Cultural memory, gender and age: Young Latvian women's narrative memories of war-time Europe, 1944-1947

Journal of Historical Geography

Volumn 30, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 701-728

  McDowell, Linda ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Displaced persons; European volunteer workers; Latvia; Memory; Refugees

Indexed keywords

CULTURAL HISTORY; GENDER ROLE; MEMORY; PERCEPTION; REFUGEE; WAR;

BALTIC STATES; EASTERN HEMISPHERE; EURASIA; EUROPE; LATVIA; NORTHERN EUROPE; UNITED KINGDOM; WESTERN EUROPE; WORLD;

EID: 18744362128     PISSN: 03057488     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/j.jhg.2003.08.020     Document Type: Article

References (133)

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19. A. Hastings The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism 1997 not known Cambridge
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21. M. Hirsch V. Smith Feminism and cultural memory: An introduction Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1 2002 1-20
22. M. Goldenberg Different horrors same hell: Women remembering the Holocaust in: R.S. Gottleib (Ed.) Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust 1990 New York
23. L.S. Kremer Women's Holocaust Writing 1999 Lincloln
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27. R. Leys Trauma: A Genealogy 2000 Chicago
28. There is for example a growing body of geographical literature on the significance of gendered imagery in the construction of Irish identity. See for example Nuala Johnson's and Bronwen Walters work on iconic images of Ireland, in. N. Johnson Cast in stone: Monuments, geography and nationalism Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13 1995 51-65
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31. A. Beevor Berlin: The Downfall 1945 2002 London which has been in the British bestseller lists for over a year
32. N. Naimark The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation 1945-1949 1995 Cambridge, MA
33. G. Grass Im Krebsgang 2003 Gottingen in English Crabwalk, 2003, London
34. M. Eksteins, Walking Since Daybreak: A Story of Eastern Europe, World War II and the Heart of the Twentieth Century, New York, 1999
35. A. Nesaule, A Woman in Amber: Healing the Trauma of War and Exile, London, 1995.
36. See M. Wyman DPs: Europe's Displaced Persons, 1945-1951 1998 Ithaca
37. J.A. Tannahill European Volunteer Workers in Britain 1958 Manchester
38. D. Kay R. Miles Refugees or Migrant Workers? European Volunteer Workers in Britain, 1946-1951 1992 London
39. K. Paul Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Post-war Era 1997 Ithaca
40. Tannahill, then a civil servant, notes in the preface that he undertook 200 interviews with refugees (his designation) but he did not include any direct quotations from them in his text although he included some footnotes based on reported comments. I have been unable to discover whether these interviews still exist in an official file somewhere.
41. G. Smith P. Jackson Narrating the nation: The imagined community of Ukrainians in Bradford Journal of Historical Geography 25 1999 367-387
42. W. Webster Defining boundaries: European volunteer worker women in Britain and narratives of community Women's History Review 9 2000 257-276
43. L. McDowell The particularities of place Transactions, Institute of British Geographers 28 2003 19-34
44. L. McDowell, Narratives of family, community and waged work: Latvian European volunteer worker women in post-war Britain, Women's History Review, 12 (in press).
45. See for example The Guardian 30 December 1999, 3 where it was reported that an elderly Latvian man living in Leicestershire but holding Australian citizenship was a suspected war criminal.
46. In 2000 and 2001 I contacted women who had entered Britain as European Volunteer Workers under the auspices of two schemes to recruit foreign workers in displaced persons camps in Germany. I traced these women through a number of contacts including personal contacts in Corby New Town, through the Latvian Welfare Organisation and from website adverts. In total I carried out 25 interviews with women who had been recruited into female dominated occupations including in the textile industry and as domestic workers in TB sanatoria, mental hospitals and other institutions and as servants in private homes.
47. M. Hirsch V. Smith Feminism and cultural memory: An introduction Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1 2002 5
48. McDowell The particularities of place Transactions
49. L. McDowell, Workers, migrants, aliens or citizens? Discourses of identity among post-war European labour migrants in Britain, Political Geography 22 (2004) 863-886,
50. as well as Paul Whitewashing Britain 1997
51. Tannhill European Volunteer Workers in Britain 1958
52. A. Fadiman The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors and the Collision of Two Cultures 2002 New York
53. L. Kirmayer The refugee's predicament Evolution Psychiatrique 67 2002 724-742
54. The contributors to a special issue of Signs 28 (2002) on gender and women's cultural memoryies and counter-memories have variously identified the significance of food
55. (see for example C. Bardenstein, Transmission Interrupted: Reconfiguring Food, Memory and Gender in the Cookbook, 353-388),
56. bodily practices (see M. Bennett, Art, Affect and the Bad Death Strategies for Communicating the Sense Memory of Loss, 333-354;
57. M.M. Childers, The Parrot or The Pit-Bull: Trying to Explain Working Class Life, 201-220;
58. T. Kaplan, Reversing the Shame and Gendering the Memory, 179-200),
59. ritual (C. Bold, R. Knowles, B. Leach, Feminist Memorialising and Cultural Countermemory: The Case of Marianne's Park, 125-148) and national myth
