“Hardly anything special today,” Jan Bazuin’s diary begins so harmlessly. In November 1944 he wrote in his new notebook that his family had received potato coupons, that they secretly cut down a tree in the street to burn it and that there was only electricity until half past six. “So, to bed even earlier. It’s nice, we’ll have had a good night’s sleep.”
It’s not all that harmless, of course. They are descriptions of everyday wartime life in German-occupied Rotterdam, characterized by hunger, cold and fears of the next air raid alarm. But 19-year-old Jan Bazuin keeps trying, with humor and later bitter sarcasm, to pick himself up: “Just don’t lose heart.” He will urgently need courage and confidence: at the beginning of January 1945, the youth will be deported to Bavaria by the National Socialists as a forced laborer.
His diary of these months, which has just been published with illustrations by the Munich illustrator Barbara Yelin and is now being presented at the NS Documentation Center in Munich, is a unique testimony. A “lucky find”, so Paul-Moritz Rabe jubilates in the book’s afterword; the historian heads the scientific department of the NS documentation center and the memorial site, which is being built on the site of the former NS forced labor camp in Neuaubing and is already taking shape in the virtual project “Departure Neuaubing” – this is exactly where he ended up after the first few days in the Dachau-Rothschwaige transit camp and in Freimann also Jan Bazuin.
When the goods and cattle cars open in Dachau after more than three days of travel, completely exhausted people crawl onto the platform.
(Photo: Illustration by Barbara Yelin/Verlag CH Beck)
Bazuin describes how this came about in a no-frills, clear, youthful, direct language – the tremors in his view of the world and of man are noticeable and are immediately transmitted to the reader. Because the situation soon comes to a head, first in Rotterdam, where the difficult situation erupts in arguments with the family. Eventually Bazuin, who had escaped the first raid, was conscripted to work in Germany. And immediately has to endure a hell of a journey in ice-cold cattle and freight wagons, cooped up for more than 75 hours without drinking anything, almost without eating. In the middle of the night on January 13, the train finally pulls into Dachau station. “The train doors open and misery after misery comes, frozen and hungry, crawling outside to find a sheltered place. Men with frozen legs and feet. Boys who have passed out from misery. Tree tall guys who are on the verge of a nervous breakdown. How could it be otherwise.”
Yes, it was obviously intended to be the same with the Nazi forced labor system, which was designed for maximum exploitation with no regard for human loss. During the Second World War, they used a total of around 13.5 million forced labourers, including 8.4 million so-called civilian workers, as Rabe writes. They were forcibly recruited in all parts of Europe, especially in Eastern Europe. The more than 500,000 Dutch people – eight percent of them women – formed the fifth largest group after Russians, Poles, French and Italians. For the western Europeans there were “better framework conditions than for eastern Europeans or for the Italian prisoners of war who were stigmatized as traitors”.
However, better does not mean good. In January 1945, the exhausted new arrivals in the Dachau transit camp were given little to eat (“hunger, hunger, hunger and hunger again”), they freeze in damp barracks when the temperature is badly below zero and have to stand for hours in between, despite the storm, “like cattle on a field market,” writes Jan Bazuin. “How long can I stand this?” the teenager asks himself desperately. “Will I ever see Rotterdam again?” And he implores himself: “Just don’t think about it.”
Jan Bazuin surrounded by Polish and French forced laborers, who even offer him a cigarette – a rare commodity.
(Photo: Illustration by Barbara Yelin/Verlag CH Beck)
When the youngster is finally transferred to Freimann and later Neuaubing – and in the process, in amazement, crosses the ruins of Munich – his situation becomes somewhat easier. Jan Bazuin manages to work part-time in the kitchen and thus be able to eat his fill, otherwise he has to shovel away snow and rubbish or sift chlorinated lime. He makes friends with other workers and even has some free time in the spring, which he uses to go to the cinema and go on excursions. But the situation remains tense. Bazuin reports constant thefts in the camp, suicide, and an increasingly threatening hail of bombs. In desperation, the youth finally dares to flee – a courage that may save him from death.
The fact that his notes, which break off on April 22, 1945, are still so vivid today is not only due to the power of his language – but also to the power of the pictures. Of course, in such cases, the photo situation is sparse, there are few pictures of the everyday life of the forced laborers. For this reason, Barbara Yelin partly based her drawings on more general historical photos, partly carefully filling in the blanks and even adding small dialogues in speech bubbles. This works very well, because on the one hand she gives contours to individual scenes with strong strokes, on the other hand leaves enough room for the imagination.
This is carried out more strongly in an app that was developed by Paintbucket Games on the basis of the diary and the illustrations: “Forced Abroad” is the name of the visual novel, which is intended to appeal specifically to young people. If you click and swipe through the story, it’s not just the details of Yelin’s pictures that move. Fictitious characters and situations also appear, and again and again the user can decide how he would behave in a scene. Anyone who has previously read the authentic diary will perhaps be a little irritated by the free use of the notes. Well then, it’s a game.
Jan Bazuin received this “employment ID” from the Deutsche Reichsbahn in March 1945.
(Photo: private property Leon Bazuin/Verlag CH Beck)
In any case, in Jan Bazuin’s later life, seriousness seems to have outweighed the game. All his life he kept his diary hidden and concealed his experiences; his son Leon only discovered the notes in 2001 after his father’s death. Because, as in other countries, the former forced laborers in the Netherlands were viewed with suspicion – perhaps they had voluntarily collaborated with the enemy after all? Today, this silence seems like a double punishment imposed on people who had done nothing wrong. A young person like Jan Bazuin, for example, who wrote in his diary on April 11, 1945: “If you’ve never been afraid before, you’ll learn to be afraid in Germany.”
Jan Bazuin: Diary of a forced laborer (CH Beck, 160 pages). Book presentation on Wednesday, February 23, 7 p.m., NS-Document Center, live and stream, ns-dokuzentrum-muenchen.de