THE EXHIBITION OF THE WAR CHILDHOOD MUSEUM UKRAINE
“In March 2022, it was boring to stay at home in Mariupol,” fifteen-year-old Alina, who was living in Mariupol when the full-scale invasion began, says. Her parents forbade her to go outside. Phones were dead, TV and radio were not working, and there was no signal. So she and her brother had to read books.
In wartime, books take on a new meaning. Adults read to their children to show love, to calm them down, to stay together before bedtime. Children read to entertain themselves, to learn something new, to change their way of thinking, to learn how to grow up, or to escape into the exciting world of adventure.
When, as the Russian army’s shelling civilian infrastructure, electric power supply disappears, when you have to flee your city or even the country, a book still remains nearby. It is carried through enemy checkpoints. It turns into the source of comfort or inspiration. The book becomes a plan for the future—for short 95 pages or for many years.
Books collect stories and themselves become stories about childhood in wartime. This is what the exhibition of the War Childhood Museum is about.
BIOGRAPHY
The War Childhood Museum is an independent institution that documents the experiences of those whose childhoods were affected by the war. The museum collected the largest archive of children’s war testimonies that will be made available to researchers in the future. The core of the archive is the stories of the Russian-Ukrainian war since 2014. In addition, the museum records the stories of people who were children during World War II. Objects connected to the children’s stories are exhibited in Ukraine and abroad. The museum’s goal today is to create a space for them to tell their own stories.