Tag: Camp

Hadas Tapouchi’s photographs show the everyday cityscape, the ordinary places where people live, work, go to school, and spend their leisure time. It is only the addition of information about the historical context that makes the history of these places palpable and alters our view of them as we discover that these are the very places where forced laborers were housed in Nazi Germany.

Tapouchi’s photographs map historic places in order to investigate how they have become normalized in the contemporary city. Her images bridge the historical distance and thus mediate between between past and present. Especially during World War II, forced laborers were a ubiquitous sight on the streets of Munich. They could be seen on their daily journey to work or at laboring in public space, for example building roads or working for the city. In order to be allocated forced laborers, an enterprise not only had to register its workforce requirement but also provide housing for the workers. For this reason, large companies erected their own camps. Public bodies, such as the City of Munich, provided mass accommodation and rented housing space to smaller companies.

Tapouchi is interested in the potential of collective remembrance to resist the marginalization and invisibility of history in public space. Through what she calls “memory practice” she explores the urban planning of the past and the power relationships it expressed and examines how the memory of the violent history of forced labor has been overwritten by gentrification and value creation. Her project brings history perceptibly and physically closer to those who remember today.

“Forced Abroad” is based on the original journal entries of Jan Henrik Bazuin, born in Rotterdam in 1925. In 1940 Nazi Germany occupied The Netherlands. When the German Wehrmacht bombed Rotterdam in May of that year, the Bazuin family’s printshop, where Jan probably worked, was destroyed. Four years later the Nazis staged a major raid of Rotterdam in which 52,000 people were deported to work in the German Reich in the space of only two days. Jan initially escaped, probably because he was outside the city helping with the harvest in the east of the country. He began writing a journal in November 1944. His daily entries describe wartime in the occupied city and the ever-worsening famine. He also tells of quarrels with his parents and with his new love, Annie, and later of his experiences in Germany.

Bazuin returned to the Netherlands after the war but he was never able to speak about his experiences. His journal, however, is an important piece of testimony for historical research. It was only discovered by his son Leon in 2001, after Jan Bazuin’s death.

The visual novel is based on the journal entries but also contains fictitious and interactive elements. The experiences of the protagonist, Jan de Boer, are based on those of Jan Bazuin: his deportation from Rotterdam to Munich, the separation from his parents and from his first love. Ultimately, he finds ways to survive in Germany. In his memory album, which users compile while playing the game, historical background information is made available to help understand the story. The illustrations are by the cartoonist Barbara Yelin. The book publication “Jan Bazuin: Tagebuch eines Zwangsarbeiters” (C.H. Beck) was produced in collaboration with Yelin.