Dnipropetrovsk National Historical Museum named after D. I. Yavornytsky

Museum and Visitor: Methodological Materials, Scenarios, Concepts. Letters from 1943

The book brings together overview articles, programs and scenarios for mass educational activities organized by the Dnipropetrovsk Historical Museum named after D. I. Yavornytsky. The materials give an idea of the museum’s work in the 1990s and 2000s in popularizing the history and culture of the region, valuable museum objects and collections, and the many different aspects of the past and everyday life of the region’s inhabitants. The collection is intended for museum specialists, teachers, historians and local historians.

The publication was produced with financial support from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Ukraine.

At the beginning of the 1990s, radical changes in society inevitably affected museums and the development of museum work in Ukraine. In addition to economic difficulties — the economic crisis and growing social inequality — museums faced serious competition from the mass media and had to reckon with a general decline in cultural participation. Museums therefore had to look for new and more varied ways of working with visitors instead of limiting themselves to lectures and guided tours.

Sociological studies carried out at the museum, including “Museum and Children” and “Museum and Visitor,” as well as psychological and sociological research into the effectiveness of museum programs for schoolchildren, helped shape this work. During the 1990s the museum developed and introduced a multi-profile program called “Museum and Children,” the quiz game “Source,” the “Living Clay” studio for younger schoolchildren, a “Family Museum Subscription” program for children and parents, thematic evenings with elements of museum theater under the title “Museum Drawing Room,” and an outdoor museum festival called “Pure Springs.” This publication summarizes the museum’s educational experience and presents some of its most interesting concepts, programs, methodological plans and scenarios.

Letters from 1943

22 May 2009

Tags: Bondarenko; Great Patriotic War; children; classes; Kapustina; scenarios

Purpose

To cultivate respect for the feat of those who defended the homeland during the Great Patriotic War and a respectful attitude toward veterans.

Using original front-line letters preserved in the museum’s collections, together with songs and poetry, the lesson is intended to help children experience the atmosphere of that period emotionally.

Method: immersion in the historical era.

Exhibits

• Radio loudspeaker
• Kerosene lamp
• Gramophone
• Recordings of wartime songs
• Letters from the war years
• Carrot tea
• Stale bread / rusks

Museum educator: Children, today we will travel back to distant years, to the time when your grandfathers and grandmothers were very young. They had finished school, dreamed of peaceful work and a clear sky. But in June 1941 a harsh and cruel war broke into their lives.

Radio loudspeakers like this one, shaped like a large plate, carried the terrible news of war. The children examine the loudspeaker.

Today, on the eve of the anniversary of the liberation of Dnipropetrovsk from the German Nazi occupiers, we have gathered around this table. On it are museum objects and genuine letters from the front. They have reached us across the years.

The loudspeaker, kerosene lamp, gramophone, letters and bread transport us into the wartime past — into a room where children your own age might have been sitting in 1943.

Evening is coming. We need to turn on the light, but there is no electricity, so we light the lamp. You wait impatiently for the latest news: What is happening at the front? Where are the Germans? How many guns and tanks have been destroyed? Where are our relatives?

On that distant day the loudspeaker announced the liberation of Dnipropetrovsk from the German Nazi occupiers. It happened on 25 October 1943.

The order of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief is read aloud.

Your peers in 1943 talked a great deal that day about life and war and reread letters from relatives at the front.

Letters from the front

They were written during halts and in rare moments of rest between battles. What did it look like? Soldiers settled themselves as best they could in dugouts. A small homemade lamp burned on a rough table. Someone quietly played an accordion, someone sewed, and someone wrote to family and loved ones.

Look at these letters. Ink was not always available, so they often wrote in pencil. Paper was scarce and carefully saved. The same sheet served both as the letter and as the envelope. It was folded into a triangle or in half. There was no postage stamp, but there had to be the mark “Checked by military censorship.” There were also field postcards.

The children examine the front-line letters.

