Our Life Behind Barbed Wire Pt 2: Alex Averbuch on Ukrainian Ostarbeiters
This is the second of a two-part explainer on Nazi era Ukrainian forced laborers (“Ostarbeiters”), adapted from an in-depth interview with researcher Alex Averbuch. By collecting the photographs and correspondence of the Ostarbeiters, Averbuch assembled an exhibit at the Fisher Family Commons (FCC) Gallery (CFIS Knafel), running from April 15th to July 1st, 2024.
In this section, the researcher discusses what drew him to this subject, as well as the valuable perspectives he's encountered. He concludes by touching on his goals for this project, including a book, further exhibitions, and an expansion of the public’s overall awareness of this chapter of Ukrainian history.
My path to the Ostarbeiter topic began back in Ukraine, when I was eleven years old and my school assigned me the task of helping a senior citizen around the house—a solitary and childless survivor of the Second World War. This kind of arrangement was quite typical in both the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Ukraine. The survivor in question turned out to be a former Ostarbeiter, who was ailing and became disabled in 1996. We grew close, and kept in touch even after my emigration from Ukraine, until her death in 2018. It was in her albums that, for the first time, I saw letters and photographs from Germany.
For me, a child from “the boonies,” for whom the most distant journey ever was to the “big” city of Luhansk, seeing these pictures from abroad was something meaningful and formative. Not only did I see the letters and photographs, I also heard the stories, which, during the Soviet period, were never told publicly—Ostarbeiters were shunned as traitors and collaborators. In her last video interview, conducted by a relative of mine in late 2018—a few months before Evdokyia Mykhailivna’s passing—she said that she wanted to be heard. And I know that she was not the only one to want this. This connection motivated me to work with the Ostarbeiters’ stories in both my research and creative writing.
Ahead of my scholarly work with these materials, I read thousands of the letters in various archives, and fell in love with the language of their texts. Ostarbeiters’ letters constitute a space of intersection, where oral tradition, folklore, and popular culture meet. These writers frequently used euphemism and allegory to describe both the conditions they lived in, and the war-related events they were witness to. They did not, however, always do this for pragmatic, i.e., reportorial, purposes. Rather, literariness of this sort can often be seen as part of the general tendency—a panhuman tendency—to poeticize and folklorize traumatic experience. So, my second personal attachment was the language and poeticality of these letters, which I have tried to recreate in my poetry.
Over a third of my latest book Zhydivskyi korol’ (The Jewish King) consists of poeticized Ostarbeiter letters, written in Surzhyk; they convey the rawness, simplicity, and personal intimacy of the Ostarbeiters’ overall correspondence. I tried to preserve the raw language of these people, restoring forgotten voices to their authentic and viable sound. They record how wars divided people, they inform us about deportations, forced labor in foreign lands, and prolonged exile, both internal and abroad.
I am also always astonished by the creativity featured in non-poeticized, real letters, and this is something that inspires me. Whether as a scholar or poet, I am always keen to understand: What does it mean to be deprived of basic rights, and to have to find creative ways to maintain meaningful communication with loved ones? To give them signs of life, signs of love; give them information, and encouragement; to struggle and resist the system that aims to grind you down, turn you into a cog in its brutal machine? How does the living and humane confront the ruthless and sadistic? And finally, why does beauty and creativity always emerge—under pressure, at such a high price?
In Soviet and post-Soviet Russian historiography, Ostarbeiters were treated as passive or defeated figures. However, some letters, and even photographs, evince resistance, for instance, the attempt to preserve national identity by wearing traditional Ukrainian attire and celebrating particular holidays; or to “smuggle out” information on certain prohibited activities, such as secret marriages or engagements.
There are many topics for which I have a particular attachment, but just to name a few that form separate categories in my research: letters about dreams; love letters; letters that are written as if farewell messages; travelogue-like descriptions; letters dealing with the preservation of national identity; letters incorporating popular culture or folkloric elements; and fully poeticized letters.
