The protagonists of the film are “Ostarbeiter women”, women deported from occupied Belarus to Germany to perform forced labor during World War II. There were over 200,000 of them, and only a few hundred are still alive today. The protagonists of the film are between 83 and 99 years old and most of them have never shared their personal stories in public.
In the film, the women talk about their experiences since the outbreak of the war. They talk about the beginnings of the Nazi occupation of Belarus, deportations and traumatic experiences in Germany, about returning to the Soviet Union, where a new challenge awaited them – they were greeted as “traitors to the fatherland”.
The memories of the film’s protagonists have been recorded since 2017 in the Verkhnyadzvinsk, Vitebsk, Klimavichy, Minsk, Navahrudak, and Pukhavichy Districts of the Republic of Belarus. Most of the memories were filmed as part of the expeditions of the Belarusian Archives of Oral History, which were joined by the film crew.
To recreate the atmosphere of those years, the film features excerpts from unique official Soviet and German newsreels (from the collections of film and photo archives in Dzyarzhynsk and Kyiv) with the narrator’s original voice-over.
Documantary, director Ales Lapo, 2020, Belarus
Photo: Andreas Jeromin / commons.wikimedia.org
