"She recalled: "We were herded between two rows of armed soldiers and ordered on to open-backed trucks. We were taken to a camp full of other children and their teachers, surrounded by barbed wire." Maria Brik was my mother, and the year was 1943. When her parents heard their daughter had been snatched by one of Adolf Hitler's armed squads, they rushed to the holding camp in a vain attempt to save her."
"The next day, armed squads stuffed my mother and the other dirty and frightened detainees into cattle cars and dispatched them to Germany to work as slaves. My mother never talked much about those days. I learned details of her ordeal only after her death, when I found a bundle of letters she'd hung on to for eighty years. Through these letters,"
Seventeen-year-old Maria Brik was seized in February 1943 while going to school and herded between rows of armed soldiers onto open-backed trucks. She was taken to a holding camp surrounded by barbed wire where parents attempted in vain to save abducted children. Armed squads loaded detainees into cattle cars and deported them to Germany to serve as slave labor in factories and farms. In processing camps, detainees were ordered to strip, examined, deloused and humiliated by medical staff and guards. Nazi racial ideology branded Eastern Europeans as "Untermensch" while exploiting their labor. Letters preserved for eighty years later revealed deep trauma and loss of dignity.
Read at The Walrus
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