This is a big, important project for the Memorial, using real people's testimonies and diary entries.
Since 24 February 2022, it has been painful and frightening all the time, but all of us (at the Memorial) wanted to do something. That's when my colleague came up with the War Diaries project. Initially, the idea was to take Ukrainian diaries from the Second World War and put them alongside the records of those who now publish online diaries from Ukraine. Then we realised that even extracts from wartime eyewitness accounts speak for themselves.
The aim of the project is to use quotes from the past to talk about what is happening now.
This happened in the past, and from that we can imagine how people feel now and how it will end.
Sometimes we thought it was too weak a protest and that maybe what we were doing was unnecessary, but people started writing to me, including from Ukraine, saying that they were reading, watching and feeling the same thing.
War is always war. It hurt then, it hurts now.
Today's events were superimposed on the texts of my diaries. In my drawings I used a lot of real photos from Ukraine that recorded the crimes of the Russian army. Old texts were interwoven with reality and I incorporated them into the fabric of the narrative.
A total of 7 diaries were illustrated in russian, two of them have been translated into German.
