Tag: Lost childhood

It wasn’t until late summer 1945 that the last “Ostarbeiter” left the camp in Neuaubing. Their journey home in many cases became a journey into the unknown. Most of them were initially sent to so-called filtration camps, where they were interrogated by employees of the Soviet security service NKVD. Later on, too, many of them continued to be automatically suspected of having collaborated with the Nazis. They were put under surveillance by the security service and discriminated.

Hanna Hutnyk, Mariya Sadova, Oleksandra Havriš, Hanna Šust‘ and Anna Šapovalova were deported from Yevmynka to Germany when they were between 3 and 17 years old. Once the war was over they were able to return to their village where they intended to resume their former lives, but their time in Germany had a lasting effect. For their entire remaining life-time they were viewed with suspicion. Even though they tried to leave this episode in their past behind them, it was all documented by the security service in their personal files and remained there until well into the 1980s.

Together with Eastern Europe expert Kristina Tolok, Sima Dehgani traveled to Ukraine in 2021 in order to trace the lost time in the lives of these contemporary witnesses. They were supported on site by Liubov Danylenko, expert on the topic of Nazi forced labor, and met members of four generations—the contemporary witnesses themselves, their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren through whom the memories of the former forced laborers have been passed down and kept alive. Objects play a special role in their family histories, since they preserve experiences that were not spoken about in material form. Often it is photos of family members that embody their absence while providing a connection to the deceased. Preserved objects from Germany are not only of symbolic value, however, but also serve as evidence of suffering of forced labor and are used to support demands for compensation. Dehgani’s photo series conveys the idea that memory can be preserved in a variety of forms and shows how objects can reactivate history. Her work illustrates that collective remembrance is triggered by specific things and places and is embedded in social contexts.