Card index of the interviews

From 1995 to 2003, the staff of the Institute of Jewish Studies in Kyiv (today’s Center for Studies in History and Culture of East European Jewry) worked on the project “Ukraine’s Jewish Fates: The Twentieth Century”, which consisted in collecting oral history testimonies of Ukrainian Jews. Project manager Roman Lenchovsky and 10 interviewers, assisted by 20 volunteers (students of International Solomon University), recorded around 180 interviews with people aged from 50 to 95 on compact cassettes.

The general outline of the interview with a list of questions was developed to that end. Almost all respondents were residents of Ukrainian cities and villages (although Roman Lenchovsky recorded an interview with the human rights advocate Larisa Bogoraz in Moscow, where she lived for the most part of her life).

All interviews were transcribed, and the transcripts were printed and preserved in digital format. The archive has full e-versions of 177 interviews. The interviewers also filled out reference cards, which contain basic data about each respondent (date and place of birth, index of geographical names, institutions, and organizations mentioned in the interview, and whether the respondent or her/his family were victims/survivors of the Holocaust or Soviet repressions).

Among the respondents were both ordinary and well-known people (academics, artists, and civil activists). For example, Sharlotta Varshaver (b. 1904) was a theatre director and the first wife of the writer Oleksandr Korniychuk; Borys Medovar (b. 1916) was a scientist, metallurgist, Member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, who worked at the Institute of Electric Welding together with the famous scientists Yevhen Paton and Boryn Paton; Faina Kovalevska (b. 1918) was a theatre pedagogue who trained many actors; Larisa Bogoraz (b. 1929) was a human rights advocate and the head of the Moscow Helsinki Group; Olha Rapai-Markish (b. 1929) was a ceramic sculptor and a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine.

The oral history collection is a chronicle of human destinies in the context of significant historical events of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some of the respondents were in ghettos, Nazi and Stalinist camps. For instance, Illia Zhibkov was a prisoner of the Vorkuta camp, and Leonid Kotliar was an Ostarbeiter. Some of them survived the Holocaust, for example, Dina Dukhan (b. 1910) and Symkho Gruber (b. 1919). They told not only about what they lived through personally but also about the fates of their relatives and friends. The memories the interviewees shared can help restore quite a lot of information, which is absent in other sources.

Each oral testimony is not just a subjective depiction of the events of the past but also a kind of “confession” and a vibrant reflection of a respondent’s personality. Interviewees were of different age, social status, cultural and educational level, and it was important to preserve their individual features, which were visible in their storytelling manners. Therefore, when editing and processing the interviews, the Center’s researchers corrected only obvious grammar and syntax mistakes, trying to convey unique speech features of each person. 99% of respondents were Russian speaking and only a few spoke Ukrainian. However, some interviewees used Yiddish and Ukrainian words or even spoke so-called surzhyk, i.e., a mix of Russian and Ukrainian, which is also reflected (italicized) in the transcripts.

These interviews can be interesting for scholars (historians, sociologists, ethnologists, linguists, psychologists, and art historians), teachers, and creative professionals (writers, journalists, theater and film directors).

The archive holds interviews with: