“I am constantly pondering, especially after February 24, whether I should shift my research focus from the Second World War to this recent war between Russia and Ukraine. I am searching for arguments as to why I shouldn’t. And I understand that it’s because there are unresolved questions. And we are still somehow in the shadow of that unfinished,” says Tetiana Pastushenko.
Tetiana is a candidate of historical sciences and a senior research fellow at the Department of Military History Studies at the Institute of History of Ukraine. Currently, she collaborates with the Center for East European History at Heidelberg University. For many years, she has been researching topics related to Ukrainians in forced labor during the Third Reich, Soviet prisoners of war, and prisoners of Nazi concentration camps. Often, these are the fates of people who have long been excluded from the official collective memory of the war.
“No matter what we say, no matter how much the modern war changes the world, we still remain with the background of the events of the Second World War. And we need to have answers to the questions, Which side were you then? What were you doing? Especially since Ukraine has found itself in the gray zone of memory about that war for many years,” says Tetiana.
In Germany, for example, where Tetiana Pastushenko is currently located, the consequences of this can still be easily noticed.
Tetiana Pastushenko spoke to LB.ua (Ukrainian news website) about the stereotypes that still need to be overcome in the European research community, the blank spots that we need to fill, the monopoly on memory and its consequences for Ukraine, about whose voices speak through the memorials of the Second World War, and how the recent war will impact the global interpretation of the Second World War.
Here is her direct speech.
Hearing from witnesses
“They sent us to Germany, and I spent three hours there, three hours without dinner. There was never any dinner. In the morning, at seven o’clock, they would give us a little bit of sweetened water, a small tin, and that’s it. And during the day, it was just rutabaga and 150 grams of bread. And in the evening, there was nothing. Only if someone wanted to, they would take boiling water, and the Germans would bring us salt. And instead of sugar, they sprinkled salt, and we drank the same water. And then our legs became swollen,” she says, pointing to her swollen legs.
Excerpt from the interview of Tetiana Pastushenko with Anastasiia Hodun from the collection “Please, Do Not Forget Me”: Oral Histories of Ukrainian Ostarbeiter.
What I study as a historian was probably determined by my work at the museum, which was then called the Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War. I started working there as a caretaker right after school. I was admitted to Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv but received a grade of three on the final exam in German. I was a gold medalist, and then this happened. The German language has been haunting me all my life (laughs). From a friend who shared the same misfortune, I learned that the museum was looking for school graduates for work. So, I went there, and in the end, I worked at the museum for the next 13 years.
In fact, the museum played a greater role in shaping me as a researcher than the university, where I later enrolled in a distance learning program. I remember the first session when I was sitting in some lecture and thinking, “Thank God I’m in a distance learning program and only have to listen to this once every six months.” Some lectures were simply terribly boring. On the other hand, in the museum during the 1990s, life was vibrant — new exhibitions, interactions with researchers, recording testimonies of eyewitnesses, searching for artifacts, working in archives. The topic of the Second World War was rapidly developing, and we were discovering non-Soviet perspectives on the events.
In the early 1990s, the museum organized an exhibition based on letters from the front. They turned out to be incredibly fascinating. Very personal. It was a different portrayal of the war, not as bronzed, not as straightforward. They wrote about everything. And despite censorship and propaganda, these letters were preserved in the archives. So, I approached the study of the war in a different way, not through textbooks, but through the stories of these individuals. That’s actually how I stumbled upon the topic of my future research — the Ukrainian Ostarbeiter.
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I had heard stories about working in Germany from my grandmother, who was also an Ostarbeiter. Those stories surfaced during my childhood on any occasion. It wasn’t taboo in our family, but it was something different compared to my grandfather, the victorious soldier who ended the war in Prague. May 9th was my grandfather’s holiday, but it didn’t apply to my grandmother and her life experiences.
Later, I came across letters from former forced laborers and prisoners of concentration camps in the museum. And finally, in 1997, I met journalist Viktor Pedak, who had gathered a lot of materials specifically about the forced labor of Ukrainians in Nazi Germany.
His interest began when a German citizen named Theo Brendel approached him. He was searching for his nanny, a Ukrainian woman named Hanna, who had worked for his family during the war and cared for their four children. They had kept letters that this young woman received from her fellow villagers who were also forced to work in Germany. Theo wanted to learn about her fate and return those letters. Viktor Pedak made a radio program on this topic, and against all odds, he managed to find Hanna Kolomiets. In 1996, Theo Brendel and Hanna finally met.
