced labour in Germany or countries

occupied by it, as well as children who were born in the places where their parents were

held for forced labour’.25

Thus, the very initiative to commemorate the experience and memory of underage

prisoners of Nazi Germany and champion their interests acted as a powerful spur for the

institutionalisation of associations uniting all victims of Nazism in Ukraine. Regardless of

the fact that the Union has been representing the interests of Ukrainian former victims of

Nazism of all age groups since 1993, initiatives to preserve the memory of the ‘children of

war’ and champion their rights constitute the majority of the USVZhN’s activities.

In their turn, compensation payments, social assistance and diverse activities aimed at

commemorating the memory of the victims of Nazi persecution have characterised the

work, since its inception, of the Ukrainian National Fund for Mutual Understanding and

Reconciliation as well as of its successor, the international civic organisation

‘International Foundation “Mutual Understanding and Tolerance”’, which was founded

in 2008. For several consecutive years it has organised a competition for projects aimed at

preserving the historical memory of the victims of the Second World War. In 2013 the

topic was ‘Children of the Second World War through the Eyes of Contemporary

Children’. The immense interest in this topic demonstrated by the general public, and

young people in particular, is attested to by the fact that approximately 700 works (texts

accompanied by drawings) were submitted to the competition from all over Ukraine, each

of these works describing the fate of someone who was maimed by the war or conveying

someone’s account and memory. Some works explored the destinies of children who

toiled as forced labourers in Germany (Figures 2 and 3). Of unquestionable importance

European Review of History—Revue europeenne d’histoire 397

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from the standpoint of the contemporary Ukrainian culture of memory about the Second

World War is the fact that, in recreating its events and horrors to produce a composite

picture of the sufferings endured by the Ukrainian people, young Ukrainians today without

fail include those who laboured in extraordinarily difficult conditions, and against their

will on the territory of the Third Reich, including children.

Besides these two ‘core’ organisations working on behalf of the Ostarbeiters and other

victims of Nazism, there are several civic organisations in Ukraine whose work is focused

specifically on children of war: Protection for Children of the War (a nationwide

association of Ukrainian citizens who were under 18 years of age when the Second World

War ended; the founding conference was held in 1996) and Help for Children of the War

Figure 2. Anastaziia Tsenova (13 years old; village of Bohdanivka, Chernihiv raion, Zaporizhiaoblast), Goodbye, My Childhood. Paper and gouache. The caption states: ‘School is over and thetransportation of workers to Germany began . . . We lived in poverty, we had nothing to wear:tarpaulin boots, woolen stockings and a coat. Sister just bought for herself and had to lose.We arrived at the station Velykyi Tokmak. There were people from the whole region. While the trainrunning mothers began to lose consciousness, cry, yell . . . Nobody knew if they would see theirchildren alive or buried [sic ] . . . .’ From an interview with Kateryna Demchuk (b. 1926). Source:Children’s Art: Works Exhibition of the All-Ukrainian Contest II Finalists: “The Fate of Children inthe Years of World War II in Students’ Drawings,” Exhibition Catalogue (Kiev, 2013), 31.

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(set up by the National Founding Conference held on 22May 2010), as well as a number of

municipal organisations called Children of the War.

The public level

A large number of humanitarian and cultural-educational projects about the victims of

Nazism are implemented by these organisations, which aim to provide social protection

for those who suffered, commemorating their experience and honouring their memory.

Thanks to their co-operation with international donor organisations, these associations

organise visits by former captives to their places of imprisonment and foster

communication between Ukrainian schoolchildren and young people and their

counterparts in other countries, publish memoirs, hold press conferences, issue press

statements, and appear on radio and television. This work helps to raise public awareness

about the experience and sufferings of war victims, including those who were children

during the Second World War.

For example, in Ukraine in the 2000s, these organisations and publishers were

instrumental in publishing a substantial number of memoirs written by people who became

Figure 3. Dmytro Havryliak (16 years old; village of Krylos, Halych raion, Ivano-Frankivskoblast), Childhood Burnt by War. Paper, watercolour, and ink. The caption states: ‘My parentstravelled in the train from Germany to Ukraine with demobilised soldiers. The soldiers took thechild, and the mother ran the whole day, crying, from wagon to wagon because she thought that thechild had been stolen. But the soldiers missed the child and wanted to hug her. Father said that theygave the child back in the evening. The soldiers gave lots of things to the child, but customs controltook everything away. Even the pram was taken away. My father said many times: “You are verydear to me, because I was carrying you on my shoulders for three hundred kilometres [sic ]’”. Froman interview with Kateryna Honchar (b. 1944). Source: Children’s Art: Works Exhibition of the All-Ukrainian Contest II Finalists: “The Fate of Children in the Years of World War II in Students’Drawings,” Exhibition Catalogue (Kiev, 2013), 30.