60. (see L. Boose, Crossing the River Drina: Basnian Rape Camps, Turkish Impalement and Serb Cultural Memory, 71-96).
61. L. Appignanesi Losing the Dead 1999 London
62. L. Grant Remind Me Who I Am, Again 1998 London
63. There is an ever expanding literature about disaporic and mobile identities, see for example R. Braidotti Nomadic Subjects 1994 New York
64. A. Brah Cartographies of Diaspora 1997 London
65. J. Clifford Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century 1997 London
66. C. Kaplan Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement 1996 London
67. B. Walter Outsiders Inside 2001 London
68. S. Hall Cultural identity and diaspora in: J. Rutherford (Ed.) Identity: Community, Culture and Difference 1990 London 222-237
69. P. Connerton How Societies Remember 1989 Cambridge
70. M. Halbwachs On Collective Memory 1992 Chicago 38
71. S. Freud Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis (The Rat Man) in: J. Strachey A. Strachey (Eds.) The Pelican Freud Library vol. 9 1973 33-128 87
72. See Vieda Skultans' work on the identity of Latvians who stayed behind in the post-Soviet era in V. Skultans The Testimony of Lives: Narratives and Memory in Post-Soviet Latvia 1998 not known London and deportees who returned in
73. V. Skultans Remembering time and place: A case study in Latvian narrative Oral History 26 1999 55-63
74. Two papers about community among East European migrants in Britain, despite being published after 1991, draw on the oral histories collected by the Bradford Community Archive Project (currently held in the City of Bradford Public Library) and so are unable to address the significance of post-Soviet independence on narratives of community; see. G. Smith P. Jackson Narrating the nation: The imagined community of Ukrainians in Bradford Journal of Historical Geography 25 1999 367-387
75. W. Webster Defining boundaries: European volunteer workers in Britain and narratives of community Women's History Review 9 2000 257-276
76. In his study of displaced persons who ended up in Canada, Wyman produced a revised version after independence. See M. Wyman DP: Europe's Displaced Persons, 1945-1951 1998 not known Ithaca (revised edition with new preface, first published 1989)
77. D. McDowell Negotiating between tenses; witnessing slavery after freedom - Dessa Rose in: D. McDowell A. Rampersad (Eds.) Slavery and the Literary Imagination 1989 Baltimore 144-163 147
78. N. King Memory, Narrative, Identity 2000 London 6
79. King Memory, Narrative, Identity 2000 12
80. I have addressed the nature and purpose of some of these activities in reconstructing ideas about Latvian community in McDowell, The particularities of place.
81. King Memory, Narrative, Identity 2000 3
82. Skultans The Testimony of Lives 1998 3
83. Wyman DP: Displaced Persons, 1945-1951
84. For details about the schemes and how the displaced persons were received, see for example Parliamentary Debates in 1947 (Commons Fifth Series) and Cabinet Debates in May 1947 and January 1948, the records of, national newspapers of the time and the excellent notes and bibliography in Paul Whitewashing Britain
85. P. Summerfield Reconstructing Women's Wartime Lives 1998 London
86. Connerton How Societies Remember 1989 21
87. H. White Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe 1973 Baltimore
88. R. Swirsky Migration and dislocation: Echoes of loss within Jewish women's narratives in: A. Brah M. Hochman M. Mac an Ghaill (Eds.) Thinking Identities 1998 not known Basingstoke 187-204
89. H. White The value of narrativity in the representation of reality Critical Inquiry 7 1980 5-27
90. E. Whittaker Some anthropological reflections on ethnography, war, ethnicity and other matters in: M. von Rosen E. Whittaker (Eds.) Baltic Odyssey 1995 Calgary 283-306 289
91. See for example J. Friedlander Women in Culture and Politics: A Century of Change 1986 Ohio
92. K. Firedman-Kasab Memories of Migration 1996 New York
93. J. Goldstein War and Gender 2001 Cambridge
94. P. Hyman Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women 1995 Seattle
95. S. Quack Between Sorrow and Strength: Women Refugees of the Nazi Period 1995 Cambridge
96. The following section is largely based on information in in: R. Iwaskiw (Eds.) Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania: Country Studies 1996 Washington, DC
97. As one of the women to whom I talked told me: It is a hard story how such a small nation had to suffer so much. We have been torn by everyone, everybody had their teeth in the Russians and the Germans, and the Swedes and the Poles
98. This Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact was not acknowledged by the Soviet Union until 50 years later by the Baltic Delegation to the Congress of People's Deputies in Moscow in 1989.
99. At the time of the initial Soviet occupation, the Allies, who were occupied in France raised no objections. However, when the Republic was proclaimed the US State Department issued a protest, thus abandoning its isolationist stance and in June 1941 in the Atlantic Charter, both the USA and Great Britain confirmed the Baltic States' right to independence See. K. Jaanson, The Baltic State region in international relations of the twentieth century: The seminal nature of the interwar period, Journal of Baltic Studies 32 (2001) 276-288. This resolution was not, of course, adhered to and Latvia remained a Soviet Socialist republic until 1991.
100. See for example, Strods and Kott's interesting reassessment of this mass deportation based on newly discovered documents that not only show the political motives of the deportation but also the extent of collaboration among some of the rural population in 1949, in: H. Stords M. Kott The file on Operation Priboi: A reassessment of the mass deportations of 1949 Journal of Baltic Studies 33 2002 1-36
