The gripping story of women erased from World War II’s official record
PORTLAND, Ore. – Feeding the Enemy: Soviet Women in Nazi Labor Camps in Norway uncovers a long-buried chapter of World War II history: the lives of Soviet women enslaved in Nazi labor camps in remote northern Norway. Captured and transported to work in fish factories near the Arctic Circle, these women were forced to support Germany’s war economy as part of Hitler’s vision for a restructured Europe.
The book began with a chance encounter in St. Petersburg, when researcher Liv Mjelde met a young man searching for the truth about his father’s birthplace. That meeting led Mjelde to a striking absence of wartime records—and into a thirteen-year investigation of a history silenced by war, Cold War politics, and national forgetting.
Drawing on archival research, family interviews, and rare photographs, Feeding the Enemy follows the lives of Soviet women imprisoned in Norway, the children born to them in captivity, and the Norwegian communities that surrounded the camps. Many of these stories were deliberately erased after the war, leaving families separated by borders, lies, and decades of silence.
Blending personal memoir, historical inquiry, and investigative research, Mjelde reconstructs the life of one child, Yuri Salnikov, born in a Nazi labor camp and hidden behind a veil of misinformation for decades. Through his story and others, the book examines how political forces determine which lives are documented—and which are allowed to disappear.
Feeding the Enemy invites readers to witness the resilience of women caught in the machinery of war, and to reconsider the narratives that have shaped World War II memory in Scandinavia and beyond.
Publication Date: December 1, 2025
Formats: Paperback and Ebook
ISBN (Paperback): 979-8-9906293-6-3
ISBN (Ebook): 979-8-9906293-7-0
Categories: History / Norway / Women
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