Written Essays of Pupils in Kherson Regional Schools on the Theme of “What I Experienced During the Occupation.”

This collection was formed from student essays written within the framework of an all-Union program conducted by teachers of the Russian and Ukrainian languages of the Kherson region in 1944-45. The collection includes a single inventory systematized alphabetically. A number of essays – by A. Figonenko (town of Velikaia Aleksandrovka [Velikaia Aleksandrovka district]), T. Moiseichenko and M. Tonkonog (city of Skadovsk), L. Bozhenova, I. Koval’, Odarchenko, A. Sidenko, and N. Timofeev (city of Kherson) – contain recollections of anti-Jewish actions during the occupation: Jews being forced to wear six-pointed stars and conscripted to unload rocks for paving roads; the formation of a “particular place” – the Jewish ghetto on the outskirts of Kherson, where the local population was forbidden to go; the removal of Jews from the ghetto to prison, and the occupiers’ and local residents’ plundering of the property they left behind; shootings of Jews “just for being Jewish”; brutal violence against children; etc. The recollections of I. Karakoz (a pupil of Kherson School No. 17), a Karaite, include reference to the fact that her family hid a Jewish woman from the Nazis, passing her off as Russian. The documents are in Russian and Ukrainian