101. See J. Hiden P. Salmon The Baltic Nations and Europe: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in the Twentieth Century 1991 London
102. R.J. Misiunas R. Taagepera The Baltic States: Years of Dependence 1940-1990 1990 London
103. V. Stanley The Baltic States in Peace and War, 1917-1945 1970 not known University Park, Penn.
104. S. Courtois The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror and Repression 1999 Cambridge, MA
105. See M.K. Baltais The Latvian Legion: Selected Documents 1999 Toronto
106. J.A. Tannahill European Volunteer Workers in Britain 1958 Manchester In his preface Tannahill notes that to the young man of 17 or 18 in any country, it (fighting for the Germans or other forms of collaboration) could mean a decision taken in a situation of extreme confusion at an age when the issues were in any case very likely to be clearly understood (ix). He suggested that the screening of refugees carried out in Germany did not condemn all who had honestly argued in this was and were thus guilty of collaboration continuing I felt that these remarks were worth making, partly as a defence against accusations which are sometimes made and believed, partly as an illustration of the pitfalls which await those who too easily make facile moral judgements (ix-x). As I shall argue later, some of the young women whose lives are recorded here may have collaborated in probably less serious ways without fully understanding the context of their actions
107. In March 1998, for example, veterans of the Latvian Legion marched in Riga to commemorate the day in 1944 when both divisions of the Legion fought together against the advancing Soviet forces. Russia responded with an official condemnation, the Russian population of Latvia protested against fascists and the western press portrayed these men as former members of the SS. Meanwhile the Latvian Government tried vainly to explain the complexities of the circumstances in 1944.
108. The Ministry of Labour considered that some of the refugees of peasant stock might fail in standards of cleanliness. They were also worried that among all classes wastage by marriage might be high. See J.A. Tannahill European Volunteer Workers in Britain 1958 Manchester 20
109. Permits under the Aliens Order had been issued during the late thirties for domestic help from Austria and other European countries.
110. 'We don't have the excesses of nature... there isn't the rapid change. With us Spring comes gradually' Elza Glaudne, quoted in Skultans The Testimony of Lives 49
111. Skultans The Testimony of Lives
112. The history of Latvian collaboration in the holocaust is a contested one. However, there is no doubt that Latvian guards were employed in an extermination camp near Riga. None of the women whom I interviewed were Jewish as the Jewish population either left earlier or perished during the war. One woman later married into a Russian Jewish family.
113. M.R. Marrus The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century 1985 not known Oxford
114. Connerton How Societies Remember 2
115. Bardenstein, Transmission Interrupted.
116. Wyman also notes how DPs hated the frequent DDT dustings to which they were subjected: See Chapter 2 Into the camps.
117. In 1944 there were 8 million foreign workers in the Reich. By November that year they constituted a third of all workers in armaments and more than a quarter in the machine building and chemical industries. See M. Mazower Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century 1998 London 158-159
118. Women from Latvia and Estonia who were regarded as Aryans tended to be much better treated by Germans than refugees from Slavic countries. Many women told me that Polish women, in particular were subjected to particularly degrading treatment as forced labourers.
119. A.P. Jephcot, Clubs for Girls, London, 1943, 123.
120. Information from Wyman DPs: Europe's Displaced Persons, 1945-1951 1998 not known Ithaca 122
121. Wyman DPs: Europe's Displaced Persons, 1945-1951 Ithaca 114
122. see also similar points in K. Hulme The Wild Place 1954 London a memoir by a welfare office in a displaced persons' camp
123. M.R. Marrus The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century 1985 Oxford 299
124. Tannahill European Volunteer Workers in Britain 12
125. See Smith and Jackson Narrating the nation, and Webster Defining boundaries on notions of community among displaced persons in Britain, and McDowell The particularities of place for a discussion of these women's working lives as well as the establishment of an imagined community in Britain.
126. The British Government believed that the term DP (displaced person) was derogatory and inadequately reflected the status of the workers who were recruited and so referred to them as European Volunteer Workers' (EVWs) in official documents.
127. Swirsky, 1998, 201.
128. In the first report on the feasibility of importing labour, Baltic women were identified as suitable for assimilation. See Tannahill, European Volunteer Workers in Britain.
129. J. Giles Narratives of gender, class and modernity in women's memories of mid-twentieth century Britain Signs 28 2002 21-42 28
130. See L. Passerini Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class 1987 Cambridge on how interviewees represent themselves as having fixed identities
131. As Vieda Skultans noted in a reflection on her own childhood in Britain, people often confused the Baltic with the Balkans. See V. Skultans, Narratives of displacement and identity, unpublished paper, 2003; paper available from the author at the Department of Sociology, University of Bristol.
132. V. Skultans. Narratives of displacement and identity, unpublished paper, 2003, 8.
133. See for example S. Boym The Future of Nostalgia 2001 New York