First of all, I want people to encounter firsthand materials: to read some letters, to view the real faces of these people in photographs, each of whom has a name and a story. I want the attendees of the exhibit to sense the borderline nature of these letters: to view them as testimonials of everyday life; portrayals of exile and rupture; and as propagandistic tools—but also as refutations of that same propaganda. Many studies about the Ostarbeiters still tend to discount the historical significance of the firsthand accounts of war most powerfully present in such correspondence, and they stand at a distance from the overall creativity featured in it, as if these captives left no textual or visual traces.
The displayed materials may strike us as belonging to some hybrid genre—for instance, a “letter-poem” or “photo-hint.” In my book, I connect the idea of literariness as a form of “secret writing” to these materials’ photographic aspects, as secret writing was not only used in the letters themselves, but could also come in the form of inscriptions on the backs of photographs (or even in covert signals in the photographs themselves).
My goal is simple: to show that texts and photographs depicting idyllic life were often propagandistic. But also to show that accurate information—accurate visual information—was often creatively smuggled through the propaganda wall.
So I aim both to expose this multilayerdness of the materials—their contradictory messages—and to create personal attachment to them, through their textual and visual individuality. I want people to read and see, and to have a sense of empathy and curiosity toward a particular person, whose photograph I enlarge to encompass all the details—to have a conversation, as it were, with the person in the photograph. All the photographs have the names and locations of the persons depicted in them, and are accompanied by either a quote from a letter that the photograph was attached to, or what was written on the back of the photograph, or both. This creates a story attached to a particular image. The viewer is not given an anonymous photograph, but one that comes with the name of the sender, and a bit of their real voice. I also like to address the people depicted in my materials by their names. This makes them alive.
In writing home, Ostarbeiters, women in particular, were able to convey covert political, even subversive communication. Traditionally, letters have served as literary platforms, conveying stories and travel accounts, thereby paving the way for various literary forms and assisting women in cultivating emotional expression. Many studies have focused on letters written by peasants, emphasizing the writers’ recourse to formulaic structures, loaded with layers of folkloric and pop-cultural motifs. Such forms enabled their writers—especially peasant women, who were often subliterate—to use existing templates and imbue them with their own narratives and experiences. So in this case, in a way letter-writing was not only an emotional outlet. It also bore agency—to inform, to update, to smuggle information.
In examining these letters, I have found that in them, women use euphemistic or metaphoric utterances more frequently than men. A scholar of the history of epistolarity, James Daybell, indeed observed that women’s letters have traditionally been the more innovative—more colloquial, and more likely to appropriate sayings and proverbs for their own purposes; to adjust them to their own situation.
These women indeed often perceived themselves as authors of literary pieces, asking loved ones to preserve their letters, often including poems, for when they return. Women letter-writers often reflected on their captive status, tailoring all possible folkloric and popular texts to their current situation. Ostarbeiters naturally saw themselves as prisoners in Germany, and sought poetic forms to express feelings of trappedness they had not experienced in the past. This is why many Ostarbeiters found existing poetic forms, especially the verse of prisoners and exiles, handy for the expression of their similar experience.
So, letter-writing definitely helped in shaping various self-perceptions reflected in these texts. These self-perceptions could pertain to the given writer’s mission as an informer, witness, recorder, or secret agent. However, existing literary and folkloric forms and motifs enabled Ostarbeiter writers to “put on” these literary and folkloric roles, and through them, to find solidarity with and consolation in others who underwent similar experiences in the past. Poetry, folklore, and popular culture were the vessels through which these writers found words for expression, modifying and expanding them with new information, senses, and creativity.
I think anyone torn from their family and homeland in wartime would be traumatized to one extent or another. Of course, in the case of children or teenagers, the sense of helplessness would be particularly intense. As a teenager you’re also more vulnerable, not just physically but emotionally. It’s easier to manipulate a child’s mind. The heavy work performed by children had its impact on their health and process of growing. Female minors were also subjected to sexual abuse and violence, as they were the most vulnerable group, in terms of age and gender.
