Returning to Berlin after 70 years was a very emotional experience for siblings Theodor Kocur Jr. and Maria Kocur (now Kiciuk). The Kocur family left its native village in western Ukraine in June of 1944 and headed west in an effort to escape the approaching Russian Communists. Along the way, the Nazis confiscated their horses and wagon and put them on a freight train.
Theodor was 17 and Maria was only 12 years old when they, their parents and 8-year-old sister were taken to a Nazi forced labor camp in Berlin. There were over 3,000 such camps in Berlin alone.
An astounding 11 million to 12 million people, among them over 2 million Ukrainians, were forced to work in these camps throughout Germany. The camp where the Kocurs were taken to work was the Pertrix factory, where batteries used for the war were made. As forced laborers, Ukrainians from eastern Ukraine were made to wear the inscription OST (meaning East) and were known as Ostarbeiters. The Kocur family, from western Ukraine, were listed as Poles and had to wear the inscription P since that area of Ukraine was under Polish rule at the time.
Maria Kiciuk and Theodor Kocur seeing the Pertrix factory, where they were forced laborers 70 years earlier.
When Theodor and Maria’s parents heard that the Russians were approaching Berlin and that Ukrainians were being repatriated back to the Soviet Union, they knew they had to escape. Early one morning in the dead of winter of 1945, the five members of the Kocur family took whatever belongings they could carry, escaped through a hole in the fence and boarded a train to southern Germany, which later became the American Zone. They ended up at a displaced persons camp in Erlangen, Germany, for the next four years and subsequently moved to the United States.
In 2014, Theodor Kocur Jr. received a letter from Uta Froehlich, a researcher from Berlin, asking if he would be willing to be interviewed about his experience at the Pertrix factory. The Kocur name had been found among the lists of forced laborers. Theodor and his sister, Maria, agreed to participate. Ms. Froehlich traveled to the United States with another historian and a videographer to interview them. As they spoke to her, the memories of those dark times from long ago came flooding back.
When Theodor and Maria Kocur were asked to travel to Berlin for the unveiling of an exhibit on the labor camps where their stories would be featured, they agreed. In the true Kocur family fashion, 10 other family members decided to join them.
On the evening of their arrival in Berlin, November 11, 2015, they were greeted by the Berlin mayor’s representative and other politicians at a lavish reception in Berlin City Hall. The Kocur family learned that the Nazi Forced Labor Documentation Center of the Topography of Terror Foundation had begun the project of documentation and research, which was funded partially by the German government and to a large extent by the Quandt family, who owned the Pertrix factories at the time of the labor camps. The Quandt family, who are the majority owners of BMW, donated over 5 million euros toward a project that exposed their family’s exploitation of the prisoners in forced labor camps.
Stefan Quandt and his cousins Gabriella Quandt and Colleen-Bettina Rosenblat-Mo warmly greeted the Kocurs at the opening reception of the documentation center, where the exhibit about the Kocur family, as well as other forced laborers, was unveiled.
The opening of the exhibit, titled “Batteries for the Wehrmacht: Forced Labor at Pertrix 1939 – 1945.” took place on November 12, 2015, and will run through November 2016 at the Nazi Forced Labor Documentation Center.
Students from Poland, Austria and Germany, who were studying about the labor camps, gave a presentation on the subject. Reporters interviewed Theodor Kocur and Maria Kocur-Kiciuk and some of their family members.
What the Kocur family took away from this five-day trip was the willingness of the German government and the Quandt family to acknowledge past injustices. As Permanent Secretary for Cultural Affairs in Berlin Tim Renner put so eloquently, “it is one of the noblest duties of a democratic community to confront the dark side of its own history as well and to remember those to whom great injustice has been done.”
When will other countries that have committed atrocities follow this noble example? Will the past injustices of the Soviet Union, particularly Russia, ever be acknowledged by its regime? Will we ever see the day when Russia not only acknowledges the Holodomor as a genocide but also makes certain that students in its classrooms learn about the millions killed and persecuted under Stalin? Unfortunately, it seems highly unlikely that the current Russian regime has the moral integrity to do so, as evidenced by its denial of the Holodomor and military involvement in Ukraine.
There are thousands of such stories about Ukrainians in concentration camps, forced labor camps and survivors of Russian and Nazi persecution. Currently the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington is making an effort to reach out to non-Jewish victims of the Nazi regime. They are looking for any persons “who were displaced, persecuted or discriminated against due to the racial, religious, ethnic, social and political policies of the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945.” It is imperative that we talk to our parents and grandparents to document their stories before it is too late.