1. Idea and Goals
The project was launched as a national competition for scholarly works by young researchers of Ukrainian history.
- Main goal: to engage early-career scholars in examining the diverse experiences of Ukrainian women during World War II.
- Key research aspects: analysis of the factors (ideological, political, cultural, and others) that influenced women’s survival strategies, forms of resistance and rescue, motives for collaboration, and shifts in value systems under the extreme conditions of occupation, genocide, captivity, and forced labor.
2. Organization and Partnership
The project was carried out from January through November 2013 through the efforts of the following institutions:
- Organizers: the International Public Organization “International Foundation for Understanding and Tolerance,” in partnership with UARWH.
- Financial support: the Heinrich Böll Foundation Ukraine.
- Expert Commission (jury): chaired by Ihor Lushnikov; the commission also included leading scholars and UARWH members Oksana Kis, Kateryna Kobchenko, and Olena Stiazhkina.
3. Participants and Thematic Areas
The competition was open to young researchers under the age of 35: undergraduate and master’s students, doctoral students, university lecturers, museum professionals, and local history researchers.
Priority research topics included:
- women in paramilitary organizations and regular armies;
- women’s everyday life under occupation, forced labor, captivity, and in concentration camps;
- women in the context of the Holocaust and the resistance movement;
- gendered aspects of propaganda and the postwar fate of women in emigration and in their homeland.
4. Implementation
- Scale: a total of 173 research papers were submitted from all regions of Ukraine.
- Quality of submissions: among the materials submitted were both derivative essays and fully original scholarly studies based on archival sources and oral history methods.
5. Results and Culmination
The project culminated in a series of significant scholarly and public events. The jury selected the three best studies as competition winners:
- 1st place: Valerii Cherniavskyi — “The Specificity of Representing Women’s Experience of Forced Labor in the Third Reich: The Genesis of Narrative and the Problem of the Relationship Between Individual and Historical Memory (1940–2000).”
- 2nd place: Mariia Melenchuk — “The Experience of Forced Labor in the Memory of Former Ukrainian Ostarbeiter Women from Canada.”
- 3rd place: Volodymyr Hinda — “Men and Women in Partisan Detachments.”
- An additional 12 works received laureate status.
Award ceremony: took place on November 29, 2013, in Kyiv, during the International Scholarly Conference devoted to the gendered experiences of women in Central and Eastern Europe in wartime.Scholarly legacy: the materials from the project and the conference formed the basis of the collected volume Central and East European Women and the Second World War: Gendered Experiences in a Time of Extreme Violence (2015). The volume also includes an article by one of the competition winners, Mariia Melenchuk, based on her competition entry.