How does an adolescent girl experience a war? Why are her everyday experiences of living under an occupation regime a valuable source for historical research? When we ask these questions, we may think of Anne Frank’s diaries and her life in hiding for 25 months in German-occupied Amsterdam. Her writing became a non plus ultra of the young adult’s account of World War II, constructing a worldview and routine of adolescent life in times of war. At the same time, in a different part of Europe, in Soviet Ukraine, 17-year-old Olga Kravtsova was also writing a diary in the summer 1941, reflecting on her life under changing dictatorships, the German occupation and the Soviet regime. Olga’s diaries are an immensely significant source for historians, presenting a wide range of issues, such as interactions between the local population and Germans in occupied Ukraine, the sense of belonging as well as identity construction under authoritarian regimes, the evolution of loyalties, the psychological transformation into adulthood, problems of cooperation with occupying forces, and young female perspectives on war. For the first time Olga’s war testimonies have now been translated into German by Stefan Schneider and published with an introduction by Tanja Penter.

Olga’s story took place in a unique constellation: she was the product of a specific ideological upbringing, was well-read and a curious mind, and she lived in a strategically important city where she worked as an interpreter for Germans in occupied Ukraine. The city of Znamianka has a significant railway node which was of strategic interests both to German and Soviet forces and therefore became a centre of interaction with German authorities, the Wehrmacht, and the railway workers. Thanks to her knowledge of German, Olga got a job as an interpreter at the railway administration and met numerous German workers, soldiers and officers, and even high-ranking executives. Olga described these encounters and the feelings they evoked in her diary, documenting the process of becoming an adult woman, forced to grow up faster in times of war, reflecting on the ideological flaws of both regimes and reconsidering everything she learned before in the Soviet school.

This edition provides an excellent introduction by Tanja Penter who has published extensively on German occupation policies in Ukraine in World War II, youth war accounts and ego documents. Her nearly 80-pages long introductory article places Olga’s diary in research fields, gives a detailed contextualisation of time, locality and policies, analyses and defines central themes and problems, highlighting the great potential of this particular source for researchers. This includes for example writing an entangled history of the city of Znamianka. The author discusses the diary studies which have been done for the Soviet period and the Nazi regime.1 But Penter also clarifies the limits of Olga’s narratives which do not fully mirror typical female experience of the violence, deportation or forced labour and other war crimes of the Nazi regime during the „Vernichtungskrieg“, but rather transmit a particular worldview of a young female undergoing personal and ideological transformations while experiencing a war (pp. 20; 50–53).

When discussing the Ukrainian experience of World War II, examples of other diaries and correspondence written in Ukraine or by Ukrainians could have been mentioned. This includes the diaries written by Kyiv citizen Nina Herasymova2, who hid and saved a Jewish couple from the Babyn Yar massacre, or the letters of Osyp Kladochnyi3, a secretary of Mytropolyt Andrey Sheptytsky (the Metropolitan Archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in 1901–1944), who reported on the situation in Nazi occupied Kyiv, Zhytomyr and Vinnytsia. Another interesting example of Ukrainian ego-documents are the diaries of Ukrainian film director and writer Oleksandr Dovzhenko, who reflected on the role and fate of the Ukrainian intelligentsia under Stalinism and during World War Two and the witness account of Viktor Kravchenko, a Ukrainian engineer, who survived the Stalinist purges and defected to the USA in 1946.4

Otherwise, the introduction to Olga’s diaries by Penter is a great reading for all interested in researching ego documents, Soviet Ukrainian history, Ukraine under German occupation and interactions between Germans and the local population. Penter fully prepares the reader for the context of the diaries, giving details on youth psychology and adolescence crises, transcultural interactions in Znamianka, and contextualising female experience of the war, by pointing to the history of sexual violence during World War II, relationships and marriages with occupants and Wehrmacht brothels etc. Altogether it helps the reader regardless of their expertise to immerse into Olga’s world, understanding the details and context of the narration.

Olga wrote her diaries in Russian with some Ukrainian words embedded into her language, as well as some passages in German. Translating such diaries can be a linguistic challenge and Stefan Schneider perfectly fulfilled his task as translator. His linguistic introduction goes into details of Olga’s language peculiarities and environment that shaped her narration, filling it with regional dialectic words and Ukrainian influence on the lexical and syntax level.

Among the most compelling topics in Olga’s diaries are the issues of ideology, identity construction and belonging, the evolution of loyalties, personal transformations and contacts with Germans. The power of personal and ideological transformation is one of the most visible dynamics in the diaries, as in the beginning we face Olga, a loyal komsomolka (member of the Soviet Youth organization, the Kommunisticheskii soiuz molodzhyozhi) who even under the German occupation tries to convince German soldiers and workers of the superiority of communism and Soviet leadership (p. 163). When she accidentally hears a Soviet propaganda message on the radio, Olga writes: „Happiness is to feel love for the motherland and hatred for enemies. No, I cannot be re-educated; I never felt before that I had been brought up so strongly by the Komsomol. True, although I was angry at the Soviet press, there were sins, nevertheless I remained loyal to my ideas and would never change them“ (p. 183). Initially, war clarifies and strengthens her loyalty and belonging to the Soviet realm of ideas, she proudly writes „us/our“ regarding Soviet and often uses propaganda terms (p. 171). At the same time, she notices how educated and charming German men can be, and thanks to her language skills she is able to start conversations with them, one encounter develops into friendships and love. Her relationship with an Austrian railway worker Heinz triggers great transformation in Olga’s life, pushing her to reconsider ideological narratives and generalisations about men in general and „enemies“ in particular (pp. 184, 187). In the course of writing Olga develops a complex worldview, discovering the multiple layers of her loyalties to the Soviet Union, to Ukraine, to her family and friends, to her beloved ones and how her loyalties change. In her final notes, Olga voices a highly critical opinion of both the Soviet and the Nazi regimes, explicitly criticizing Soviet authorities and refusing to identify with them (pp. 415, 419, 422).

This publication is the result not only of extensive research, but also a great work of translation. The volume brings the reader closer to the experience of a young girl in Nazi-occupied Ukraine, and shows her emotionality, deep self-reflections and her transformations over time. Thanks to the brilliant introduction by Penter, German readers are offered an in-depth analysis of the diary’s context, and thanks to Schneider’s sophisticated work these diaries now will be accessible to German speakers with all the nuances of the original, giving a voice to Ukrainian experiencing World War II and hereby amplifying their presence in German scholarly debates. However, this book is also of a great interest for a wider German audience as it can serve as an impulse to look anew at the Eastern front and occupation policies in Ukraine from the inner perspective of a young woman, giving unique insights into how local Ukrainians perceived Nazi-occupation during Germany’s war of annihilation. Today, in 2022, when due to Russian aggression a new atrocious war is raging in Ukraine, and Ukrainian children and young adults are writing war diaries again, the presence of Ukrainian perspectives on the history of World War II is extremely significant and deserves to be widely read and studied.

Notes:
1 For example Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind. Writing a Diary under Stalin, Cambridge 2006.
2 Nina Herasymova diaries are part of the collection at the National Museum of Ukrainian History. Digitalised excerpts are available here (in Ukrainian): https://www.radiosvoboda.org/a/ninas-war-diary/29510966.html (26.09.2022).
3 Available on the website of the Digital Archive of Ukrainian Liberation Movement: https://avr.org.ua/?idUpCat=907 (26.09.2022).
4 Kravchenko Victor. I Chose Freedom. The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official. New York 1946.