European Review of History—Revue europeenne d’histoire 399

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forced labourers when they were children or teenagers. These memoirs have appeared in

collections26 and as separate publications. Inessa Mirchevskaia is the author of one

noteworthy memoir. Here is a particularly moving episode. Little Inessa became a forced

labourer at the age of 10. For some time she lived with her mother in a work camp, where

she toiled in the kitchen with other children. One day, following a visit to the camp of a

commission charged with examining the children in preparation for deportation, Inessa’s

mother refused to go to work in order to remain with her daughter and prevent her from

being deported. For her disobedience the mother was sent to a punishment cell; her

execution was to take place the next morning. On the square stood a gallows to which the

woman was led in the presence of all the camp residents, including little Inessa. Suddenly

a woman came up to the commandant and told him something.

He called me (I already had a pretty good understanding of German). I approached him. Thecommandant asked me if it was true that I turned eleven today. I said yes. Then he said: ‘Soit’s your birthday today!’ He considered for a moment. Then he shouted something to thosewho were dragging my mother. They came up to him. He inspected my mother from top tobottom and said: ‘Your mother violated camp order, but . . . But you turned eleven today, yes?Today is your birthday. A rather original idea has occurred to me: I will give you a present . . .I will give you a costly and original present, the kind that no one has ever received!’ . . . Hegave me my mother, my dear, own mummy. We rushed to each other, hugged, kissed,caressed, and touched each other.

We were permitted to go to the barrack. Mummy was covered with bruises . . . I bunched myhands into little fists, but what could I do! He had the power to execute and the power topardon. And he pardoned. That was his whim, his will.27

This episode, as well as a number of other incidents that are embedded in the memories

of former child slaves and which have been published in the collection Pam’iat 0 zaradymaibut 0noho (Memory for the Sake of the Future, ed. N. Sliesarieva), served as the basis of

a brilliant and penetrating documentary play entitled Zhaivir dlia Olenky (A Skylark for

Olenka), written, directed and produced in 2011 by Andrii Senchuk, director of the Kiev-

based Incunabula Youth Theater. The cast was composed exclusively of young people,

and the viewers of the first performances were authors of memoirs: former child labourers

of Nazi Germany. On the stage in the opening scene is a theatre stage that has been

transformed into a camp barrack, where bunk beds stand amidst the clutter of discarded

stage decorations. The set was meant to resemble the interior of a private dramatic theatre

located on the outskirts of the Upper Silesian city of Beuthen (Germany; today, Bytom,

Poland), which became the site of an Ostarbeiter camp during the Second World War.

Outside, a camp loudspeaker blasts music, a melody from an operetta. Suddenly a young

girl named Nastia appears in the spotlight. She is making flowers out of paper and coloured

rags. She narrates the following:

I was thirteen. The war. The fascists captured my Dnipropetrovsk. In forty-three I was broughthere by force. I became an ‘Ostarbeiter’. That’s what the Germans called people from theEast, mostly from Ukraine, whom they forced to work for them. At the time I lived in a campconsisting of several barracks, behind barbed wire and under armed guard. Before the war thisbarrack had been the hall of a private theatre, but now Ostarbeiters were held here. The campcommandant wanted to keep the stage and the curtains; he considered himself a theatre andmusic lover. That is why music was always heard in the camp. Over a period of two years Isaw more than a thousand people on this stage, and then, in June forty-three more than twohundred people were housed here.28

In general, young Ukrainians today are taking a very active part in projects that seek to

commemorate the fate of their peers who, 70 years ago, were forced to leave their native

land and brought to an unfamiliar, cruel world of abuse, exhausting work and premature

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adulthood. These young people do not overlook another topic that is only just now

beginning to attract the attention of scholars and which has not been the subject of any

historical research: the post-war experience of children of Ostarbeiters who were born in

Germany in 1944–5. Between February 2007 and August 2008 Alternatyva-V, the

Ukrainian Association for Youth Cooperation and Friends of the Neuengamme

Concentration Camp Memorial, carried out a joint project entitled ‘The Fate of Children

of Former Forced Labourers Who Were Born in Germany in 1944–1945’. As a result of

prior agreements and recorded interviews, 20 biographies were collected (10 in the form of

video interviews and 10 in the form of written questions and answers), published by the

Friends of the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial in the form of a brochure

entitled The Fate of the Children of Former Eastern Workers Born in 1944–1945 in

Germany.29 In the afterword to this publication, the compilers and initiators of this project,

Janine Dressler and Kristina Ulrich, make some very interesting observations and

inferences that should be further developed and analysed:

