The Matryoshka Memoirs: A Story of Ukrainian Forced Labor, the Leica Camera Factory, and Nazi Resistance

Historian Colby (Stratified Modernism) offers an inventive account of her grandmother’s harrowing survival in a Nazi forced labor camp. In 1942, 19-year-old Irina was taken from her family in Ukraine by Nazi soldiers, brought to Germany, and forced to work at the Leica camera factory in Wetzlar. Leica cameras, Colby explains, were used by Hitler’s personal photographer as well as Nazi propagandists documenting the “depraved conditions” of the Warsaw ghetto. The factory also produced optical equipment for the military, including bombsights for planes. But the factory’s owner, Ernst Leitz II, and his daughter Elsie Kühn-Leitz clandestinely helped many Jewish employees leave the country. Kühn-Leitz also often took young women, including Irina, out of the camp by hiring them to work as maids at the family estate. Loosely interweaving the women’s stories, Colby notes that Kühn-Leitz was arrested and spent three months in a Gestapo prison, while Irina and her husband (she fell in love with and married a fellow Ukrainian at the camp) were briefly held prisoner by the invading Russian army and escaped with the help of a British soldier. Throughout, Colby lays bare her own struggle as a writer in present-day Canada grappling with a distant past, describing how her frail but feisty grandmother is more focused on watching soap operas and preparing Ukrainian delicacies for a family reunion than sharing her story. As a result, Colby must scour the internet, quiz her mother, and use her imagination to “piece together a puzzle of second-hand memories.” In so doing, she breathes new life into well-trodden WWII tropes, building a vivid, novelistic narrative focused on memory and family. Readers of WWII fiction will savor this evocative work of history. (Sept.)