Wearing the Letter "P"

Sophie Hodorowicz Knab's "Wearing the Letter 'P': Polish Women as Forced Laborers in Nazi Germany, 1939-1945" examines a chapter of World War II history that has received comparatively little attention in English-language scholarship: the systematic deportation of Polish women to Germany for forced labor. The book's title refers to the purple letter "P" that Polish workers were required to wear on their clothing, a visible marker of their designation as racially and socially inferior under Nazi ideology, distinguishing them from German citizens and subjecting them to a strict set of discriminatory laws and regulations.

Knab, who has written extensively on Polish history and culture, draws on a combination of archival research, published memoirs, and personal testimonies to reconstruct the experiences of the estimated hundreds of thousands of Polish women who were forcibly transported to work in German households, farms, and factories during the occupation. The book traces the mechanics of this labor system from its origins in the early occupation policies of 1939 through the escalating demands for labor as the war progressed and German men were increasingly conscripted into military service.

One of the book's strengths lies in its attention to the bureaucratic and legal framework that governed the lives of these forced laborers. Knab details the Reich's elaborate system of regulations, which dictated nearly every aspect of a Polish worker's existence in Germany, including curfews, movement restrictions, prohibitions on using public transportation, and bans on attending religious services or cultural events alongside Germans. Sexual relationships between Polish workers and Germans were criminalized, with severe consequences, including execution in some cases, for Polish men and women found to have violated these prohibitions. The author's careful documentation of these laws illustrates how deeply racial ideology was embedded in the everyday administration of the forced labor system, extending well beyond the immediate conditions of work itself.

The book also gives considerable space to the personal dimension of this history, incorporating first-person accounts from women who endured this experience. These testimonies describe the circumstances of their deportation, often involving roundups in villages or cities, separation from family members, and the disorienting journey to an unfamiliar country where they faced hostility, exploitation, and in many cases, physical and psychological abuse from their German employers. Knab is careful to present a range of experiences, acknowledging that conditions varied considerably depending on the type of work assignment, the attitude of individual employers, and the region of Germany to which a woman was sent. Some accounts describe relatively tolerable circumstances on farms where labor was hard but employers were not overtly cruel, while others recount severe mistreatment, inadequate food, and unsanitary living conditions in factory dormitories and camps.

Knab situates these individual stories within the broader context of Nazi racial policy, which classified Poles as Untermenschen, or subhumans, a designation used to justify both the brutal occupation of Poland and the exploitation of its population as a labor source for the German war economy. The book draws connections between the treatment of Polish forced laborers and the Nazi regime's broader goals of weakening Polish society, eliminating its intellectual and cultural leadership, and reducing the population to a subordinate labor force.

The writing throughout is accessible, and Knab avoids unnecessary academic jargon in favor of a narrative approach that keeps the human stories at the center of the book. At the same time, the historical framing and documentation lend the work credibility as a serious contribution to the historiography of World War II and Nazi occupation policy in Eastern Europe. The book does not shy away from difficult material, including descriptions of sexual violence and the particular vulnerabilities faced by young women far from home and without legal protection.

"Wearing the Letter 'P'" fills a notable gap in the English-language literature on the experiences of Polish civilians during the Second World War, particularly regarding the specific experiences of women. It stands as a valuable resource for readers interested in the social history of the war, the mechanics of Nazi occupation policy, and the experiences of civilian populations caught between the demands of a wartime economy and the ideological priorities of a regime that viewed them as expendable.