Meaningful Work: Cultural Frameworks of Forced Labour in Accounts of Nazi Concentration Camp Inmates.

This article examines how inmates and survivors of Nazi concentration camps made sense of forced labour by framing it within three major cultural frameworks: military and war imagery, industrial concepts of productive destruction and destructive production, and Jewish religious culture, particularly the Exodus narrative. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including interviews, artworks, songs, and memoirs from the 1930s to the early 2000s—the study highlights how these frameworks helped prisoners interpret their coerced work by connecting it to familiar social, historical, and symbolic meanings. The authors argue that such framing was a creative act that expanded the camp reality, enabling survivors to communicate and comprehend their experiences beyond trauma alone. This approach challenges views that forced labour in Nazi camps was entirely exceptional or senseless, emphasizing continuities with pre-existing cultural understandings of work and suffering across diverse inmate groups.