The preliminary assumption that women became pregnant deliberately in Germany in order toreturn to Ukraine was not confirmed. There is no question that young women had absolutelyno idea about sexual relations and birth control, and this was precisely why they becamepregnant . . . What is striking is that during the interviews respondents talked more about theirbirthplace and the time their parents spent as forced labourers in Germany, and less about theirlives from 1945 to 2007–8. Perhaps the reasons for this are the following: the topic of forcedlabour in Germany was taboo until 1991, and the respondents have still not got over this. Therespondents did not want to talk about Soviet times because this is connected with painfulmemories. To this day they are ashamed that they were born in Germany.30

In contemporary Ukraine’s public discourse, interest in topics connected with young

Ukrainians who were forced labourers in Germany and their children who were born there

is tied with a personal, special attitude to this question on the part of citizens whose

families had the same experience. In contrast to the above-mentioned publications that

discuss the feeling of shame and sense of tragedy, in these cases we have an example of a

respectful attitude to such stories, one that is based on the sense that the trials and

tribulations of life in Nazi slavery gave rise to their new and strong families and that this

experience cemented their attitude to life. In order to ensure that their relatives’ stories do

not vanish without a trace, the caring descendants have also devoted creative works to

them, like the young Ukrainian writer Roksoliana S0oma, who wrote and published the

novel Vacation in Tangermunde.31 The author’s mother, the fifth and last child in her

family, looked after her parents, Pavlo and Maria Kulyk, from whom she often heard

stories about their life, which she committed to memory and then transmitted to her

daughter Roksoliana. Her novel explores her grandparents’ lives: their incredible love

story and difficult experiences in 1942–5 in Germany, where they married and where their

first child was born. The author begins her novel thus:

Concealed behind this title, which at first glance seems to presage an adventure novel about anexciting journey and relaxation in an exotic place called Tangermunde, are in fact the tragicdestinies of millions of Soviet people who at one time found themselves in a foreign andhorrible country by compulsion, against their will, which, in addition to the ingrained brand ofthe ‘Ostarbeiter’, damaged their souls and destinies and destroyed others.32

In addition to being immortalised in literature, the topic of children born in conditions

of slavery and the tragedies connected with growing up, more often than not in single-

parent families and sometimes in a foreign country, is also reflected in post-Soviet

documentary films. In an earlier article I cited the example of the 2003 documentary film

Roses for Signora Raısa, which is based on real-life events. I will recap briefly here: the

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film recounts the story of Katia (Kateryna) Khanina, a girl from Kharkiv, her lover Mario

Siniscalti, an Italian man from Sorrento, and their son Stefano, who was born in Germany

in early 1946. Katia and Mario worked in the same factory, but in 1946 Katia was

repatriated to the USSR, while little Stefano and his father were repatriated to Italy.

While Stefano was growing up, he was aware that his mother lived somewhere far away,

but it took him many decades to find her. With the onset of perestroika, the situation

changed rapidly: during President Gorbachev’s visit to Milan, his wife Raisa noticed

someone in the crowd – Stefano – holding up a poster saying, ‘Help me find my

mother!’ She offered her assistance and soon afterwards Katia Khanina was located in a

small village near Kharkiv. Stefano was the first to pay her a visit, followed later by

his father Mario. The story has a happy ending: the wedding of these two elderly

people took place first in Ukraine and then in Italy, where Katia moved to join her

husband and son.

This film was very well received by post-Soviet television audiences, as it concerns

what people hold dearest: timeless love – real, eternal and faithful. The social significance

of this film and the public’s huge response to it are attested by the fact that the first

Ukrainian documentary film festival, Kontakt, which took place in Kiev in April 2005,

opened with the screening of this Russian-made film that was attended by the son of Katia

and Mario, Stefano, as well as by the incumbent Ukrainian president, Viktor Yushchenko,

and his wife. According to Liga.net, a Ukrainian news website, President Yushchenko

emphasised in his speech to the festival participants that many Ukrainians had shared the

fate that befell this particular family, revealing that his own parents had met each other

while in forced labour in Nazi Germany. Yushchenko presented Kateryna Khanina a

medal commemorating the ‘60th Anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War of

1941–1945’, as well as an embroidered towel in memory of her native country. This

medal was accepted by her son who thanked Yushchenko for his attention to their family,

noting that he was proud of the fact that he, too, is a Ukrainian.33

Concluding this overview of the public dimension of the memory of child

Ostarbeiters, I would like to highlight the visual embodiment of this memory, specifically

the monument to Ostarbeiters that was erected in 2005 in Babyn Yar (Babi Yar). This

monument is dedicated to all victims of Nazism, including those who were forced to work

in Nazi Germany. The monument slab symbolises a wall of memory, one side of which

bears the inscription Pam’iat 0 zarady maibutn 0oho (Memory for the sake of the future),

with the Latin letter ‘V’ carved in place of the required apostrophe in the Ukrainian word

Pam’iat 0, along with the letters ‘Ost’, a truncated version of the word ‘Ostarbeiters’. Next

to it stands the figure of a little girl who, according to the designers of the memorial,

symbolises the future. In my view, however, the figure of the little girl can be interpreted

another way: as a memorial to the innocent children who were fated to experience

suffering, pain and death in a faraway, hostile country.

