Feeding the Enemy uncovers a long-buried chapter of World War II history: the story of Soviet women enslaved in Nazi labor camps in remote northern Norway. A chance meeting in St. Petersburg with a young man searching for his father's birthplace led researcher Liv Mjelde to investigate the mysterious absence of wartime records-beginning a thirteen-year journey into a silenced past.
Thousands of Soviet women were captured and transported to work in fish factories near the Arctic Circle, supporting Nazi Germany's war economy as part of Hitler's grand plan for a restructured Europe. Their stories-erased during the Cold War and omitted from official histories-resurface here through archival research, family interviews, and rare photographs. Mjelde traces the lives of these women, their children born in captivity, and the Norwegians they encountered. Blending personal memoir, academic research, and investigative work, she reconstructs the life of one such child, Yuri Salnikov, born in a Nazi camp and hidden behind a veil of lies for decades. Through Yuri's story and others, she explores questions of memory, gender, ideology, and historical responsibility.
A powerful blend of history and humanity, Feeding the Enemy illuminates the resilience of women caught in the machinery of war-and the political forces that determine which stories are remembered and which are forgotten.
