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Preodolenie Rabstva

Fol’klor i Iazyk Ostrabaiterov: 1942-1944

This book has a very unusual story. The documents published here were written by Slavs who were deported to Germany during WWII to make up for the labor shortage Germany suffered during the war. The prisoners lived in special camps and were expected to die after their task was complete or their strength spent. The archive was formed due to the efforts of a censor who, risking his life, gathered a formidable collection while reading letters the workers sent out from the camps. The majority of the authors were women from Ukrainian, Belorussian, Polish and Russian villages who had received an elementary education. The censor distributed all the copied documents under several headings: “Vocabulary”, “Phraseology”, “Folklore”, “Dreams”, “Prophecies”, “Chain letters”, “Popular medicine”. He later mailed the archive to a famous German authority on folklore, Meyer, who managed to safeguard it against the encroachments of Hitler’s officials and the danger from allied bombing.