The scholarly level

Despite the immense number of studies on various aspects of the history and memory of

the Second World War, researchers have only recently begun to study the experience, fate

and memory of the children who lived through those terrible years and to devote attention

to their commemoration in the culture of the various countries or societies. As justly noted

by the compilers of the recently published collection Children and War (focused in part on

the fate of children in so-called ‘new wars’), the surge of interest in studying the

experience and memory of children who lived through the Second World War

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has to be explained by the changing of the generational guard among the survivors . . . Thisnew focus on children is also reflected by the memorials to commemorate theKindertransport, which have been installed in recent years at London’s Liverpool Station,Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse railway station, in Rotterdam, and at Vienna’s main railway station,the Westbahnhof. A similar generational change took place in the societies of the perpetrators:Germans and Austrians who experienced the war as children took over the role of warwitnesses from the soldiers of the German Wehrmacht. Thus, the impact of World War II onchildren and on their lives afterwards is given special consideration. Moreover, intensifiedfocus on children’s experiences and their strategies for dealing with what they went through isevident in Eastern Europe as well.34

A collection of articles with an emphasis on the study of children’s memories of the

Second World War was recently published in the post-Soviet space. Published in the

Russian city of Krasnodar in 2010, the collection The Second World War in Children’s

‘Framework of Memory’35, contains articles written by specialists in the fields of history,

psychology, pedagogical anthropology and others. The featured articles explore children’s

memories of the war in relation to public, ‘official’, models, the specific character of

children’s recollections of the war in the autobiographies of adults, and the mechanisms for

conveying and transforming these recollections throughout the life of an individual and

society on the whole. Both of the above-mentioned collections have a clear-cut

interdisciplinary character. But unlike the articles based on the proceedings of a conference

that took place in Salzburg, the volume of research published in Russia is not directly

focused on the experiences of children caught up in the war. For the most part, these articles

highlight other questions that are determined by the specific character of development and

topical questions in post-Soviet historiography, such as the scholarly legitimisation of

‘another memory’ of the war, related questions pertaining to methodological principles and

sources of this kind of research, and themindful consideration of the sociocultural context of

existing practices governing the reinterpretation and redefinition of collective identities.

A similar situation exists in the substantial body of current historical literature on

forced labour in the Third Reich, only a small proportion of which is devoted to the history

and memory of children who were engaged in forced labour. This particularly concerns

children who were deported from the occupied territories of the USSR, that is, those

territories that became the largest suppliers of manpower for programmes aimed at putting

foreign civilians to work in Nazi Germany. In the absence of a special monograph

published in the post-Soviet space, until recently most of the information about children

who were forcibly deported to Germany appeared only in the works of the Russian

researcher Pavel Polian, in which he presents statistics on the number of these children and

reveals the dynamics and features of deportation and engagement in forced labour. The

first monograph that specifically addresses the fate of Soviet and Polish children who were

forced to work both in Germany and occupied Europe was written by Johannes-Dieter

Steinert, Professor of Modern European History at the University of Wolverhampton

and published only in 2013.36 Based on substantial archival materials, recorded oral

histories and published memoirs (including those that discuss the fate of children who

were deported from Ukraine or whose authors are Ukrainian former child Ostarbeiters),

his study explores two main issues: first, the participation of military and civilian

departments in the organisation of deportations and forced labour, as well as various

interconnections between child forced labour and the policy of Germanisation; and,

second, the experience of deportation and forced labour as reflected in the oral histories of

former child forced labourers.

In general, oral-history projects to record the memoirs of former forced labourers, a

large number of which were completed in post-Soviet countries in the last 20 years,

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constitute, in my opinion, a very significant and conspicuous phenomenon marked not

only by the reflection of the experience of living in slavery but also by the result of

contemporary methods of (re)creating and disseminating the memory of these events;

that is, they are a specific semantic synopsis of all state, legal, scholarly and public

efforts to commemorate the history and memory of this group of war victims. Ultimately,

they not only offer the public a look at the unique experience of forced labour during the

Nazi era but also convey the current view and understanding of this slavery and the

models of explanations and generalisations that were formulated within the framework of

the contemporary culture of memory of the ‘slaves of the Third Reich’. Once again I

must stress the fact that, if one accepts the classification according to which a child

forced labourer is someone who performed forced labour aged 18 or younger, then nearly

half of the oral narratives recorded in the post-Soviet period should be included in any

scrutiny of the features of the oral-history recreation of the forced-labour experience.

