Compensation for his forced labor

My mother tells me that her father and I would have gotten along very well. Józef Kozak was a talented story teller who could spin a yarn a mile along. Although a farmer and road worker without much of a formal education, which was interrupted by war, he was an avid reader that could get lost in a book. At times this would annoy my grandmother, particularly when there were chores to be done. He worked hard to support his family, but it was never enough to lift them out of poverty. Still there was some benefit to enduring the life he did. One came in the form of compensation for his forced labor during the Second World War.

Life under Nazi occupation

Dziadek, Polish for grandfather, was born in 1923 and raised in the Polish village of Strzelce Wielkie near Tarnów. This area became apart of the Generalgouvernement, the Nazi zone of occupation, after the Invasion of Poland in 1939. Poles residing within this zone were subjugated to compulsory labor by 1940. An estimated 13.5 million foreign persons, civilians and prisoners of war, were utilized as forced laborers within Nazi Germany or the occupied territories during the war. Of this number the Poles consisted approximately 1.9 million.¹ It wasn’t until March 1941 that dziadek became apart of this statistic.

My great-grandparents had four children that were forced laborers. Dziadek was just seventeen when his time came. He was sent to work as a farm laborer for a Sudeten German family in Jägerndorf, which was a Czechoslovak town annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938. Now the town is named Krnov and resides within the Czech Republic. It was here that dziadek toiled away for almost three years.

When his service ended on 30 December 1943, dziadek returned to his village but brought with him something unexpected. This was psychological baggage. He was also likely in worse physical health than upon his departure. The nature and extent of his trauma is unknown. Like many survivors of forced labor who found it difficult to communicate their experience, he spoke very little on the subject.² My mother and aunt only learned the details of their father’s forced labor long after his death.

The value of forced labor

Despite his experience having been unpleasant, dziadek still retained certain documents from the war. One of these was most likely an Arbeitsbuch Für Auslãnder, ‘Workbook for Foreigners’, which was an employment document issued to foreign workers in the Third Reich. It contained a photo of the owner and such information as nature of work performed. These documents were held onto by employers for the duration of their worker’s service.

Dziadek died in 1984 and whatever documents he kept were destroyed a decade later. Still the story they tell is preserved thanks to my grandmother. In February 1990 my babcia, Polish for grandmother, requested that the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Arolsen, Germany, confirm the details of her deceased husband’s forced labor. ITS is now called the Arolsen Archives but what they do is still the same, which is to preserve documents on Nazi persecution.

Ultimately no record of my dziadek was found. Fortunately the archives saved their correspondence with babcia and sent me scans. Why did she seek confirmation? She hoped for compensation. This was not available during the Cold War. West Germany and East Germany had compensation legislations for victims of Nazi persecution but forced labor was not an eligible type. A major obstacle standing in the way of change was a lack of political will. Then came the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc.

Fighting for compensation

The voices of former forced laborers grew powerful soon after the Revolutions of 1989. Pressure for the now reunified Germany to change its position on forced labor came from several sources. Survivors in Poland banded together and formed the Association of Polish Victims of the Third Reich, which eventually had over half a million members.³ They were likely responsible for the flood of over 100,00 enquiries from Poland received by the Arsolen Archives in 1991. So strained were their resources that it took the archives two and a half years to respond to babcia! Another significant source of pressure were class action lawsuits filed against German companies in the United States.

A decade of progress led to Germany passing a law in 2000 which created the foundation ‘Remembrance, Responsibility and Future’. The foundation’s initial assets of 5.2 billion Euros, contributed by the government and German companies, was to compensate victims that performed forced labor under three eligible conditions: in concentration camps and ghettos, in other confined settings for companies, and in other circumstances like agriculture.⁴ The payouts ran from 2001 to 2007. Some 4.4 billion Euros was distributed to 1.66 million people.⁵

Babcia never received a cent from the foundation. She lost her battle with cancer in 1994. In the process of sorting her estate, a family member found the papers from the Arolsen Archives. Along with it was my dziadek’s documents from the war. To most other people those yellowed documents from the 1940s wouldn’t mean much. But to my babcia, they represented one last gift from her beloved husband that never came.

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1. ‘Introduction’, in Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh, and Christoph Thornfeld, editors, Hitler’s Slaves: Life Stories of Forced Labourers in Nazi-Occupied Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), p.3-4.
2. Two excellent books that detail the experiences of Polish forced laborers are Sophie Hodorowicz Knab’s Wearing the Letter P: Polish Women as Forced Laborers in Nazi Germany, 1939-1945 (New York: Hippocrene Books, 2016), and Alexander von Plato et al., eds., Hitler’s Slaves.
3. Ewa Czerwiakowski and Gisela Wenzel, ‘The Fate of Polish Slace and Forced Labourers from Łódź’, in Alexander von Plato et al., eds., Hitler’s Slaves, p. 96.
4. Friederike Mieth and Günter Saathof, ‘Introduction’, in Günter Saathoff, Uta Gerlant, Friederike Mieth, and Norbert Wühler, editors, The German Compensation Program for Forced Labor: Practice and Experiences (Berlin: Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future, 2017), p.7. Link (accessed 07 April 2020): https://www.stiftung-evz.de/fileadmin/user_upload/EVZ_Uploads/Publikationen/Englisch/EVZ_Compensation_Program.pdf.
5. ‘Foreword’, in Alexander von Plato et al., eds., Hitler’s Slaves, p. ix.