Let us read them and touch the lives of the people who wrote them and of their loved ones.

The museum educator turns on the gramophone and plays K. Listov’s song “In the Dugout.”

Before you is a letter from Guards Major Mikhail Lukich Velichai, a Hero of the Soviet Union who received that title for crossing the Dnieper and fighting on the bridgehead near the villages of Voiskovoye and Vovnigi. He was born into a peasant family in the village of Lyutenka in the Poltava region, worked in the Donbas mines, and became a professional soldier. In 1943 he crossed the Dnieper with the 35th Guards Rifle Division.

A museum educator or one of the children reads Velichai’s letter to his wife, dated 20 August 1943:

“...I am still in the ranks and directing the battle. I am beating the fascists and will continue to beat them as long as my heart is beating...”

Sergei Fedorovich Yarmak also took part in the crossing of the Dnieper. He was born in the Kharkiv region and worked at the Kharkiv aircraft factory before the war. His combat service began in February 1943 with the 25th Guards Rifle Division. During the fighting on the Dnieper, Yarmak’s mortar crew repelled repeated German attacks and killed dozens of enemy soldiers. In February 1944, during heavy fighting near the village of Zhuravka in the Kirovohrad region, he was mortally wounded. He died at the age of twenty.

From Yarmak’s letter to his family:

“...As I already wrote to you, I am on the right bank of the Dnieper. We beat the Germans every minute. As soon as the Fritzes appear, we open hurricane fire... However much they tried to throw us back into the Dnieper, they failed. All their attacks were repelled with heavy losses in men and equipment...”

The gramophone plays “Dark Night,” music by N. Bogoslovsky.

Here are letters from another participant in the Dnieper crossing, Major Alexei Vladimirovich Postny, commander of an artillery unit.

A schoolchild reads Postny’s letter to his daughter Larisa, dated 22 September 1943:

“...Your father could not see you off on your first day of school, but you know very well where he is. You went firmly to school to study, just as I went firmly to the front to destroy the fascist vermin and liberate our native land...”

In a letter to his wife dated 20 July 1945, Alexei Vladimirovich wrote:

“And if, dear Frosya, I should have to lay down my head — it is war, after all — you know that your husband fought as a Bolshevik, without fear, for the Motherland, for the happiness of children and mothers... But in general, I shall return home victorious. ‘Wait for me and I will return — only wait very hard...’ Lyuba, one cannot put everything into a letter. After the war I will tell you about it for a long time... My hand is falling from exhaustion; I have not slept for three days. The fighting is stubborn and cruel. Write often, dear. It is joyful to read letters on the battlefield.”

A student reads Konstantin Simonov’s poem “Wait for Me.”

Museum educator: Letters from the front are filled with concern and love for family, hatred of the enemy and great faith in victory over Nazi Germany.

These letters are addressed to Vladimir Natanovich Gelfand, commander of a mortar platoon in the 301st Rifle Division of the Belorussian Front and a participant in the liberation of Mykolaiv, Nikopol, Odesa and Berlin.

One letter came from A. N. Grekova, a teacher at Secondary School No. 80 in Dnipropetrovsk:

“...It is very pleasant to meet one of my ‘chicks’ who has already grown feathers and now even wears military rank. I see you in two ways: as my Vova, about whom one always had to speak in connection with your father, the boy who once read his poems at an evening, and as Vova the soldier, participant in heroic battles...”

Two other letters were sent to Vladimir at the front by his father, N. Gelfand. The children examine the letters and are invited to read them aloud.

From these letters we learn that relatives described their difficult life in the rear, wrote about work for victory and hoped for a reunion. But what was life like in the rear and in occupied territory?

There was not enough of anything. It was cold. There was hunger. Ordinary food and everyday goods disappeared. Even tea was rare, and people often drank only hot water.