In the concluding section of this article I mention accounts provided by people born in

the 1930s, who were deported to serve as forced labour together with their parents or

other family members and whose oral interviews were recorded as part of projects in

which I was directly involved. It goes without saying that these oral-history narratives

are extremely varied, for the destiny of every individual is unique. However, from the

standpoint of the specific features associated with the process of recalling these events,

the accounts of former child Ostarbeiters contain certain similarities that may be

summarised as follows.

Elaborating on the conclusions reached by Johannes-Dieter Steinert and drawing on

Valeriia Nurkova’s psychological studies of ‘children’s memories’ of the war37, I consider

the following to be the main features of reminiscences of a wartime childhood and which

was spent in forced labour in Germany: first, most of the stories and incidents described in

these memoirs are extraordinarily vivid ‘bursts of memory’ that maintain a specific

‘metre’ of space in conformity with the narrator’s age or the conditions in which s/he

perceives a given situation and in which the ‘world of experiences’ that took place at the

very moment when an event was fixed in time is actualised. These are ‘living pictures’ that

literally ‘stand before the eyes’ of those who recall them. These pictures are often a set of

unrelated sketches arrayed in a certain chain; more often than not the quintessence of

feelings wrested out of time and space, in which fear is predominant: ‘I remember two

apartments. One apartment was in town. Because I was often completely alone there, I sat

underneath the table; the tablecloth hung low . . . and I always hid there. I had such fear

that I always sat there.’38

Along with the intense fear that plagued a small child in the conditions of slavery, there

are frequent references to the humiliation experienced by the child or which it witnessed in

relation to other people, mainly its parents:

Of course, they were unclothed and humiliated. Of course, there was humiliation. Like a beast,like a beast. Mother and father worked, as did my older brother; he was eight years older; howold was he—thirteen? So, he worked . . . And, of course they had the look of animals, youcould say; wooden clogs, everything on them was dirty and greasy because no clothingwhatsoever was supplied, only wooden clogs.39

Typically, references to humiliation suffered at the hands of the Germans often go

hand in hand with memoirists’ indignant comments on the behaviour of ‘their own’ Soviet

people after the war ended, including fellow citizens and even relatives:

My mother was in Germany, and when we arrived in the Union [that is, the USSR] after thewar, Uncle, daddy’s brother – he was a lieutenant-general said: ‘If I had known that you hadgone voluntarily to Germany, I would have shot you myself.’ That’s what he said to mama.

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But mother, who was never at a loss for words, says: ‘So you swine are accusing me ofsomething. That means you went somewhere’ – but she said it ‘in Russian’ [that is, she usedfoul language—G.G.] – you abandoned us, we were scoffed at here, we experienced a lot offear here. And then we were driven here. Where were you, our protectors? And you say thatyou would have shot me?’ . . . I remember my postwar childhood . . . People knew that I hadbeen in Germany; they teased me for being a ‘German’; I remember that this was not verypleasant for mama. Do you understand? There you have it. And no one ever talked about this.They tried to keep quiet. They were afraid.40

Framing the experience of living in forced labour conditions by referring to the

symmetrical oppression on the part of ‘foreign’ Germans and ‘our’ fellow citizens is an

interesting example of the contemporary culture of memory, in which Ukrainian

Ostarbeiters are presented for the most part as Hitler’s slaves and Stalin’s orphans.41

Contemporary productions (for example, Ostarbeiter) as well as literature (Serhii

Baturyn’s novel OST) and the recently published memoirs of underage workers in the

Third Reich mentioned earlier are also constructed according to this pattern:

‘Why do you have a German accent? To which Ukrainian party do you belong?’ theinvestigator asked. After my contradictory response he came toward me slowly and with abored glance, without enthusiasm, he knocked me from the stool onto the floor with his fist.And this was what happened during each of the three interrogations. I must note that the two-metre-tall Hitlerite policeman Berger, who beat me for reading the Ukrainian Herald, thenewspaper of the Ukrainian National Federation one year before the investigator did,demonstrated more emotion during the torture than the Stalinist oprichnik. But these twomonsters had one trait in common: hatred of Ukrainians.42

Another feature of memoirs about war childhood in general43 and childhood spent in

forced labour in Germany in particular is that, in addition to bursts of memory, these

reminiscences contain a large cast of characters and entire groups of people who are united

by various traits: from the generalised, non-personified ‘our people’ and ‘Germans’ to

‘occupiers’, ‘fascists’, ‘SS men’, ‘prisoners of war’, ‘Ostarbeiters’ and so on, who are

discernible by their social markers. Even in mentioning a specific person, Ukrainian

narrators tend to present a certainwhole image that ismeant to absorb, in the narrator’s view,

themost characteristic features of, for example, the enemy, the oppressor, even if this image

departs markedly from reality. Like, for example, the images of the members of one family,

the image of someone being ‘hung round with’ weapons is clearly hyperbolised:

