Ferdinand Matuszek. Remembering a Polish forced labourer

Prologue
 

January 2019: the man on the stage appears to be unconscious, with no words for the memories that have haunted him for decades. Barbed wire sways in front of his face, which bears the emotional scars of his past life. Years after its end, the war still has Ferdinand Matuszek in its grip. The war with its cruelty and suffering, but which also called his own innocence into question. The play by the Bielefeld duo Michael Grunert (drama) and Regina Berges (direction/text) “Im Herzen ein Nest aus Stacheldraht” (“In my Heart a Barbed Wire Nest”) is based on these memories and offers an episodic portrayal of the life of Ferdinand Matuszek, who at 15 was forcibly taken from his home in Poland and brought to Germany as a forced labourer. Many of the scenes are derived from common knowledge and familiar images about the Holocaust and from studies of the subject. Yet what about the stories of the forced labourers? What is their narrative? Where do they appear at all in our cultural memory[1] and in society? I am in search of ways in which we remember forced labourers and how the media and public institutions create memories, taking Matuszek as an example.