After that, Viktor Pedak collected many similar stories and brought them to us at the museum. This gave rise to the idea of an exhibition about the fate of Ukrainian Ostarbeiter, which we opened in 1998. It was the first major exhibition on this topic in Ukraine. In fact, the meeting with Viktor Pedak also inspired me.
I started searching for former forced laborers, collecting artifacts for the museum. And then, when I started working at the Institute of History of Ukraine, I collected materials, and corresponded with witnesses. Later, I participated in an international oral history project, to which I was invited by my colleague Helinada Hrinchenko from Kharkiv.
And it turned out that those conversations I had with witnesses were called oral history. That’s when I gained experience in professionally recording such interviews. Gradually, I moved in two directions — towards people who had lived through historical experiences, and towards the world of new research methods. And it was crucial for my career. Not only in terms of writing a scholarly work, but in understanding history. After all, history is about the lives of ordinary people. Their narratives are important historical sources. They are not merely complementary to archival documents. The individual’s story can be at the center of research, around which other events, facts, and circumstances are constructed. These stories are highly personal, emotional, and contain many nuances, events, and facts that are not found in official documents.
The documentation of the modern war is essentially happening in real-time, online. People themselves create stories, record videos, write diaries, or express themselves publicly on social media. There are now many diverse means to capture the events of this war. And it turns out that experts such as historians, sociologists, and anthropologists are essentially trying to keep up with this process of documenting the war. It is still unknown when or how the war will end, yet we already have numerous research projects that record eyewitness testimonies. This is beneficial because it prevents a monopoly on memory.
Research stereotypes
“…The history of Nazi concentration camps is one of the most extensively studied aspects of the Second World War. The history of Ukrainians in Nazi concentration camps is a new and practically unknown question…”
From the book “Prisoners from Ukraine in the Mauthausen Concentration Camp: History and Memory.”
I maintain connections with former victims of Nazism and have many contacts with German civil organizations. At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, we assisted people who had been prisoners in concentration camps or subjected to forced labor in Germany. When I spoke with them, they would constantly compare Russians to Germans. This need to compare the ongoing war with something is hanging in the air. And that’s why words associated with violence and trauma, such as Holodomor, genocide, Germans, and Nazis, are constantly heard. It is quite normal that we refer to the experiences of the recent past.
This war is taking place in the shadow of the previous World War. The current aggression of Russia is essentially a consequence of the unfinished Second World War. I am not the first to discover this idea. Historians such as Serhii Plokhy, Vitaliy Nakhmanovych, and Timothy Snyder emphasize this. The Western allies had to make a deal with the Soviet Union to get rid of the Nazi state, thereby legitimizing Stalinism. The Nuremberg trials condemned Nazi Germany and Hitler but rehabilitated Stalin and the USSR, even though they jointly ignited the Second World War in 1939. And modern-day Russia continues to build its policy on the narrative that it defeated Nazism (now without the Western allies and Ukraine), portraying itself as a victim and the winning state. Despite the fact that Europe now clearly sees how Russians use the Second World War in their propaganda, it is difficult to eliminate these stereotypes.
If we look at it from the perspective of a historian studying the Second World War, the ongoing war in Ukraine should have an impact on the interpretation of the events of the Second World War. It primarily concerns colonial and post-colonial aspects. The Ukrainian people are currently fighting on the battlefield against Russian colonial war, but also against Russian colonization in the cultural and historical space, both within the country and abroad. However, this is a slow process.
In May, I was in Austria for the annual commemoration of the liberation day of the Mauthausen concentration camp. For Austria, it is a central event in the memory of the Second World War. It is held in the presence of the President and the Prime Minister of Austria, with around 40 delegations from all the embassies of countries where the prisoners of the concentration camp originated. By the way, after the start of the full-scale aggression, Russian delegations were prohibited from participating in official ceremonies.
This is probably the only memorial of Nazi concentration camps where each country has erected its own monument in honor of its citizens who were prisoners of this Nazi concentration camp. In addition to the official ceremony at the former roll call of the Mauthausen concentration camp, delegations hold brief solemn events near their respective monuments. Then, they lay flowers at the monuments of other countries or to other victims. In fact, the number of wreaths reflects the current sympathies and political relations between countries.
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This year, there were few flowers near the monument to Soviet citizens and Dmitry Karbyshev, which are officially considered monuments to Russian prisoners. Consequently, a large number of people gathered for the rally near the Ukrainian monument (the monument to Ukrainian prisoners appeared on the memorial site only in 2002 – ed.). Ukraine and Russian aggression were constantly mentioned in the speeches at the official ceremony. But I witnessed another story as well at these solemn events.
