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On 15 December 1942 Tina Boschko found herself forcibly mobilized for “work in Greater Germany”. She was given only one hour to pack her things and leave her family, whom she never saw again. Tina Boschko was even forced to leave her five-year-old daughter behind.

After the Wehrmacht invasion of the Soviet Union, thousands of Soviet citizens from the occupied territories were deported to the Third Reich for forced labour. They were deployed as support for the war economy. From autumn 1942, almost 4,000 Russians, White Russians and Ukrainians were sent to Luxembourg and northern France. Often they were young men, even more often women, and they were called Ostarbeiter, or “eastern workers”. They had to do hard and dangerous work in industry, without protection or training. Their clothes were marked with the letters “OST”. They were interned in so-called “Russian camps”, where they lived marginalized lives under difficult conditions and constant surveillance.

In the winter of 1943, Boschko was deployed in Diedenhofen and interned in “Russian camp” no. 1239. She kept in touch with her family through letters. In Diedenhofen she met Mathias Hoor, a Luxembourger, whom she married in 1945. After the end of the war, liberated forced labourers were returned to their homeland, where they were often labelled as traitors and collaborators. Boschko stayed in Luxembourg and started a new family.