Historians often say that the real beginning of the twentieth century does not coincide with the calendar year 1901. Instead, a century of wars, genocides, and countless unprecedented tragedies first really showed its face in 1914, when the world plunged into the horror and madness of the First World War. During this war, in 1915, a large-scale tragedy happened - the genocide of the Armenian people in the Ottoman Empire. A separate part of the exhibition, located right in front of you, is dedicated to the history of this genocide. It took the lives of more than one million people.

In 1944, the USSR authorities started the genocide of the Crimean Tatars, the indigenous people of Crimea. You can see materials dedicated to these events in the showcase on the left. In just three days in May, almost two hundred thousand people lost their homes and homeland. Many of them did not even see the place of their exile as they died on their way there because of the inhumane conditions of deportation. Representatives of other ethnic groups in Crimea, such as Crimean Bulgarians, Armenians, Greeks, and Karaites, were deported along with the Tatars. At the beginning of the XXI century, after the occupation of Ukrainian Crimea, these people again became the target of repressions by the criminal regime of the aggressor country - the Russian Federation.

World War II, Soviet and Nazi occupation, the imperial approach “divide and rule” used by the totalitarian regimes affected the aggravation of interethnic relations in Western Ukraine. It culminated with the events of 1943-1945. As a result of auxiliary police and the Ukrainian nationalist underground combined actions followed by spontaneous violence, thousands of civilians (primarily Poles) in Volhynia, Galicia, and Lublin (the territory of modern-day Lublin Voivodeship, Poland) were tortured and killed. The exhibits in the far-right showcase tell about this tragedy. Ukrainian and Polish historians are still debating its nature and scale.

Unfortunately, the horrors of World War II did not prevent the world from other genocides. It was evidenced by the genocide in Cambodia in the mid-1970s and Rwanda in 1994. You can see the silent witnesses of these little-known genocides in the relevant exhibition blocks in front of you. And, of course, we shouldn’t forget about the genocide of the Roma. The Nazis and their allies also organized it during World War II. Take a look at the wagon behind you. More than 500,000 Roma in Europe (including Ukraine) became victims of this genocide. The Nazis killed them only because of their origin.

“There is no somebody else’s pain.” It is the ideological imperative and a moral credo, determining the purpose of the Museum “Jewish Memory and Holocaust in Ukraine” and its staff. Researching terrible tragedies of the past like the Holocaust, the Holodomor, and other genocides of the twentieth century, we seek to prevent the history of human madness from happening again in the future.