An extraordinary collection of stories from normal people – residents of Ukraine – who survived the Russian invasion in 2022. This is the aim and expected research results of Anna Wylegała, Ph.D., from the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, and Natalia Otrishchenko, Ph.D., from the Centre for Urban History of East Central Europe in Lviv, conducted as part of the FOR UKRAINE programme ran by the Foundation for Polish Science, titled “24.02.2022, 5 a.m.: Testimonies from War.”
“Our project seeks to document the human dimension of Russian aggression in 2022, by collecting and archiving the personal stories of refugees from Ukraine who became victims of war. We have worked with Anna Wylegała for many years, and this project is part of our longer collaboration. At the time of the Russian invasion, like many other researchers, we started to think: what can we do when bombs are falling and people are dying? How can we help people whose daily lives have suddenly been ruined? At the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe in Lviv, where I work, an asylum for refugees was organized, and we realized very quickly that in the space around us, there are many different personal stories. Then I thought it was worth capturing this extreme moment in history and preserving it for posterity. I got in touch with Anna, as Poland has the highest number of refugees and refugee women, as well as colleagues from the UK and Luxembourg, and we started thinking about how to organize our work so that, in this extremely emotionally difficult and traumatic situation, we would show such sensitivity and empathy that our research would be both ethical but also based on a solid scientific foundation. We wanted to develop a common methodology for interviews conducted in all countries. Above all, we wanted to create a safe space where people were willing to talk, but with the proviso that it would not be psychotherapy,” states Natalia Otrishchenko.
The Best Documented War
“We, too, had a great need to do something and, like most people in Poland, we joined in as a natural reflex to help. However, apart from brewing making tea, and packing clothes, we also wanted to help as scientists, in a way that would use our skills and qualifications. I have been talking to people professionally for twenty years about all sorts of issues, hence, it was natural for me to think that the best thing I could do was to talk to refugees about what they experienced in 2022 and 2023. While this war is the best documented war in the history of all wars, we believe that our way of documentation is unique. We are not doing it in a journalistic way, we are not looking for great stories but we are committed to creating a solid collection of ordinary people’s accounts. Initially, we doubted whether it was too early to record interviews and whether they could be called oral history, because some of the scientific community thinks that oral history is about things that are far away in time. In our opinion, oral history also gives tools to study what has just happened, because that too is already history,” explains Anna Wylegała.
We conduct the interviews in Ukraine, Poland, the United Kingdom, Luxembourg, and more recently, in Germany.
Shock and Disbelief
In Ukraine, the scholars completed 150 interviews with 90 women and 60 men from different regions of the country, from large cities as well as small towns and villages. However, most interviewees were from Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Mariupol.
As the scholar explains, the team did not need persuade anyone to participate in the interviews, which according to the project’s objectives, they did not want to do: “In other projects I have worked on so far, we usually had to persuade people, while in this one they came forward on their own, because they wanted to bear witness to the events. They wanted the story to be told in an ordinary, human voice, not just by politicians, historians, or journalists. Thus, we heard stories about cooperation, solidarity, trust, and mutual help given by complete strangers; about freedom and democracy that exist in small things and small interactions between people. As for the emotions that dominate among our interviewees, in addition to anger, sadness, and fatigue, what shines through is the immense surprise and disbelief that this war is happening.”
Identity Declaration
In Poland, the team collected 182 interviews, of which only 17 involved male respondents, reflecting the structure of the refugee population in Poland, which involves more than 80% women. “It came as a surprise to us that most of the interviewees wanted to speak in Ukrainian, although their mother tongue, used daily, at home, in the family, is Russian. We always gave the opportunity to choose the language, but knowing that this was not a casual conversation, but a testimony that would be in the archive, speaking about their country and their identity, our interviewees chose Ukrainian. Even though many people found it really difficult to speak Ukrainian, they chose this language, treating it as a kind of identity statement,” Wylegała indicates.
The scholars grouped the collected interviews into several clusters. “We heard many very dramatic accounts from besieged Mariupol. These are stories of violence, fear, death of loved ones, confinement in cramped spaces for several days or even several weeks. We have more than twenty stories from Kyiv, and these are mainly accounts of escape, dominated by disbelief, shock, and incomprehension as to how it is possible to have bombings or tanks in the streets in these times. We also have very moving stories of mothers who want to protect their children at all costs. These are stories of unheard-of fortitude, of overcoming one’s own limitations, but also of loss, as many mothers declare that they will not return to Ukraine until it is safe for their children, meaning they may never return there. This may mean being forever separated from their husbands, parents, friends, and previous lives,” states Wylegała.
“We are currently at the stage of organizing the database and transcribing and describing the collected interviews. We are wondering when and how we will be able to make these materials available to other researchers, museum professionals, or artists. We need to very carefully consider this, because the interviews do, after all, contain sensitive data, if only personal data, and we cannot allow this to have any negative consequences for the interviewees. We want our material to serve others, but above all, we feel responsible for our interviewees,” emphasizes Otrishchenko.
Anna Wylegała holds a Ph.D. in sociology and is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Her research focuses on issues of biographical and social memory in Poland and Ukraine, as well as the social history of war and the early postwar period in both countries. She is the author of books such as Przesiedlenia a pamięć. Studium (nie)pamięci społecznej na przykładzie ukraińskiej Galicji i polskich “Ziem Odzyskanych” (2014) and Był dwór, nie ma dworu (2021). Moreover, she co-edited such volumes as The Burden of the Past: History, Memory, and Identity in Contemporary Ukraine (2020) and No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe: Vanishing Others (2023).
Nataliia Otrishchenko holds a Ph.D. in sociology and is a graduate of the Faculty of History at Ivan Franko Lviv National University, as well as the Interdepartmental Individual Humanities Studies program and the Institute of Sociology at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. She also studied at Berea College in the USA, the IEDC-Bled School of Management in Slovenia, and the University of Warsaw. Currently, she works at the Center for the History of Central and Eastern European Cities in Lviv. Her areas of scientific interest include the methodology and methods of sociological research, projective methods, urban sociology, and the sociology of everyday life.
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