Biographical representations of forced labour for the Third Reich and the life after (original) (raw)
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Survivors of Nazi Persecution: Beyond Camps and Forced Labour
Palgrave Macmillan, 2024
This volume contains thirteen selected papers from the seventh international 'Beyond Camps and Forced Labour conference', held in London in January 2023. The geographical and methodological scope of the chapters, ranging from postwar trials to survivors’ memoirs and former classmates’ letters, from Greece to the Soviet Union, France to Croatia, indicates both the range encompassed by Holocaust Studies’ focus on the immediate postwar period and the expansion and flourishing of the discipline. The book examines the experiences of forced labourers, postwar struggles to obtain restitution for stolen property, the political and cultural activities of displaced persons, trials of perpetrators, and the emergence of survivors’ collective memory. With chapters on non-Jewish forced labourers, Roma and the care of Black youngsters by a noted Jewish refugee, the book speaks to the international dimensions of the Holocaust and its effects, and shows how postwar responses to the Nazi crimes shaped the world after 1945. The vast range of groups affected by the Nazis’ crimes found its echo in the postwar responses of many different constituencies, and this volume highlights, on the basis of cutting-edge historical research, why the turn to the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust is so important a part of Holocaust Studies.
Navigating an unresolved legacy: the memory and representation of Nazi forced labour
This paper explores the memory and representation of the Third Reich’s forced and slave labour system, which was unprecedented in its scale and impact yet remains unaccounted for within dominant academic and mainstream narratives of the Second World War. Here, I analyse and compare two former Nazi forced and slave labour sites transformed into heritage sites in Germany (the NS Forced Labour Documentation Centre in Berlin and the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial in Hamburg). Through my analysis of these case studies , I am led to consider questions of governmental and corporate complicity with the Nazi forced and slave labour system in Germany and their impact on remembrance of its victims. I ultimately ask what role material heritage plays in navigating this complex and unresolved legacy, where most survivors' calls for compensation were ignored, and discuss how their experiences might be translated into the narratives of memorials and museum exhibitions.
The Holocaust in the Memory of the Roma. From Trauma to Imagined Community?
The Roma (as many of those called Gypsies in the English-speaking world prefer to call themselves) were among the main victims in the time of the Holocaust. Although historians argue whether they were targeted on the same racial grounds as the Jews were and whether their suffering may be compared with the tragedy of the Shoah, it is beyond question that hundreds of thousands of European Romanies perished in the Holocaust, many of them in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau and other Nazi death camps. For various reasons, partly related to the peculiarities of Romani traditional culture, partly to their marginalized position in contemporary societies, the suffering of the Roma during WW II did not, until recently, become a part of the collective memories of the Romani communities. It was by and large a repressed trauma, which resurfaced only recently, mostly due to the intellectual and political activities of the Romani elites. It may be argued that the emergence of the memory of suffering among the Roma is a factor that contributes to the construction of a new, transnational Romani identity. Thus, the emergence of the memory of extinction becomes a crucial part of the process in which different Romani communities scattered all over the world may develop a sense of being a single ‘imagined community.’ This paper aims at presenting the advantages of this process as well as the obstacles it may encounter from various sides.
From Radom to Vaihingen via Auschwitz: Testimonies and Memoirs of Jewish Slave Laborers
This article examines ways testimonies and memoirs of Holocaust survivors help us better understand official German documentation, providing a new window onto Nazi slave-labor policies and the flexibility with which they were implemented. It discusses three findings extrapolated primarily from a transport list of 2,187 Jewish slave laborers from the Szkolna camp in Radom who arrived in KL Vaihingen in August 1944 via Auschwitz. It considers their ages, their trades (in particular that of butcher), and other evidence documenting their Holocaust experiences. The article sheds light on how German authorities balanced the ideological imperative of eliminating the Jews against the economic need for their labor.
Separate Suffering, Shared Archives: Jewish and Romani Histories of Nazi Persecution
Bridging Holocaust history and memory studies, this article explores the multiple and asymmetrical entanglements of Jewish and Romani (or “Gypsy”) accounts of Nazi genocide. These entanglements exist in large part due to the fact that testimonies of the Romani Holocaust are commonly filtered through the lens of Jewish survivors or stored in archives dedicated to the Jewish Holocaust. Modern Jewish-Romani relations thus represent a rare—and arguably unique—case in which one minority controls such a significant portion of the public memories of another.
The history of Breslau/Wroclaw mirrors all the catastrophes of the twentieth century: racially based nationalism, the mass murder of Jews, the nonsense of war, flight, expulsion, displacement, and other consequences of totalitarianism. After the Second World War, the Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust were resettled in the region of Lower Silesia and in Wroclaw especially. What deserves particular attention is the return of a group of more than sixteen hundred German-Jewish survivors from Breslau to post-war Polish Wroclaw. For the German-Jewish survivors from Breslau, who had survived the National Socialist regime in hiding places, concentration or forced labour camps, May 1945 brought their long-awaited liberation. But the fact is that for this group of survivors, the following months were full of new traumatic experiences. They were treated by both the Soviet military and the Polish administration in the same way as the German citizens of the Third Reich. Parallel to the ongoing resettlement of German inhabitants from Breslau/Wroclaw in the years 1945 to1948, German Jews suffered persecution, expropriation, and expulsion for the second time. On the basis of numerous witness testimonies and archival documents, I wish not only to reconstruct those events in the first post- war years in Wroclaw and Lower Silesia but also to answer questions pertaining to social framework, concepts of identity and strategies of self-assertion, and, finally, to the rift between western and eastern European Jewry.