LONDON — Agnes Kaposi was just 11 years old when she was forced to work on a state farm in Austria contributing to Nazi agricultural production. Still a child, she was later sent to an armaments plant, where she moved materials around a factory producing anti-aircraft guns.

Born to a Jewish family in Hungary, Kaposi was one of an estimated 20 million men, women and children exploited by the Nazis’ vast apparatus of forced and slave labor — an often-overlooked topic in wider Holocaust remembrance and commemoration that is now the focus of a major exhibition in London this summer.

“Nazi Slave Labor: Perpetrators and Victims” runs through the end of October at the Wiener Holocaust Library. It highlights the breadth and development of the system, which stretched from the Atlantic coast of occupied France to the Eastern Front in the Soviet Union.

Kaposi survived. Her portrait is among those displayed at the exhibition, which features six survivors whose early lives were shaped by the horror of the Third Reich’s slave labor program.

But millions didn’t survive. Two and a half million slave laborers died — victims not simply of the Nazi war effort, but also the greed of civilian industries and businesses that tapped the ready supply of cheap labor to line their own pockets and bolster their profits.

Agnes’s cousin, András, was among them. Enlisted into a labor service unit run by the Nazis’ Hungarian allies in 1941, he perished in 1944 as a result of ill treatment. A postcard he sent shortly before his death is displayed in the exhibition: “My dearest parents, I implore you to report as soon and often as you can about our home, so I can also feel its nearness and warmth.”

Exhibition curator Clara Dijkstra says that while it is well-covered by academics, the subject has been less of a focus in more popular retellings of the Holocaust story.

“Because it’s linked to economic history, it can be quite a dry topic based on anonymous statistics, big numbers and faceless companies,” Dijkstra told The Times of Israel. The exhibition thus sought to “put a lot of faces and names” to the victims.

Reich built on the backs of slaves

Those victims stretch back to the Nazis’ earliest days in power. Newly established concentration camps required inmates to engage in heavy manual labor, with forced labor designed to punish and “reeducate” the Third Reich’s opponents.

The annexation of the rump of Czechoslovakia and invasion of Poland in 1939 marked a growth of, and shift in, the system. Economics, rather than punishment alone, became the focus, with groups of Czech and Polish civilians employed as voluntary laborers or conscripted to work in the Third Reich. As the exhibition states, forced labor was also “a key part of early discriminatory policy against Jews.”

Jews in Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia were dragooned into labor deployments and often sent to work in temporary labor camps. By the end of 1940, over 700,000 Polish Jews had been forcibly sent to work on construction sites in the Greater Germanic Reich. Their efforts were mocked by the Nazi press. A 1939 photo article entitled “The Jews must work” in Illustrierter Beobachter (Illustrated Observer), for instance, featured images of Jews carrying out forced labor with captions such as: “The Jews have never worked so hard in their life” and “Polish Jews are not working hard enough yet; a German construction worker carries five times as many stones up a........

© The Times of Israel