The main goal in creating this film was to explain how people managed to survive in an unusual situation as prisoners in a PoW Camp and how far the unusual situation became a normal routine after a certain time.
The aim was to retain the interviews‘ authenticity, so there were just a few voice-over situations introduced to maintain continuity in the narrative. The voice-over provides a few more historical facts, such as the entire number of Luxembourgish prisoners in the camp and those who didn’t survive or simply the duration of captivity in the PoW Camp No 188. These details weren’t mentioned by the interviewees but nevertheless we wanted to include them in a discreet way.
The short film was split in four chapters. Chapter one is more about a description of the camp and how the prisoners remembered it. Chapter two is about the conditions (nutrition, hygiene factors), the relation between prisoners and guardians and of course how they managed to overcome the thought of dying. Chapter three focuses on the work itself, the working conditions in the camp, the work in the military hospital near Tambow-City and the activity in the collective farms. Finally, chapter four describes the prisoners‘ “recreational activities”.