24. She was Marked By the Letter P

Untermensch. Subhuman. The fate of the racially inferior Poles was to be the labourers for the German master class. The Polish workers needed only a basic education—which is why the Germans closed most schools—and had value as long as they could work, whether in Germany or occupied Poland. Many times, Maria was reminded of her inferiority. Ungeziefer. Vermin—as Hitler often said.

Her journey to Germany began with a stark realization that she had no choice. The first stop was Kalisz, the largest town near her village—a place she'd visited only a few times in her young life, accompanying her mother to buy supplies for their small farm.

Now, instead of bustling markets, it’s not hard to imagine the situation Maria found herself in based on dozens of testimonies I have read. She might have been brought to a shed or maybe a small warehouse. No windows, just blistering heat and a sea of faces—men, women, all crammed together like livestock. What does modesty mean, when you're treated like animals?

By the door sat a bucket. Its stench hit her before she saw it—a nauseating blend of urine and feces that poisoned every breath. That's the toilet, she realized. Maria tried not to look when someone used it, but in the cramped hell, there was nowhere else to turn.

Most seemed young like her: farm kids, factory workers, students. Then she noticed the older woman in the corner. Why would they want her? The question nagged at Maria, hinting at a cruelty that spared no one. She closed her eyes and felt her heart beating strangely as if some monstrous terror was about to descend on her. When she opened them, she saw the older woman slumped over and holding her head in her hands.

A couple of days passed, melting into a haze of heat, stink, and hunger. When they were finally moved, it was no relief. “On to a bigger town," a guard sneered, shoving people into a truck.

At the next stop, they were herded into a jail's basement—a collection point amassing workers from across the district. Soon, there'd be enough to ship to the next stop and then eastward, to the Reich. Forced labour, they called it, but everyone knew the truth: they were to be slaves.

If the warehouse was bad, the basement was an inferno. No light, barely any air. Walls with mould and remnants of past suffering. The floor—Maria dared not look closely—bodily fluids, food scraps, and vermin droppings.

She gazed at her fellow captives: young faces etched with despair, the old woman's quiet dignity. In each, Maria saw her own terror mirrored back. What horrors await her in the enemy's land? All she could do was wait, a prisoner not just of this basement, but of a fate too colossal to comprehend.

From here, Maria and the others were shuttled to a transit camp—one of many processing points that had sprung up with chilling German efficiency in the border towns and major cities of the annexed western territories: the Wartheland. These camps were the heart of the Nazi system, funnelling millions through their gates to be interrogated, examined, segregated.

The sorting was meticulous, reflecting a horrific vision. Men, women, and children deemed racially suitable were set aside for Germanization. Two hundred thousand children—blue-eyed, blond-haired to match Nazi ideals—were torn from their families. Only thirty thousand would ever return to Poland. The elderly, the sick, those with young children were shipped to rural areas in the General Government district. The healthy, like Maria, were destined to be Germany's forced labour workers. Others had even darker fates: the concentration and extermination camps.

The transit camps varied in structure—former schools, old warehouses, hastily built barracks, abandoned factories—but shared a common inhumanity. Each could process thousands, treating people like items on an assembly line. All were filthy, unheated, without proper sanitation. Waste accumulated, creating an unbearable stench. If you were lucky, you got a cot or dirty straw mattress, but many slept on bare floors. Insects and rodents had more freedom than the captives.

Encircling it all, barbed wire fences—a metal cage for human animals. Guards patrolled with trained attack dogs, a constant reminder: attempt escape, and you'll be torn apart. For Maria, each day hammered home her new status. Here, in this purgatory between her old life and the forced labour awaiting her, she was less than human—just another object to be sorted, shipped, and used up by the Reich's monstrous war machine.

Based on the information I obtained from the Arolson Archives, I estimate that Maria stayed at the transit camp for five or six gruelling days. Stays in transit camps were among the worst experiences described in the memoirs of the Polish women being transported to Germany as forced labourers. Women described humiliating moments of being forced to strip, standing naked in large groups, being examined by German doctors and men, and the purported baths and disinfection process. This latter process was to prevent the transmission of lice and diseases rampant in the unhygienic conditions of the transit camps. The message from the Nazis was that the Polish people were filthy, bug-infested, and needed to be washed and deloused before entering Germany.

After the disinfecting process, the Poles were herded onto trains and sent to Germany. Most had no idea where they were going and what work they would be doing. At first, the Germans used regular passenger trains, but soon they switched to cattle cars—freezing in the winter and suffocating in the summer. The vision of Maria living through this harrowing and humiliating experience ricochets relentlessly in my dreams.

After the transport finally arrived at a railway station in Germany, the women, sometimes still with their husbands and children, were taken to another camp or large hall for further processing. They were tired, hungry, and often frozen from the cold or dehydrated from the heat. Farmers and representatives of factories stood waiting to pick the healthiest and strongest from the lineups. Sometimes, the Germans haggled over who they considered to be the choice workers: young, single men and women. It is at this moment that families were often separated and many children taken from their mothers.

Where did they take the children? I contacted Lauren Fedewa, a young Fulbright scholar who has researched this question. It was heartbreaking to learn from her that infants and small children were placed in one of hundreds of foreign child-care facilities, Ausländerkinder-Pflegestätte, established across Germany. Despite the official sounding name, these were primitive and inadequately staffed facilities without medicine or equipment.

I close my eyes and picture a mother handing over her healthy child upon arrival in Germany or after giving birth if she was already working. She must be at work or return to work as soon as possible. When the mother is allowed to visit the child a month later, the child is sickly and hollow-eyed. Sadly, the majority of the children in these centres died of starvation or illness.

They are buried in mass graves. Did these places exist so that labourers could get back to work as quickly as possible, or were they intended as killing facilities for racially inferior Polish (and after 1941 Soviet) children? Sadly, both.

While the fate of children remains one of the most harrowing and little-known aspects of the forced labour system, the dehumanization process continued for adult workers. Having been sorted, examined, and separated from their families, the labourers faced one final step: The issuance of labour cards, or Arbeitskarten, with each worker’s photograph and a stamp on the back with the word Kennzeichenpflichtig—required—in bold red letters. This stamp referred to a Nazi decree from March 1940, which required people like Maria to wear patches on their clothes with the letter “P” for Polnisch (Polish).

On June 13, 1940, eight days after leaving her home, the Arolsen Archives documents state Maria found herself 650 kilometres away from her village in a labour camp near the small Bavarian town of Vilseck. She joined a gang of workers clearing a sizable wooded area, felling trees and removing them, making way for an extension to a munitions factory.

Maria wore the letter P as mandated, a requirement aimed at identifying, controlling, and preventing contamination from the workers brought into Germany. This simple insignia marked her as a forced labourer, instantly subjecting her to a labyrinth of rules and regulations.

The patch was a square of yellow cloth edged by a band of purple with a purple P in the middle. It had to be sewn, not pinned, on the right breast of every garment worn. Workers had to pay for these patches at the cost of 20 to 50 percent of their monthly wages per patch. The money was deducted from their meagre earnings, as was their food and accommodation.

While the Poles were the first labourers brought to Germany and the first subjected to the distinguishing identification, other nationalities from countries the Germans occupied joined the ranks and were identified by their own patches. OST—meaning "from the east"—distinguished the Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians who arrived after July 1941 when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. This group formed the largest contingent of forced labourers.

The work was gruelling—twelve to fourteen hours a day, six days a week. When she wasn’t working, Maria remained in the workers’ barracks, a primitive wooden structure some distance from the area she was clearing. Munition factories were generally located in forests and far from towns or cities, so they would be protected from aerial view and enemy bombardment. Even on her day off, there was nowhere to go.

The universal complaint in the memoirs of women occupying the barracks in the labour camps was the constant battle with bedbugs. These critters came out at night and disturbed the little sleep the workers were allotted. Between bedbugs, long hours of strenuous work, and malnutrition, the women suffered health issues.

After almost two years of hard physical labour, overcrowded living conditions, lack of proper hygiene, and a poor diet, Maria’s legs were badly swollen and covered with infected ulcers or sores that would not heal. She could no longer keep up with the others. A decision was made to move her to the small farm of the Winkler family near the village of Schlicht, just outside of Vilseck. She was still useful to the German war economy, and by this point, all foreign forced labourers had become critical to maintaining the ‘total war’ machine.

There were no rules regarding hours of work on farms. The tasks were physically gruelling: milking cows, plowing, seeding, harvesting—often without equipment—and then milking cows again in the evening. She once told my sister Ann that she slept on straw in a small, unheated room off the kitchen, and the farmer’s wife did not mistreat her. Frau Winkler bought her a pair of shoes and regularly sent her on foot to the nearby village to bring milk to the local priest. But when she had a horrible toothache, it was not looked after.

As a teenager, my sister had broached the subject with our mother when she had surgery on her legs. “Because of the war,” my mother said. Lacerations, sores, ulcers, whatever my mother called them, the long hours of standing, heavy lifting, and poor nutrition plagued my mother for many years.

Hunger and poor nutrition were a daily reality, and food was a constant source of stress and worry. Polish women repeat over and over in their memoirs that they did not have enough to eat. Even if workers wanted to use their hard-earned, scant wages to buy food, they were restricted by their ration cards.

Beyond the rations they received, shops and bakeries were forbidden to sell to Poles, with authorities placing restrictions on the sale of fruits, vegetables, eggs, coffee, tea, and other goods accessible only to Germans. Despite the strict regulations, some found ways to circumvent them, but both Polish workers and Germans caught breaking the rules faced punishment. As the war dragged on and food shortages worsened, the rations allotted to foreign workers dwindled even further. By the war's final year, the workers’ meagre bread rations were slashed in half.

Police officers sometimes took pity on foreign labourers and ignored Nazi laws. Employers sometimes were lenient when following the directives imposed on them. Some individuals, perhaps Frau Winkler, the farmer’s wife where my mother worked, found it in themselves to be kind. I was always struck when small kindnesses were remembered by the forced labourers, but these stories are not the ones that dominate the memoirs. Edicts constantly reminded German citizens that Poles and other workers from Eastern Europe were subhuman and of economic value only until they weren’t.

While my mother was silent about her experiences, except for a few small details my sister managed to eke out of her, the memoirs of other women describe all the heartbreaking aspects of the ordeal: brutal working and living conditions, barely adequate wages, escape attempts, punishments, epidemics of typhus and other diseases, sexual assault, pregnancy, the death of many of their children, forced abortions, Gestapo and police with guns and dogs, restrictions of every conceivable kind, and suicides. No words describe my feelings as I read about forced labour.

Maria remained on the Winkler farm for another three years. My information about places, dates, employers, and her health is based on forms she submitted to the UN High Commission for Refugees in 1962 and the International Tracing Service (now known as the Arolson Archives) in 1994. My father filled out these forms in his precise penmanship, and my mother signed them. He would have encouraged her to submit the forms in the hopes that one day the hardship she lived through would have been acknowledged and compensated. For me, they provide a few tangible breadcrumbs of information to illuminate what was otherwise my mother’s secret.

Maria toiled in Germany for five full years, a cog in a vast system designed for transmuting the Führer’s vision. Why would she have ever wanted me to know this horrible fact?