In the fall of 2013, a national competition was held for scholarly works by young researchers of Ukrainian history on the topic “Women of Ukraine in World War II: History, Memory, Representations”.
The competition was organized by the International Public Organization “International Foundation for Understanding and Tolerance” in partnership with UARWH, with the support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation Ukraine. The aim of the competition was to engage young historians in examining the diverse experiences of Ukrainian women during World War II.
Participants were expected to analyze the various factors — ideological, political, pragmatic, cultural, ethnic, and others — that influenced women’s choices regarding their survival strategies in the crisis of war, their modes of adaptation and ways of saving themselves and their loved ones, the motives and forms of collaboration, and shifts in the value systems and life priorities of individual women under the extreme conditions of war, occupation, deportation, genocide, forced labor, or imprisonment.
In accordance with the “Regulations on the National Competition for Scholarly Works by Young Researchers of Ukrainian History”, the competition was open to young researchers (under the age of 35): undergraduate and master’s students, doctoral students, holders of the Candidate of Sciences degree, educators, university lecturers, museum professionals, local history researchers, and other individuals engaged in scholarly or teaching work.
The Expert Commission (jury), chaired by Ihor Lushnikov, President of the International Foundation for Understanding and Tolerance, also included three UARWH members: Oksana Kis, Kateryna Kobchenko, and Olena Stiazhkina. A total of 173 research papers were submitted from various regions of Ukraine. Among them were both routine essays with clear signs of plagiarism and fully original scholarly studies of a historical nature, written on the basis of primary sources (archival, museum, and local history materials, private documents, and oral history), with proper use of scholarly literature.
After extensive deliberations, the jury selected the three best works as competition winners.
First place was awarded to Valerii Cherniavskyi for his study “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).”
Second place went to Mariia Melenchuk for her research “The Experience of Forced Labor in the Memory of Former Ukrainian Ostarbeiter Women from Canada.”
Volodymyr Hinda’s study “Men and Women in Partisan Detachments” took third place. An additional 12 works received laureate status.
The award ceremony took place on November 29, 2013, in Kyiv — at the height of the Revolution of Dignity — as part of the International Scholarly Conference ” Central and East European Women and the Second World War: Gendered Experiences in a Time of Extreme Violence,” which brought together scholars from the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Russia, the USA, Hungary, and Ukraine. A detailed review of the event and the content of the presentations is available here.
The materials from the above-mentioned conference formed the basis of the eponymous collected volume “Central and East European Women and the Second World War: Gendered Experiences in a Time of Extreme Violence”, edited by Helinada Hrinchenko, Kateryna Kobchenko, and Oksana Kis (Kyiv, 2015). The volume also includes an article by one of the competition winners, Mariia Melenchuk, based on her competition entry.