In August 1941 the Nazis entered Dnipropetrovsk. They destroyed and looted factories, institutes and theaters; more than 600 houses and 17 schools were destroyed or burned. The dark days of occupation began. Automatic weapons and gallows became the occupiers’ principal means of “persuasion.” Official proclamations bearing the eagle and swastika ended with the warning: “Disobedience will be punished by shooting.”

One such proclamation is shown and read aloud. During the occupation, the text states, tens of thousands of residents of Dnipropetrovsk were shot. Many Soviet citizens, especially young people, were deported to work in Germany.

Among them was a young resident of the Pavlohrad district, Nina Lubenska. The museum educator shows a letter sent from Germany to Vasily Lebedinsky in the Pavlohrad district on 27 May 1943. The original spelling is preserved:

“...Vasichka, when I think about the life we had in our native land, my heart begins to ache and hot tears pour from our eyes. Oh, my dear Vasichka, why are our young years being wasted, why is our beauty fading...”

Another postcard was sent from a labor camp by Vera Rybkina to her family in Pavlohrad on 25 August 1943:

“My dear mother, brother and sisters. How my heart aches when I think about your life. It seems to me that under the hard German labor you have no time even to look up at the sky...”

Life in the occupied city and villages was extremely difficult. Sometimes there was nothing to eat: a small piece of stale bread, a potato or potato peelings, carrot tea. Hunger stopped only in sleep. The products displayed on the table represent what children and adults might have eaten once a day.

Yet even in those conditions people helped one another and shared the last things they had when someone was in trouble.

The educator holds two triangular soldiers’ letters. The Dudchenko family received them from Red Army soldiers D. Ryskin and Yu. Madrimov. In autumn 1941 they had been treated in a hospital in Synelnykove. When the Germans seized the town, Lyubov Dudchenko, who worked in the hospital, hid Madrimov in her home at great personal risk. The whole family cared for the wounded man until his wounds healed and he could return to his unit. Ryskin escaped from the hospital after the Germans had already taken control. Wherever the war later carried these soldiers, they continued to send news to the Ukrainian family that had saved them.

From Yu. Madrimov’s letter to A. Dudchenko, Synelnykove, 1 February 1944, original spelling preserved:

“...Thank you for everything I received from you. I was so happy, as if I were with my own mother and father... I wrote this letter myself, your son Yusup...”

From D. Ryskin’s letter to A. Dudchenko, Synelnykove, 23 November 1944:

“Hello, comrades Lyuba, Dasha and the others whose names I do not know — that is not important. What matters is that you, worthy people, saved our lives when we lay hungry and wounded in the Synelnykove hospital...”

Museum educator: Front-line notes and letters carry the imprint of unique individual lives. Their purity and sincerity still move us. By reading them today we have touched the lives of their authors.

Now we will turn on the gramophone and listen to songs and music from the war years. We will taste carrot tea and rusks.

Songs performed by Klavdiya Shulzhenko, Leonid Utyosov, Mark Bernes and others are played.

Museum educator: Have you ever drunk carrot tea? Here is the recipe: grate carrots, dry them and brew them like tea. Have you ever eaten potato peelings? Probably not. The peelings are washed, boiled and salted. You would not want to eat them — they are bitter and far from a good meal. And here are bread rusks.

The children drink carrot tea and eat rusks.

Children, our meeting with the past is coming to an end. We return to our own time, but we will always remember the Red Army soldiers and Soviet people who brought our city its long-awaited liberation.

Much has changed since then. Information that was once unknown continues to appear, sometimes tragic, contradictory and shocking. Yet the attitude toward those who achieved victory despite everything, the text argues, should remain one of respect.

The names of our fellow countrymen and soldiers who bore the burden of the war and fulfilled their duty to the homeland will remain in our memory.

Methodological author: L. I. Bondarenko
Concept: N. I. Kapustina, head of the museum’s educational department

Source: Museum and Visitor: Methodological Materials, Scenarios, Concepts. Dnipropetrovsk: ART-PRESS, 2005, 148 pp.