FIG. 00Rotary-telephone project interface supplied for Talk to the Past.
The public-history question
What was left of being young in forced labour in Nazi Germany?
Why this story matters
Forced labour was the largest coerced population movement in modern European history and is still the most under-commemorated. Greek forced labour in particular is thinly researched compared with the Polish and Soviet cases.
An interpretive interface
Dial a chapter of the story
Select a number to explore the historical context. These are written chapter summaries, not substitute recordings of the author’s audio work.
TALK TO THE PAST 1943–1945
Read the record
A call to memory is not a call to 1943.
Telephone directory
LINE 1 / 04
Before deportation
Mieczysław Gnojek was fifteen when he was deported from Poland for forced labour in Nazi Germany in 1943.
LINE 2 / 04
Deportation
A forced journey separated young people from family and familiar places. The project examines how that journey appears in later recorded memories.
LINE 3 / 04
Forced labour
The demands, restrictions and vulnerability of forced labour are reconstructed from the survivor’s memoir and contemporary documentation.
LINE 4 / 04
Memory and liberation
The project reflects on what later testimony can tell us and on the ethics of reading those memories aloud today.
Research basis: Gnojek’s published memoir, wartime records and the contributor’s submission.
CHAPTER 01
A telephone without a line to the past
The creators use the familiar rotary telephone as a way of approaching the memories of Mieczysław Gnojek, who was deported from Poland to Nazi Germany for forced labour in 1943, when he was fifteen. The visitor can imagine making a call, but no telephone line connects the present directly to the experience of a forced labourer.
FIG. 01Original rotary-telephone interface designed for Talk to the Past.
CHAPTER 02
A youth shaped by coercion
The project draws on memoir material recorded and published long after the events. That distance matters: memories are documents in their own right, shaped by recollection, language, editorial decisions and the conditions under which people finally recount what happened.
WHO OWNS MEMORY?History is made visible through evidence.
CHAPTER 03
Who speaks for a remembered experience?
The telephone format invites questions about the ethics of narration. A person who listens in the present encounters a mediated account, not an unfiltered voice from 1943. The work asks what remained of youth under Nazi forced labour and how that experience should be publicly communicated.
WHO OWNS MEMORY?History is made visible through evidence.
Research · Evidence · Attribution
Sources & Credits
Original project references, visual sources and creator credits are collected here in one place.
Creator & project
Natali Petala-Weber and Oleksandr Tsilyi. Audio story / podcast. Who Owns Memory? Digital Public Exhibition, First Cycle 2026.
Dębski, Kazimierz. “Memories of Mieczysław Gnojek about Forced Labour in the Third Reich.” Rocznik Spytkowicki, no. 1 (2022): 125–130
Source: Spicknall, Charles G., Howard D. Fishburn and William S. Baum. “The Diet in Germany and the Occupied Countries during the Second World War.” Public Health Reports 58, no. 46 (12 November 1943): 1669-1681
Photographs, documents, illustrations, video and audio are attributed through the project text, captions and contributor documentation wherever that information was supplied. This exhibition page does not grant additional reuse permissions.
Digital exhibition edition
Web presentation adapted for Who Owns Memory? (2026), with layout and language editing. The original contributors retain authorship of their research, interpretation and creative work.
