Hello, r/askhistorians. I hope you can help me.
My husband's grandparents met in a German work camp. His grandfather was a French soldier and his grandmother was a farmer's daughter from the Ukraine. Both have passed on now, so we cannot ask them any questions.
Basically, I am helping my husband piece together his genealogy/family history. I am trying to find out what camp they were in. I am taking a guess--perhaps incorrectly--that they were likely in one of the ilags, of which I think there were four, but I am really not sure. It was not a "concentration" camp. I know the camp was in Germany.
I have tried to use online sources to try to figure this out, but it seems like most of them are run by Jewish historical entities, and focus very specifically on Jewish survivors.
Can anyone point me in the direction of a resource that has an account of non-Jewish survivors?
As far as I can tell, I can't seem to find any military records for my husband's grandfather. It appears as if you actually have to go to Paris to find that sort of stuff out!
I would very much appreciate any help you could give. Their story is really quite extraordinary, and very romantic, and it would be lovely to know a little more.
It wouldn't have been an Ilag, because those were civilian internment camps and your grandfather-in-law was a prisoner-of-war. However, he was not in an OfLag (officer POW camp) or StaLag (enlisted POW camp) either because his future wife wouldn't have been working there.
The interesting thing is that the overwhelming majority of French prisoners-of-wars actually performed forced labour, both in agriculture and in industry. Your grandmother-in-law would have been one of the many many Soviet civilians deported to Germany as forced labourers. And so they met. Probably not in a real camp either. Forced labourers were assigned to Kommandos or labour detachments that were generally nothing like people commonly imagine a (concentration) camp. They would have been small operations, many on farms where the labourers' treatment depended a lot on the local Germans' attitude. Russian and Polish men might be treated harshly, but the French were not considered a great threat (after all, the Vichy regime was collaborating with the Germans) nor inferior (as the Slavs were seen), and a farmer's daughter might have been a valuable asset. They would have been housed in barns, or any suitable communal building in the village, and guarded by at most a couple of probably elderly German guards. If they were both employed in industry, their life might have proved harsher depending on the type of factory and available accommodation. Food was always more plentiful in the countryside, for one thing.
As there were tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of such small Kommandos scattered around Germany, it's impossible to guess which one it was.
The individual files of French prisoners of war during WWII are kept in Caen, not in Paris. You might try to shoot them a letter (no emails! letters only!) asking for assistance, but it'll have to be in French.