Researching in Small Ukrainian Archives
The H-Files project helps piece together histories of Nazi persecution
The documentation on Nazi persecution preserved in Ukrainian micro-archives is often fragmentary. Our H-Files project helps to bring the documents together, trace people’s life stories, and preserve historical sources.
Ukraine was one of the countries most badly affected by Nazi occupation, deportations, and mass crimes during the Second World War. Many people’s experiences are still only partially documented, with information scattered across different geographical locations, archives, and collections. Important evidence is often tucked away in small local archives or private collections – it can take the form of photographs, employment record books, identity cards, camp records, letters, or handwritten testimonies, for example. The H-Files project gives Ukrainian micro-archives the professional and technical support they need to preserve these sources. Russia’s war on Ukraine makes it even more important to protect historical documents and shed light on experiences of Nazi persecution.
One of the core goals of the H-Files project is to reveal connections between specific individuals and documents that relate to them: “When a name comes up while we’re digitizing documents in a micro-archive, we can search our databases for more information,” explains Hanna Lehun, who works for the Arolsen Archives and coordinates the H-Files project. The approach applied to reconstructing Hanna Shevchuk’s fate is one example of how family knowledge, local knowledge, and research in large databases can be combined to good effect.
Hanna Shevchuk’s story — Deported as a forced laborer
The holdings of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum include several photographs of the same woman. Her hair is closely cropped; in one image it is covered by a headscarf. She is wearing prison clothes, and there is a number included on the photos. But her name and her story were unknown for years. This photograph can also be found in the online archive of the Arolsen Archives.
The woman is Hanna Shevchuk, née Karpenko – but neither the museum in Auschwitz nor the Arolsen Archives had this information initially. It was only through the efforts of numerous people in Ukraine, the knowledge shared by Hanna Shevchuk’s family, and the careful cross-referencing of information from the databases of major institutions that her story could be told.
As a young woman, Hanna Karpenko attended the pharmaceutical school in Uman. Later, the Nazis deported her to Austria, where she had to perform forced labor. After she tried to tell her family about her living conditions in a letter, she was arrested, interrogated five times, mistreated, and finally deported to Auschwitz, where the number 26357 was tattooed on her arm. Hanna had to work on a farm.
When Soviet troops liberated Ukraine between 1943 and 1944, the Nazis sent camp inmates on long marches. Hanna survived the ordeal. The Nazis sent her all the way to Hamburg in Germany, where she was liberated by British troops.
After returning to Ukraine, she married Tanasii Shevchuk and took his surname. The couple had no biological children, but adopted a little boy. Hanna Shevchuk worked in a village pharmacy all her life.
Grassroots methods for Holocaust research: Nothing can replace local knowledge
In Hanna Shevchuk’s case, information was gathered by local history activists and employees of the Museum of Trypillian Culture in the Cherkasy region. Her family were able to share a lot of information about how Hanna survived the death march and how deeply her experiences in the Auschwitz concentration camp impacted her both physically and mentally. The only surviving physical document in the family’s possession was the photo shown above taken years later.
The research into Hanna Shevchuk’s life story shows how important direct contact with local relatives is. People involved in this kind of research often work in different places and take on different tasks: Some digitize small institutional collections, others visit elderly people in villages, asking whether they have any documents or photos to be scanned and recording oral histories.
Micro-archives present researchers with different challenges than those they face when they work with the collections of larger institutions: Each collection is unique, often incomplete, and heavily influenced by oral tradition. Different approaches help to complement the collections, connect them, and make historical contexts easier to understand.
Matching names, places, and administrative units remains a constant challenge. Without the knowledge of regional circumstances and without the commitment of Ukrainian colleagues and local volunteers, it would be almost impossible to correctly interpret, contextualize, or connect fragments of family knowledge with documents from the Nazi era.
