New acquisition: Letters from forced laborers
Interview with our archive employee Hanna Lehun
Through cooperation with archives, memorials and other institutions, millions of digital documents have found their way into our online archive in recent years: Deportation lists, pictures of concentration camp prisoners, death certificates and letters from forced laborers. They are among the thousands of digitized documents that were added to our archive in 2022, thanks to a cooperation with the State Archive of the Kyiv Region. Our archive employee Hanna Lehun, who is Ukrainian herself, has made them accessible.
“Be good to me, little sister, I have not forgotten you and I will never forget you. You are angry with me for not sending postcards. I have already written three postcards, but I don’t know why you don’t get them,” wrote Maria Borodinja to her sister Anna in April 1943. Her postcard is one of thousands of documents from a new collection in the online archive of the Arolsen Archives that contains letters from Soviet citizens who were deported to Germany as forced laborers and wanted to write to their families back home.
Postcards and other documents
Our archive employee Hanna Lehun also found some Easter postcards in the collection of letters. However, it is highly likely that the relatives never received these messages. They are now stored in Ukrainian state archives, which are now trying to return undelivered letters to the descendants of the so-called Eastern workers. The Arolsen Archives have made copies of the documents in order to provide more information about forced laborers.
Why do these collections of letters and postcards from the Ukrainian forced laborers exist?
They are part of a long, tragic history of persecution of people from the Soviet Union who were abroad during the Second World War: All those who returned were systematically persecuted in their homeland – even those who had been deported to Germany as forced laborers by the Nazis. The Soviet government suspected them of being traitors and created what were known as filtration files about them, in which they collected all the documents about their time abroad. These letters somehow also ended up in this system – how exactly is unclear. The forced laborers had sent them from Germany to their families in their homeland in order to keep in contact.
Did the letters ever reach the families? Where are they today?
No, most of them were undoubtedly intercepted in the post. These documents can now be found in many archives in the territory of the former Soviet Union. I have mainly worked with the collection from the Vinnytsia State Archive, including on site. I have already produced scans of some of the letters. These digital documents can now be viewed in the online archive of the Arolsen Archives. One of my colleagues has also researched a collection from the State Archive of the Kyiv Region, which is also already available in the online archive.
Which archive holdings do you primarily look after at the Arolsen Archives?
I work with the wartime card index. These are millions of documents that were created about foreign forced laborers in Germany after the war. Many of the people were what were known as “Ostarbeiter” (Eastern workers) and came from the former Soviet Union. In the Archival Description team, we sort and record the archival material and collect further documents about the people who were persecuted by the Nazis. To do this, we also cooperate with other archives, who have interesting holdings.