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08 September 2009 12:27

Ukraine 3000 Foundation and Provincial Rhineland Alliance Present Rift through Life International Exhibition in Lviv

September 8, 2009, the Rift through Life documents exhibition, based on witness accounts by Ukrainian female forced workers in Rhineland, was presented at the Lviv History Museum.

Among the participants of the event were Head of the Culture and Tourism Administration at Lviv OSA Halyna Doroshchuk, Lviv Mayor’s Deputy for Humanitarian Issues Vasyl Kosiv, Head of the Board of Directors of Ukraine 3000 Foundation Oleksandr Maksymchuk, Head of the Board of Directors of Provincial Rhineland Alliance Dr. Jurgen Wilhelm, and Head of the Ukraine 3000 Foundation’s Lessons in History program Olesia Stasiuk.

The Rift through Life: Witness Accounts by Ukrainian Female Forced Workers in Rhineland is a display of 20 posters, narrating the stories of ten admirable women, whose lives were profoundly affected by the years of forced labor. Every fate is presented in two posters: childhood years and life in the post-war Ukraine as a repatriate, split apart by the deportation and years of forced labor, connected with indelible horrible memories.

The exhibition resulted from a Ukrainian-German project, establishing connections with former forced workers (Ostarbeiterinnen) whose names were found in the books of the Provincial Women’s Hospital in Wuppertal, at that time part of the Provincial Rhineland Alliance.

Forced labor is one of the most thoroughly researched topics in the modern history of Germany. However, the situation with mothers with children in the situation of forced labor is much less researched. Those women’s life stories give a unique chance to view the victims’ situation through their own accounts. Touching, depressing, sometimes even funny, their stories tell us about the life of people in-between of two dictatorships.

“Due to our German partner, the Provincial Rhineland Alliance, all our heroines have undergone treatment courses in Germany,” Head of the Board of Directors of Ukraine 3000 Foundation Oleksandr Maksymchuk said. “They have once again visited places where they had spent their youth, now in another capacity. It was an act of coming to mutual understanding and reconciliation between nations and generations. This sets a graphic example for our Ukrainian society; extending a hand of friendship to your neighbor, finding a way out of any situation, and looking into the future with optimisim and inspiration.”

The Rift through Life exhibition was first presented in November 2007 at the Provincial Rhineland Alliance’s Federal House and in October 2008 at the Ukrainian House in Kyiv. In the first six months of 2009 the exhibition traveled to Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa, Mykolayiv, and Kherson. The Lviv presentation continues the all-Ukrainian project, embracing 12 Ukraine’s oblast centers. Simultaneously, similar exhibitions were unveiled in Ternopil and Ivano-Frankivsk.

The exhibition was the first joint project by the Ukraine 3000 International Charitable Foundation and Provincial Rhineland Alliance, based on the Memorandum on Cooperation between the two organizations signed November 10, 2008.