A Communal Experience

After 24 February, Polish people felt the urgent need to get involved by providing material assistance, volunteering, or taking in refugees. Researchers like me felt that something had to be done in our area of expertise: to research and document the experience of Ukrainians fleeing war. There are many important projects that deal with war crimes. We, on the other hand, wanted to focus on everyday life during the war, under occupation and in a new country. This is what we want to record in order to provide source material for researchers, educators and artists. Moreover, we want to remind Polish people that there is still a war going on just across the eastern border, and we want to communicate this story in a responsible and ethical way. The idea for the project was conceived at the Centre for Urban History of Central and Eastern Europe in Lviv. A few days after the outbreak of the war, I got a call from Sofia Diak, director of the Centre, who told me that refugees from eastern Ukraine who had found refuge there wanted to share their stories. A team was formed by the Centre for Urban History, the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the University of Luxembourg and the University of St Andrews.

Why did the employees of the Lviv Centre themselves not turn on their dictaphones and start recording?

A proper methodology is required. Oral history has so far been primarily a tool for researching events from decades ago.

What does it mean: oral history?

It is a method of collecting data to record the knowledge of a particular experience or the life story of a person who would not share it in any other way because they do not keep diaries and will not publish their memoirs. It is a method derived from the need to give voice to underprivileged groups: Mexican peasants or British workers, which is exactly how it originated. In Poland, researchers working with this method have so far recorded witnesses to World War II, the Holocaust or, as in my case, the land reform. All that happened in the distant past; such interviews have been conducted with elderly people, and it is often the very last moment to reach them. Hence, among others, the scepticism of some researchers working with this method towards the idea of our project.

Is it because the time distance is too short in their view?

Yes. However, we felt that this was nevertheless the method we could use to record the experience of war in Ukraine. Our Ukrainian partner, the Centre for Urban History, has carried out similar projects before. After the Maidan, testimonies of witnesses to the event were recorded virtually without delay. In the United States, recognised researchers of oral history have recorded, for example, the testimonies of people who experienced Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Oral history, which requires great sensitivity to the plight of individual participants, is a very good method of documenting and researching crises not long after they have occurred.

What methodology did your team adopt?

Priority is given to humanitarian aid and psychological support over documentation. This is why the methodological and ethical foundation of the project is the principle of doing no harm. This is what we are guided by when looking for interviewees. We did not conduct interviews at railway stations or in the centres where those in need were received. Our interviewees need to feel safe, have their basic needs met: a roof over their heads, a livelihood. Secondly, we talk to those who are ready to share their story. We do not persuade anyone who is hesitant to participate. We only record adults who declare that they are not in a mental health crisis. We want to avoid involving people who suffer from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). We do not record people who depend on us in any way, as this would carry the risk that they agree to be interviewed for this reason alone.

Does this not distort the sample?

We cannot reach out to people who are struggling with specific problems caused by the war and the need to leave the country, or those who are not coping in a new place. But we accept this, because it follows from the principle I mentioned earlier: we don’t want to do harm to someone in this position.

The project’s website says that the “testimonies emphasise the reconstruction of factography and the changing realities of everyday life, not emotions”.

Our work is based on a questionnaire developed by researchers from Poland, Ukraine, and Luxembourg. We focus on how the daily lives of our interviewees have changed. We ask for details: for instance, when talking about the day the war broke out, we are interested in knowing where our interviewee was, what they were doing that day, whom they met. This doesn’t mean that we don’t talk about how they felt at the time, but we don’t pursue the issue of emotional states, especially when we can see that these are painful and difficult, and we do not want to cause secondary trauma. Of course there is a lot of emotion in the conversations we record: grief, sadness, anger, hatred. But we are not therapists, and we keep to the framework set out in the questionnaire. We follow the interviewee, but we also try to make sure that the emotions that arise don’t hurt them or us.

What is the questionnaire like?

