Exhibition "Postscriptum" on the fate of Soviet people in military Germany

From September 15 to October 14, the Postscriptum exhibition: Oriental Workers in the Third Reich will be held at the Gilyarovskiy Center, a branch of the Moscow Museum. The exhibition is the result of the work of a group of Moscow schoolchildren who undertook to describe and digitize the largest collection of original documents of oriental workers in Russia. The exhibition includes photographs, documents, fragments of memoirs and details that determined the life of ostarbeiters - millions of Soviet citizens who were driven to forced labor in Germany.

In Moscow, an archive of photographs and documents from military Germany is stored, where millions of people stolen from the occupied territories of the USSR lived in peasant families, worked in fields and factories, in adits and hotels. In the Third Reich they were called Ostarbeiters - eastern workers - and determined at the very bottom of the hierarchy of foreign labor that supported the German economy, while the Germans fought on the fronts of World War II. After the war, the Ostarbeiters returned home - to a country where they were considered almost traitors, and their history was not worthy of mention.

The archive of the history of forced labor was formed from hundreds of thousands of letters that arrived at the address of the Memorial Society in 1990-1991. After almost 30 years, a group of Moscow schoolchildren undertook to disassemble boxes with more than 14,000 documents. A year later, almost the entire archive was digitized, and the most “talking” photographs and documents made up the Postscriptum exhibition.

A multidisciplinary accompanying program will be held as part of the exhibition, including master classes, lectures, film screenings and discussions. For example, a master class will be held on September 23, during which young participants from 12 years old will be able to feel like historians and animators: they will learn to read photographs as historical sources and gain initial animation skills. The result of the master class will be a cartoon that will be included in the exposition of the Gilyarovsky Center.

The exhibition was prepared by the International Historical, Educational, Charitable and Human Rights Society (“International Memorial”) with the support of the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”. Enlightenment Award was of great help in preparing the exhibition, the jury of which noted the work “The Sign Will Not Be Erased, Based on the Evidence from the Memorial Archive”. The fate of ostarbeiters in letters, memoirs and oral stories ”as the best non-fiction book of 2017.

The exhibition will open on September 14 at 19.00. Free admission.