Christoph Thonfeld – författare

During World War II at least 13.5 million people were employed as forced labourers in Germany and across the territories occupied by the German Reich. Most came from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldavia, the Baltic countries, France, Poland and Italy. Among them were 8.4 million civilians working for private companies and public agencies in industry, administration and agriculture. In addition, there were 4.6 million prisoners of war and 1.7 million concentration camp prisoners who were either subjected to forced labour in concentration or similar camps or were ‘rented out’ or sold by the SS. While there are numerous publications on forced labour in National Socialist Germany during World War II, this publication combines a historical account of events with the biographies and memories of former forced labourers from twenty-seven countries, offering a comparative international perspective.

This book arises out of a long series of conversations about one of the most intriguing, but still under-researched, aspects of testimony: how the remembering and telling of an individual Holocaust survivor changes through time, through shifting contexts and with increasing age. It comes at this issue from an interdisciplinary perspective, not with the intention to develop a synthetic method but to explore how different perspectives overlap, conflict with or complement each other. It sets its definition of ''testimony statement'' very broadly, treating published texts, video testimonies, and fragmentary statements and publications as of equal interest, without a hierarchy of value. The book focuses on Olga Lengyel (1908-2001). She wrote a memoir about her imprisonment in Auschwitz, first published in French in 1946, which was translated into English with modifications in 1947, and, half a century later, in 1998, she gave video testimony for the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. Her testimony is well known enough to have gained a public profile and to have attracted some scholarly attention, but is not ''canonical''. Her work is internationally known, having been translated and received in a number of languages, and having been an inspiration for William Styron’s bestseller Sophie’s Choice. This book provides a condensed critical resource on Lengyel’s testimonies, addressing matters of historical veracity, of trauma, of gender, of memory, and of genre in the transmission and reception of Holocaust testimonies over time and across cultures.