PHILADELPHIA – Toward the end of 2016 the German publishing house Verlag Jörg Mitzkat published a 360-page illustrated and well-documented study by Ernst Würzburger titled “Zwangsarbeit im Kreis Höxter: Fremdarbeiter. Displaced Persons. Heimatlose Ausländer“ (Forced Labor in the Höxter Region: Foreign Workers. Displaced Persons. Stateless Foreigners). The work is of great interest to Poles, Ukrainians and other Slavic peoples who found themselves in Germany during and after World War II.
The author is a well-known German historian who set himself the goal of acquainting the younger generation of Germans with the horrors and injustices of the Third Reich and the post-World War II fate of the millions of uprooted people whose destiny is still largely unknown and whose trials, tribulations and sacrifices remain unappreciated.
The city of Höxter is located on the River Weser in north Germany, in the state of Westphalia. It was the site of a large international refugee camp. In the beginning of 1950 some 700 displaced persons from other camps in the British zone of Germany were brought to the barracks of the Höxter DP camp from which most of them eventually emigrated to the New World.
In addition to ample archival documents and other sources, such as newspaper articles and letters, the author was able to find some former denizens of the camp who are still alive today, among them the Pole Czesław Parchatko who at the age of 14 was brought as a forced laborer to a farmer in the region where he bore witness to the end of the war; the Polish woman Ewa Chrobak, whom he found in Poland and who contributed several photographs featured in the book; and the Ukrainian Leonid Rudnytzky, who came with his parents and grandfather, the Rev. Leonid Lushnycky, to Höxter in 1950 and from where he and his mother eventually emigrated to the United States.
In his introduction to the German-language tome, the author expresses his gratitude to the above mentioned for their memoirs and their photographs, which are featured in the book.
Of special interest to Ukrainians is the sub-chapter titled, “From a Stateless Foreigner to an American Professor,” which offers memoirs of Dr. Rudnytzky from that particular period (pp. 320 – 323).
Among the other Ukrainians featured is the notable Shevchenko scholar Pavlo Zaitsev, who lived in Höxter under the pseudonym Jerzy Abramowitsch and later became professor of Ukrainian literature at the Ukrainian Free University in Munich. Today, Mr. Zaitsev is known primarily for his groundbreaking study on Taras Shevchenko, published in English by the University of Toronto Press in 1988 in an edited and abridged translation by George S.N. Luckyj.
Mr. Würzburger’s study “Forced Labor in the Höxter Region: Foreign Workers. Displaced Persons. Stateless Foreigners” is truly a gold mine for historians of World War II and its aftermath. Its value is perhaps best assessed by the contemporary German historian, Wolfgang Jacobmeyer, in the statement: “I believe that a society which is only partially informed about its past will not be able to solve its problems properly in the future.” (p. 16)