450,000 witnesses

One cold winter day in 1942 the Nazis drove the members of the Demydov family, who were living in the village of Dubrovky in the Vitebsk region of Belarus, out of their house and herded them to the public baths. All their neighbors were already assembled there. The oldest and youngest villagers were separated from the rest and were burned alive.

This was witnessed by seven-year-old Markian Demydov, who never again felt like a child. A few days later he and his mother ended up at the Salaspils concentration camp in Latvia. There he was separated from her, like all the children who arrived with their parents. The camp had separate barracks for children and adults. The boy was given to a certain Janis Weide “for use in labor.” Markian escaped from him, but ended up working for another landowner, looking after 40 cows, 18 calves, and up to 100 sheep. The work lasted until 1944, when the Red Army arrived and liberated him from slavery. That was when he was reunited with his mother.

Considering how other kids were taunted in other German, Polish, and Austrian concentration camps, Markian Demydov was comparatively lucky. He did not have to spend 14 hours standing at a machine tool in a factory. Neither was he forced to give blood regularly. Today there are more than 450,000 witnesses in Ukraine, who can describe the horrors of the concentration camps — those who were sentenced to slave labor or their relatives.

In condemning the crimes of its previous regimes, every civilized state is obliged to pay back certain financial compensation to the victims of slave and forced labor. Although no one can calculate the moral and physical losses of those people, it is clear that the health of the former Ostarbeiters was seriously undermined. Since 2001 the German federal foundation, Memory, Responsibility and Future, and the Austrian Reconciliation Fund have been issuing such payments to Ukrainians who worked in the Third Reich during the Second World War. These two funds take care not only of Ukrainian Ostarbeiters but also those from Moldova, and the countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia. In Ukraine the payments are managed by the Ukrainian national foundation, Mutual Understanding and Reconciliation, run by the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine.

Who are those 450,000 Ukrainian citizens slated to receive considerable sums from German businessmen? First of all, they are those who were imprisoned in German death camps and ghettos during World War II, individuals — including children — who worked in German enterprises, children who were born there, and the victims’ heirs. Each category is assigned a certain sum ranging from DM 5,000 to 15,000.

Maria Hubenko, 71, received DM 4,930 in 2002. In 1942, as a 16-year-old girl, she was taken by the Nazis from the Cherkasy region to a small Bavarian town for forced labor. She worked in the military industry at the Siemens factory for three years. She says that in those days she didn’t know exactly what she was making. She worked for 12 hours a day and was poorly fed. Other workers, who could not endure the conditions, died. Disobedient prisoners were put into the punishment cell, beaten, etc. Maria has used part of the money to repair her apartment, and some on health care. In addition the compensation from the German foundation bought her a course of treatment at a sanatorium and a visit to Germany.

Besides the German compensation, Ukrainian citizens who were involved in forced labor received an opportunity to undergo necessary surgery. As a rule, this is orthopedic or eye surgery. The German foundation has allocated more than 1.5 million euros for this purpose.

So far, it has paid about 900 million euros to more than 450,000 Ukrainian citizens. The Austrian foundation has paid out 84 million euros. Ihor Lushnikov, the head of the Mutual Understanding and Reconciliation All-Ukraine Foundation says that more than 300 Ukrainians have not received their compensation yet, but there is still time to get it by the end of the year.

But the problem of material compensation paid to Nazi victims has a reverse side. Nadia Slesareva is a case in point. She experienced misfortune twice. In 1942 she, along with some other teenagers, was taken by the Germans for forced labor in Germany. For two years she helped build a tunnel bomb shelter in the town of Stettin.

But this was her second stint in a concentration camp because she was in her first one before the Second World War. In the late 1930s her father was shot and her mother was exiled to Siberia for 10 years. The Soviet government placed little Nadia, as the child of “enemies of the people,” in a special colony (penitentiary) in Dnipropetrovsk for such children. Sad to say, Slesareva insists that the Dnipropetrovsk colony and Nazi slavery were the same. She still remembers the address of the colony, where the children were kept behind barbed wire. The children hated each other only because of their status as “enemies of the people.” They were tormented: beaten and deprived of food. Every morning there was one less child.

The German authorities have paid Nadia her compensation. But it seems most unlikely that she, along with tens of thousands of people with similar stories, will ever get compensation from the Soviet totalitarian regime.