The Nazis began the mass murder of Jews in the summer of 1941, after the outbreak of the Soviet-German war. For many Ukrainian Jews who found themselves in Wehrmacht-occupied territory, the Nazis’ actions came as a complete surprise. After signing the Non-Aggression Pact between the Third Reich and the USSR in August 1939, references to Nazi anti-Semitism disappeared from the Soviet press. With repression and famine, most Soviet citizens had no idea they would live worse under German occupation than under the Bolsheviks. Before the war, the Germans had a reputation as “highly cultured people.” That’s how they were called by elderly people who remembered the German-Austrian troops in the Ukrainian state of Pavlo Skoropadsky in 1918.

The Soviet leadership didn’t inform the Jewish population about the Nazi threat. Moreover, they didn’t organize a full-scale evacuation of civilians. To the left of the screen, showing pre-war Dnipropetrovsk chronicles, you can see a copy of the newspaper “Komsomolskaya Pravda” as of June 24, 1941. It published the Decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet, restricting citizens’ rights and freedoms and transferring all power to the military.

In front of you, there’s a ceramic installation of an abandoned apartment. The people who lived here took only the most necessary things and set off for evacuation. People’s houses became empty. Their belongings were petrified. The date of August 25 is frozen on the calendar. It’s the day when the occupation of Dnipropetrovsk started. The residents of the apartment might have managed to get evacuated at the last moment.

To the left of the installation, you can see the document: Etlia Shchupak’s evacuation ticket. At that time, she was raising two children alone because her husband died during the Holodomor. Working on a collective farm and receiving stick-marks for each working day, she got an evacuation ticket for herself and her children, Sofia and Yakov. This document was a real ticket to life. Once in Uzbekistan, Ethel, 16-year-old Sofia, and 12-year-old Yakov worked on a collective farm and, despite the hunger, survived the war. After the expulsion of the Nazis, the Shchupak family returned to Ukraine. Later, Sofia Schupak lived in Israel and died in 2020 at the age of 95.

Just opposite, you can see a showcase with personal belongings people took with them when leaving their homes. Here’s Ida Shchupak’s suitcase. She took it when she was evacuated to the east. The suitcase contains the essentials: threads, needles, salt, sugar, documents, keys to the apartment, photos of relatives. Later, being an adult woman, Ida Shchupak kept this “evacuation emergency suitcase” in the closet. She told her children, Igor and Yuri: “If something happens, grab this suitcase and run away.” Only on May 9, 1995, on the 50th anniversary of the victory over Nazism, Ida Shchupak started believing that “there will be no war tomorrow” and unpacked it. Currently, she lives in Canada. If Ida Shchupak were in Ukraine today, perhaps she would have had an evacuation suitcase in her closet again, like some other elderly people who survived World War II and now see the horrors of Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine and the occupation of Crimea do.

Pay attention to the collage telling about the tragedy that happened in Zaporizhzhia. On August 18, 1941, a powerful explosion shook the city. Retreating Soviet troops blew up the “Dniproges” dam to impede the advance of the Nazi army to the east. In a few minutes, a massive wave of water from the Dnipro river covered the lower part of the Khortytsia island, southern districts of the city, and surrounding villages. Nobody knows the exact number of victims. The communist authorities hid this fact for decades. Only recently, it became a documented fact that the order to destroy “Dniproges” was given by Joseph Stalin personally.