Project documents "ordinary women in extraordinary times" of World War II (05/22/05)

Project documents "ordinary women in extraordinary times" of World War II

by Oksana Zakydalsky

TORONTO - The oral history archive, consisting of video and audio taped interviews, of the Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Center (UCRDC) is the largest such Ukrainian collection anywhere. The recording of these interviews began in the mid-1980s, when the center was gathering witness testimony for its documentary on the Ukrainian Famine, "Harvest of Despair," and their number continued to grow during the collection of material for the film "Between Hitler and Stalin - Ukraine in World War II," released in 2003 (English-language version) and 2005 (Ukrainian-language version).

The archive has also been enlarged thanks to UCRDC's cooperation and joint projects with the Institute of Historical Research, Ivan Franko National University in Lviv, and today it contains over 600 catalogued video and audio records, some of which have been transcribed.

Now the UCRDC is planning to publish a selection of the interviews in a book - "The Ukrainian Woman in World War II." Iroida Wynnyckyj, archivist of the UCRDC, is one of the editors of the book. At the beginning of this year, Natalia Fedorowych, a lecturer in sociology at the Pedagogical College at the National University in Lviv, spent four months in Toronto as a Kolasky Fellow, preparing the selected material for publication.

The John Kolasky Memorial Endowment Fund, set up in 1990 and administered by the Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies (CIUS), sponsors three- to nine-month research projects in the social sciences and history at a Canadian university. Ms. Wynnyckyj became acquainted with Natalia Fedorowych 10 years ago in Lviv, when Ms. Fedorowych was an interviewer for Borys Gudziak (now the Rev. Dr. Gudziak, rector of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv) who was assembling an oral history of the underground Ukrainian Catholic Church under the Soviets. Since then, Ms. Fedorowych has taken part in several oral history projects of the Institute of Historical Research.

On April 7, a public presentation of the book project by Ms. Fedorowych was sponsored by the UCRDC and CIUS.

The compilation of material for the book "The Ukrainian Woman in World War II" began with the delineation of the source material: interviews with women, born in Ukraine between 1893 and 1941 who were witnesses and/or participants in events leading up to and during the second world war as well as in events that were consequences of the war. The interviews were conducted in the period 1979-2004 in Ukraine, Poland, Canada, the United States and Australia.

Fifty such interviews were selected from the UCRDC archives and collections of the Lviv Institute of Historical Research and the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. A few new interviews were added specifically for the project. The book will contain descriptions of all 50 selected interviews, with 20 of them fully transcribed.

"Recording the interviews, we did not aim to present a detailed historical description of the period of World War II. Our assignment was to present the experiences and views of ordinary women on the events of World War II. Using examples provided by concrete persons, we tried to recreate everyday life in circumstances of social cataclysms, to see how these persons reacted in specific situations, what they were thinking, what prompted them to one or another set of actions, why and with whom they worked together," Ms. Fedorowych explained.

Being in the theater of war, women were active participants in the political events of the time. One of the reasons for selecting women's interviews as a special group was the fact that women can offer an added perspective: the burdens of family and the demands of day-to-day living fall disproportionately on women and they experience and see things men normally don't. Such a perspective is particularly well served by oral history, which focuses on the individual and on the detail. It also records the history that Soviet historiography ignored or falsified, and it can be a substitute for non-existent documentation.

The 20 interviews to be presented in transcribed form were selected to include a wide variety of life stories. The interviewed women were born in many cities of Soviet Ukraine (Kyiv, Khmelnytsky, Odesa, Poltava) and in regions of western Ukraine (Volyn, Carpatho-Ukraine and Galicia); one interviewee was born in Siberia. They include women whose husbands were executed and who themselves were imprisoned by Poles, Germans and Soviets. They were "Ostarbeiters (slave laborers)," members of the nationalist underground and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), rescuers of Jews during the Nazi occupation, targets of forced repatriation by the Soviet regime, and victims of atrocities and forced deportations by the Polish authorities, prisoners of the gulag, exiles to Siberia and members of the underground Ukrainian Catholic Church. They form a microcosm of a society that survived through some of the worst cataclysms of the 20th century - famine, war and oppression under various foreign occupations.

Fortunately these stories - and hundreds of others - have been recorded and form a part of the UCRDC oral history archive. It is hoped that the publication of the book "The Ukrainian Woman in World War II" will not only fill out the history of Ukraine during the war but will bring attention to the archives of the UCRDC and encourage researchers and scholars to use them to fill the blank pages of the history of Ukrainian society in the 20th century.

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