The Sign Cannot Be Erased. Fates of the Ostarbeiters in Letters, Memoirs and Oral

The book is dedicated to the Ostarbeiters – five million people who got caught up in German occupation, were sent to the Third Reich for forced labour, and when they returned to the USSR they faced ostracization and their own history was banned. We learn about what they went through in captivity and what they had to experience after coming back to their homeland from interviews, letters, memoirs and photographs kept in the Memorial’s archive. The role and place of the “Eastern workers” has not been dealt with yet at all – they are not considered victims, participants, let alone veterans. The years they spent in Germany did not count – neither in a literal sense in terms of their experience of the work, nor in a figurative sense in terms of their collective memory of war of their country. On Victory Day, which was supposed to become the day of liberation for the Ostarbeiters, they felt useless: they did not have their place in the festive demonstrations, where veterans marched together with their children and grandchildren, wearing their medals and decorations. Moreover, the Osarbeiters were treated like traitors in their homeland. The girls who came back from Germany were called “German mattresses”.
This book is based on more than two hundred testimonies. That and also many hours of interviews, conducted by the Memorial employees, and around 350,000 letters preserved in the archive.

Moscow: Publishing house Agey Tomesh, 2016