The women's side of the story : Soviet “displaced persons” and postwar repatriation

[Extract] At the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union was insistent on the repatriation of all its citizens who found themselves on the wrong side of the border, mainly prisoners of war (POWs) and forced laborers taken to Germany during the war. Some strongly resisted forced repatriation, and this was widely publicized in the West.1 The publicized resistance came from men, and was largely prompted by fear of being sent to the Gulag for collaboration with the Germans or allowing themselves to be taken prisoner. Women— mainly young and single, sometimes still schoolgirls, when they were taken to work in Germany—often resisted repatriation too, but less publicly than the men and for different reasons. The women’s chances of being sent to Gulag were small, and based on prewar experience that showed men to be much more vulnerable than women to political arrest, they were almost certainly less worried than men about this possibility.2 For women, a major fear was probably of being shunned as “German whores” and having their children mocked in the playground as fritzy.