The Mauthausen concentration camp had many branches, including one in the town of Gusen, where memorial ceremonies are also held every year. An Austrian researcher, a professor from the University Linz, spoke there. She mentioned a well-known story of how an Austrian family, the Langthalers, saved two escapees from the death block of the concentration camp (on the night of February 2-3, 1945, 419 Soviet prisoners of war escaped. The raid lasted for three weeks, and most of the escapees were killed. Eight survivors remained, five of whom were from Ukraine – ed). In her speech, she referred to them as “Russian prisoners” as usual. Later, I asked her if she knew that those escapees were not Russians: one of them was Mykhailo Rybchynsky, a Jewish man from Kyiv, and the other was Mykola Tsemkalo, a Ukrainian from Luhansk.
She replied that she knows it. She just automatically referred to them as Russians without realizing it because she has always done so. “Russischer Kriegsgefangener,” “Russian prisoners of war” — it’s such an ingrained phrase that even researchers find it difficult to get rid of. Not to mention the average citizens. The stereotype that the Soviet Union is all Russians and that Russian soldiers achieved victory in the war still persists in Western European society.
I have been collaborating with the Center for East European Studies at the University of Heidelberg, led by Professor Tanya Penter, for a long time. She has written a book titled “Coal for Stalin and Hitler: Work and Life in the Donbas, 1929-1956.” It would be great to have it translated and published in Ukraine. Back in 2010, she already examined the layers of this colonial policy and practice, whether Russian or Nazi, in Ukraine.
Many researchers at the Center are focused on Ukraine and Ukrainian topics in their studies, and they are actively assisting Ukrainian scholars. For example, five Ukrainian historians have received research scholarships at this Center. The interest in Ukrainian history is advancing, in part due to the openness of Ukrainian archives. Unfortunately, documents pertaining to the history of the 20th century in Russian archives have become increasingly inaccessible in recent years.
However, it must be acknowledged that inertia is a powerful force. Remnants of the traditional perception of the Soviet Union as the Russian Empire can be found everywhere in Germany, even at the level of the topography. The cemetery where Soviet prisoners of war and civilian forced laborers are buried is called Russischer Friedhof, meaning “Russian cemetery.” Camps where a multi-ethnic group of forced laborers worked are referred to as “Russian” camps. And the memorial plaques that were installed in the 2010s are predominantly dedicated to Russian workers, even though the majority of these forced laborers were from Ukraine. This situation has arisen in part because Nazi documents did not classify workers by nationality such as “Ukrainians.”
White spots
“…As Mykhailo Marunchak, the chairman of the World League of Ukrainian Political Prisoners, aptly wrote, “The Ukrainian giant was buried behind foreign national letters…”
From the book “Prisoners from Ukraine in the Mauthausen Concentration Camp: History and Memory”
A few months ago, we met with employees of memorials of former Nazi camps in Bremen. We also discussed the idea that it is important to portray Soviet prisoners not as Russians but to emphasize their multi-ethnicity and to move away from this colonial perception of the post-Soviet space. Although this idea is not revolutionary, as memorials work with various national groups of victims and witnesses, many of whom are from Ukraine, it was still important for them to hear about this shift in emphasis, which is often overlooked. And it is necessary to talk about it.
Because even when remembering the prisoners of Nazi concentration camps, the traditional emphasis is still placed primarily on the memory of Jewish prisoners, which is understandable, as it is the case in both Western and Eastern Europe with regards to French, Dutch, Belgian, Italian, and Polish prisoners. Firstly, Ukrainian prisoners were not officially recognized as a distinct group among the other prisoner categories. In other words, such prisoners did not officially exist; they were labeled as “Russian” or “Soviet” prisoners. Secondly, the public organizations representing Western and Eastern European prisoners are more active and have greater financial resources, which means their voices are louder.
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Moreover, they did not have the same prolonged period of silence lasting 50 years as we did. They spoke about their experiences immediately after the war and advocated for the rights of their prisoners. And then, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when our former prisoners finally had the opportunity to visit these memorials, they too did not always consciously raise the topic of Ukraine; they also merged into the general group of former Soviet prisoners. Overcoming the country’s prolonged isolation is not an easy task.
It is important to add what Ukrainian historian Andriy Portnov from the European University Viadrina (Oder) formulated as selective ethnization in the history of World War II. When, in response to the question of who won the war, the Russian soldier is named. And Ukrainians are mentioned in the context of collaboration with the Nazis, the activities of the “Ukrainian police,” the Ukrainian Division Galician, or the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Bandera.
