answer:I don’t know if your question is specifically directed toward African Americans because that is exclusively your area of interest, or because it seems like the easiest demographic to tap into on a relatively small site like Fluther. So if my response is not relevant to your question, I apologize. However, I am aware of slavery in my own family history, as my grandparents both lived to (vaguely) tell about it. “Eastern workers were primarily from “Reichskommissariat Ukraine”. They were marked with a sign OST (“East”) and were subject to even harsher conditions than the civilian workers. They were forced to live in special camps that were fenced with barbed wire and under guard, and were particularly exposed to the arbitrariness of the Gestapo and the commercial industrial plant guards. At the end of the war 5.5 million Ostarbeiters were returned to the USSR.” My grandfather hardly ever spoke about his experience in Germany before he died, and my grandmother is still reluctant to talk about it. They gave us bits and pieces over the years, but you can see in their faces that the stories are just too painful to repeat. I know that my grandmother, who was 15/16 years old at the time, was repeatedly raped and beaten. Any research that I’ve done regarding the conditions and stories of people in my grandparents’ situation seems to often downplay the severity of the firsthand accounts that I have heard. My “aunt” (who is not really my aunt, rather a friend that my grandmother made while in a Displaced Persons camp) was more open about what happened, and once told me a story about how people became so hungry that they resorted to cannibalism, and started eating dead babies and children within the camp. Some years later, this “aunt” would be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and spend months dwelling on the cannibalism and other atrocities that she witnessed in the forced labor camps in Germany. It was pretty traumatic, all around. I don’t mean to imply that the circumstances that my family endured are comparable to the history of African-American slavery, but I am the descendant of people who were literally kidnapped and forced into slave labor, and my life has been touched by these stories on a very personal level.