Employees of the State Archives of Gomel Region visited the exhibition «We Are Not Slaves! The Fates of the Ostarbeiters in Photographic Documents, Letters and Memoirs»
On 21 June 2022, employees of the State Archives of Gomel Region visited the exhibition «We Are Not Slaves! The Fates of the Ostarbeiters in Photographic Documents, Letters and Memoirs», dedicated to the Day of National Remembrance of Victims of the Great Patriotic War and the Genocide of the Belarusian People. The event was held at the Gomel Regional Universal Library named after V. I. Lenin.
The idea for the exhibition belonged to the Gomel Regional Prosecutor’s Office. The exhibition was based on the archival documents from personal files of the repatriated citizens of the Gomel region (Fond 3100), a unique copy of the register book of the Gomel Labor Exchange (Fond 1688), letters of the deported Soviet citizens (Fond 2821) from the State Archives of Gomel Region, and some documents from the collections of the Gomel Palace and Park Ensemble.
During the event, the director of the State Archives of Gomel Region A. N. Sushchevich noted that in the regional archive today there are more than 30 thousand documents, the so-called filtration cases, which describe the fate of the people deported for various jobs. Some people worked for the Bauers in agriculture, others in factories.
Also, the archive director Sushchevich said that the only way for the Ostarbeiters (eastern workers) to communicate with their relatives was through correspondence, which was strictly censored. The letters that reached their relatives mostly contained information that people were doing well, but the documents compiled later on the basis of the testimonies of those who came back said quite the opposite: people had to work and live in inhumane conditions.
Viktor Morozov, Prosecutor of Gomel Region, noted that the studied archival documents will be attached to the materials of the criminal case on the genocide. This terrible tragedy should not go unnoticed. We must remember this tragic page in our history in order to prevent similar actions in the future.