They abandoned the Nazi ideology, but they did not rid themselves of a colonial view of Eastern Europe. Therefore, after the collapse of the USSR, everything Soviet automatically became Russian. And modern Russia actively supported and continues to support such a perspective, investing a lot of money into it. This imperial view of history, shaped by Russians, is imposed on all post-Soviet countries, and it is important to emphasize that it is also preserved in Western academic circles.
For about a decade now, there has been a discussion about the importance of researching the history of Ukrainians in Nazi concentration camps, finding out how many of them were there, in order to break free from the Soviet-Russian cover, as they say. And this task concerns not only Ukrainian prisoners but also Belarusian, Kazakh, Georgian, Uzbek, and others. In 2019, we attempted to explore this issue using the example of the Mauthausen concentration camp, focusing specifically on Ukrainian prisoners who were documented in Nazi records as “Soviet prisoners of war,” “civilian Russian workers,” “Poles,” “Czechs,” and “Slovaks.” As of today, we have partially processed data on “Soviet prisoners of war” and “civilian Russians,” estimating the number of Ukrainian prisoners to be approximately 20,200 individuals.
The search for this Ukrainian component in the interpretation of World War II events is crucial. That’s why I’ve been toying with the idea of creating a database on Soviet prisoners of war in Ukraine.
In general, the topic of prisoners of war remains one of the biggest white spots. Military captivity on German territory has been well-researched because the archives have been preserved. However, what happened in the occupied territories is like a puzzle with missing pieces. The documents from German camps that were located on the occupied territories, such as Stalags and Dulags, were mostly destroyed. Why is there still no book on this topic? Simply because there is no material to write it. It requires assembling a mosaic from many small fragments. Only when you understand the overall picture can you guess where to place that puzzle piece.
Despite the fact that there were over 5 million Soviet prisoners of war, they remain a gray mass without a face. It saddens me greatly that when I started researching this topic, I didn’t have the opportunity to conduct many interviews with former prisoners of war. I was essentially running after the last car of the departing train, which was already disappearing over the horizon.
But we have the opportunity to publish the names and even photos of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian prisoners of war who were registered in German captivity. For a long time, it was believed that the card index of the Wehrmacht’s records service was destroyed during the war. However, in 1996-1997, German researchers Raimund Otto, Rolf Keller, and Jens Nagel accidentally discovered a part of it in Podolsk, in the archives of the Russian Ministry of Defense. It turned out that it had fallen into the hands of the Americans, who then handed it over to the Soviet Union.
In Podolsk, the card index of the deceased prisoners of war was preserved, and now these documents are presented on the website of the OBD Memorial. The cards of surviving prisoners of war were stored in regional archives, including those in Ukraine, as “trophy cases of military personnel of the Soviet Army who were in German captivity.” In total, there are over 800,000 cards.
Currently, all of these cards have been digitized. It may seem like a small task: to create a database and enter the information from these cards into it. So that descendants can learn about the fate of their relatives, so that scientific research can be conducted, and basic calculations can be made. Finally, to answer the question of how many prisoners of war from Ukraine were among the Soviet prisoners of war. Such work will allow for substantiated claims that Ukrainians not only collaborated with the Nazis (like many other representatives from all European countries and Russia as well) but also that they were Soviet prisoners of war, camp inmates, and forced laborers. This plays an important role in Ukraine’s self-presentation in the context of the Second World War. However, this cannot be accomplished based on the enthusiasm of researchers alone.
My colleagues from Vinnytsia have independently started creating a database of Soviet prisoners of war based on documents from the Vinnytsia Archive. Currently, there are a thousand surnames in it. However, funding is needed to continue this work.
This cannot be ignored. In the past decades, we have lived with the perception that the economy is the most important thing, while history is unimportant. But now we see how important both history and culture really are. Because it is the image that precedes the economy. People first look at who you are, what your cultural and historical background is. And what do they notice in the end? They see the image created by the dominance of the Russian and Soviet empires. And we need to dismantle this image and create our own, which requires great efforts. I see my small task in this field.
But still, in this situation, the greatest contribution belongs to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Their resistance, struggle, and death gave Ukraine subjectivity. They prove that Ukraine exists. And history shows that we have no other way.
Originally posted by Olena Struk on LB. ua. Translated and edited by the UaPosition – Ukrainian news and analytics website
See also: A source of non-knowledge: the history of Ukraine in European school textbooks
