"They had been waiting for death, they but it did not come, had been hoping for freedom, but it was not...": reality in children’s essays about what they witnessed in the years of the Second World war - Статья

Donetsk National University of Vasyl’s Stus «They had been waiting for death, they but it did not come, had been hoping for freedom, but it was not...»: reality in children’s essays about what they witnessed in the years of the second world war Maria Bystra, PhD (History), Docent, Doctoral Student at the Department «History of Ukraine» Vinnitsa Анотація «Чекали смерті, але вона не приходила, сподівались на свободу, але її не було...»: дійсність у дитячих творах про пережите в роки другої світової війни Марія Бистра, кандидат історичних наук, доцент, докторант кафедри історії України Донецького національного університету імені Василя Стуса У роботі аналізуються твори школярів міст Костянтинівка і Сніжне Донецької області на тему: «Что я пережил(а) во время Великой Отечественной войны / оккупации», написані у травні 1946р. з нагоди річниці перемоги над Німеччиною. Ключові слова: нацистська окупація, твір, школярі, фашисти, Друга світова війна. Ключевые слова: нацистская оккупация, сочинение, школьники, фашисты, Вторая мировая война. Introduction. Recently, the Ukrainian researchers’ interest in historical sources of the special origin arises due to the change of methodological approaches to historical science countries of the former USSR [7, 10]. They was remained out of sight scientists in honestly, albeit the fact that they were extremely interesting and important. These documents bear the distinctive stamp of individuality of the author, his personal understanding and vision of the world, to the attitude of the events and that’s why allows to discover aspects such as historical events that were out of sight of traditional historical science. In particular, they contain social and psychological information that is missing in other types of historical sources [6, 413]. This is the reason why school essays on the topic: «What I experienced during the Great Patriotic War / occupation», are an important source of special origin of the history of wartime, which reports about childhood and daily life during the war in general. Data analysis: In spite of the urgency and importance of this type of historical sources and its presence in the funds of the central and regional archives of Ukraine, scientific community has not yet paid due attention to children’s writings, publications in this area [2; 3]. Using analysis of children’s memoirs about the war like one of the base of reconstruction of the collective memory of the war is more typical for Russian historiography [8; 9]. This type of historical source was firstly introduced for scientific use in Ukrainian historical science. To create a more complete vision of the situation the author combines structural (qualitative) content analysis, which is associated with understanding of the meaning of the text, fixing nontrivial statements accents, with quantitative content analysis which is based on the calculation of frequency of using certain notions, symbols and subjects, the abovementioned approach allowed to reveal some patterns of perception of reality by representatives of young generation of Donbass. The author analyzes the essays of 30 pupils of the 6th-8th grades in Kostiantynivka and Snizhnoe, Donetsk region, which were written by 20 girls and 10 boys [4; 5]. Essays were written only in Russian, in contrary to the other archives of Ukraine, which have similar funds of pupils’ essays in Ukrainian. This could be probably explained by the region peculiarities. The essays were selected by a method of simple random selection, due to characteristic features of the documentary fund archives. The use of cluster or stratified sample, which would have grown up the level of validity of the obtained results, was not possible. Overview of the facts and events which are described in the essays is not the main subject of research because they are duplicated in the essays. The main focus was given to how children have remembered and described their own military experience that private impressions. Purpose. The article is based on an evaluation of historical sources - childhood memories during the war, written by children on the first anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany in the Second World War, we will try to reconstruct ideals and stereotypes, children’s feelings, that are associated with extreme experience of life in war. Presenting main material. Degree of autonomy of writing essays is an important aspect for providing the reliability of the conclusions. And we have no information about the participation of teachers and other adults in the process of writing essays. Because of that, we assume that children wrote their works on their own. Implicitly, it is difficult to imagine that pupils were not instructed on the main accents and content of the work by teacher. That shows that the most number of works were written within a similar plan and contain several semantic blocks: 1) the beginning of the war and changes in their lives; 2) entry into the city of enemy troops,