Forced labor in Nazi Germany affected approximately three million Poles and millions of laborers deported from other parts of Nazi-occupied Europe. Katarzyna Woniak's book tries to comprehensively understand the experience of Polish forced laborers in Berlin. It is a dense local study, although one with special relevance not only because there were many enterprises using Polish forced laborers in Berlin but also because the city was a hub for their distribution and often also a station on the flight of Poles trying to reach their home from other parts of Germany.

Poles faced not only a most repressive racist occupation regime at home but also a particularly harsh living environment in Nazi Germany itself, characterized by hard work and long hours, poor food supplies, subpar lodging, and racially motivated legal restrictions. Most Poles were involuntary workers, including former prisoners of war (POWs) transformed into civilian laborers, and people grabbed from the streets and factories in occupied Poland and deported to Germany. Legal provisions, sharpened at various stages and created a particularly harsh penal regimen for Poles, multiplying the opportunities for infractions and absurdly inflating the punishments for those forced to carry the discriminating “P” on their clothing, marking them as Polish forced laborers. Those Poles sentenced by a German court or arrested by the Gestapo had to expect especially brutal and harsh conditions in labor camps, prisons, or concentration camps. Ironically, the Polish laborers, while being treated with institutionalized hatred and contempt, became indispensable for the German war effort. Nazi Germany did not want them inside Germany and treated them as despised pariahs, yet it could not function without them.

Against this grim backdrop, Woniak reconstructs the everyday lives of Polish laborers. She aims to trace individual experiences, the dynamics of adaptation and resistance, and the emotional worlds of the laborers. Focusing exclusively on contemporary testimonies, she traces survival strategies, escapist methods, and options, pointing out that even in a highly coercive environment the laborers sometimes did have choices. She does not idealize the laborers, stressing that survival strategies sometimes included stealing from comrades or denouncing them.

The book studies a great variety of themes relevant to the daily life of the laborers: their material conditions, their tenuous contact with home, their religious practices, their relationships with other laborers and with Germans, their experience of the bombings, communications in German and Polish, and the sometimes-detrimental efforts to make life more bearable, for example by drinking high-grade alcohol, which killed a significant number of laborers. Unlike many other studies of forced laborers, Woniak's book also discusses leisure time (or more accurately “time without work”). A separate chapter deals with love relations, both permitted ones (usually with other forced laborers) and forbidden ones (with Germans and POWs), and the difficulties of pregnant women in a setting that valued only their ability to work. The brutal conditions in so-called Arbeitserziehungslager and other places of detention receive ample consideration, as do the desperate conditions of Poles unable to work and secluded in what was popularly called Sterbelager (camps for dying).

The book presents an empathic and detailed look at the experience of Polish forced laborers in Berlin, sometimes at the risk of becoming slightly repetitive. Still, some questions remain open. For example, does the source base, which consists to a large extent of court documents, bias the research results? Admittedly, it was easy for Poles to get into conflict with the law, given the repressive and arbitrary legal framework of the various decrees that applied to them. But does the source base not also highlight the most desperate and perhaps more rebellious among the laborers? Also, it seems that a large number of examples concerns Poles deported in the wake of the Warsaw Uprising and arriving in Germany only in the fall of 1944. One wonders to what extent these people, who came to Nazi Germany very late, were more prone to rebellion and perhaps also screened with greater suspicion than the Polish laborers of the earlier years. They certainly experienced particularly difficult conditions.

Woniak acknowledges some different experiences of Poles in the workplace, for example by pointing out that agricultural work, which was available in the rural parts of Berlin and in the surrounding regions, usually conferred some advantages over urban and industrial settings. The food supply tended to be better on farms, and they provided relative safety from bombings. But it would have been interesting also to highlight differences in the treatment and the situation of forced laborers in various urban and industrial enterprises. Some individual cases indicate that not all employers were equally harsh and demanding, especially in light of the enormous need for laborers.

Occasionally, a deeper comparison of the punishments applying to “ordinary” Germans and Poles would have been welcome. The ruthless legal system and the extreme conditions in prisons, penitentiaries, and penal camps applied to Germans too, as Woniak admits. Some of the laws, for example the law against taking goods from bombed houses, also led to draconian punishments of Germans and West-European prisoners of war. Finally, some information on POWs requires refinement. For example, as shown by Rüdiger Overmans, not all Polish POWs captured during the 1939 campaign were transformed into civilian laborers and forced to stay in Germany. Different measures applied to Jews and people from the Soviet-occupied parts of Poland, as well as to army officers and ethnic Ukrainians and Byelorussians. Under the Geneva Convention, moreover, POWs could not be prosecuted simply for escaping. Still, the book is a welcome contribution that offers through the concentrated lens of a local study some new perspectives and allows for a closer look at the experience of a significant group of forced laborers in wartime Germany. It enriches the history of World War II as a lived experience.