And so we ended up with this family, these nationalists, SS people. And the grandmother, andthe daughter, and the son . . . (Pause) he was in the army. On the Eastern Front. And the threeof them, draped with weapons, that’s how they walked around. We were here for a long time.(Pause) Well, it was cleaner than in the camp . . . (In an undertone) . . . It was horrible . . . Shehas a lash, and this, and a submachine gun, a Schmeisser. Yes. And a pistol, she carried onearound, too. (Pause, sigh).44

Another distinctive feature of these reminiscences is that, alongside references to the

trials and tribulations of war, our narrators nevertheless also tried to recall episodes from

their childhood that were connected with games, toys, and children’s recreational

activities:

Kids. You know what kids are like. They only have one thing on their minds. They neededdolls, some rags. They found them at the garbage dump. There was some kind of sewing plantthere and some sort of rags. For me it was the highest degree of happiness to collect these rags.There’s nothing like it! So, [we made] some kind of dolls out of these rags . . . After all, achild needs to play. Childhood is childhood.45

It would appear that such references play a very important compensatory role, as they

support the narrator’s feeling that his or her childhood was not entirely lost in the

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whirlwind of war. A similar compensatory role, but one that accords meaning to the entire

experience of the war years, is played by the ‘historical content’ of memoirs of war

childhood. At issue here is the perception of historical events as facts related to one’s

personal biography, in relation to which the narrator occupies four different psychological

stances: Participant, Eyewitness, Contemporary and Heir of historical experience.46 It is

interesting to note that in oral histories about children’s experiences of living in forced

labour conditions the first two stances often coincide. This constitutes the final feature of

these stories, which I will discuss here. According to my observations, many former child

Ostarbeiters in their autobiographical narratives also recount their own experience of

slavery, which is presented in fragmentary fashion but ‘from inside’ the events that are

being described (that is, they are in the position of Participant), and parallel to this they

provide a description, not of what happened to them but, more often than not, what

happened to ‘adult’ participants of certain events; in this process they seem to be

positioned ‘on the sidelines’ and are not physically included in the situations that they are

recalling (the Eyewitness stance). As a result, these oral histories recreate both the most

personal sense of life in the conditions of forced labour – from the stance of an

‘I-Participant’ of an event – and the social, solidarity-based significance of this experience

as part of the general tragic fate of the entire Ukrainian nation during the war.

Conclusions

The figure of a child against whom Nazi Germany committed the crime of forcible

deportation to Germany where s/he was compelled to work (age permitting) occupies a

specific place in the memory politics of the USSR and post-Soviet Ukraine. In Soviet

propaganda and agitation during the war and in the early post-war years, the figure of a

young child transported to a foreign land played a purely mobilisational and consolidating

role, inasmuch as it was part of the general image of forced labour and constituted its most

expressive and emotional component. In the 1950s–80s, again within the framework of

the place occupied by forced labour topics in the memory politics of the USSR, the figure

of the child Ostarbeiter underscored the Nazis’ inhumane policies toward civilians in

general and forced labourers in particular; concentrated within it was a strong emotional-

affective potential for exerting influence on Soviet citizenry and, more importantly, on

Soviet children. It is worth noting that the literary work about forced labour in Germany

that sparked the strongest reader response during the Soviet era was a novel written from

the point of view of a child – a teenager – who became a forced labourer at the age of 15.

In the post-Soviet period, societal and scholarly interest in the history and memory of

forced labour during the Nazi era was sparked by the payments to this category of Nazi

victims, which were already being issued by the Federal Republic of Germany, by the

activities of organisations and funds that were specially created to issue these payments

and humanitarian aid, and by the broad rejection of Soviet heritage – typical of the 1990s

– within the context of changes in the general vector of history-writing in favour of the

formation of national historiographies. This situation gave rise to the attitude toward the

memory of forced labour as a memory that is being rediscovered and whose goal it is to

honour victims and maintain attention on the issue of forced labour and its

commemoration, which was ‘overlooked’ during the Soviet era. Against this backdrop,

vivid interest has been observed since the 1990s in the recreation of, among other things,

the experience and memory of former child Ostarbeiters. In the contemporary culture of

memory, this interest has been reflected on the level of state-legal regulation, institutional

support, public interest and scholarly research. At the same time, the recorded oral

G. Grinchenko406

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histories of former child forced labourers are becoming the product and generalisation of

current tools that are used in the (re)creation and dissemination of the memory of child

forced labourers; these instruments are the semantic synopsis of all state, legal, scholarly

and public efforts aimed at commemorating the history and memory of this group of war

victims. Based on these stories, films are being made, novels and plays are being written,

and plays and shows are being produced, all of which help to preserve knowledge and

experience of this aspect of the Second World War, as well as sustain an international

dialogue between victims of the war and contemporary youth.

