Ostarbeiters: portrait of dispossessed workers.

Анотація

A lot of researches, documentaries, fiction and nonfiction literature is devoted to the study of the German-Soviet War, and the role of Ukraine in the Second World War. Notes and other resources from ostarbeiters` history play an important role in the war period.

Ostarbeiters were predominantly young residents of occupied territories of the USSR (in Borders till 1939), who were taken out for coercive work to the Reich during the Second World War and used in various branches of the German economy, first of all – the industry, rural and domestic economies.

Getting acquainted with the letters they sent from captivity we can try to restore the realities of this terrible war history period. Unfortunately, for a long time in the Soviet Union, this page was like blind spots. Probably, the study of the tragic fate of people who worked for enemies wasn’t needed at that time. In the confirmation of this, we know that those who returned from the other side of barricades were often declared "people`s enemies", "traitors", some were sent even to the Gulag, where they, unbroken by Nazi machine, were killed by a totalitarian system. Ukrainian researcher T. V. Pastushenko said, that the history of those workers of the Third Reich, was for a long time forgotten, ousted from the official memory. In the early 90's of the last century these gaps in history were observed and played a great role in the creation of a “new”, “non-Soviet” vision of the events of the Second World War. And, really, now studying of workers` lives is gaining greater importance. It has become a topical issue, because it is so interesting for scientists to fill these gaps with primary sources, such as letters, personal diaries, etc., to investigate the use of coercive, almost free, labor, to know what was actually happening behind the walls of labor camps and how the “portrait” of enslaved in those difficult times looked.