We don’t just sit down in front of the interviewee with a set of ready-made questions. Instead, we use a list of topics that we want to cover, while the interview, for all its structure, is narrative and gives the interviewee a sense of agency. The first question is never about 24 February. When we start an interview, we ask for the biographical context, who our interviewee is, where they lived, worked or had family before the war. We ask them to say anything they find relevant. This helps us to understand their story of the war.

For example?

I recorded the testimony of a man who was born in 1941. For nearly two hours, he talked to me about the history of his family, World War II, Stalinism. Only then could I understand that when he left Kyiv on 24 February, he was very afraid of war and famine, a memory that cast a shadow over his entire life. The interviewees are introduced in advance to the issues we want to raise during the recording. This gives them comfort during the interview: they know what to expect, they can decide what they want to talk about and what they don’t want to talk about. Often they come with a ready-made story. My role is to ask for details such as dates. I ask relatively few questions myself.

What next?

We talk about whether the person had anticipated the war and whether they had prepared in any way for what happened on 24 February. Then we ask about that very day. It is a very important memory that unites Ukrainians. When they meet, they often talk about exactly where they were then. It’s like Americans talking about 11 September. In both cases, there is a communal dimension. We then try to establish how what happened changed their daily lives. We ask about food, access to water, electricity, the ability to communicate with others, etc. The next part of the interview focuses on the refugee experience: we want to find out why they chose Poland, how they got here, what they took with them, and these are very different stories. Finally, we are interested to know how they are living in their new place and what their plans are. We often hear that they want to return home. Some of our interviewees fled to Poland having had the experience of living under Russian occupation. I explained earlier that war crimes are not the main topic, but we record those testimonies in which they are present.

So what is the day of 24 February 2022 like? What place does it hold in the memory of Ukrainians?

It is clear that the outbreak of war was something the Ukrainians expected and were surprised by at the same time. On the one hand, we hear that there was something in the air. Our interviewees remind us that the war in their country has been going on since 2014. Some of them fled their homes back then, for example, people who moved from the Donbas to Bucha at the time, and from there managed to escape to Poland after 24 February. On the other hand, our interviews record a collective shock: the interviewees cannot believe that such brutal aggression of one country against another is possible in 21st century Europe. This is also the day that, for almost all of our interviewees, severs any relationship with Russia. This can also be heard in the recorded testimonies.

So you are recording the changes that have taken place in the consciousness of the Ukrainian people?

We don’t ask direct questions about their identity, but our interviewees very often talk about it themselves. For many of them, the war is when they felt fully part of the Ukrainian political nation. A particular example are interviews with people who come, for example, from the Donbass. They would not have defined themselves conclusively as Ukrainians before. In addition, many people who come from regions where Russian is the first language prefer to talk to us in Ukrainian. It is a demonstration, an identity choice. I heard from one of the people I recorded, a woman from Dnipro, that she thinks in Russian because that’s how she’s done it all her life and she cannot change it, but she doesn’t want to speak in the language of the aggressor anymore. By analogy, I am reminded of the Polish Jews who, after World War II, gave testimony before the Central Jewish Historical Commission in broken Yiddish, which they explained by saying that it was material for future generations. There are other circumstances, as well. I recorded the testimony of a woman from Mariupol who does not speak Ukrainian. Her mother-in-law died during the siege of the city because she had run out of medicine. She and her husband buried her in a sandpit in front of their block of flats. In pure Russian, she told me that she hates the Russians for what they did to her family and the city. This is very telling. A woman who only speaks Russian is also part of the Ukrainian political nation, and what happened on 24 February finally completed the process of shaping it.

Do the project participants talk about the importance of the resistance put up by the Ukrainians?

We hear that they are still very proud of the resistance that has not abated. They stress their pride in the fact that they are still resisting, even though at the very beginning the West gave them a maximum of two weeks. I should add at this point that we have been holding interviews since June last year and the recorded testimonies vary, depending on when they were recorded. The experience of what is happening on the frontline is changing: we are increasingly talking to people whose loved ones have been killed. We recently recorded the testimony of a woman whose husband was killed in combat and she was left alone with four children. In that sense, these are different conversations than at the beginning. There is in these stories a sense of loss and an awareness of the huge price being paid by Ukraine. And a growing sense of loneliness.