Acknowledgements

This article was translated from Ukrainian by Marta D. Olynyk.

Notes

1. From the “General Clauses” of the Law of Ukraine “On the Social Protection of Children ofWar” located at: http://zakon4.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/2195-15

2. For the most informative website on the history of forced labour in German, English andRussian, featuring bibliographies, documents, references to archival collections and otherrelated information, see http://www.bundesarchiv.de/zwangsarbeit/index.html.en

3. Spoerer, Zwangsarbeit unter dem Hakenkreuz, 94.4. On this point I disagree with Johannes-Dieter Steinert, who regards as child forced labourers

those who were under 18 years of age when they were compelled to perform this type of work.See Steinert, Deportation und Zwangsarbeit.

5. Ibid., 28, 278.6. Spoerer and Fleischhacker, “Forced Laborers in Nazi Germany,” 199 (Table 9: Age Structure

of Selected Forced-Labor Groups by Year of Birth [in Percent]).7. Polian, “Ne-pe-re-no-sy-mo!;” Nikolai Karpov, “Malen0kii Ostarbeiter,” 5.8. Ibid., 6–8.9. Grinchenko, “The Ostarbeiter of Nazi Germany in Soviet and Post-Soviet Ukrainian Historical

Memory,” 401–26; idem, “(Re)Constructing Suffering: ‘Fascist Captivity’ in SovietCommemorative Culture,” 243–61. See also in German: Grinchenko, “UkrainischeZwangsarbeiter im Dritten Reich,” 371–402.

10. Kononenko, Otomsti nemtsu, 28.11. From late 1944 onwards this set of written testimonies came to include letters, diaries and

albums that were discovered by Soviet troops in territories outside the borders of the USSR.12. The Ukrainian writer Mykola Smolenchuk and his Russian colleague Vitalii Semin were both

born in 1927.13. Semin, Nagrudnyi znak OST, 8214. For example, the Ukrainian writer Mykola Smolenchuk’s novel The Grey Generation,

published in 1965, corresponded to the fundamental theses of the general Soviet discourse ofthe Great Patriotic War. The main hero and his friends straight away launch a struggle inGermany against the enslavers, and even though the antifascist underground is depicted in thenovel through the author’s hints and the hero’s conjectures, for the purposes of their ownstruggle these young people opt for acts of sabotage, setting fire to fields of rye, and taking partin the destruction of a guard and a traitor in the penal battalion. See Smolenchuk, Syvepokolinnia: roman. For another literary portrayal of unvanquished, young Soviet patriots inGerman slavery, see Avramenko, Hintsi z nevoli: povist 0.

15. One revealing publication that appeared in the late 1960s–early 1970s was the 53-page-longarticle “Zabuty nemozhna! Rozpovid0 pro te, iak rozkrylasia strashna istoriia hitlerivs0koikatorhy,” published in 1970 in the journal Znamia, one of the most important officialperiodicals of the Soviet era. In the opening lines, the two authors explain its topicality by theconfrontational and tense political atmosphere of that period, which emerged against thebackground of the discovery of numerous “new pro-fascist movements in the FRG [FederalRepublic of Germany]” and the “scandalously mild sentences” that were handed down to Nazi

European Review of History—Revue europeenne d’histoire 407

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war criminals, including the “notorious trial of the Auschwitz executioners . . . who got offwith only a mild scare”. See Iurii Zhukov and Roza Izmailova, “Zabyt0 nel0zia!”

16. For detailed discussion of the literature of the Young Pioneer Organisation of the Soviet Unionas an ideological, agitational-propagandistic, and functional phenomenon, see SvetlanaLeont0eva, “Literatura pionerskoi organizatsii.”

17. In the novel, the girlfriend dies and the main hero, Kuz0ma Kovtiuk, takes little Johann awaywith him. Together with Kuz0ma’s fellow countrywoman, Katia, who has agreed to become hiswife and Johann’s mother, the hero leaves liberated Bremen and sets out on the journey home.

18. My three articles cited in n.9, which are devoted mainly to the Soviet memory project aboutforced labourers of the Third Reich, are based on materials that mostly address the experienceand memory specifically of young people who were deported to Germany in keeping withorders and mobilisational lists mandating that all individuals born no later than 1926 weresubject to “independent” deportation, i.e., without their families.

19. Sin0ova, “Pravove rehuliuvannia sotsial0noho zakhystu ostarbaiteriv,” 13. The author alsoemphasises that the term “Ostarbeiter” was not used in legislative acts regulating socialpolicies on participants of the war. Instead, the terms “repatriants” or “former forced labourersdeported by force to Germany and its allied countries” appeared in these documents. Thiscoincides with my observations about the absence of the word “Ostarbeiter” even in the publicspace of the former Soviet Union, where one of the rare exceptions was the novel Ostarbaiter(1980), co-written by the Ukrainian writers Ivan Zozulia and Ivan Vlasenko.

