Page 465 - Le Operazioni Interforze e Multinazionali nella Storia Militare - ACTA Tomo II

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emphasize the unlikeliness of being protected or being able to flee. Therefor the ques-
tion arises how such a difference can be explained. Given the possibility that the men’s
stories may contain exaggerations in order to voice their (growing) disgust about the lib-
erators’ behavior, it is also the women who make up their own versions of what has (not)
happened to them. Maybe the best example to show how such a “story of salvation” is
produced by multiple re-telling is the following interview fragment.
It is by Janina M., a freed Polish forced worker, interviewed for the Online-Archive
for forced work. When telling the first time about her encounters with Soviet Soldiers in
a barrack were she was staying with some colleagues after the Germans had abandoned
the camp close to Treuenbriezen she remembers it as following: “Then the Russians
came [into our barrack, kb] and raped one of my colleagues, who slept two beds beside
me, brutally. There was even shooting, but I don’t know at whom. I don’t know. I just
know that one Russian came and stood beside my bed. He laid down his gun and said:
‘Where are you from?’ I didn’t know what to answer and said ‘From Lemberg.’ Because
I thought, maybe he will treat me then differently. Then he: ‘I want to sleep with you.’
I say: ’Ok.’ And ka-woom, I got under the bed and was gone. Then there was a shot. I
don’t know – somewhere … It was dark, there was no light. Somewhere were shootings.
He took two bikes […] and left.“
As it is very often the case with narrarive interviews, also this passage is very frag-
mented. During its course, M. hints simultaneously at being raped and of being not
raped by one of the entering soldiers. The term „and [I, kb] was gone“ is left open for
interpretation. It could mean her being gone out of the dangerous situation by hiding
under the bed, but it can also refer to a fleeing only mentally, a splitting the traumatic
experience off. The darkness she is referring to is thus used as a measure to obscure the
whole incident.

After talking about something else M. comes again up with this topic. When she is
asked by the interviewer if she was religious at that time, she answers:
“Always. I was, I am and I will always be. […] When I slept there [in the barracks
during liberation, kb] with my colleague we made a board from a plank. There we had
a little picture, we prayed to this little picture. [laughs] I had even in a little bottle, […]
holy water. And when this Russian guy entered the room, and said to me: ‚I want to sleep
with you.‘ I said with this holy water in my hand: ‘Ok.’ And immediately I was under the
bed [laughs]. Later I got to know […] that two of my colleagues had been killed by the
Russians, killed. Yes. Maybe, they had tried to flee.”
In this sequence Janina M.’s being threatened of being raped is entitled with very
few attention, much more is on the colleagues who had tried to flee were killed. On top
of this, M. now backs her narrative of being spared by the Soviet soldier with additive
information: By referring to the holy water in her hand she appeals to the likeliness of
her audience to believe that the soldier refrains from his intentions due to some intrinsic
respect towards the holy item. The possibility that she got raped is thus more and more
blurred.

25 For example: Kazimierz Benedykt B., Archiv-ID ZA186, Zwangsarbeit 1939-1945.