How are the interviewees finding life in Poland?

We have recorded almost 150 interviews. There were only ten men among the interviewees. This mirrors the picture of the refugee population that emerges from the available statistical data. We mainly talk to middle-aged women who have fled to Poland out of concern for the safety of their children. As such, we mainly hear about what the acclimatisation in the new country is like for this particular group. Our female interviewees often find it difficult to enter the labour market because they are unable to secure care for their young children. Sometimes they are multi-generational families: a grandmother has come with the mother and children so that she can take care of the kids. These are stories of the effort to provide a normal life for the children: education, social relations. But there are also very poignant stories of separation: some say that when they eat dinner, they try to call the husband or father remaining in Ukraine. There are stories about under-qualified work. I have recorded a successful woman lawyer from Kyiv who is a cleaner in Poland. She could not find work in her profession, but her children have done well in a Polish school and she says she will not return to Ukraine until she can be sure they will be safe there. The Ukrainians also share warm feelings towards Poles, and not only when talking to researchers who are from Poland, because they tell this to our Ukrainian colleagues just as often (we have two researchers in the team who are refugees themselves). There is a genuine abundance of gratitude. It is a huge resource.

How many more recordings will you make?

The project is being carried out in collaboration with the Mieroszewski Centre, which is providing us with financial support. We have also received a grant from the Foundation for Polish Science and another grant from the House of European History. This allows us to plan 200‒250 recordings. We don’t plan for more because, although each story is unique, experiences start to repeat themselves at a certain point, which is known in social science as sample saturation. This means that we won’t learn much more about the group with a few hundred more recordings. The strength of projects like ours, which produce extensive hours-long testimonies, is always their in-depth nature, not the number of records in the database.

Where will the recordings be physically located?

We have to handle them very carefully because the conflict is still going on. The people we are talking to are safe in Poland. But they have relatives in their country, often in occupied territories. Data security is our priority. That is why we are not releasing the recordings at this time. We will do so in the future under certain conditions at the Qualitative Data Archive of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. We do not expect to provide open online access. If everything goes according to plan, we will offer on-site access where the testimonies can be listened to on the spot. If we go for a different model, it will be online access but under very restrictive conditions, only for registered users and for the purposes for which our interviewees have given their consent, including research, education and culture. We are certainly not making recordings that will be allowed to be forgotten. Especially that the project participants, who choose whether to disclose their name or remain anonymous, really want the world to hear their stories. Ten anonymised testimonies have already been handed over to the House of European History in Brussels and an exhibition will be set up. The Mieroszewski Centre has made a film featuring two of the project participants. We are also working on the idea of a comic book.

How does the project affect the people who record their testimonies?

We care a lot about the wellbeing of the people being recorded, that is obvious. However, we quickly realised that we also had to take care of ourselves, because doing interviews is very difficult. Most of us have a lot of experience working with themes of violence and loss: we have recorded testimonies of the Holocaust, World War II, post-war displacement. The difference, however, is that these chapters are closed. Our interviewees cannot be told that it’s all behind them, which makes every recording emotionally very challenging. Our team consists of 12 members. We hold regular supervision meetings where we talk about workshop and ethics. The meetings are led by someone who has had similar experiences but is an outsider and does not record interviews for this project. And this is a huge help.

Do you feel that what happened on 24 February changes the way we talk about history, war in general?

It makes us realise, first of all, that war is not something that could never happen again. This may be obvious to people in the Balkans. In this part of Europe, we used to believe that war had happened to our great-grandparents and grandparents but would never affect us. At the same time, we see that World War II is still a vivid memory in Poland. I also think that the war taking place in Ukraine has, for us, the face of a woman with a child. There was already a trend in historiography which emphasised the everyday civilian experience. It is now the focus of attention. ©℗