20. Pastushenko, “V’izd repatriantiv do Kyieva zaboroneno . . . ,” 38.21. A large body of literature exists on the negotiations and decisions concerning the issuance and

practice of implementing these payments, but it is mostly in the German and Englishlanguages. In the post-Soviet space, Pavel Polian’s book is still the most detailed study on thelaunch of these payments. See Polian, Zhertvy dvukh diktatur. Some facts and a description ofthe payment policy are presented in Liudmyla Sin0ova’s dissertation: see n.18.

22. I did not apply this differentiated approach to examining the recreation of the memory of childOstarbeiters during the Soviet period because of the absence of both a socio-legal initiativeconcerning the regulation of the status of forced labourers and attempts to institutionalise theirassociations. However, the scholarly and public dimensions of the construction and transmissionof the memory of this group of war participants in the works listed in n.9 were examined.

23. Sin0ova, “Pravove rehuliuvannia.”24. Pam’iat0 zarady maibutn 0oho, 8.25. See the USVZhN website, located at http://usvzn.com/?p¼1480.26. See the four-volume collection Pam’iat 0 zarady maibutn 0oho, published jointly by the

Ukrainian Union of Prisoners–Victims of Nazism and the Ukrainian National Fund for MutualUnderstanding and Reconciliation.

27. Mirchevskaia, . . . I on podaril mne mamu: vospominaniia, 89.28. http://usvzn.com/?p¼1940.29. Dolia ditei kolyshnikh skhidnykh robitnykiv, narodzhenykh u 1944–1945 rokakh u

Nimechchyni, comp. Ianina Dresler [Janine Dressler]. (Blurb on the cover notes that thesematerials are designed for use in elementary schools and may be reproduced for this purpose.)

30. Ibid., 61–3.31. S0oma, Vakatsii u Tangermiunde: roman.32. Ibid., 5.33. http://news.liga.net/news/old/255500-prezident-prinyal-uchastie-v-otkrytii-pervogo-ukr

ainskogo-mezhdunarodnogo-festivalya-dokumentalnogo-.htm34. Embacher et al., Children and War: Past and Present, 12.35. Rozhkov, Vtoraia mirovaia voina v detskikh “ramkakh pamiati”: sbornik statei. For a selection

of articles and discussions of questions relating to the history, anthropology, sociology andethnography of childhood, see also the website of the Working Group on the History andCulturology of Childhood at the Department of History and the Theory of Culture, RussianState University for the Humanities, located at: http://childcult.rsuh.ru/

36. See Steinert, Deportation und Zwangsarbeit. In his introduction, the author notes that the nextvolume will be devoted to Jewish children who became forced labourers.

37. Nurkova, “‘Voina i mir”: voennoe izmerenie v vospominaniiakh o detstve.”38. Oral-history interview with Olena Kalashnikova, in Grinchenko, Nevyhadane: Usni istoriı

ostarbaiteriv, 152.

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39. Oral-history interview with Valentyna Ivanivna Kuz0mina, ibid., 119.40. Oral-history interview with Kalashnikova, ibid., 153.41. In the late 1990s the formula “The Ostarbeiters of Ukraine: Hitler’s slaves, Stalin’s orphans”

first appeared in the works of Mykhailo Koval0. It subsequently constituted the main directionof the (re)creation of the memory of forced labour both in the public space and scholarlydiscourse of post-Soviet Ukraine.

42. Havrylenko, “Ne chas mynaie, a mynaiem my,” 97.43. Nurkova, “‘Voina i mir.’”44. Transcript of an interview with Elena Murashova, in Projekt “Dokumentation ehemaliger

Zwangs- und Sklavenarbeiter.”45. Oral-history interview with Kuz0mina, in Grinchenko, Nevyhadane, 120.46. Nurkova, “Voina i mir,” 200.

Notes on contributor

Gelinada Grinchenko – historian, Professor of History at the Department of Ukrainian Studies(Faculty of Philosophy, V. N. Karazin National University, Kharkiv, Ukraine), Head of theUkrainian Oral History Association. Currently she is a member of the European research networkCOST ‘In Search for Transcultural Memory’, and Project Partner of EU’s 7th FrameworkProgramme for Research and Technological Development ‘EUBORDERSCAPES: Bordering,Political Landscapes and Social Arenas: Potentials and Challenges of Evolving Border Concepts in apost-Cold War World’. Her main areas of research are oral history, the history and memory offorcing to labour during World War II, war and post-war politics of memory, border studies. She hasedited several books and journals, and published many chapters and peer-reviewed articles on theseissues. Her latest authored book is An Oral History of Forcing to Labour: Method, Contexts, Texts(Kharkiv, 2012).

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