However, in cases in which conditions were more favorable, teenagers proved to be also more adaptive to circumstances: it was easier for them to learn German, to get used to a new world. Imagine a person arriving in Germany at the age of twelve, spending four years in these conditions, in a foreign land. This person goes back to the USSR when they are sixteen or seventeen. These four or five years are extremely formative at this age. So, to some extent, these teenagers would have returned as completely different people.
It is crucial for Ostarbeiters and their descendants alike that this page of Ukrainian history be well known, that their voices be heard. Because the Soviet regime for decades shrouded this topic in shame, these people’s stories, their suffering in captivity, loss, and grief, were never considered legitimate. One of the goals of my project and this exhibit is to shed light on one of the most silenced topics of the Soviet-German War; to show how these alleged “collaborators,” or at best, “passive/defeated” people, were in fact not so: they recorded what they suffered through, and they resisted.
This trauma also of being silenced, of being persecuted for something that was beyond your control, passed on to the Ostarbeiters’ children, who in the Soviet period were likewise often denied access to prestigious educational institutions, careers, etc. These people also lived alongside parents engaged in a lifelong processing of their trauma, with no possibility of being heard, to say nothing of receiving professional (psychological, medical) treatment. These subsequent generations have absorbed the offense of the general ignoring of their loved ones’ pain.
However, as my project shows, the “hour” of these people’s stories has now “come round.” Their letters and photographs, that is, can be seen as alternative to institutionalized historical authority, to professional history-writing, complementing the canonic perspectives thus far dominated by the (masculinist, often unrealistic) concept of heroism. The Ostarbeiters stand ready, as it were, to make our understanding of history more sophisticated and complete.
Soviet propaganda still buzzes in people’s minds. I aim to help break its linkage of Ukrainianness with weakness and treachery—a symbolic association that has gone hand in hand, moreover, with the historical perception of Ukraine as rebellious and unreliable vis-à-vis the imperial/Soviet authorities. For that matter, contemporary political upheavals and the war with Russia still involve, in literature, media, and popular culture, a conceptual victimization of Ukraine by its former colonizer, ascribing infidelity to its alleged dalliances with the vicious/“fascist” West.
My project on the Ostarbeiters, I hope, is timely, as it highlights the durability of colonialist constructs of memory—their preservation and continued representation. Unfortunately, the terms involved—occupation, captivity, hostages—are once again relevant today. The exhibit is thus also applicable to current debates on the production, transmission, and control of knowledge in modern wartime.
One of the outcomes of this project is the monograph I am currently working on. The book is to broadly examine letters home, written by Ukrainian Ostarbeiters, as literature, historical sources, visual and textual propaganda, and transmitters of news and secret messages. It’s essentially a transdisciplinary analysis, considering these letters’ inscribed literariness (rhythm, rhymes, Aesopian language) alongside photographs enclosed with them, and in light of the picture postcards the Reich authorities provided for this correspondence to tout Nazi “benevolence” and the Ostarbeiters’ “wellbeing.” I juxtapose totalitarian methods of controlling communication with captive letter-writers’ attempts at creative escape therefrom, and argue that the Ostarbeiters’ letter-writing and photography also functioned to form knowledge and opinions, and blurred the bounds between private message, public newsletter, and historical testimonial.
But that book is only one part of the project. I plan to bring this photography exhibit to other universities and institutions, and some have already reached out to schedule events for the upcoming fall. Of course, I will be more than happy to collaborate with anyone interested.
I believe that the Ostarbeiters’ ordeal of exile and captivity has a prominent place among the many historical traumas experienced by the Ukrainian people. It should be constantly voiced, acknowledged, and explored, and information and knowledge of it disseminated as widely as possible.
To learn more about the Ostarbeiters and their history, check out part 1 of this two part explainer. Averbuch's exhibition was cosponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, as well as the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.