Anna Surdakova (25.7.1931 Dubrovka)

The youngest child of a family of four, Anna Surdakova (now Vladimirovna) was born in 1931 in the small town of Dubrovka near Bryansk in the Soviet Union. Her father Vladimir was a laborer, while her mother Efrosinja took care of the children, the house and a small farm. Her father died of an illness on June 20, 1941, two days before the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Aged ten at the time, it was at the funeral service that she heard the war had started. She was an eyewitness to shootings of villagers by the German occupying forces. Anna was only able to attend school for a few years, during which time she also learned some German, but the Germans subsequently closed down the schools.

At the age of 13, Anna, her mother Efrosinja (1885-1945) and her older sisters Ekaterina (1925-2005) and Tatjana (1928-2010) were deported to Munich-Neuaubing in freight cars to do forced labor. The camp in Munich-Neuaubing is the only one she still has memories of: she still recalls the gnawing hunger and the hard work during her time there. The children left the camp unnoticed to beg in the neighboring houses on the Dornier estate in Neuaubing. Even now, Anna Vladimirovna can still recite the phrase “Give me a potato or a small piece of bread” in German.

Anna was employed at a workbench at the Reich Railway Facility Neuaubing. She remembers clamping and cutting wire, and filing large metal parts, her hands becoming tired from the work. She and the other workers made their way to the workplace in columns: they had to walk quickly or they would be beaten. They received no information about how the war was progressing, nor did they know anything of the fate of their eldest sister Maria, who was deployed in forced labor elsewhere in Bavaria. The US soldiers who liberated the camp on April 30, 1945 gave her white bread: “Oh, that’s the sun! They’ve given us sunshine.” She also remembers how camp inmates took revenge against a brutal guard by beating him up.

Anna’s mother fell ill in the spring of 1945. After the liberation, the Americans took her to a makeshift hospital run by Dornier in Germering, but she died on June 27, 1945, probably as a result of the hard years of forced labor. She was buried at the cemetery in Germering in the presence of her daughters.

The three sisters returned to the Soviet Union alone, where they went on to find work and get married. Only later did they receive a small amount of compensation for having done forced labor. Now living in Riga, Anna Vladimirovna is a great-grandmother of two. In October 2017 she returned to Munich for the first time at the invitation of the Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism. She also paid a visit to the cemetery in Germering to see her mother’s grave, but there was nothing there to mark the burial spot.