“The Germans captured me to go to Germany. Like a slave. I was still a young boy, between 16 and 17 years old. There were five people from our village – two old men and three boys standing near the shop. They captured and sent all of us.
We were thrown into a camp and kept there for three weeks. My legs swelled from hunger. There were terrible lice in another camp. We were taken to a bathhouse and disinfected. There was a bed, a chair, and a table in the room. (…)We had no right to sit on the bed during the day.
I got to a Bauer. He was better for me than my dad. He fed me every two hours for three weeks. He had other workers: two Poles and a German. Only in a month, after he fattened me up, he gave me a horse and told me to do the farm work”
Petro Matviyev from the village of Lyubsha in the Lviv region
This post may be interesting for those whose ancestors were deported to do forced labor for the Third Reich during the Second World War, among over two million Ukrainians.
We have done a lot of family history research projects for their descendants who grew up in Australia, Great Britain, the US, and Canada. The one we have just finished concerns Khotymyr village in Ivano-Frankivsk province. When doing this research, we found an article by Roksolana Popelyuk, master of history, and postgraduate student of the Institute of Ukrainian Studies named after I. Krypyakevych, a researcher of the “Living History” project.
I thought you might find it interesting too and let me share some insights: both first-hand evidence and some background information.
The western Ukrainian provinces — Lviv, Drohobych, Stanislav, and Ternopil — were included in the General Governorship, which covered Polish lands with its center in Kraków as a separate district of “Halychyna”. The Nazi regime there was softer than in other Ukrainian territories: Galicia used to be part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and its residents were expected to have a good attitude towards the new government.
The first Ukrainians were forced to work in Austria in the summer of 1939. They came from Transcarpathia, which was occupied by Hungarian troops. In 1941, volunteers – civilian workers from the Halychyna district – began to arrive. The large-scale recruitment of workers from Ukraine began in 1942 and lasted until 1945.
The term Ostarbeiter is translated as “oriental worker”. This name was used to designate people who were taken to work from the Soviet territories. Some of them were Ukrainians.
Ostarbeiters wore an OST patch on their clothes to distinguish themselves from the rest of the population. The workers from the Halychyna district, Western Belarus, and the Baltic countries were not forced to wear such patches. But the name “ostarbaiter” stuck with them too.
Most often, unmarried Ukrainians were taken to Germany. Most of the deported were girls.
“I was 14 years old. A girlfriend living next door and another friend were of the same age. There were three of us. They knocked at the door at night and woke us up. Mom cried and did not want to let us go. They took us to the basement of a Jewish house and there were 37 people there already. We spent a day there. They brought horse carts and drove us to Tlumach to take a train to going to Lviv”
Paraska Trachuk, born in 1928, from the village of Khotymyr in the Ivano-Frankivsk province.
The lists of the potential ostarbaiters were often formed by the village mayors, often guided by private interest.
“An order to provide a certain number of people came. They would not include a “kum” (godfather of one’s child) or a “svat” (best man at one’s wedding). The children from the poorest families had to go: they don’t have anything to eat anyway, it’s still the way to survive. (…) There was so much sorrow! They don’t know where they were going (…)”
Olga Baran from the village of Korosne in the Lviv Region
Voluntary trips also happened. According to the recollections of eyewitnesses, a big part of the population of Galician villages and towns left for Germany “of their own accord”: people exhausted by hunger and unemployment fell under the influence of German propaganda. The trips to Germany were not easy.
“There were many people from the village on that train. (…) We starved so much on the way! My God, it took us a whole month to get to Germany. Everyone was taken to the bathhouse (regularly on the way). After the bathhouse, we received just a small slice of bread smeared with marmalade. I got so hungry on the way.”
Nataliya Boichuk from the village of Kosmyryn in the Ternopil Province.
People were directed to local labor markets – “arbaizant”. There they were assigned to different jobs. Working conditions at factories were very difficult. About one-third of ostarbeiters went to work for farmers. It was not an uncommon kind of work for them. The Germans used modern agricultural machinery which often made things easier. However, things could be very hard too.
Did any of the ostarbeiters return home?
According to historian Tetiana Lapan, about 84% of the total number of the identified Soviet citizens, and only 42% of the residents of Western Ukraine came to live in the Soviet Union. It became another huge challenge for many, followed with the NKVD persecutions. Hope to tell you more in another post.
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Love from Ukraine.
Andriy Dorosh
Source: https://localhistory.org.ua/texts/statti/liudi-z-poznachkoiu-ost/